Page 26 of In This Iron Ground
Damien tucked his hands underneath the blanket. He nodded.
“Okay. Before we get started, do you want anybody else here with you?” she asked, and Damien’s head jerked upwards in alarm. He stared at her, waiting for her to mention the McKenzies. She simply stared back, not looking surprised at his reaction.
“Mia,” his mouth said, and he immediately regretted it. “No, never mind, no one.”
“It would be no trouble to get her. She’s in the waiting room,” Sam said.
Damien’s stomach tightened. “Really?”
“Yeah. You have quite a few people there, actually. Mia, and…I think he said his name was Cameron. And then Hakan, and Kiki.”
“Koko.”
“Oh, right. Koko.”
“What about…the McKenzies?” Damien asked. At this, Sam and Nicola shared a strange, guarded look.
“No, not at the moment,” was all Sam said.
“Should I get Mia, then?” Nicola asked. Damien hunched into himself in indecision.
“Damien,” Sam said softly, and it was the tentative feel of her fingertips on his elbow that made him realize he was scratching at himself again.
“Sorry,” Damien said quickly, but his attempt at hiding his hands under the blanket was halted by Sam.
“Leave them out here for a little bit, okay?” Sam suggested, and the softness of her voice grated, but Damien complied. “Nicola’s going to get Mia, okay? And how about this? If you want her to leave at any point, you just tug at your earlobe twice. It’ll be like a secret sign, and I’ll make an excuse and ask her to step out, okay?”
After a moment, Damien nodded slowly and then suffered the awkward silence until Nicola returned. She stepped through the door first and then—Mia. Her face seemed calm, but Damien had gotten to know her eyes and they were strained around the corners, her face paler than usual. The look punched Damien in the sternum, forcing all the air out.
He was flying in the forest, he was in a warm room, there was red blue red blue, he was amidst a smile across a dinner table, a warm hand on his shoulder, a—
For some reason incomprehensible to Damien, the moment their eyes met, he burst into sobs. Unlike his tears before, which seemed to be a deluge pressing down on him, digging him into unrelenting earth, these seemed to be ripping something from him. They were a baptism of salt water as he was purged and emptied.
Mia didn’t ask permission, instead striding to where Damien was curled tightly on the bed. Suddenly, warm, strong arms were around him, holding his rattling bones and bursting lungs in place. She was making soft noises, hums and whispers, but there were no words. It was Mia, the home smell of her, rocking him back and forth in her arms. He couldn’t help but cling to her, the desperate clutch of the drowning, but the air in his gasping lungs felt full and giving.
Time disintegrated. Damien could feel the low humming in Mia’s chest. He let the hand running through his hair calm him until he was nothing but an empty vessel, numb to both emotion and thought. This time, however, the feeling was almost restful, as if he had finally hit the bottom of the well. But he knew there was much more still to come.
He untangled himself from Mia slowly, leaving the damp impression of his face on her shirt. He opened his mouth to apologise reflexively but was cut off by Mia’s hands cupping his face. She looked into his eyes and the love there—it could not be mistaken for anything else—could fertilize even the barren fields inside Damien.
Damien closed his eyes, letting out a shaking breath as a kiss was pressed to his forehead.
After cleaning up his face and being given some water, everybody relocated so Sam was sitting in a chair on one side of the bed whilst Mia sat on the other, still holding his hand. Nicola stood behind Mia.
“You okay to start?” Sam asked. Damien nodded. “Okay. Remember what I said—take your time, if you want to take any breaks, ask, and if you feel a question is too much, we can skip to the next one, although some of them we’ll have to come back to later. Okay?” she said in the same calm, straightforward voice.
Damien nodded again, focusing his gaze on his hand worrying at the sheet.
“Okay. We’ll start with getting a bit of a picture about what happened today. Am I right in saying that you took a number of pills?”
Damien nodded, steeling himself.
“Do you know what they were?”
Damien shook his head. “Not really. I just grabbed whatever I could see.”
“Where did you get them from?”
“The, um, from the nurse office at school. I mean, it wasn’t the nurse’s fault. The pills were in a locked cabinet. Well, I mean, it wasn’t lockedthen, but there was a key hanging from the lock, so…”
