Page 13 of Needing to Fall
Drew hadn’t said a word to me as we walked home. He knew something was wrong, but he let me deal. He also knew I would tell him in time.
Drew came right to me, and I didn’t hesitate to throw my arms around him, burrowing my head in the only safe haven I had. As the tears fell, he didn’t let me go.
Suddenly, Drew’s body was limp in my arms, all of his weight pressing on me.
I moved my head back only to see blood coming from his eyes and mouth, pouring all over me.
I woke with a jolt, my arms unable to move, which only made me fight harder. The images of Drew burned my eyes. I wanted to get up. I wanted to check the locks, make sure no one could get in. However, I was stuck to this bed in this hospital. I couldn’t move in this white, sterile place. I was trapped not only here, but in my head. I felt like a prisoner in both places.
I allowed the tears to fall, never succumbing to sleep.
That stupid, little, baldheaded prickwas what I thought, but I didn’t say it as I stared at my shrink. For days we had been at this, and the only good thing was Nurse Hatchet didn’t make me wear the restraints on my arms. She put me in a room that had nothing sharp in it, but at least I wasn’t confined. That shit made my head swim.
There was no defending myself if something were to happen. I would have been at their mercy and stuck. I avoided getting stuck at all costs. It was a little ironic here, though, because each time I got up to check to see if the door was locked, it was, but from the outside. It did little to help my anxiety. While it used to comfort me to check the doors, in here, it only added to my unease.
Today, this asshole decided to get into the nitty-gritty of my time at the Petersons’.
I tried hard to keep my answers simple. I tried hard not to let everything hang out.
He looked over at me from his desk. “Tell me how you feel.”
I sat in a chair across from him as he played with the corner of his glasses. I thought for sure he would take them off at any moment and put one end in his mouth like those corny TV shows, but he didn’t.
“I want to know what is going on in that head of yours. I want to know what it felt like when you saw Drew kiss the other woman or when the child ran up in his arms.”
My insides turned to ice and my throat began to close, suffocating me. I had blocked as much of that moment out of my head as I could, just trying to get myself out of here and putting all my strength into that. I didn’t want to think of it right then, but he didn’t stop.
He just kept pushing.
“How did you feel when the three of them went into the house?”
Nope. I wasn’t doing it. Instead, I gripped the chair, holding on for dear life, using it to keep me firmly planted in the room.
“How did seeing Drew take off with hisfamilyand leave you behind, yet again, feel?”
The way he said family hit me in the gut. The knife already lodged inside twisted its serrated blades, shredding me to the depths of my core. There was no going back from that one. Nope. Nothing.
My heart constricted at the thought of Drew playing with his son out on that big front lawn while his woman sat watching, smiles on all three of their faces. The deepest recesses of my soul came to the surface, and I couldn’t push them back.
Tears streaked my cheeks as I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around my body, trying to hold myself together. I had been focusing so hard on getting out of here that the vault I had all these emotions in was left unguarded and sprang open. The swirling tornado sucked me into its depths, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“This what you want, doc?” I pointed to the tears dripping down my face. “Because this is how I feel.” I got up from the chair, needing space, and began pacing behind the chair. My thumb went to my mouth as I began chewing on it as I moved. “I’m alone. Desperately, unequivocally alone. I have no one in this world.” I stopped momentarily and stared him in the eye. “Do you even know what that’s like?” I didn’t wait for him to answer as I turned away and continued answering for him. “Of course you don’t with all those family pictures behind you. Did you ever think someone coming in to see you had no one, and I mean no one, on this planet to turn to? No. You probably grew up in a house where people actually gave a shit about you. You probably didn’t have to scrounge for food or result to eating dog food because there was nothing left for you after your parents ate their dinner. You probably did shit like play games or whatever it is parents are supposed to do with their kids. Me? None of that. I didn’t even know what a game was until my first foster home, and they looked at me like I was a freak when I didn’t know what Go Fish was.”
I sucked in deep breaths and carried on. “Nope. You didn’t have to do any of that. You didn’t have to spread your legs to keep the only person on the planet who gave a shit about you from having to go through the same pain. You haven’t watched that same person die in front of you, the life fading from the eyes of the one you loved.” By this point, my words were so jumbled with sobs I didn’t know if he was understanding, but I really didn’t care. It was coming out without any way to stop it.
“You didn’t have to live on the streets, surviving by opening your legs again just to get food or protection. It was all I had to offer anyone.” I swiped at my nose, wiping the snot-covered tears on my hospital-issued pants. “You didn’t have to pick yourself up from that, get two jobs, work your ass off, get your own place—hell, even make a new friend. But I wasn’t living.
“The only thing I was living in was fear: fear that my father would find me; fear that Mr. Peterson would find me; fear that my mother would find me and give me back to my father; hell, even fear that Mrs. Peterson would see me out and drag me back so she could get back the money I lost her when I left, since I wasn’t her paycheck each month anymore.”
The doctor had a brown, ratty couch in the corner of his office, and I needed more space. I sat with my back to him, resting on the arm of the couch. I curled myself into the smallest ball I could make myself, wishing I had one of those superpowers you see in the movies so I could just disappear. Forever. No such luck. A small ball was the best I could do.
“Then Andi wanted me to get closure. She’s the one who started all of this. She wanted me to go to Drew’s gravesite and tell him bye. I didn’t want to. Ireallydidn’t want to. It would be telling him good-bye all over again, and I couldn’t do it. But her words played in my head for weeks, only to find out he’s alive, happy, a father, a husband or boyfriend.”
I began rocking back and forth, unable to stop the tears or my words. “So how I feel is I’m in a big, black void of thick, sticky tar. I’ve always been in it, unable to get above the surface as it keeps pulling me in. But seeing Drew, knowing he’s alive and didn’t come to look for me, didn’t bother to even think of me … I’m under it so far now I can’t breathe. I’m ready to end all of this.
“I don’t want to be in this world anymore. I don’t want this pain and ache to take me over, and I don’t need you or anyone else telling me how fucked in the head I am. I know it. I live it. And you need to know, doc, nothing you do is going to pull me out of it.”
I sat there, rocking back and forth, wanting everything to stop, wanting it all to go away. It didn’t. It just kept getting louder and louder in my head.
