The Basement Part 2

“What are you doing down here?” He asked, it seemed incredibly odd for his grandmother to be sitting down here by herself, and why didn’t she answer any of his calls? She must have heard him, possibly even when he rapped on the screen door to begin with.

“I remember when you were just six years old.” She was holding a book of pictures in her hands, one of all her children, grandchildren, and relatives, and slowly flipped the pages as she talked. “You were playing in the wooded area out back, you used to call it a jungle and pretend that you were Tarzan. You always had an active imagination, that’s why I always thought being a lawyer was wrong for you. Suits and ties and courtrooms aren’t for dreamers.”

“Are you okay, grandma?”

“Well, I guess you got to close to a nest, or maybe you didn’t and you were just unlucky, but a wasp landed right on that little finger of yours. You tried to shake it off, probably didn’t even know what it was at the time, but it bit you anyway. You came crying all the way back to the house, it amazed me how such a small little boy could make such a loud and terrible noise. I rubbed some medicine on the wound and tried to console you as much as I could, even let you have a chocolate chip cookie I had made that afternoon even though it was getting close to supper.

“Do you remember that?” She said, as she came to last page in the scrapbook.

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I was there for you, William, when you needed me.” She set the book on a shelf next to the chair and started to get up. “So, why weren’t you there for me when I needed you?”

“What?”

As she stood and turned around, her face, which had always been turned away from William and hidden by the chair, became visible. This, unlike the house, looked very different than what he remembered. The whole right side of her face seemed to be shattered and broken, covered in dark red blood and her right eye was missing. It only took a moment for Will to realize what had happened.

His grandmother owned a shotgun, although she never seemed to use it, for as long as he could remember. It was given to her as a present long ago, supposedly for protection. She had put the barrel of that gun to her wrinkled, noble face and tried to shoot it off while sitting in this basement, this God-forsaken basement.

Will shrunk back in horror as his bloodied grandma crept towards him. Her slippered feet scraped against the hard basement floor.

“What did you do?” Will cried, as his back touched one wall of the dark room. He had nowhere to go.

“I needed you and you weren’t there. I just needed you. I needed help.”

She was still walking towards him as he slowly slid down the wall he was backed into. He began to sob.

“I didn’t know. I would’ve been here.” He said with tears running down his face and snot dripping from his nose.

“No, I just needed my grandson. I needed you.”

She was little more than a foot from him now. He wanted to run, out of that basement and up those stairs, but he couldn’t, partly out of fright and partly out of sadness. And so he stayed there; paralyzed in fear and guilt - waiting.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He kept saying it over and over again like a broken record player.

“Why weren’t you here for me, like I was there for you?” She reached out and grabbed his shoulders and shook him violently saying, “Why? Why? Why?” yelling it almost.

It’s true that one person can only take so much. Will clutched at his chest and writhed in agony as a heart attack rocked his body. The last thing he saw was the burgundy chair on the other side of the basement as his vision dimmed and his heart stopped.

When the police finally found them it was the next day. A medical examiner determined that Will Jacobson died of a heart attack sometime between three and four o’clock that afternoon. The same examiner also placed Mrs. Lenore Jacobson’s time of death, by suicide, at sometime between ten and eleven that morning.

After reading the medical reports two cops at the precinct sat at their desks drinking coffee. In an effort to give closure to the case, one of them said to the other, “I think it’s pretty easy to see what happened here. The grandma offed herself when she was alone that morning. The grandson finds her in there dead at a later time and dies himself from the shock. Open and shut case.”

His colleague nodded in agreement.