The Wire Hanger

Chapter Three

“Quickly, Coby, help me,” said my mother, stepping out onto the front porch. When she stepped aside, and I had a clear view, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I had never been good with blood. “Coby!” snapped my mother. “Now.” She lifted the woman on the porch by the armpits, and jerked her head to motion me towards her feet. I stepped out and grabbed the woman’s ankles, trying to avert my eyes from where all the blood was coming from. “Bring her inside. To the back room.” The woman was moaning, nearly insensible, limp in my mother’s hands. I hadn’t realized she was that strong.

            We carried her through the house, blood dripping all the way. The woman’s gray skirt was stained a deep, rusty red, as though she’d bled, and then stopped, and started again, over and over. I thought, somewhat crazily, of the woman Jesus had healed, who had bled for twelve years. Maybe this was something like that. I held my breath as the smell of iron hit me within the closed doors.

            After we lay her down on the floor in the back room, my mother said, “Go get me a stack of towels from the hall closet. And put the kettle on. And wipe up the blood we tracked in. But make sure there’s nothing on the porch first.”

            These were a lot of instructions to take in at once and I spun in a circle in the kitchen, rocking back on my heels, trying to decide what to do first. I grabbed the towels and brought them back; my mother was working on getting the woman comfortable, her head propped up on my brother’s old hockey bag. I kept one for myself and drenched it in the kitchen sink, then ran out to the front porch, dripping water the whole way there. The looked like an echo of the drops of blood lining the hallway. On the porch I wrung out the towel and roughly slopped it over the concrete, dispelling the traces of blood as best I could. It wasn’t enough water and I had to run back to the kitchen and repeat the process, anxiously scanning the sidewalk. Nobody was there, but that didn’t mean nobody was watching.

            Back in the house I mopped up the blood in the hallway, walking backwards and crouched on my heels. The woman must have come to because she was moaning loudly. My mother shouted, “Coby?”

            I left the towel on the floor and ran in to the room.

            “Listen carefully. I need you to go into my room, my closet. Move the laundry basket. At the very back, where the carpet meets the wall, there’s a loop. Pull it up. Bring me what you find in there. Hurry.” She had a towel wadded tightly between the woman’s legs. It was dark but I could still see the crimson tinge of blood seeping through it. I felt faint and didn’t say anything as I backed out of the room.

            I never went into my parents’ room. It was as unthinkable as sleeping in their bed: it was their own private space, where children weren’t allowed, for as far back as I could remember. So the strangeness of the entire situation coalesced on this single, manageable strangeness: turning the handle on my mother’s bedroom door, and going inside.

            The closets were on the left side of the room, where the wall wasn’t shared with any neighbors; we had the end house on the block because of needing the two bedrooms for my brother and I. Her closet was easily identifiable from her uniforms hanging in it, nearly identical and all neatly pressed. A laundry basket sat on the floor, as she’d said, the bottom of the dresses just barely brushing the rim. I pulled it out and shoved it behind me, kneeling in the dark closet and feeling around the baseboards at the back. At first I couldn’t find anything: it was just industrial-strength carpet and dusty wall. Then my fingers caught on something. It might have been just a loop of carpet but I tugged experimentally and something seemed to give. I pulled harder, worrying all the while that I was unravelling the carpet and how would we ever explain that to my father, and then the carpet peeled back in one smooth motion.