Prologue

"Amazing grace,

How sweet the sound,

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost,

But now am found

Was blind, but now

I see"

The water, the water is everywhere. The current pull me at a frightening pace, my head bangs against a rock. Cold hard panic fills my gut.

I wake up, the sheets are tangled around my legs, stick with my sweat. It was just a dream. I look at the glowing clock on my bedside table, trying to steady my racing heart. Its 12:15 pm, I should be asleep, but at this time I never am. For the past week, every night, I have the same nightmare. In it I'm drowning, no matter what I always wake up at 12:15. Maybe I'm on some creepy auto clock.

I wonder why I'm always drowning in my dreams, but of course, she drowned. "No," I tell myself, "don't think about it," but it's too late. Memories of her swirl around my brain, dominating my thoughts. It takes forever for me to fall back asleep.

Chapter 1

Maybe because of the dream, or maybe because Mom hasn't gotten up yet, (which means she's in bed crying) I decided to get up early. I got myself a bowl of cereal and ate it slowly. I hate this cereal, I like lucky charms. Unfortunately they are off limits; it was her favorite cereal too.

We were sitting on the floor, watching TV; a Lucky Charms commercial was on. As the kids witlessly tried to get the cereal she looked at me and said, "Connor, why don't those kids ever stop chasing that poor leprechaun, there not going to get the cereal. So why keep going?"

I've been having lots of flash backs latterly, I think flash backs are one way that I dealt with her death. My dad secludes himself and gets wrapped up in work, I have dreams and flash backs, but my mom is the worst; she doesn't deal with her death at all. She quit her job; and sits in her room all day. I haven't seen her all week. I sort of understand how mom feels, in the first weeks after her death I didn't want to get up either, but I dealt with it, eventually I went back to my life. The only changes; a few pictures in my room, and a red rubber ball next to her grave. I guess part of me resents my mom and her sadness. I have been taking care of her for so long, and all I have wanted to do is curl up in a corner and fade away, she should be caring for me, putting herself to get her like I have, I'll give her one year, then, despite her insistences, I will send her to therapy.

I finish my cereal, dad shuffles into the room. His voice is gravely from lack of use, he mumbles "you're not going to school today; I need to go out of town for a while and I want you to stay and look after your mother." I look at him, askance; today is the pep rally, I can't stay home, I'm captain of the football team, and I am needed at school. But my dad and I have an unspoken agreement that at all times one of us must watch my mother. This practice arose a few days after the funeral.

I awoke to the sound of my mother's screams, echoing around the acoustics of our magnificent, marble home. I dashed down the stairs to see my parents wrestling in the doorway of the kitchen. I can still feel the horror and hear my terrified gasp when I saw the knife in my mother's hand. "No Marina!" my dad was yelling, over my mom's blood curdling shrieking. I got a glimpse of my mom's eyes before she turned again, what I saw haunts me to this day; her pupils where dilated, like she saw something we didn't, her actual eyes balls where rolling around in their sockets, so that sometimes only white showed, lased with red veins. Those where the eyes of a desperate, crazy woman, who had given up. Slowly she collapsed on the ground, and let the carving knife clatter to the floor. My dad gingerly picked it up, and placed it in a cupboard, then he came back to my mom and sat on the floor across form her. "Oh Angus," she wailed, "my baby, my poor poor baby, I want to go with her Angus, she needs me to protect her in the afterlife. She needs her mother; she's just a little girl." "Marina, you can't leave, she wouldn't have wanted that, you need to be strong Marina," my father replied. My mother looked at him and whispered, "Angus, it's just so hard."

Neither of them had seen my, as I stood in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs, so I slid silently back to my room to contemplate what I saw. The day after that my dad told me to stay with my mom and he walked out of the house. He returned half an hour later, with a small set of surveillance cameras and a padlock. First he installed the cameras, one in every room in the house, and then he gathered all the dangerous objects that we own (knives, scissors, letter openers, alcohol, medicines, etc.) and threw them into a metal box. He placed the padlock around the door and put the box in the garage.