Page 47 of A Shade of Myself
Please, God, be acting. I dropped to my knees, the concrete scraping my skin. I felt its warmth the same way I felt Sadie’s when I pressed three fingers to her wrist. If she was dead, she’d be cold, right?
There wasn’t a pulse, but I could never find my own on the wrist. I always had to check under my jaw. I was sure it was the same for finding Sadie’s.
The driver had gotten out, babbling and frantically calling 911, her words a buzzing in my head.
I kept searching for Sadie’s pulse, careful not to move her head in case of injury and scared to lean over to check if her eyes were open or closed. Maybe pulses were harder to find if a person was unconscious?
“Get up, sweetheart.” I slipped the runner that had fallen off back onto her foot. “You can have a double scoop. A triple. Just wake up, okay?” Her chest didn’t rise and fall.
I clamped my lips together against the scream building in my head, because if I released it, it would have no end.
Someone tried to pull me off her, but I swung out at them and gathered my baby into my arms.
Her lifeless eyes stared up at me and I had to look away, focusing through tears on a bird sitting in one of the cherry trees in the shaded area provided for people to enjoy their ice creams. How dare the world look normal? A crack splintered my reality, my grief pulling me into the chasm where madness lived. The impossible truth that my child was gone burrowed into my skull like a splinter that I’d never be able to dislodge.
I smoothed Sadie’s silky black hair back from her face, intending to kiss the tiny scar at her hairline from when she’d fallen off her bike years ago.
The scar was gone. I stilled.
I checked all along her forehead, but it wasn’t there. My brain stuttered. A missing scar, my scream that could never be fully released.
This wasn’t right.
A man knelt down next to me. “I know this is hard, but you have to let her go.”
“No.” I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and screamed.
