Charles Wallace's Favorite Toy Read online

streamed down my face, and I realized that I was crying. I don’t remember when I started crying. Or when I began to panic. How long had I been lying here like that? I turned to the right to see the clock on the dresser. Seven-fifty. “Okay, not that long. But too long. I have to move. I have to call for help,” I told myself. There is no way I’m driving myself to the hospital.

  I scanned the dresser for my cell. It was not there. Of course it wasn’t. The last time I used it was the night before. My sister had called to see if I had found the warranty papers for the camera I had bought her for Christmas. I had been sitting at my desk, watching an episode of Being Human on Hulu on my laptop when she had called.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  The desk was out of my reach. In order for me to reach it, I had to push all of the debris off me and crawl out of bed over to the desk. I moved my left leg a mere eighth of an inch and cried out in pain again. Nothing was broken in that leg, I was sure, but it hurt nonetheless. Getting angry now at how wimpy I was behaving, I jerked my left leg and kicked the larger pieces off me. My leg received a few more cuts for its effort, but I smiled in satisfaction when the debris slid off me and crashed to the floor.

  I felt the bed move again and the heaviness of an overweight, four-legged creature crawl up my back. I lay there panting. After a long second a small, upside down, pear shaped-face popped into my view as Charles Wallace peered over my shoulder to look down at me.

  “Hi baby. Momma’s okay,” I said to him in a whisper. “Momma’s just being a baby. She needs to woman up and call for help.”

  He licked my face in acknowledgement, spread his body out along my back, and lay his head on my shoulder. Some nights, when he is feeling exceptionally loving, he sleeps this way. Well, until I switch sides and wake him, which annoys him to no end. I guess he expects me to sleep in one spot all night so that he is comfortable. After I shift my position, he huffs down to the foot of the bed and sleeps there for a while, until someone kicks him, then he stalks off somewhere else until he feels it is safe to crawl back into bed.

  I reached up and petted him for second while I gathered my strength.

  When I had myself under control, I slapped the bed and told myself to move. At the sound of my hand hitting the mattress, Charles Wallace leapt off my back in a flash and ran out of the room again.

  We live in a house that my husband’s parents left us when they passed away. This meant that we no longer had neighbors up our backsides the way we did when we lived in an apartment. This was not a good thing at that moment, because had we lived in an apartment the chances were high that someone would have come to my aid by now. They would have heard the crash and came running.

  “No one’s coming for you, now move,” I told myself.

  Turning my head to the right to face the west wall, I shifted my right leg again, trying to bend my knee to put the weight of the foot further on the bed. More pain shot through me as my leg slid faster and farther than I had intended for it to in my impatience. I moved my other leg in the process, flinching as the both moved over shards of broken glass.

  “Fuck,” I cried out. I’m going to have to turn over. I didn’t want to make that large of a movement, but I couldn’t keep shifting my legs blindly over the debris.

  Shaking off another wave of nausea, I began my slow turn around. The movement felt as if it took hours, but in seconds, I was lying on my back, looking up at the gaping hole in my ceiling. The space where my fan had once been looked as if the Hulk and slammed his fist into it. If the hole had been any deeper, I would have been able to see inside my attic.

  What the hell had happened? A weak boards? Termites? Loose wiring? Was the fan just too heavy?

  Phone, I needed my phone, I reminded myself. I can worry about everything else later.

  I sat up to look down at my legs. The top halves of them looked fine. A little blood smeared a few cuts, but other than that, they looked okay. The backs of them would show the most damage.

  Carefully, I swept the rest of debris into the floor, clearing the way so that I could move to the end of the bed and get my phone. My mother was the closet person to me. She would panic, but she would get here quicker than anyone else would.

  In order to keep my broken foot on the bed, I turned so that I was sitting across the bed then moved to the foot. Once I was there, I cursed as my phone was still out of reach.

  My desk was along the west wall, just past the foot of my bed, and the phone was at the opposite end of the desk from where I sat. Grabbing hold of the chair at my desk, I pulled myself almost completely off the bed, putting too much pressure on my broken foot, causing my vision to blur, and reaching as far as I could, I grabbed the phone. I popped it into my mouth and pushed myself back onto the bed. I felt the bed shift again as Charles Wallace made his presence known. He walked over to me and looked up, waiting for me to pet him. I leaned down and rubbed my nose across his to show him I was all right and that I still loved him. He licked my cheek, head-butted my jaw, turned, and walked back to the head of the bed. I turned to watch him sniff the vomit again.

  “Oh, no you don’t. Go on. Get away from that,” I said, trying to turn on the phone with one hand and swatting at him with the other. This swat did not affect him the way the first had. He now realized I either couldn’t get up or wouldn’t get up to chase him. I scanned the area around my bed looking for the fly swatter. I have never actually hit him with it, but that time I might have. Mostly because if I saw him eat that mess, I thought I would throw up again and again and again. The fly swatter was gone and, luckily, he had come back down to the foot of the bed where I was. I reached out and petted him while I held down the power button.

  “Mother F…” I begin to curse when I realized that phone was dead. Of course, it was dead. When it was charged, people could call me. I purposely let it die so I can ignore calls. This was a problem easily solved, I reminded myself. The phone charger was still plugged into the extension cord that was lying in the floor between the bed and the desk. I reached down, grabbed the USB end of the charger, and jammed it into the phone. Before I gave the phone any time to charge, I pressed the button. Impatiently, I waited for the thing to chime back to life.

  Tears splashed down onto the phone, distorting the menu. I’m still crying, I thought, looking down at the phone in shock. Of course, I am still crying, I chided myself. Despite all that I have to do, I am still in pain.

  I turned the phone face down on the bed to wipe away the tears, but when I turned it back around there was blood smeared across the phone where the tears had been. That was when I realized that I was lying in my own blood. My head swam, but I didn’t let it get the best of me. Apparently, I get woozy at the sight of blood, something I had never known about myself. Reaching over the side of the bed, I wiped the face of the phone on the dust ruffle.

  To be honest, it wasn’t as if I was lying in a soggy puddle of my own blood, but I had enough cuts, scratches, and nicks to be bleeding a good bit. I wouldn’t die from the loss of it, but seeing it, feeling it seep out of me, made me light-headed.

  When I brought the phone back up, it had finished its boot-up. Then I dialed the most important number in the world to me at that moment then prayed she was home. She answered cheerily. Damn it. I hated giving her something to worry about. In as calm of a voice as I could muster, I told her what happened. She freaked. Of course, she freaked, I was her child. Telling me she would be right over, she hung up.

  Next, I needed to call my husband. He worked at the hospital mom would take me to. I wanted him waiting for me when I got there.

  “Babe,” I whispered into the phone when he answered.

  “What’s wrong?” After twelve years, he knows my tones well enough to know when something is wrong.

  “I am on my way to your ER,” I said, feeling drowsy from blood loss.

  “What? Why?” His voice was loud, scared.

  “The damned ceiling fan fell on me.” I laughed.

  “What?”
I could hear noises in the background, but I had no idea what he was doing.

  “Mom’s here now.” I could hear her pulling into my driveway. “Wait for me…”

  The phone cut out then. I cursed a blue streak when I looked down to see that the cord had come out. It hadn’t been in long enough to charge enough for me to have more than a few minutes conversation.

  Everything happened quickly after that. Mom burst into the room, cried, wrapped me up, helped get to the car, and carried me to the hospital.

  When I asked later what had happened, the assumption was that something in the ceiling had given way. This was not surprising. His parents had bought the house thirty plus years ago and had done very little in the way of renovation or remodeling. They fixed all of the “have to” things that had broken over the years, but that was all. They had added the drop ceiling shortly after they moved in along with the fan. It was old, rusty, and ready to die. We knew this and just hadn’t taken the time do anything about it. I simply had the misfortune to be lying under it when it chose to do so.

  This theory seemed highly possible, though I have a sneaking suspicion that Charles Wallace may have been the catalyst or had been the final straw. On more than one occasion, I wondered if he had finally gotten a hold on the fan’s pull chain. His weight would most