Chapter 4: The Bell

Max's POV

The bell went off at 5:10, and I was already awake, because I had not slept.

It is a small brass hand bell with a wooden handle.

She bought it the week she came home from the hospital.

I had only ever heard it from downstairs, where it was a small clean sound.

Upstairs it was loud.

I was in the guest room, because I could not make myself get into the bed upstairs.

I found my slippers, and then my mother's door, and then my mother, sitting up against four pillows with the bell in her left hand.

Her own slippers sat on the rug by the bed, with the heels worn flat.

I made a note to buy her new ones.

"Maxwell," she said, surprised. "Where is Aubrey?"

"She's at a friend's. I told you last night."

"I assumed you'd fetch her. It's very early for you."

She set the bell down on the tray.

The list had come at nine the night before.

A bearded man in a bow tie had put it into my hand on the stoop.

"She says good luck," he said, and left.

It was a dozen pages, handwritten, numbered, with the times down the margin.

I held it up under the hall light.

At 5:10, it said, pills.

Two white, one yellow. The yellow one gets crushed into a spoon of applesauce. She won't swallow it whole. Do not argue. She will say she took it.

I crushed the yellow pill.

I stirred it into the applesauce while my mother watched me do it.

"You're holding the spoon like a shovel," she said.

"I'm sorry."

"Aubrey holds it by the neck. It's nicer."

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