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Show count. I remember being angered by the distraction. My mother returns to find the wooden table covered in orderly piles, the floor around me spotted by rejected silver coins, and both the Yuban coffee can and the bottle of finger nail polish remover empty. Did he drink this, she cries. / don't know, I answer. And that is maybe the truth. Whisking Bryan up, my mothers knocks the pennies to the ground. I remain in the room amid a sea of copper. Within fifteen minutes the ambulance arrives, the shrieking sirens disrupting the winter afternoon and shaking crows from the trees. Not waiting for the medics to locate their boxes and tanks, she bundles Bryan in her winter parka and grabs his medical record, rushing out to meet the EMTs who wait on the driveway where days before I had gone sledding. It is not the only time the ambulance comes to our house that year. Hunched over my Holly Hobby diary later that night, in scrunched, tight, barely-learned cursive, I name what I saw and failed to do. Then I lock the diary with a tiny, bronze key. Years later, I will read my diary entry out loud to my mother. As I sit beneath the kitchen countertop in our house in Seattle, my nine-year-old body folded like a fan, my mother moving pots across burners as she prepares dinner, I will confess. What I am seeking is not absolution but punishment. I want to be held accountable for my lack of responsibility. It does not occur to me that my mother must carry her own suitcase of guilt. ^ You are thrown into a bucket, the nurse presses the hot pedal instead of the cold, 64 |