Prompt: Anonymous said: I like pain. YB verse. Landslide. Diane finds Alex when she ODs.
Tw: drugs
In reality, moments of superhuman strength don't come from men changing clothes in phone booths or scaling tall buildings. They aren't performed by multi-millionaires concealing their identity and packing wild technology.
Women who lift cars to save their children; that's the go-to example, the popular tale that people have no trouble believing.
In reality, superhuman strength belongs to mothers.
Diane Vause doesn't lift a car. She makes a phone call.
It feels just as superhuman.
Diane gets home from work after midnight, glad to see Alex's car in the driveway; the two of them haven't crossed paths in the apartment for the last few days.
There's a single lamp on in the apartment living room, and Alex's bedroom door is closed. "Al?" Diane calls out loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough to wake Alex up if she's asleep.
There's no answer. Diane slips out of her sneakers and gets a beer out of the refrigerator. She sits on the counter, drinking with one hand and massaging the arch of her foot with the other. She grabs a banana off the top of the fridge and eats around the bruises.
She wastes seven and a half minutes in the dim dark of the kitchen before she goes down the hall for the bathroom, stopping habitually to look in on Alex.
Her bedroom is empty. Diane frowns, surprised.
She flips on the light, like she needs to make sure. Alex isn't there.
Backing out of the room, Diane glances down the carpeted hallway and notices light coming from under the bathroom door.
"Alex?" She's loud, now, making sure her daughter will hear.
Alex probably left the light on, she's probably gone somewhere in someone else's car, all of that makes so much more sense than any worst case scenario, but Diane's head is still full of airy panic as she hurries to the door and grabs for the knob.
It's unlocked, and Diane shoves it open and ends up thumping her knee against the door when it doesn't open all the way, colliding with something solid on the other side.
Diane's eyes shoot down, peering into six inch gap of the doorway, and she sees Alex's dirty black Converse, the one with the laces fraying at the edges and smudged sharpie scrawled song lyrics fading around the white edges.
For a hard few heartbeats of a moment, Diane stares at the shoe like she can't make sense of what she's seeing.
Then she realizes it's not just a shoe, and all of a sudden Diane's life starts caving in on itself.
"ALEX." Her daughter's name is the word she knows best of all, but she has never said it like this. Like it might rip her at the seams. "AlexAlexAlex..." She keeps saying it as she pushes on the door, colliding with something, with what she now knows is probably leg and hip and shoulder, and she doesn't pause long enough to hear the answer not come.
Diane angles herself through the crack and bursts into the bright white of the bathroom. Alex is sitting on the floor, but it's not really sitting because her eyes are closed and she's slid too close to the floor.
Mothers with superhuman strength lift cars off their children.
This is what Diane does:
1) She checks Alex's neck for a pulse.
"C'mon, baby, wake up for me..."
1) Watches her chest, looking for a rise and fall. She can't be sure.
"Please please please please Alex."
3) Leans close to her face, listening for escaping air, trying to feel her breath against her cheek. She does barely.
"You're okay, you're okay, I'm right here, babe, you're okay."
4) Leaves the room, lets Alex out of her sight long enough to find a phone.
"I need an ambulance, 453 Eleanor Ave, apartment 203. My daughter's unconscious, she's barely breathing."
An ambulance is on its way. Diane had called for help. She had done what she was she supposed to.
She goes back to the bathroom with the cordless phone in her hand. Even though Diane is holding her daughter against her, it feels like she's still trying to get closer, like her heart is clawing through her chest to get to Alex, shredding muscle and bones. She strokes Alex's hair with one hand and moves the other between her pulse and her mouth, checking for heartbeats and breathing. She holds herself together so she can answer the paramedics' questions, so she can listen to what they say.
She doesn't act like a woman who is collapsing. A woman knee deep in the end of the world.
That is her superhuman strength.
She doesn't see the needle on the floor until they pull Alex away from her.
"Is she a regular user?"
"How long's she been IV-ing?"
"Does she have a history with heroin?"
Heroin.
Diane falls back in time, just for a second, checking out of the horror show that is the present. She remembers Lee shooting up so many times. She'd done it with him a few times, and it makes her veins run cold with guilt. Like Alex was born into this poison.
She thinks of her father, drifting off the road in his car with God knows what corrupting his blood - Diane had never let her mother get close enough to tell her the truth - and she thinks of giving her daughter his name.
Her strength stays intact in the ambulance ride, she is holding onto Alex's limp fingers and straining to listen to what the paramedics are saying. She does not feel smart enough to understand them, to even know what questions to ask, if there's something more she should be saying than "Is she okay is she okay is she okay?"
Mothers lifts cars but all Diane can do now is sit and watch and not feel this for just a little while longer.
They wheel Alex away from her in the ER, dismissively tell her she has to go a waiting room, no one is giving her answers but Diane finally grabs the sleeve of one of the doctors swarming Alex and demands an answer, "Is she going to be alright?"
The doctor's eyes meet hers, and for a second Diane sees what he's thinking: that she is trash in a waitress uniform and she let her daughter shoot hard drugs right under her roof. She failed, she has always been failing, but there's no coming back from this one. "Please..." she whispers thickly. "Please tell me she's not going to die."
The doctor's eyes soften. "We're going to do everything we can."
Then he's gone, without giving her a yes, without saying that Alex is going to live.
A nurse comes over and gently shows her to a line of chairs outside the emergency room, promising to update her as soon as they know something. Diane turns to her, very deliberate. She wants to tell them things about Alex, make them see more than just another drug using teen delinquent. She wants to tell them that her daughter is smart and strong and probably heartbroken, but Alex's name breaks apart in her throat and suddenly Diane can't stop shaking. She is human once again, she is feeling everything, every piled up second of the last hour walloping her all at once.
It's like a hook snags in her gut and drags a long animal howl straight out of the deepest part of her. The sound slices the air, shatters what's left of her strength, and eventually it falls to pieces, too, collapsing into a fit of desperate weeping as Diane lowers herself to the ground out of necessity.
Mothers lift cars.
But if it isn't enough, if everything isn't okay after, are mothers allowed to disintegrate?