Page 17 of Spellbound
I felt the words of his spell hit me as he left the room, but softly, gently, the way he’d been caressing me as he thought I fell asleep. He’d told me to stay sleeping, but I was too restless, too full of wonder at what had just happened. I’d never really expected him to be attracted to me. I guess because he was a little older and so much more self-assured. And so freaking gorgeous. Anyway, I took a shot and just see how that worked. I hoped he wouldn’t be all tedious about it tomorrow, with regrets and second thoughts.
I stretched out my leg and felt it twinging, but the doctors said it would be painful for a long time. They’d even said that I might one day need a knee replacement, but that was far in the future, and I told myself not to worry about it until the day came. He’d asked me how I hurt my knee and I’d been cagey about it, hating to admit how stupid the accident had been.
Sometimes I wondered if I actually had been possessed by some kind of demon that day. My grandmother had come close to hinting that I might have been.
Well, hell, it had been a crazy thing to do. When people asked me about it, I usually just say I had a fall. If they press, I’ll say, “I fell on some rocks at a waterfall,” though that just opens up a whole long conversation. Mostly about how crazy I am.
Why did I even go to that park that day? I don’t know. I was depressed. Lonely. I wasn’t getting along with Brent, in anykind of way, and I hated my classes. Hence the depression and a feeling like I didn’t have much to live for.
I’d never felt that way before—after all I was young and ready to graduate college pretty soon. I had everything to live for, but on that day, I just felt this solid wave of black depression. Like nothing would ever get better and I was just kidding myself if I thought differently. I got in the car to take a drive, hoping to distract myself. I started driving, and I remembered someone talking about that park and the waterfalls. Some kids in one of my classes had been talking about going. I decided to go see them for myself. I guess I wanted to get away, or…who the fuck knows? It was totally out of character for me.
And it didn’t really help. As I got gas for my car and drove north to the park, I still felt so horribly depressed, and I guess I thought about just ending things once and for all. It would be the best for everyone if I wasn’t around anymore. I wanted it to just be over. All of it. School, and work. Brent. The thesis I was working on. I was under so much stress. I hated my job. I didn’t like the students, and I hated teaching, and I shouldn’t have felt that way, because that was supposed to be my career. I mean, I was aTeaching Assistant, and I needed the money. It wasn’t much, but it kept me going, but I didn’t see a way out.
It was the one time in my life that I could remember wishing I was crazy like my father and thought I had magic. Maybe I could magically fool myself into thinking everything would work itself out. I needed to know that I could finish what I’d started, but I didn’t feel any real hope for that. So, I just drove and kept driving.
I didn’t have a real plan or anything in mind. I just wanted to get there and once I did, I thought that I’d know just what to do. When I finally got there, I parked and went in. I saw the parking lot for the trail—I had some crackers and a bottle of water in thecar, so I took those with me, and I followed people who were hiking the trail.
I had told my grandmother that I had friends with me, but that was a lie. I just told her that to make it seem less weird. There were a lot of people on the trail that day though. People were pulling out food, sharing it around. I ate my crackers, and some nuts this guy gave me and drank my water. But I didn’t want company, and I could never seem to hold up my end of small talk anyway. So, I decided I needed to take a closer look at the falls.
It was nice, I guess, if you like that kind of thing. And it was like three or four falls in one, but small ones, one falling into another. All of them cascaded down, with the sun shining on the water. It was nice, but I was still so steeped in misery I barely noticed. The sun had just come out of the clouds—so I walked up about fifty feet or more—it was a steep trail with signs everywhere saying, “Do Not Climb on the Falls.” I ignored them and kept going. No one tried to stop me. I stopped at the top of the trail to just look down. But it was so hot, and I thought what the hell? I climbed over the fence and went up to the top of the falls, thinking I could stand in the spray and cool off. When I was actually there, it seemed so easy, and a niggling little voice in my head was telling me it was. Just step out into the water at the top and cool off some. Just for a minute. I looked out over them and thought, I could almost jump down into that pool. It’s not so high.
I waded out to the edge and really thought about jumping. It would be so easy and then all of this would be over. That’s when my brain realized where I actually was, and finally, I got scared. I wondered what the hell I was doing, and all the people below the falls were yelling at me and waving at me to go back to the side, so I started trying to get back out of the water.
But the water falling over the rocks kept pulling at me, coaxingly. The rocks were as slippery as wet ice. I fell three times trying to get back to the side and the rocks scraped my ankles and elbows and knees. I finally started trying to stay down and just drag myself to the bank, barely feet from the waterfall’s edge. I was shivering by this time, either from the cold or awareness of what danger I was in. The trees around me were silent, and dark, like they were watching me. I almost made it and then I had this thought—why am I chickening out?This is my chance.
I can just let go and this whole thing will be over. No more Brent, no more school and no more paper to write. It would be so easy. I inched over toward the edge to look over again. I wasn’t scared. It just seemed like the right thing to do, but I knew I hadn’t actually decided to do it. I was still resisting the pull a little bit and that’s when I tried to stand up. I slipped in the algae on the rocks.
I fell down hard on my ass because the rocks were so slippery, and I started clawing at the water and the rocks to get out of there. But the stones under me were covered in algae and moss too. That’s when I started falling over the edge. I wentcrashingover it, and I flew to the next set of rocks maybe six feet below me. The pain barely registered at first because I was numb. Then I fell again and again. I was falling downhill with the water, like it was some crazy waterslide, and I was slipping and crashing and screaming…I bet it was something to see. Everybody was shouting and pointing at me. There was a lot of screaming, to be honest, most of it coming from me. It hurt so bad.
I couldn’t stop myself though. I was still going and grabbing at the rocks to try and stop, but I couldn’t get hold of them—my hand would slip right off, and the water was really coming down hard. I thought, “This is it. I’m going to die!”
I flew over one ledge and dropped hard onto another, and then the last, which was a freefall of about fifteen feet down onto the rocks at the bottom of the falls. The others had been less, only five or six feet. Maybe a little more. People were screaming at me, but it was too late. That last fall was the one that really almost killed me. My leg took the brunt of the fall, and the pain was so bad I think I passed out. A white shard of bone was sticking out, and I-I passed out and I think I left my body.
I started floating up over the waterfall. But suddenly something was pulling me back, People had come out in the pool after me. Some guys had made a human chain, and one of them made it out to me. He started doing that thing where they press on your chest—CPR—and thenbam, I snapped back into my body again.
They pulled me over to the side of the pool where it was safer. The guy helping me held my head out of the water, and they used their phones to call for help. I was still screaming though. I thought I was going to die, and it hurt so bad that I kind of wished I would. Everything hurt, but especially my leg. I was flailing my arms, and that had almost made me start flying down again, but I was lucky, because one of my feet had wedged against another big rock and it got stuck. Some more people held onto me and were beside me until a big forest ranger or park guy came to kneel next to me. I begged him to stop the pain, but he said he didn’t have any way to do that. I wanted drugs to knock me out, but he didn’t have any.
I was screaming so loud that people said they could hear me a mile down the trail.A rescue team finally got me out and onto a stretcher and rolled me along the trail on some kind of wheeled thing. They gave me the strongest painkillers they said they had once they transported me to a medivac helicopter. Finally, I came to again in another ambulance. I’d never been in the back of an ambulance before, and I had no idea it was such a roughride. I was strapped down securely, and an EMT was beside me the whole time, talking to me, telling me to hang on. I could even hear the siren, but despite all of that, somehow, I dozed off. It must have been the drugs. After we arrived at the hospital, things moved pretty fast. I was taken to an examining room and looked over by some doctors, who seemed pretty excited and the next thing I knew I was on my way to surgery. I was in the hospital for six weeks or a little more.
I broke my patella, my kneecap, and my tibia, right at the top where it attaches to the knee. There was a ton of blood where the bone was sticking out. They thought I might even lose my leg at first—it was that bad. I heard the doctors talking to my grandmother. I was going to surgery, and they’d have to put in screws and pins. I guess I hit my head a few times too and I had a concussion, but no skull fracture. I was still out of it for a long time.
A long time later, after the surgery, there was a psych consult because they thought I’d tried to kill myself. And I guess I did. But I think that someone else tried to help me do it too. There was a voice in my head the whole time, telling me how worthless I was and why I should just go ahead and kill myself.
It said things like how I was a burden to my grandmother and my friends, and I needed to get out of everybody’s way. That it was easier to just let go. I made the mistake of telling one of the psych doctors, and they started giving me some strong medicine, but I think it may have saved my life, because it made me sleep almost all the time, and I no longer wanted to hurt myself. I was so drugged up between the psych meds and the pain pills that I don’t think I could have done it anyway.
****
I woke up the next morning feeling amazing. I wondered if I had dreamed what had happened with Ben, and it did seem a little too good to be true, but I was too sticky and messy to believe I hadn’t really been making love the night before.
I hardly even remembered going to bed, and I’d slept well until I decided it was too hot and I got up to open the window. I went to lie back down and right away, somethingknockedat the glass. It scared the shit out of me, and I jumped up, backing away from the window, afraid to go look and see what it was.
When the knock came a second time, I called out, “Who is it? What do you want with me?”
But predictably, nothing made any kind of reply. The only thing I could think to do was head down to find Ben. I didn’t really know him all that well, but I had a feeling of safety around him. I knew that he’d know what to do.
He did come to my room, and he knew what to do, all right. I was still shaking from some of the things he knew to do to me, with my wholehearted approval. I was nervous about seeing him today.
I slept through the rest of the night with no dreams that I could recall, which made for a refreshing change. I got up and showered in the ensuite bathroom that had to be a modern day add-on—maybe an old dressing room that had been converted and remodeled. It must have been expensive, because it was a really nice bathroom, with a ceramic tiled shower and granite counter tops on the vanity. Whatever—I was just glad it was there. I didn’t want to go rambling around a house I was unfamiliar with so early in the morning looking for the bathroom.
