Natalie's Diary

[01] Shock

SHOCK

This chapter contains scenes of suicide and imagery that may be triggering for some readers

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It began with a scream.

Blood curdling, it came from outside. The last kind of sound you'd want to hear on a night when your parents are out for a date night. There was nothing ever comforting about a woman's screech, but the sound of it jolted chills down my spine.

What was the natural reaction to something like that? Hide under the coffee table until the screaming stopped? Turn up music until it drowned out everything else while guilt ate me up inside?

I did none of that. Instead, I ran to the front door, throwing it open and from my front step, I could clearly see the commotion next door.

Mrs. Driscoll crumpled on the walkway between her front gate and her front door, her screams dissolving into sobs. Her voice cut through the thin fog hanging in the night air. Fog was nothing. It cut through my soul. 

Mrs. Driscoll, wailing into her hands, framed in the yellow light pouring out of the house.

Caught in the shadows between pools of tungsten street light, Natalie Driscoll drooped over the wrought iron fence, her fingertips reaching toward the ground.

My heart tore itself between stopping and pounding. All the late night snacks and home-alone pizza I had for dinner threatened to churn back up. I fought the urge to double over and give in to the nausea.

Mrs. Driscoll was disintegrating next door. Like the way mothers are able to lift whole cars off of their children to save them from death, I had the ability to think about nothing but what had to be done.

I pulled my phone from my pocket, dialing from my front door. I told the 911 dispatcher my emergency quickly before I got too close to Mrs. Driscoll. It wouldn't do her any good to hear the words. They meant something; they weigh something especially one like dead.

I stayed on the line, my phone pressed against my chest as I walked from my house to the Driscolls' gate.

Beneath Natalie, the dark pool grew wider and wider, dripping off her fingertips down the path that was her outstretched arms on one side of the fence, and leaking down onto the leaves of roses on the other side. 

Her loose hair entirely obscured her face, leaving her in shadows.

The longer I stared, the harder it became to separate this Natalie from the neighbor I saw in school. Unassuming Natalie with her dirty blonde hair and her neutral face, rarely expressing anything more than disinterest in her eyes. My pace quickened past her body. 

I imagined her eyes still open, staring at me as I knelt next to her mother. Mrs. Driscoll didn't care that for the year that I lived next door to her family, we didn't really talk. She only cared that someone walked past the limp body of her daughter to hold her. Salt tears soaked into my shirt while I held my phone up to my ear, murmuring answers to questions from the emergency dispatcher.

"Mrs. Driscoll, where is your husband?" I tried.

Nothing. She erected a glass wall around herself and no one could get through it.

"Mrs. Driscoll, I called 911. They're on their way."

It turned out when you call 911 about someone dead out in the open, the paramedics and police came quickly. Maybe they hoped I was wrong, that Natalie could still be saved, but when they arrived to see the wrought iron spires jutting through Natalie's torso, I figured they agreed with my assessment.