Before My Eyes by Caroline Bock Read Free Book Online Page B

sunscreen—and get the dishes done—before noon. Before we go, I’ll push the vacuum through the house and make sure all the windows are open wide. I’ll dust her tables crowded with knickknacks on lace doilies, and at least the house will smell like my mother’s house, of summer breezes and lemon oil.
    â€œIzzy? If you don’t come now, I’m leaving you.” I shake some stale cereal into the last clean bowl. Before my mother had her stroke, I never had to think of dishes, or laundry, or the sun burning Izzy, or me.
    There is the “before” for everything. Before the stroke, my mother worked as an adolescent psychologist, part-time. My father always kidded her that part-time meant full-time to her. She loved her job, though. She’d run through the day. She did everything fast—her job, her cooking, her talking. I don’t ever remember her still, or sitting, until I saw her lying on the bathroom floor, by the toilet, that morning.
    One minute before she was fine.
    Izzy was in her bed. My mother had woken up with another headache. But she hadn’t even drunk her morning coffee. The kitchen was full of the scent of fresh coffee.
    â€œI’m taking a cup of coffee,” I said from the kitchen. I had just started drinking coffee in April, on my seventeenth birthday. I liked it fresh-roasted with cream and two sugars, the same as my mother. I had convinced her to spend a little more and buy “organic fair trade” beans.
    â€œI want to blow-dry my hair, so I’m unplugging the coffee pot,” I called out to her. I didn’t want a fuse to blow again. This house is old and the rooms boxy and tight, even the electricity seems to be set up for a time and place when everything moved slower. My mother never complained, even though, if anyone asked where we lived, she often conveniently dropped the “South” part from “Lakeshore.”
    That late May morning, I hung in the kitchen for a moment or two longer, daydreaming, breathing in the coffee as much as drinking it, running my hands through my tangled hair, thinking about nothing, and everything, a moment when my mind filled up with the enormity of myself. I heard a crash but I thought it was something else—the garbage being collected—roofers on top of someone else’s house—I wasn’t paying enough attention, not to my mother, not to someone who was always there. She always had everything under control. That morning, I had one of my writer’s notebooks out, a black-and-white composition notebook, nothing fancy, and was thinking about a poem, or a string of words, or I don’t know what.
    â€œBefore” is a strange, curious word—both prior and next—both what preceded and what is about to happen—both memory and what will be. “Before” is the kind of word my English teacher would spend lots of time on as if there were time in the world anymore for one word, any time for anything but what has to be learned now. And the now is over and gone in a blink, without a moment to reflect, or to foresee what’s coming at you—because there’s always something else.
    Now, I can’t stand the smell of coffee. I can’t drink coffee. I can’t eat coffee ice cream or fancy desserts like tiramisu. I can’t hang out with everybody else in the local coffee shop. One minute, she was fine. I didn’t hear her fall. I didn’t hear her body hit the floor. The world was all there, too much with me, and I wasn’t paying attention at all.
    And when I found her, when I finally finished that cup of fair-trade organic fresh-roasted coffee and wanted to blow-dry my hair, I don’t even know how many minutes had passed (the ambulance guys asked, and I could only guess: Five? Twenty?). I didn’t even know what I was seeing.
    My mother was on the floor. Her body was sprawled on the tiles. Her body had hit the floor.
    My father would