The smoke detector goes off at 12:10am. I jump out of bed run to the middle of the room in a weird fight stance staring out into the hallway and the sound is gone. I know I heard it. I hear footsteps from downstairs. Sabreena is talking, “What the heck is going on”. She’s sniffing around the kitchen for smoke or fire.
Rob barely rolls over, Shaun and Shae never wake up to the noise. I lay in bed for 15 minutes still shaken at that shrill of the ear piercing beeping that jolted me out of bed.
12:40am. That damn sound again. It only lasts 3-4 seconds and it’s gone. This time Rob gets up and walks around the house. the CO2 detector is fine, green light for all good. The smoke detectors are hard wired into the house so maybe there was a power surge. Maybe one battery is dead but how do I know which one.
8 minutes later they go off again, this time longer. I start to feel like the house is taunting us. Rob jumps up and starts to take them down. The expiration date says 2005. That was a long time ago.
As Rob is removing the one in the living room it goes off in his face. He throws it down onto the ground as it punishing it. It breaks into little pieces.
We have a new smoke detector, never opened in the garage. We assemble it and place it on a shelf in the living room. At 1am there wasn’t anything else we could do. I stayed awake for another hour in a panic that our house wasn’t fully protected in case of a fire. I didn’t want to be that statistic.
Meanwhile Shaun and Shae never woke up to the commotion.
Today we head to the store for new smoke detectors for the house.
