A lesson in physics

First let me start by saying that I'm a writer, so while it may seem as though I've taken some poetic license, if you will, please remember this fact because though it seems incredible--literally every word is true. Having said that, let us begin. In the years leading up to the winter of 82 when my mother gave birth to me, she lived in a mid-sized two family house with my brother and father in the suburbs of Staten Island. I say it this way so that I may impart two stories upon you and a little context helps. My brother was born in 77 so he was three or four years old when this first story occurred. My entire life my mother swore she was clairvoyant in some way or another. Whether it be the mind of an impressionable child or that there actually was something to what she said, I always believed her. She also told me that of her three children, she saw something bright in me, some gift of extra sensory ability though I've seen so much more in her than I ever have in myself. I digress...Like I said, my family lived on the second floor of a two family house. It had two bedrooms which were on opposite ends of a long hallway with the kitchen and bathroom on one side and the den or living room on the other side of the hallway. As you walked towards the master bedroom the walls closed off on both sides so the hallway was tight and closed in about seven or eight feet from my mothers door. My mother always said that whenever she traversed that section of hallway the walls were abnormally cold to the touch, she could see her breath on sweltering summer days, and when she would lie down in bed sometimes it became very hard to breathe, as if a very large person were pushing down on her chest. My mother was over weight so she thought it was connected to that, but why only in THAT room and ONLY when she would lie down. I said my mother thought she was clairvoyant in some way, so she didn't dismiss ANY possibilities. It was very common for the guy who lived downstairs to fire up the grill on a summer day and induce some revelry. On one such day while my mother was engaged in a conversation with someone but simultaneously she was catching pieces of another neighbors conversation, and something caught her ear. The neighbor was relating a story about an old woman who had been suffocated with a pillow about ten years back. As tragic as the story is my mother loved that sort of creepy shit. "Oh my god, where did THAT happen?" chimed my mother as she leaned in like she was a part of the conversation the whole time. The woman looked at her like she was joking though. "What do you mean?" the neighbor responded. "The woman, where was she suffocated?" my mother reiterated. It dawned on the woman that my mother really didn't know the answer to the question. "Right here..." she said, pointing to my mothers house. "...upstairs in the master bedroom." My mother turned pale, became sick, vomited and ran upstairs to the bedroom. She gave the room a quick scan and began taking everything she owned out of the room so that she never had to go in there again. She literally made my father put screws through the door and into the door frame, so even if someone did manage to unlock it, they still wouldn't be able to get into the room. She was genuinely terrified something would happen to my brother. Fast forward a few months, my mother is having a small get together with some friends in the back yard. Everyone is having their own conversations and although its light out it was getting late as my mother recalled, when from out of the front of the house there's aloud crash followed by a cascade of smaller, lighter crashes. Like someone broke a window and some of the glass fell to the concrete. There are a ton of kids in the neighborhood and it wouldn't have been the first time that someone wound up with some thing flying through a window. Everyone got up to investigate, my father went straight upstairs to take the screws out of the door to see what it was. My mom is downstairs laughing with one of the neighbors and she sees my father look through the window. My father is Middle Eastern, but my mother could see he was as white as a sheet. "Laurie, a you come up here?" He said nervously and through broken English. When my mother got upstairs she understood what was wrong with my father, what he found up there could not have possibly been scarier or harder to logically explain: Nothing. There was absolutely nothing in the room, not even broken glass. All of the glass was outside sitting on the front walk and sidewalk, not even a single shard of glass could be found, let alone the object that shattered it. The window had been broken from the inside...I was conceived a month after that happened, my family moved out of the house less than a month after that.