Breathing Water - Chapter 1

OPENING SCENE - Introduces protagonist, setting, and tone. Hints at the antagonist and sets up the flashbacks that will fill in his story. This was not originally my first chapter, but I pulled this scene forward for a quicker immersion into the conflict and rewrote it as a starting point.

Chapter 1 

“It’s the police,” Ellen whispered as she walked back in the den.

My lungs stopped. People think the heart is the vital organ that arrests in these fixed moments, but no, the heart races forward shooting tiny sparks of stress to the tips of your fingers, toes, and ears. The ends of you burn with the feelings of fear, but you can’t breathe. Your lungs have stopped.

I willed myself up from the far side of the L-shaped couch where Ellen, Tom and I were watching a Harry Potter movie. The bad one. The Dumbledore dies one. But he hadn’t plummeted, yet.

Ellen, closest to the hallway leading to the front door, had gone to answer the knock, but when she saw through the side panes who was on the other side, she came for me instead.

Keep them out of the house, was all I could think as I walked toward my daughter, her eyes searching mine for the answer to a question we were both too scared to ask. Keep them away from the kids.

“Hi,” I clipped in warning as I opened the door and immediately stepped onto the brick portico, closing the heavy wooden barrier behind me to keep the wrong news on the right side of my home.

“Mrs. O’Hara?” The one not in a uniform asked. There were two men in police garb, one in regular clothes. They were a few steps down from me on the brick walk that snaked around the front of our house. I forced myself past them and out into the yard, compelling the group away from the well-lit house into the shadows of the chilly night. Before I could turn to face them, I saw my mother’s car slow down in front of the house and pull into my driveway. I asked her to come stay with the kids while a friend and I went to look for Geoff. My kids were old enough to stay home alone, but installing an adult in the house had felt like a thing I needed to do first.

“That’s my mother,” I explained to the army of messengers as I walked toward mom’s red Hyundai. She opened her door and dumped her eager young puppy Biscuit onto the ground. I wanted to shout back to the police that my mother was driving with an unsecured pet in the front seat, hoping they would spring into action, haul her away, sirens blaring. Anything to get them away.

Mom was flustered gathering her purse, the dog bag, and the eagerly dancing puppy’s leash as she sat in the running car. I was frozen, waiting, watching. I couldn’t think how to force this scene in the direction I needed it to go, though I knew this was the pivotal point.

“Will you check on the kids?” I asked when mom finally stepped onto the driveway. She opened her mouth to speak, but I stopped her with a shake of my head.

“Can you go inside, please, with the kids? I don’t know anything. I haven’t talked to them, yet.” I awkwardly pointed at the police now surrounding me, impatient for my attention.

My mom stood looking at me, then at them, then at me again. She didn’t know what to do. I didn’t either.

“Can you take care of the kids, mom?” I asked again. She nodded, picked up the leash of the quieted pup and went inside. I turned to face the storm.

I wanted the stoic soldiers to blurt out their message, get back in their cars and leave my house. I did not want them in my house. 

“Can we go inside, Mrs. O’Hara?”  

“Can we talk outside?”

“I think we’d better go inside.”

Out of the darkness a slender woman came to stand next to me. I realized she must be a social worker. She was there to make sure I did not lose my mind when they told me whatever it was they were there to tell me. I took several steps backing away from her and tripped on the edge of our stone walk. The closest cop leaned forward to catch my arm.

“Careful,” he said, as if the distraction of a good wipe-out would be a bad thing.

I gave up and turned toward the front door to lead the somber group inside.

As I approached the entrance, I could see our blonde doodle Beau through the window barking all the resistance I was feeling at the men trailing behind me. He did not like strangers in our yard. He did not like strangers in our house.

I opened the door as my oldest daughter Liza came down the stairs complaining about the endless barking. My mom stood in the foyer shouting at the dogs to stop yelling. 

I paused in the doorway, stretching myself into all the barricade I could be, legs keeping the attack dogs in, arms keeping the strike force out.

“Can you take them upstairs?” I begged my mother, glancing toward the snarling fur-balls. Liza paused on the bottom step, her eyes narrowing when she saw the threat behind me.

“I need to talk to the police,” I explained, trying to think of something I could say to reassure her. But first I had to stop the commotion. 

“Can you take the dogs upstairs to calm them down?” I asked my mother again as Ellen and Tom joined the disturbance. Each kid grabbed a harness and led the dogs toward the stairs. I wanted them all as far away as I could get them before the darkness entered the house.

I stayed wedged in the doorjamb as the whimpering scramble of paws and socked feet climbed their way up the dark wooden stairs, left-turned at the midway point and disappeared at the top. The pack did not pass back across the second-floor landing, so must have gone into my bedroom.

I led the police into the Xbox optimized gamers den just to the left of the front door, directly under my waiting children. 

“Why don’t you have a seat?” the officer pointed to the brown leather couch that had been a gift from my father eighteen years earlier. My CEO dad drove the enormous sofa along with a king-sized cherrywood sleigh bed from North Carolina up to Rhode Island when Geoff and I moved into our first house, pregnant with our first child. Dad was not a truck-driving type, but he’d wanted us to have the nurturing items for the start of our new family, and delivery service was not available for several months. 

The couch consumed me. Then it consumed the young social worker who sat down next to me.

The police officers remained standing, the plain clothed one slightly in front of the others. He spoke very few words, but there was only one that I heard; dead. My husband was dead.

But I knew that already. I didn’t so much think it as I felt the reality of it before the word came out of the composed man’s mouth. Perhaps I knew because they were not rushing me to a hospital. Perhaps because I’d been afraid of this shocking moment for so long. Afraid, but always proven wrong. Always convinced I was overreacting. 

I wanted these silent men to tell me I was overreacting, but I wasn’t reacting at all. I wasn’t crying. I wasn't moving. The police were watching me, waiting for the news to sink in and me to start screaming. Pulling my hair out. Pulling their hair out. The ones who had hair.

But all I could think was that my children did not know, yet. That I was now the one carrying the big, horrible news and I would have to share it with them. I could feel their anxiety hovering one floor above my head, crushing me into the monstrous couch.

I stood up. The counselor stood, too.

She said something to soothe me, but I do not remember what. 

“I need to see my kids,” I said as I headed out the French doors back into the foyer.

Two of the stoic men trailed behind me, perhaps worried that I was going to collapse in despair, but I was too determined for despair. 

I climbed the same stairs my scared brood had just ascended, desperate to reassure them that they would be okay. But as I rounded the corner of the L-shaped landing, the place where the dark mahogany of the downstairs morphed into the bright birch of the newly renovated upstairs, I realized I did not have anything comforting to tell them. I paused, causing the rear ending of the trail of cops behind me. 

I needed help. I wanted to parade us all back down the stairs to make these beacons of strength tell me how to be strong. How to do this right, or at least how to not do this wrong. But the kids would have heard all the boots clomping up the stairs, their eyes glued to the bedroom door, hungry for comfort to come open it. I had to go forward, even if I had no solace to bring.

And so I marched on, convinced I could find the right words.

A sharp left at the top of the stairs put me in front of my bedroom door. I was unfamiliar with this view of the entrance, being the only one to ever close the structure, and then only when I had a call I did not want others in the house to hear. That had been happening more lately.

I coaxed the door open to find my three teenagers and two puppies sprawled on the bed in a tangle of limbs and fur. My mother stood motionless in the bathroom doorway on the far right of the room. The crowd hushed as I stepped in, the only sound a muffled growl from Beau, still agitated by the strange men, but less distressed curled in the lap of my son. 

The policemen did not abide by my bodily roadblock this time, instead pushing their way into the space next to me at the foot of my giant bed. The spot where, if the bed truly had been a sleigh, my kids could press their feet into the bow, pull back on some magical reigns, and fly out of my window like the down of a thistle. Fly my innocent babies, fly.

But there was no magic here. Just hard, heavy words that were about to sabotage the holidays to come. The memories to come. The futures to come.

I drew in all the air I could fit in my now working lungs and waited for some wisdom to find its way out of my mouth. The words that would explain to my kids that their father was dead without planting the seeds of destruction that same message had sown in my husband when he was their age.