WHAT SHE STAARTED - by Khadijah Mohammed

The ambulance came without urgency, because there was no urgency left to have. Two paramedics did what paramedics do, quietly, professionally, checking for something that wasn't there to find. One of them looked up at the other after a while and didn't need to say anything. I understood before either of them said it out loud. They took her away on a stretcher, a white sheet drawn up to her collarbone, and I stood at the gate and watched the ambulance pull off down our street without its siren on, because sirens are for people who can still be saved. Rah drove me to the hospital anyway. I don't remember much of the ride. I remember a nurse's voice, low and careful, using the word gone instead of any of the harder words, like softening it would make it weigh less. I remember signing something. I remember someone asking again if there was anyone else to call, and I said no again, because there wasn't. I don't remember the walk home. What I remember is my room. The door shut. The curtains pulled. My phone somewhere on the floor, dead by the second day, and I didn't care enough to charge it. I sat on the bed with the framed photo from my nightstand in my hands — the four of us, taken years before any of this, before Eni, before any of it. My father laughing at something off camera. My mother mid-sentence, caught with her mouth slightly open, her hand resting on Eni's shoulder. Eni herself grinning too wide for the camera, missing a tooth. And me, younger, smaller, tucked into my mother's side like I still fit there. I looked at that photo until the faces stopped looking like faces and just became shapes and colors, and then I looked at it some more. I didn't eat, not really. Rah's wife left a plate outside my door twice a day and I let it go cold both times before I finally forced down a few bites of the second one, not because I was hungry but because some old, stubborn part of me still remembered that I had to keep living even when I couldn't think of a single reason why. I didn't leave my room for three days. I replayed the good memories on a loop, because they were easier to survive than the bad ones. My mother teaching me to tie my shoelaces twice, patient with me even after I'd gotten it wrong the third and fourth time. Her humming in the kitchen on Saturday mornings before anything went wrong in our house, before Eni, before any of it, back when humming was just humming and not a sound that meant she was confused. Her hand on my forehead when I was small and sick, cool and certain in a way nothing about her had been certain in two years. I held onto every one of them like they might wear thin if I didn't keep touching them. The thoughts came in the dark too, underneath the memories, and didn't stop coming. If I hadn't lost the chain in that field, none of this happens. If I'd been more careful, more controlled, less like the thing I clearly was underneath everything, my mother would still be in her chair by the window right now, hands in her lap, eyes tracking me across the kitchen. And under that thought, older and worse, the one I'd been carrying since I was fourteen — if I had done something different that night, Eni would still be here too. My phone buzzed on the floor where I'd left it, charged again now, and I almost didn't reach for it. When I finally did, there was one new message. Look what you did. The number was Tessa's. I sat very still, staring at it, my thumb hovering over the screen like touching it again might make it worse. Tessa's phone had never been found, as far as I knew — no one had mentioned it, not once, not in any of the whispers I'd overheard at school. Whoever had it now wanted me to know exactly whose hands it was in. It was Nurse Lucy who came to see me the next morning, not the funeral home, standing at my bedroom door in her cardigan instead of her scrubs, telling me gently that the hospital had confirmed it — a heart attack, brought on by an overdose of her own medication, something that could happen easily enough with someone on the doses my mother was on, nothing anyone could have caught in time. She said it the way people say things they've been told to say, kind and rehearsed, and I nodded and let her believe I was comforted by it. It was only after she left that the detail sat wrong in my chest and wouldn't move. An overdose meant pills, more of them than she was supposed to have, taken all at once or close to it. My mother hadn't been able to bathe herself in over a year. She couldn't always remember which hand held the toothbrush. I was the one who filled her organizer every Sunday night and handed her each dose myself, morning and evening, because she couldn't be trusted to manage it alone — she never had, not once, not since the diagnosis. She physically could not have opened that bottle, counted out that many pills, and gotten them down on her own. Someone had done it for her. The second she left, I was up and moving, pulling my underwear drawer open so fast it nearly came off its runners, digging beneath the folded stack of boxers to where I'd hidden the half-moon chain three days before. It was gone. I stood there with my hand still buried in the drawer, the fabric cool under my fingers, and said it out loud to the empty room because I needed to hear it in a voice that wasn't just inside my own head. "She didn't have a heart attack. Someone gave her those pills. Someone killed her."

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