Chapter 9:
My eyes opened to bright florescent light. The sound of respiration machines, an EKG, and god knows what else surrounded me. I felt groggy and heavy. The pain had returned to both of my wrists. I tried to move my arms up to examine them, but something held them down. I looked around me and saw the institutional walls of a hospital. IVs and machines that were monitoring my vitals were next to my bed. There was a respiration machine, which I assumed was to help me breathe, though I was now breathing quite fine on my own. My arms had been tied to the bed. I guessed that it was done as a precaution, just in case I woke up and decided to harm myself again.
After a few minutes of observation the panic and grief set in. I had been so close. I was just a few feet from him and now I was here is this damned hospital bed. Andrew had been stolen from me yet again. I began to cry. How long would this go on? All of this reality and unreality kept interchanging. I myself did not even know what was real and what wasn’t anymore. All I knew was that I wanted nothing more than for someone to come into the room and put me back under so I could back to wherever I had been at. I could find him there. He existed there, even if it had only been my imagination.
I decided just to lie where I was and accept defeat. I was such a failure. I could not save him from the fortress. I could not reach him in the forest. I obviously was not able to effectively kill myself to escape the misery. I would be forced to live in this perpetual nightmare for the rest of my life as doctors and orderlies analyzed me, poked, and prodded me.
A nurse walked in with a clipboard humming to herself. She was very young, with pretty red hair. She looked at me and her freckled face twisted, her green eyes slightly alarmed. She had realized that I was awake. I wondered how long I had been out.
“Could you remove this from my face please?” I asked in my kindest voice through the face mask. “I don’t think it is necessary.”
She stood there just staring at me for a beat and then nodded. She walked over and timidly removed the mask from my face. She just stared down at my shocked. I looked at her nametag. Her name was Violet. What a lovely name, I thought to myself.
“Violet, may I talk to a doctor please? I have a lot of questions.” I said, trying to cover up the sadness in my voice from crying before she had entered. I had obviously caught her off guard and did not want to stress her or frighten her any more than I had.
She nodded and walked out of the room in somewhat of a hurry. The door shut behind her and I was left once again to my thoughts. What would happen to me now? I wondered what they would have to say about Andrew and his disappearance. Had they decided that my psychotic suicidal rampage had resulted from an elaborate murder? Whatever they thought, they would not believe the truth when I told it to them. That was the one thing I knew for sure. While it didn’t really matter what they thought, I was still anticipated their theory with much curiosity.
The door opened and a man in a white jacket stepped in. He was short and stout. He had a red face framed by dark hair and there were streaks of grey through his very full beard. His white medical shoes squeaked as he walked across the sterile looking tile. His tiny brown eyes looked me over like I was some sort of strange specimen.
“Hello Torey. My name is Dr. Taylor,” he said in a very professional sounding voice. He pulled a worn leather chair over to the bed from the side of the room over to my bedside. “I was told that you had some questions that you wanted answered. So, I will let you start with those, and then I will give you any additional information that I think you will need.”
Where was I to begin? I had enough questions to fill an entire evening. “Well, I guess a good place to start is where am I?”
He nodded and then replied, “You are at the Holy Cross Hospital downtown. Are you familiar with it?”
I nodded and moved onto my next question, “How long was I out for?”
“Well, when they had brought you in you had lost a very large amount of blood. You were in a sort of coma-like state. You have been out for about a month now,” he answered, his eyes looking cautious as though he thought that I might not take well to it. Little did he know after all I had been through, that very little could possibly shock me at this point.
“Have they conducted an investigation? Do they have any theories?” I asked.
He looked at me in a way which suggested that he was not sure how he wanted to answer me. “What investigation are you speaking of?” He asked, carefully sidestepping telling me what I was sure he already knew.
“I am talking about the investigation of my boyfriend Andrew’s disappearance and the disappearance of all of his possessions,” I replied. I honestly wondered if the doctor thought I was too fragile to discuss such matters. Coma or no coma, I was not going to forget the love of my life was gone.
“Torey, there are some things we need to discuss. Some of these things might be hard to hear. Some of these things you are not going to want to believe. However, believe me when I say that they are all true and that as a professional I would not lie to you or try to harm you ok?” He talked to me as someone would talk to a five year old if they were going to tell them that both of their parents had died and now they were alone in the world.
“What are you talking about?” I asked; my words acerbic.
“Torey, Andrew isn’t missing. As a matter of fact, Andrew is perfectly fine,” he paused gauging my reaction to see if he wanted to continue.
I was relieved! Andrew had escaped somehow. Now Andrew could back up my story. Everyone would know that I was not crazy. There is no way that we could both have the same exact story and be wrong. Even if they didn’t believe us, at least we would believe each other. I was so happy that I wanted to cry. Thank god that I hadn’t died!
“That’s wonderful! Does he know I am here? When do I get to see him?”
The doctor’s face sunk and I felt a small twinge of fear. “Torey, Andrew is married. He got married the day before you were brought here. I have talked to some of your friends and family members. The two of you have been separated for over a year now,” he looked at me, his eyes full of deep concern. I shook my head, unable to believe it. It wasn’t possible. I had no recollection of us ever separating, of anything that he was talking about. “We believe that you were getting out of the shower and that you slipped and knocked yourself unconscious. You must have been out for quite some time. We think that while you were out, your brain came up with a way to cope with the news of Andrew’s marriage. You woke up and you were unable to understand that the things that you had dreamt of while you were unconscious were not reality. The dream had become so real to you that it made you suppress what had really happened. Since you believed that what you had dreamt of was real, when you woke up, you understandably panicked when you found all of Andrew’s possessions and your injuries gone. You attempted to kill yourself. You almost succeeded. If the police would have arrived even a few minutes later than they did, it probably would have been too late.”
I allowed it all to sink in. Apparently I was completely nuts. I struggled to remember Andrew and me separating, to remember him ever moving out. I struggled to even remember what I had done the day before all of this had happened. I could not even recall what had happened a month prior. It was as if someone had walked in with a gigantic eraser and had taken away all of the memories of anything that had existed after the “alleged” separation. As frustrating as it was, I pondered if maybe this was a blessing in disguise. Would I really want to remember what had happened, what the horrible months following the separation were like?
“You are right. I do not remember any of it. So, what happens to me now?” I asked, my voice sounding flat. My mind and heart were a butchered mess of emotions. I was still suck in the wake of everything that I had thought that I had been through. All of that was hard enough without new pain and information to process. What was I going to do now? I felt drained, exhausted, and completely out of hope or desire to continue on.
“Well, we are g
oing to keep you here until you recuperate and then we are going to move you to the psychiatric wing for some evaluation. After the evaluation you may be released depending upon how the psychiatrist feels about your mental status.”
The words “psychiatric”, “evaluation”, and “mental status” played over and over again in the mind. I laughed internally. Andrew had been right that night on the porch so long ago. We had broken up ten years later, and apparently I wasn’t able to handle it. For some unknown reason I found that fact incredibly amusing.
“Do I get to see my family?” I asked hopefully.
He smiled at me and said, “Yes, of course. As a matter of fact, your mother is here. The second we finish up our discussion here, I will send her in.”
Why was my mother at the hospital? I had been out a month. It made no sense. “Why is my mother here?”
“She visits every couple of days. We encourage family and friends of comatose patients to talk to them. It supposedly helps some find their way out of their comas,” he said in an upbeat tone. “Do you have any other questions?”
I couldn’t think of anything else. After all, what more was there to know? I am nuts, Andrew left me and married someone else, and I was probably going to be in the hospital for a long time. “No, I don’t have any more questions at the moment.”
“Ok, well, I am going to go get your mother. She is excited to see you,” he said, smiling.
He left and I was alone again. I continued to try to remember what had happened in the months before the mirror, before the imaginary world I had traveled through, before I had slit my wrists. There was nothing. Maybe my mother could help me to remember, or at least fill me in on the details.
My mother walked in with a smile on her face and a tear in her eye. Her curly dirty blonde hair bounced with her every step. The green in her eyes was glowing today. She wore a bright floral top and a dark pair of jeans. She looked thinner than she had the last time I had seen her. In that moment I felt guiltier than I can remember feeling in a long time. I did not want to imagine what it had been like to receive the news that your daughter had gone a little cookoo and slit her wrists. I shut out the thought and formed a weak smile at my lips. She sat down in the chair where the doctor had sat before and grabbed my hands. The familiar feeling of her warm soft hands made me want to cry.
“Hi Mom,” I choked out, trying to keep my composure.
She stared at me for a minute and then wrapped her arms around me, crying in my hair as she spoke. “Oh Torey, how could you do something like that? Why would you do that to me? Everyone loves you. Do you know how many people love you? Do you know how many people this hurt?” She looked at me, the pain pouring from her eyes, “Honey, one man is not worth killing yourself over. No one and nothing is worth that!”
If only she could have seen what I had seen, experienced what had seemed so real to me. Maybe it was not a good enough excuse. She was undoubtedly right about me hurting people. I knew that there would people who would be very upset when they received the news of my death. I felt like the world’s biggest asshole.
“I am so sorry. If you could have just seen it or felt what I had felt Mom, it was horrifying. It was so real. I just didn’t know what to do. I’m sorry…. I’m just,” My faced crumpled and the guilt overtook me. I was sobbing heavily now.
My mother encompassed me in her arms again. I felt comfort there. She whispered to me, “Don’t cry Torey. What is important is that you are ok now and we are going to get you the help you need.” I nodded under her grasp. She looked at my face and removed the tears from my eyes, and then her own. She sat back in the worn leather chair.
“Mom, what happened with Andrew and me? I can’t remember anything at all before my,” I paused trying to find the words, “my little accident. I mean why did we break up? When did he move out? What have I been doing since then?”
My mother just stared at me. I could tell she didn’t want to discuss these things. I understood completely. I mean, who would want to be the one to possible shove an already fragile person back over the edge. These were things I had to know though.
“Please,” I said in my sweetest voice.
She sat still for a moment and then sighed before she began to tell me the story. “Well, from what you had told me, you and Andrew had been fighting a lot. It had been several months since the two of you had really gotten along. You both toyed around with the idea of counseling, but never ended up going. He had told you that he didn’t feel that things were working out, and though he loved you, he was moving out. You took it badly, which was completely understandable. I think anyone would have. He moved out in late October of last year. Then, a few weeks later he had started dating Ameda. You felt that he had left you for her. There is no way to be sure if that was true or not, but you believed it to be true. You started drinking a lot. You stopped going out with your friends. You even quit calling me after a while. You completely withdrew. When the news of his wedding reached you, you called me. You were highly upset. I had told you that I was going to come down the next day to stay with you for a few days. You sounded like you didn’t need to be by yourself. When I got here… well,” she stopped and her eyes looked distant. I could see the pain that I had put there. I wanted to disappear.
I did not want to imagine it, my mother arriving at my house only to be greeted by police tape. How would I have felt if I were in such a situation? I had been selfish. No matter what, the people I loved had not deserved to be put through such a mess. It was time to take responsibility and move forward.
“Well things are going to be better now,” I said in my best attempt of an optimistic voice. “I am going to get help here and I’ll be out before you know it.”I smiled at her, wanting nothing more but to erase the pain from her face. She returned my smile, but I could see the uncertainty that she had about my words.