Today, I rented a room at Kidz Quarters for India's sixth birthday. It's the first time she's had a real friends' birthday party, and I was a little nervous - I still don't feel grown up enough to be a real mom who does things like throw birthday parties. But all the invitations went out, all the parents responded and all the kids showed up, as did I, early, with loot bags and the cake and candles. And just as things were starting and the sugar levels rising like the helium balloons tied to their skinny wrists, there was a phone call from my sister. My sister-in-law, who is six months pregnant, was carrying a plate of cupcakes down the stairs to the basement of her house, had tripped at the top of the stairs on her two-year-old's toy, and fallen all the way down to the bottom. I kept shoving my hands over my mouth like I was trying to shove her words back in. "Her water broke. She's in the hospital. We have no idea what's happening."
And then three hours of birthday party with ten six-year-olds. I took pictures, sang the song, cut the cake and kept praying that this wouldn't be that day. The one you marked and looked back on as the day where loss changed everything.
I stayed home with the kids while my mom went to the hospital and for now, my sister-in-law seems to be stable. She's not going into labour. The baby is alive. We'll know more in the morning. I walked past my brother's house later, but it was late and all the lights were dark, so I went around back and called to him through his bedroom window because I could hear the T.V. on, but no one answered, and I didn't want to risk waking him. It made me think of the time when we crept through the mall with our walkie talkies spying on people and reporting our findings to each other.
"The house is dark. No movements inside. T.V on in the bedroom. Lying in bed alone, probably afraid."
I wanted to walkie-talkie him and tell him that I was outside, thinking of them, praying, that he wasn't as alone as it must have seemed in that dark house, in his empty bed where those two other bodies should have been sleeping.
