Writing Assignment 1- Draft 2!

When you hear death, you feel death. I know this because on that morning, the morning that plays through my head on a constant re-run, the air literally escaped my body. Tears refused to leave my eyes; noise refused to leave my mouth. My tongue was dry, yet my stomach made me feel as if I was about to spew all across the hotel room. My sister had received the call and shut the hotel suite door in with my mom. I heard a shriek, and a noise I had never heard before-- but was later to understand. I cautiously opened the door that had just been shut. My pregnant sister, Erin was on the flowered carpet of the hotel: heaving, moaning. Michaela was squeaking, screwing up her face in all directions as she bawled in quick spurts. Lauren was eerily quiet, her face disoriented and lost. My mother kept telling us all to shut up, Amber was still in the shower.
No one had to tell me what was going on. It was exactly what I had always feared as a part of my inborn paranoia. He was dead. Not alive. No longer in physical existence. (No more smell of chewing tobacco.) We had called Tim to go over to his house to check on him. He had not picked up our calls since last night, after we got out of the Nutcracker.
Soon upon enttering the room, my first stage of true, absolute, unquestioned shock set in. My mother pulled out her blackberry to call Steve. Hearing the words leave her mouth is when the air left me. “Richard is DEAD.” … “Don’t you dare make me say it again.” … “I have to get my girls home.” After the thirty seconds of breathless petrification, I let out the same noise I had heard earlier. A moan- like an animal, a crazy person, a person who’s brain could not connect to her throat or any function in her body because she had just found out her brother died.
Erin went to the toilet and started to heave. Kayla began rocking next to her. My mother went into the adjoining room to tell Amber. To tell her that her husband was dead. (No more country accent booming happily throughout the house.) I was not there to see her reaction, and was thankful. After my stunned phase, I had entered hyperventilation. There wasn’t enough air in the hotel room. My sister opened the window and Amber came out of the other room in silence. Lifeless. Emotionless. She took out a cigarette and went to the window. Lauren yelled at me to stay with her. I thought my family thought she would fall out of the window, I thought she would kill herself. She swooned and fell a little, about to faint. We sat in silence except for my sharp, quick breaths. We could hear Erin from the toilet and Kayla’s shrieks. My mother and Lauren were throwing our luggage onto the cart like machines.
I remember the ride down the elevator. I remember our absolute disaster of a family stepping in, and a poor couple looking the most uncomfortable I have ever seen human-beings. I remember sitting in the lobby waiting for the van we had rented to come pull up. I remember that right upon hearing of the death of my brother-- (No more prickly chin against my cheek in headlocks) --I spent the most terrible two hours in a van with my four, miserable, on the edge of being temporarily insane sisters, one of whom the youngest widow I had ever known. And I remember my mother, having the courage and strength to put her children first and get us home safely while beginning the mourning of the death of her son.