In the hospital again. This time barely conscious and probably for the last time ever.
She’d been in and out of the hospital more times than a hypochondriac. A spiral fracture to the arm, a dislocated shoulder, cuts that needed stitches, internal bleeding and massive ecchymosis – and it didn’t go unnoticed. Though she’d visited alternate hospitals, her records had been shared, and the pattern had been seen.
One kindly nurse had noticed and had tried to get her help, numerous times, but she wouldn’t take it. She’d insisted over and over again that she was fine, just clumsy. She’d known he could tell that she was lying, but what else could she do? She had her kids to think about.
But this time was not a broken bone or a punctured organ. This time was not even visible at all. This time was weakness and seizures out of nowhere. It was fatigue and headaches and nausea. It was difficulty breathing and fainting.
This time, it was poison.
Her nurse knight wasted no time calling for a toxicological screening, and they knew cyanide was the problem in only hours. They started treatment right away, keeping her from falling over the edge of death. Whenever she had breath enough to spare, she called for her children. Over and over again until her elderly neighbor brought her babies to the hospital.
And with them came the story of daddy being taken away by the police. Her precious children babbled and rambled, talking over each other about the lights, and the policemen, and the fight, and the handcuffs. On and on they went, but she was too tired and weak to settle them down.
Her neighbor explained he’d gone to her home when he’d seen all the lights, and her husband was being led away in handcuffs. When her neighbor had heard she was in the hospital, he took charge of the children and brought them to her. After all the years of seeing what he’d done to her, her neighbor wasn’t sad to see him taken away.
And neither was she.
She didn’t know how much more of that arsenic she could have swallowed down. But for her babies, to keep her dearest treasures safe, she would have drunk it until she died. She would have done whatever it took to get her babies away from him.
