Free Dark Doorways by Kristin Jones Page B

”
    Watching him wake slowly, his
face peeling off the cheap pleather, I began to slap his cheeks to accelerate
the process. He’d hate me for it later, I knew, but we were running out of
time. The bridge was a block away.
    “Michael, we have to get Mom
out of here. Come on!”
    The window finally succumbed,
shattering around our feet, shattering like so many things in life seem to do.
    “You first,” she insisted.
    “Mom, no.”
    “Yes. You first, then I’ll
push Michael out.”
    “No, we’ll push Michael out,
then I’ll hold on to you while I squeeze through. I’m not letting go of you.”
    Shaking her head, she helped
me drag him off the couch. His limbs were useless, but I’d be there soon to
help him out of the river. Surely those swimming lessons from my youth would
all come back to me, at least that’s what I was hoping.
    Once we got his head, arms
and shoulders through the open window, it was only moments before the rest of
him slid through. I could tell from the splashing that the impact of the cold,
polluted water roused him a bit more.
    “Now you, Sarah.”
    “Okay, but hold on to me.”
    She pushed me through,
duplicating Michael’s escape. Just as I felt my torso teetering on the edge, I
told her to hold on to my feet. I was hoping some miracle of physics would
allow her to get sucked out with me, even though the window was a good three
feet above the floor.
    “Sarah, I love you! I’ve
always lo–” Her voice disintegrated, just as I felt her grip slip away
from me. It was all disappearing so quickly, every conversation I had hoped to
have with her, every shopping trip, every dinner waiting in the slow cooker.
    With that, I fell, kicking
and screaming for my mom, into the dirty Chicago River. Motherless.
     
    ***
     
    Others at street level stared
dumbly, watching the two of us floundering in the river. Chicago’s finest were
all out for their lunch break, from the suited corporates checking their phones
to the lost tourists checking their maps. Not one person considered helping us.
Looking back, though, I wasn’t sure I would jump voluntarily into the Chicago
River either. The Italian Riviera this was not.
    Michael was already reaching
the edge of the river, trying to grasp onto the stones of the sidewalk. Just as
I hauled myself up to catch my breath beside him, we both turned to look for
the boat. Part of me was still hoping to get Mom back, to perhaps take a taxi
to outrun the boat, jump on it from a bridge somehow, and get her off. Such are
the impractical thoughts of a mourning daughter.
    But as we turned our heads,
still dripping the sewage of the Chicago River, there was no boat.
    The morning fog lingered just
a bit, but not enough to conceal an entire boat. Neither of us expected to see
the boat, really. We looked, acted surprised not to see it, but knew it
wouldn’t be there. It would have crossed under the last bridge by that point,
never to return. We didn’t have to understand any of it to admit the boat was
gone.
    There were no words needed.
There never are when you finally realize you’ve lost someone, really lost them.
You have to pick yourself up and let people stare at the polluted water leaking
off you. That’s what you have to do.
    Michael knew instinctively to
stand beside me as I stared at the void where Mom last had held me. If I graced
my cheek, I could still feel the comfort of resting on her shoulder. Maybe
that’s what I should do , I thought. I should just stay here forever, in
this place where I let down my mom.
    “Será!” Gabi’s voice cut
through the smog in my head, her tender voice making my misery all the more
pathetic.
    “Sarah? Michael? Are you two
okay?” Swanson was out of breath, clearly not the sign of a man who visited the
gym.
    “Yeah, I think so. Michael,
are you feeling alright?”
    The fuzziness in his eyes
told me all I needed to know. How he ever swam out of the river by himself was
beyond me.
    “You need a doctor. I should
call