August 13, 2023, New York
Nora
NORA Smith thought of her daughter. It seemed that overnight, Arianne became known to the world. The small family fell under the spotlight of Arianne’s fame as it skyrocketed within just days. At times, their phones were ablaze with calls requesting interviews about their daughter.
They took a few and offered comments about this fantastic book about the old serial killer Arianne wrote about. But their daughter’s strange behavior, while writing the book and after it was published online just over a month ago, never sat well with them. Now, living a state away, they wondered how well their daughter was riding the wave of sudden success.
Soon they learned, however, that she wasn’t surfing it well at all. They saw less and less of her, and she spoke less and less to them. Though they were happy with Arianne’s success, they both had grown to see how brutal the American society was—how they celebrate you until you’re no longer the fad of the day, then spurn you.
Could it be that the fear of rejection amid the fame was what made Arianne become this way so fast? Or was it the fact that the massive sales had made her a millionaire overnight, and she couldn’t handle that pressure? Whatever it was, they watched Arianne gradually fall into debilitating anxiety and knew that it was time to step in.
***
Nora made the call just after noon. This was the second 911 call within a few days. On the first call, three days ago, she told the dispatcher she was very worried about her daughter, Arianne, the brilliant but sensitive author she couldn’t make contact with. Officers had been dispatched to Arianne’s home at 421 128th Street, but reported all “appeared well, except your daughter just seemed tired.” This gave Nora’s mind some rest for a while, yet here she was calling again.
“It’s been three days. You said she seemed okay last time, but she’s still not answering my calls, and no one else has heard from her either,” Nora said to the dispatcher. “Please, I’m really worried. We have no relatives or friends close by. Please send someone over again.”
She hung up the phone after being promised that they would check. Nora slumped into the chair in her living room. She felt hopeless and just a little guilty that perhaps she had some hand to play in her daughter’s current mental state.
Nora and George Smith were simple Caribbean folks, immigrants from the South American country of Guyana, and they were deeply rooted in their Caribbean ways, caring little for the “fast life” of the United States.
Did either of them yearn to live in America? No, but if the opportunity to do so arose, it was rare for a Guyanese not to take it. So, when their “papers came through,” within a month, they packed their belongings and headed to what they believed would be a better life, with their five-year-old daughter, Arianne, in tow.
Nora thought that, as a child, Arianne did well with the transition. They first settled in Brooklyn, New York, where the foreign twang soon replaced her Creole tongue. She excelled in school at first, often applying her Caribbean standard of excellence to fly far ahead of the class. But then she grew into the age of rebellion and started committing petty offenses that would get her into just enough trouble for the school to call home and get her parents’ attention.
At first, Brooklyn was heaven—a city buzzing with a mix of Caribbean faces, sounds, and smells. But time passed, and both Nora and George quickly learned that this wasn’t like Guyana, the place where you could drop the children by Aunt Merle while Daddy was at work and Mommy went to market, or where the man who owned the corner shop would chase your children home if you stayed too late playing on the street.
In either case, you had to pray that the closeness these neighbors had with the children did not result in the latter letting loose any “house business” to these nosy elders, or else it would be all over the community by the next day.
America was a place where it seemed that everyone looked out for themselves. The communal closeness of Guyanese neighbors wasn’t easily there. So, while Nora sought companionship in Arianne, George retreated to silence in his longing to return to Guyana. To get away from the bustle, George encouraged them to find a home in the less hectic state of New Jersey.
Arianne hated the move. She wanted to stay in New York and made sure that that was where she went to college after graduating from high school.
Nora guessed that after Arianne became eighteen, she probably felt the pressure of being her mother’s best friend, and that it drove her to rent her apartment fresh out of college instead of returning to New Jersey. Nora knew her daughter’s ambition of becoming a best-selling author. It echoed every other sentence in the Smith household, so she and George willingly used their savings to fund the rent in the name of “creating a creative space.” They wished her well and hoped the new space she was going into would help her spread her wings.
Nora sipped her tea, letting the aroma of honey and chamomile caress her nostrils to calm her anxiety as she waited for an update from the police.
“Please call me back to tell me if my girl is okay,” she had begged the dispatcher, who promised they would, though things were a bit hectic.
Maybe she and George should have been more hands-on in all this, Nora thought, but their sweet Arianne was always one to run away if the pressure was too much, even from them.
***
About forty minutes later, Nora’s phone rang. On the other side of the line, Officer Ray Delgado of the Ninth Precinct identified himself as the responding officer for Arianne’s wellness check.
“Mrs. Smith, I’m calling with the update you requested,” the man said, his tone was flat but empathetic. “I’m afraid your daughter wasn’t in good condition when we arrived. She’s been taken to Lenox Hill Hospital. She’s stable, but you’ll want to get there as soon as you can.”
“Oh my God,” Nora managed to respond, immediately struck with grief that her worst fears had been imagined: the spiral they had been observing had come to an unfortunate head. “I—I’m about two hours away, but we will leave right now. But can you tell me one thing quickly, Officer?”
“Sure, ma’am,” Delgado said kindly.
“What exactly happened? What did you find?”
“When we got to the apartment, she didn’t answer the door,” Delgado responded.
Nora could hear the dispatcher rambling details of other reported matters through the radio in the background.
“We had the building super let us in,” the responding officer continued. “The place was … ransacked, and from her condition, it looked like she hadn’t left in days.”
“Was she hurt?”
“No physical injuries, but she was in bad shape mentally. We found her in the bedroom, on the floor, not responding at first. She was disoriented … kept saying strange things about someone coming for her—”
“Someone coming for her?”
“Yes, ma’am—then, she lashed out. We had to restrain her to prevent her from hurting herself.”
Nora gripped the rail of the stairs. While she was on the phone, George had been attentive to the conversation, and they started to move the moment Delgado announced what they had found. They hurried to the garage and into their car as the officer filled them in.
“She’s safe now, though, ma’am,” Delgado continued. “Paramedics sedated her and got her out calmly. I’m truly sorry, Mrs. Smith, but you should probably get there as soon as you can.”
“Yes, yes, of course, Officer, thank you very much.”
“We’ll let the hospital know you’re on your way,” he said before ending the call.
As they drove on the interstate, Nora was quiet. George didn’t ask her what she was thinking.
She gazed through the vehicle’s window and struggled silently to hold herself together. Someone coming for her. Nora felt even more guilty as she recalled her daughter’s increasingly erratic behavior while writing her book. Nora felt she should have visited her daughter more to find out what she had been struggling with.
