Reborn: I Let My Mother Suffer the Price of Her Favoritism novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Nine-One-One

Callie calls the police while Dale tries to lock the doors, and Sloane says on camera she thought it was Callie. On the stretcher Maureen tells the officer Callie did it on purpose.

I dialed 911 with my mother looking straight at me.

"Callie, no." Her voice cracked. "Hang that up right now."

"Nine-one-one, what's your emergency?"

"My mother has been stabbed," I said. "Forty-one Alder Lane. She's bleeding from the shoulder. The person who did it is still in the room."

I put the phone on speaker and held it out in front of me.

Sloane had not moved.

She stood at the side of the bed with the paring knife hanging from her fingers and blood on her wrist.

"Mom?" she said again. "Why are you in Callie's bed?"

"Ma'am, is the person armed?" the dispatcher asked.

"Yes. A kitchen knife. She's my sister. She's standing very still."

Mom pressed her good hand over the wound and stared at me.

"Sloane, put it down, baby," she said. "Put it on the floor. It's all right."

Sloane opened her hand, and the knife dropped to the rug.

Then she began to shake.

Dale's door banged open down the hall.

I heard his bare feet on the floorboards, and then he was in the doorway beside me, in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, looking at the bed.

"What did you do?" he said.

He said it to me.

Mom was bleeding onto the pillow, Sloane was standing over her with her wrist red, and he looked at me.

"I called an ambulance," I said.

"Hang up the phone."

He reached for it.

I stepped back and held it above my head.

"The dispatcher can hear you, Dale."

"Ma'am, stay on the line," said the phone. "Help is four minutes away."

Dale went white and spun toward the stairs.

I knew where he was going.

In the other life he had gone down in the dark and thrown every deadbolt in the house, the front door first.

I listened to him take the stairs three at a time.

I heard him reach the front hall, and then I heard nothing at all.

When he came back up, he was out of breath.

"The door's open," he said. "The front door is standing open. Who did that?"

"I did," I said. "Around midnight. I put the doorstop under it."

He stared at me.

I let him.

The housekeeper came up behind him in her robe with a stack of clean towels already in her arms.

She had lived in our house for twelve years.

She looked at the bed and at the blood, and she did not look at anyone's face.

She went to my mother and pressed a towel to her shoulder with both hands.

"Hold still, Mrs. Haldane," she said.

I had asked her to be ready, earlier tonight at the kitchen sink. I had said I had a bad feeling and she should keep towels by the stairs.

She had not asked me a single question.

Mom grabbed at her sleeve.

"Don't call that number, Dale. Tell them it was an accident. Tell them I fell."

"Mom," Dale said, "she's already called."

"Then tell them Sloane was sleepwalking."

Sloane was crying without any noise now, with her arms wrapped around herself.

I looked at the blood on my mother's nightgown, which was my nightgown.

I should have been the one in that bed.

I had bled in my own bed once, and she had stood over me and told Dale to pull the curtains.

So I did not step forward to help, and I did not say a word of comfort.

I stood in the doorway and let the minutes go by.

Red and blue light swung across the ceiling.

Footsteps came up the front stairs, heavy and fast.

The officer who came in first was a big man with a camera clipped to his chest.

The second one went straight to Sloane and said, "Ma'am, I need you to step back from the bed."

"I didn't mean to," Sloane said. Her voice was thin. "I thought it was Callie."

The officer's camera was pointed right at her face.

"I thought it was Callie," she said again. "She was supposed to be in this bed."

Dale made a sound in his throat.

"She's not herself," he said. "She's a medical patient. Officer, you have to understand, she has a diagnosis. She doesn't know what she's saying."

"I know what she said," the officer answered.

The paramedics arrived behind them with a stretcher.

They cut Mom's nightgown away and clamped something down on her shoulder, and she lay back and let them.

She was pale, but she was awake.

They rolled her toward the door.

As the stretcher passed me she turned her head on the pillow and found the officer's face.

"Officer," she said, in her calm church voice, "before you take my daughter Sloane anywhere, you should know the truth."

He bent down to her.

"It was Callie," Mom said. "Callie did this on purpose. She moved me into that bed."

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