Seeing It

I saw the spot today where #4 had her accident. A steep hill, a broken sidewalk…it was a tragedy waiting to happen.

I stood there this afternoon and looked at the four inch height difference between the slabs of concrete. Just beyond it was the already fading stain from a pool of blood. Her lost teeth were still there – one in the grass and the other nearer to the street. I held them in my hand awhile and jiggled them like dice. The neighbor’s boy, who had spotted them and come to fetch me to this spot, jabbered on excitedly. I didn’t hear a word he said. My eyes kept returning to that blood stain where my baby had laid.

I took a few steps and began to follow the spatters of blood that traced her pained lurch toward home. She staggered past several houses, wailing – I’ve been told. She screamed and cried until our next door neighbor heard her and came running. I found that spot too. The place where he scooped her up and began to run with her toward our house, and the place on our porch where he set her down again.

I stood on my porch and looked awhile at her scooter with the marks from her teeth on the handlebars and her blood all over it. I can’t bring myself to touch it to move it off the porch. A part of me wants to throw it away and have the hated thing gone from our home. The rest of me is afraid to move it, as if moving it would make this all real and not some sick and scary daydream. Touching it makes it final. It makes her broken. It means that awful day is over and that we can’t somehow go back to before this ever was.