I Saved My Sister, So They Drowned Me Chapter 06
Mom arrived at the hospital at three in the afternoon.
I heard the sharp clicking of her heels rushing down the hallway.
Click.
Clack.
She was walking fast.
Then I heard her conversation with the nurse at the station.
“Which room?”
“Are you family?”
“I’m her mother.”
When she said those four words –
“I’m her mother.”
There was no sadness in her voice.
Only irritation.
Like she had been summoned to school to deal with a child who had done something wrong.
The door opened.
Mom stood there.
She looked at me once.
I couldn’t make out her expression.
Or maybe I just didn’t want to face it.
She walked to the side of my bed.
I thought she would say something.
She did.
“What exactly do you want?”
Her voice was shaking.
But it wasn’t the trembling of someone who was worried about me.
It was anger.
“You weren’t embarrassed enough at home, so you had to go out and embarrass us somewhere else?”
“You jumped into a river?”
“Why didn’t you pick somewhere no one would find you?”
“Do you know what I was doing when the police officer called me?”
“I was shopping for Lily’s seasonal clothes.”
“Lily was standing right beside me.”
“What was I supposed to do if she heard?”
What was I supposed to do if Lily heard?
Even now.
Even after everything.
The first person she thought about was still Lily.
I closed my eyes.
“Say something!”
Mom hit the bed rail.
“Why did you do all this without saying a word?”
“Are you trying to kill me with this?”
Someone softly cleared their throat at the door.
It was Dr. Bennett.
He knocked on the doorframe and walked in.
“Could I speak with you privately for a moment?”
Mom glared at me.
Then followed him outside.
The door was left slightly open.
The voices from the hallway drifted in.
Broken.
Faint.
“Your daughter has severe depression.”
“Before she was admitted, she was already showing severe psychosomatic symptoms.”
“This wasn’t a moment of impulse.”
“This happened after a long period of…”
“What severe depression?”
“Lily is the one with depression.”
“She’s just copying her sister…”
“Family member, I’m going to be honest with you.”
The psychiatrist’s voice became heavier.
“If you had arrived twenty minutes later, the paperwork you signed today wouldn’t have been a hospitalization form.”
“It would have been a death certificate.”
The hallway went silent.
For a long time.
A very long time.
Then I heard a sound I had never heard before.
Mom was crying.
Not the kind of crying she put on in front of relatives.
Not the kind filled with self-pity and waiting for someone to take her side.
This was different.
She was sitting on the hallway floor.
Her face buried in her knees.
Her sobs muffled.
Her breathing uneven.
Her entire body shaking.
I lay in bed and listened.
I felt nothing.
My heart felt like a sheet of paper left in the rain.
Soft.
Broken.
One poke would leave a hole.
But it didn’t hurt anymore.
Nothing hurt anymore.
Dad arrived that evening.
When he entered the room, he didn’t say anything.
He stood at the end of my bed and looked at me for a long time.
Then he slowly walked over.
He sat down on the chair beside my bed.
His head was lowered.
His hands were clasped together.
The veins on the backs of his hands stood out one by one.
“Nina.”
His voice was quiet.
I didn’t answer.
He didn’t say anything else.
He just stayed there.
Sitting.
For a very long time.