Chapter 2 - Mom Said the Juice Was Not the First Time
I called hospital security first.
Then a nurse.
Then the attending physician.
Celeste immediately began speaking over everyone.
“Evelyn became aggressive.”
Mom laughed once.
A dry, exhausted sound.
“I became difficult when she couldn’t drug me.”
Celeste’s face tightened.
I stared at my mother.
“Drug you?”
She pointed toward the juice on the floor.
“She crushed something into it.”
Celeste shook her head.
“She’s confused.”
That word landed strangely.
Confused.
I had heard it constantly during the previous month.
From Celeste.
Mom forgot breakfast.
Mom accused people of moving things.
Mom was becoming suspicious.
Mom woke disoriented.
Mom sometimes slurred her words.
Celeste had been documenting all of it.
I looked at my mother.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried.”
“When?”
“Tuesday.”
Tuesday.
I remembered the phone call.
Mom told me:
“That girl is putting things in my drinks.”
Celeste had called me ten minutes later.
She sounded calm.
Concerned.
“She’s having another paranoid spell, Graham.”
I had believed the professional caregiver.
Not my mother.
The shame arrived instantly.
Mom saw it.
She did not comfort me.
Good.
I hadn’t earned that yet.
The hospital preserved samples of the spilled liquid and reviewed Mom’s medication chart.
Then the attending physician discovered something else.
Evelyn’s bloodwork from two previous admissions contained traces of a sedating medication she was not supposed to be taking regularly.
Nobody had connected the result to foul play.
Why would they?
A frail seventy-six-year-old woman experiencing weakness and intermittent confusion was not unusual.
Especially when her caregiver kept providing a reasonable explanation.
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Except now the explanation was lying beneath a shattered cabinet.
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