Chapter 17
Kate
I couldn’t help but wonder who found her, and what they saw. I was horrified to think about what she looked like laid out on the floor, motionless. I felt my throat clench, and my breath become ragged just thinking about it. My eyes burned as tears threatened to fall.
It sounded like it would be a vicious nightmare to witness.
It sounded like I would have been scarred for life if I had been the one to find her.
Hell, I was pretty sure just seeing her now, lying in a hospital bed, was enough to scar me for life. Life was funny, wasn't it? In times like this, I could know about something. I could understand it to its absolute core, what really happened. But there was something about seeing the destruction that made it new and even more horrible. Seeing it made it worse.
I was just thankful that someone had found her quickly, no matter how badly I felt for the person.
I heard the sirens off in the distance as I looked at my sister. Another ambulance coming in. Another family on edge.
I was tired. I’d been crying since I’d arrived and a young doctor gave me a brief summary of her injuries.
I thought I’d cried so hard, and so long, that I had completely worn myself out. Because now, I was drained.
I almost never cried. But I guessed there was something about seeing my baby sister pale, her skin looking cold as ice as she lay unconscious right in front of me, that brought out the real tears. Just thinking about her surrounded by a pool of crimson…it gutted me.
I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen this coming, why I hadn’t realized she hadn’t been taking her meds. But before, there had been signs. She’d be evasive. She’d trap herself in her room and sit at her computer, all by herself. She’d skip out on dinner, avoid my calls. No appetite, no desire to chat.
But that hadn’t been the case this time.
Hell, I had just stepped on a shit ton of god knows what in her room. The girl had an appetite—there had been food everywhere.
But I still should have known. I was her sister and her best friend. I still should have seen it coming. There had to have been some signs, and I’d just been too blind to really notice them.
I’d been distracted lately. That was it. God, the guilt. If I hadn’t been so obsessed with Ian, I might’ve paid more attention to my baby sister. I sighed as I looked over at her from the curtain of the cubicle, and remembered the doctor coming out and talking to me as soon as I first got there. The doctor had blond hair, and she was thin. She wore plain blue scrubs with neon orange shoes. Her face was pleasant, with deep gray eyes that glistened with sympathy.
In fact, every single word that left her lips was sympathetic.
She had sighed before she spoke. She truly felt bad for me — and bad for Claire. But I didn’t think too much of it. She probably felt something for all of her patients. Or she was just really good at pulling out sympathy when she felt it was needed.
“Claire’s sleeping,” she’d said. “No severe blood loss. Nothing too deep, just a good amount of damage to the skin.”
I’d barely nodded, only able to stare at the door leading to Claire’s room. I didn’t want to wait any longer before seeing my sister.
“She should be awake soon,” the doctor continued. “But once she wakes up, it’s our policy to keep her here with us for a while to place her on suicide watch. And then we would like to have her evaluated by a mental health professional.”
I knew the drill. I nodded and cleared my suddenly dry throat. “I’ll call her therapist immediately.”
She smiled faintly and nodded back at me. “You can see her,” she said, just before leading me to Claire’s curtain and pulling it to the side.
I’d walked in. Alone, of course, since neither my dad nor my brother was here.
Claire was lying on the bed, almost zombie-like, with her arms at her sides. She was pale, and sweat beaded off of her face as well as what little bit of her chest was exposed from the gown. Her leg was halfway out of the blanket, and I saw the gauze wrapped tightly around her thigh. I’d immediately cringed.
Now, I walked over and sat down on the single chair beside the bed. It took me a minute of heavy breaths. In. Out. Back in again. Just to take one of her hands in my own.
I couldn’t speak, and I could hardly even move as I watched her lying there unconscious. All my silly, overactive mind could do was consider the what-ifs.
What if no one had found her? What if I’d paid more attention to her lately? What if I’d looked inside her backpack? What if I’d monitored her meds?
“Why?” I choked out. My nose was congested, and my throat clenched tightly as I struggled to breathe. “Why didn’t you talk to me?”
She was silent, asleep. Looking so small and frail in her bed.
My tears were flowing, stinging as they streamed down my face. “Damn it, Claire. You’re everything to me.”
She continued to sleep. I knew the relaxation on her face was a guise—that inside, her mind was as tortured as I felt right now—but that didn’t matter at the moment.
“Do you know what this would have done to me?” I croaked. “Do you even care?”
My questions were getting angrier, fiercer by the second. And even though I asked them all, I knew the answer to each question: she was depressed. And that was all that there was to it.
I knew I was being ridiculous with how angry I was getting. I didn’t know what it was like to be her or to feel like she did. I had never felt so depressed that I felt like life wasn’t worth living. And I knew that because of that, being mad at her wasn’t the answer.
I just felt so many emotions, that I didn’t know how to deal with them all. And the one I felt the most was fear…I was fucking scared to death. I didn’t want to lose my sister. Just because I hadn’t lost her this time, didn’t mean I wouldn’t. What if we weren’t as lucky next time?
“Next time,” I whispered under my breath. “What if there is a next time?”
In reality, I knew that there wasn’t a “what if.” If we didn’t get her on the right path, I knew there would be a next time. It was entirely possible that if she continued, she might very well fall to the illness.
I looked down at our hands and smoothed the back of hers with my thumb. I was heartbroken. Absolutely heartbroken.
I sighed and leaned forward. “I love you so much,” I whispered, hovering just over her forehead.
I placed a single kiss on her head and hesitated there for a second. I found myself taking in her scent. The smell of her shampoo. Brisk and spicy, like men’s deodorant, almost. She’d been using it for years, and it suited her. I sat back down and closed my eyes for a second.
I wanted it to be a nightmare that I could be woken up from, but I knew that it wasn’t. I knew that I was here in this hospital room — and this terrible scenario was real. I just wished she’d wake up. Waiting to talk to her, to get over the part where she sobbed and apologized, was torture.
Almost as if she could hear my thoughts, her hand tightened around mine, and she gave a small groan.
My head snapped up, and I watched as her eyes squinted open and her lips curled in pain.
She had to have felt groggy. In a sense, she literally was death warmed over.
“You’ve been out for a while,” I said quietly.
She was starting to stir even more, and her head fell slowly to the side so that she could look at me. But only for a second. Because as soon as her eyes met mine, she closed them and sighed.
I stood up and roamed to the other side of the cubicle, pacing, unsure of what to say.
“So can you handle telling me what you remember?” I didn’t want to seem like I was grilling her, but I wanted to hear what she had to say before we saw her therapist. I wanted to hear it from her.
“Let’s not do this,” she whispered, just before a single tear fell down her ghostly pale cheek.
“We need to,” I said.
“I went to the bathroom at school!” she snapped back in anger.
But then, something changed. It came just as suddenly as her outburst had. Her breath became shaky, and a stream of tears rolled down her cheeks. Choking sobs sounded from deep down in her throat. I knew that she didn’t want to do this.
I knew she was sad — ashamed even. I knew she was having a difficult time telling me what happened. I knew she knew how fucked up it was.
“Before I got there, I spent all class…” Her lip was quivering. “…trying to break the metal piece off my ruler.”
I cringed, but I’d asked her to tell me about it. The least I could do was listen without judging her.
“When I finally got it off, I just stuck it in my pocket and asked permission to go to the bathroom.” She was trying to steady her shaking breath. I could tell it was hard, reliving it all, retelling it. Especially to me.
“When I got to the bathroom, I had already made my mind up that I was going to cut myself.” Her voice had returned to normal. It was matter-of-fact. She was trying to shut off the emotions, to act like it wasn’t a big deal. In some way, it was probably the only way she could deal with it.
“And what happened then, Claire? Can you tell me what you did?” I didn’t want to push her, but I didn’t want her to act like it didn’t matter. To act like she could just go her entire life not talking about it.
“Stop, Kate,” she groaned. “Please, stop. You know.”
I did know. But I wanted her to say it. I wanted her to admit it to me.
“I fucking cut myself! I cut the hell out of my thigh! Carved pieces of my skin out, and then went deeper and deeper!” she yelled. “There, I said it. Does that make you feel better?!”
She balled her fists and pressed them to her drenched eyes. Then she punched the bed beside her, sobbing. Her chest heaved up and down, and even though I hated to see her cry, I knew that she had to be forced to face reality. To face what she almost did.
“Shh,” I soothed, moving toward her bed.
I sat down just beside her, at the edge of the mattress, right where the side rail opened. “I love you,” I whispered, pulling her quivering body to me. “I’m so sorry you’re feeling this way. I don’t want to make it worse, honestly. I just love you, and I know you, and I know you need to talk about it.”
I wasn’t going to leave her alone. She knew that by now. She closed her eyes again. I knew what she was doing — it was what she always did. She was pretending to be asleep. But she couldn’t do that forever, not with me.
I rose from the bed and paced the room some more, just before turning back to her. I crossed my arms in front of my chest. I was prepared to stare for as long as it took.
“Can you please not look at me like that?” she growled. “I can feel your eyes still on me!”
“My eyes are always going to be on you!” I said loudly, not caring who heard our conversation. “I love you.”
We stared at one another with anger, sadness — and a mix of a million other emotions unknown to either of us.
I wanted to take my ass to bed and just cry it out until I didn’t hurt anymore. But I knew that I couldn’t. I knew it wasn’t that simple. I knew that I had to be strong. I knew that if she saw me break, that she’d break right there with me.
I knew why she didn’t want to look at me—it was because she didn’t want to see the sadness, the disappointment, and the fear.
“Can we really just drop this for right now, Kate?” Her eyes glistened with tears.
“We really need to talk about this now.” My voice was sharp, but no longer angry. I knew that I had to ease off. I had to keep my cool and hear her out. I had to be here for her.
I eyed her bandages. I knew she felt numb. I knew she felt empty. And that scared me…but what scared me the most was how numb and empty I felt at that moment — at just the notion of losing my baby sister. And I hated that she knew me so well that she could feel how empty I felt.
“Kate,” she said.
“No,” I stopped her. I didn’t need to listen to a half-assed excuse. “Talk. Right now.”
Finally, she opened up. She cried a little, but that didn’t stop her. She talked to me about everything she’d been hiding from me for a long time. She said for a while, she took the medicine. For a while, she tried to do what everyone wanted her to do. But she said one day, she felt like she was a robot — being controlled by everyone and everything, including the medicine she was taking.
When I asked if she was taking her medicine, she told me the truth. She told me that she wasn’t. Not that I was surprised. She probably wouldn’t have pulled this sort of stunt if she had been. But she did say that she would swallow the pills — and she’d done that every day for a long while. She’d hoped every time that she’d start to feel better. But she never did. Not completely.
She said it was true that after taking them, she hadn’t felt sad, necessarily, but she didn’t really feel anything. She’d even eat loads and loads of food and make herself throw up just to feel, but it hadn’t worked, either. She tried to go to school and act like none of it was happening, but because she was finally in a “good school,” there was someone always there “breathing down her neck” as she so beautifully put it. I chose to look at it as someone constantly monitoring her, trying to assess and manage her needs.
But she clearly didn’t like people checking up on her. She said there was always someone asking, “Are you all right?” or “How are you feeling?” I guessed I could understand where she was coming from. I wouldn’t like to feel constantly monitored either.
She told me with all of their “checking in” all the time, it made it impossible to forget how fucked up she felt. How fucked up she had to have been to make Mom leave — to drive her all the way across the country.
She said she hated the struggle she put on everyone. How much money she cost me, how much resentment Dad felt toward her. She said she saw all of our faces — every single day — and wondered what the point was. Everyone was always so worried — or angry. She thought we were all mixed up with emotion, and none of the emotions was happiness.
She said she was sick of making everyone miserable. Especially herself.
I shed one more quick tear and wiped it away. My voice was hoarse, but I didn’t care — I had to say something. “I don’t ever want you to feel like that.”
She shrugged. I watched as she took her hand and ran her fingers over her bandages.
“I just felt like this was the easiest way to get rid of the feelings,” she said.
“And since when do we do the easy thing?” I was full of compassion and love for her, but she’d fucking scared me to death, and I was mad, too. “Do you think anything I do is easy?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Kate.”
“I just want you to know that you’re not a burden, and I never want you to think that you are. I worry about you because I love you, and I would worry even if you weren’t depressed — and even if you didn’t have a single issue or problem.”
She looked
defeated, and my heart felt heavy for her.
It was hard biting my tongue. It was hard not doing what I wanted to do. I wanted to go up to her and shake the shit out of her. I wanted to scream in her face. I wanted to yell loud enough that she’d finally, finally hear me and be well—even though mental illness didn’t work like that. I wanted to try and make her understand that I wasn’t the one who didn’t understand — she was.
She nodded, so faintly that I barely noticed. Her tears continued to fall in steady drips. I wiped them away.
“I’m sorry, Kate,” she whispered. It was like she was crumbling, right there, and I was there to witness it. I held her close to me as she sobbed. “I’m so sorry…”
I held her while she sobbed. I comforted her, soothed her, and held her close to me as she cried. And cried. And cried so hard that she cried herself to sleep again. I gently laid her head back down and kissed her forehead before leaving the tiny room.
I needed to walk around, get out of the tiny room. I needed my own space without my little sister in it. Just for a second. As soon as I walked out of the cubicle, I was surrounded by white. The hospital walls were bright white in color. And so were the floors. All white. All over.
I stared at the fork in the hall: a waiting room on one side and a check-in desk to the right. I craned my neck to look around, hoping my dad would be at the large check-in desk. But he wasn’t, of course.
I sighed. I hoped more than anything that he’d walk through the doors soon that he’d put everything behind him when it came to Claire, and he’d just be her father for a day.
But somehow, I wasn’t as hopeful as I should have been. I walked toward the waiting room. It looked comfortable enough, at least. There were a lot of chairs — and plenty still open. My legs shook as I walked toward a seat, and my eyes felt dead. It had been the longest day in the history of long days. I was tired. Emotionally and physically.
I looked over to what I assumed to be a mother and son. The mom, beautiful, thin, young — and absolutely drained-looking — was reading a magazine, every now and then glancing over the pages to her little boy, who played on the floor with a pile of blocks. He was talking, the best that he could for his age, about “aminals” and how he wanted to go to the zoo.
I couldn’t help but smile and wonder why they were here. I couldn’t help but wonder why everyone was here.
I could only hope that all of their loved ones were safe and sound and that they were as fortunate as I was. Terrible as this hospital visit was, at least Claire was okay for the moment, and her injury would heal.
I looked over to couples who held each other close. Parents and children — of all ages. They were all just people. Some old. Some young. But all here in this waiting room — all worried. A group of strangers with nothing in the world in common, except for the fact that their worlds were shaken that day by concern for the well-being of a loved one.
I noticed that no one was really talking — except for the one little boy playing on the floor. The quiet in the room felt almost ominous, as everyone seemed filled with worry and dread.
I stood directly in the center as my gaze fell over everyone. I sighed, and just as I was about to shake myself away and find a seat, my gaze fell on a young man. He couldn’t have been older than his mid-twenties, and he was with a woman. He held her close as she snuggled into his chest from the seat just beside his. He held her hand over his lap and rubbed small, slow circles over the back of it. In the midst of all their turmoil, they were experiencing comfort and love.
I took a deep breath and sat down. Relief seemed to come as soon as my ass touched the seat. I had really needed to be out of Claire’s room. I needed to stop looking how pitiful she was for a second. I needed to stop hearing how incredibly depressed she was.
And I really needed, for just a second, to stop feeling like a huge fucking failure of a sister. My eyes pointed upward to the ceiling in sadness. I wondered how my mom could live with just not knowing about all of this, how she could sleep at night knowing that her teenage daughter had problems, and she wanted no part of them.
I knew how upset I was that I had failed Claire, and I was just her sister. I wondered why Mom felt nothing about failing Claire. Mom knew that she was Claire’s mother, that she was the one person who was supposed to stick around through it all.
I was starting to get angry. But it was an ancient anger, and it wouldn’t help. She was gone. Long gone. It had been years. It was hard for me not to hate her in that moment.
My phone buzzed inside my pocket. I took a deep breath and groaned before retrieving it. The display was lit up with my brother’s face. He must have gotten my message.
“How is she?” he asked in a panic before I even got the chance to say anything.
“Well, she’s alive,” I answered. I wasn’t going to say she was fine. Truth was, she wasn’t fine. I walked out of the waiting room to stand in the hall, giving us some more privacy for our conversation.
“Are you okay? How the hell could this happen? What the hell was she thinking?” The questions kept coming, and they were coming at a rate that I really wasn’t ready to deal with. Especially the last one. She was fucking depressed and off her meds.
He finally spoke again. "What happened to our sister?"
I could tell that he had been crying — and he was trying everything in his power not to cry now. His voice quaked and shook with every word he spoke. “Why is she so fucked up?”
He sounded concerned. And I knew that he was. He was her brother, after all. But sometimes, it felt like he was too busy following in our father’s footsteps to really care.
“She’s not fucked up.”
“She is!” he said, angrily. “She wouldn’t have done what she did if she wasn’t!”
“She’s off her meds!” I snapped back.
Yes, he was worried and upset — but damn it, so was I. And Claire didn’t need another person telling her something was wrong with her.
“Look,” I said after he went quiet. “She’s going to be fine.”
“Should I come? I want to make sure she’s going to be okay.”
“Not unless you can be kind and keep your mouth shut,” I answered firmly.
He sighed. “I probably can’t do that.”
“I didn’t think so.” The last thing Claire needed was everyone in the family being there and interrogating her about why she’d hurt herself. Besides, my brother wasn’t always the gentlest of people. He was an amazing person — caring, kind, genuine even — but sometimes that kindness was overshadowed by his ability to care. Because when he cared, he really cared. That meant that whenever anything bad happened, he was on edge — and sometimes the way he dealt with that edginess was by lashing out.
“I’m on top of everything,” I reassured him. “Besides, I think Dad is coming. I left a message for him.”
“Well,” he said. “Please let me know if you need anything.”
“I will.”
“Take care, Kate,” he said. “I love you. Tell Claire I love her.”
“Love you, too. Talk soon.” I hit the end call button and buried the phone back in my coat pocket. I knew I should get back. I wanted to be there when she woke up.
I stood up and walked back down the hall toward the emergency cubicles, and pushed Claire’s curtain to the side when I reached it.
She was still asleep, which was good; at least she hadn’t woken up alone. I walked over to the chair just beside the bed and sat in it. I didn’t grab her hand again; instead, I nuzzled into the arm of the chair and tried to drift off myself.
Try being the key word. All around us, there were sounds of machines beeping. Low, long beeps. Short, high-pitched beeps. There were machines whirring. There were the tapping sounds of nurses typing information into their computers. People were walking around, rushing from one place to the next, their rubbery soles squeaking on the clean floors. It was enough to drive anyone insane, and I had no idea how Claire had even begun to sleep through it, even after having lost a shit load of blood.
A man’s scream echoed from nearby, and I jumped up.
Claire jumped, too. “Jesus. I’m going to have a fucking heart attack in here.”
“Watch your language,” I said, reaching out to grab her hand.
“You can’t be all strict parental on me, and then hold my hand all lovingly,” she said. “You gotta either be a hard ass or a hippy all-is-love type. Can’t be contradictory, sis.”
I rolled my eyes. “Shut up, and be glad that I’m not smothering you in your sleep.”
“Is Dad coming?” she asked.
I sighed. It was an excellent question. He still hadn’t shown up, and I’d left a message ages ago. But instead of depressing her further, I smiled and nodded. “I think so.”
She glanced down at her sheets. “Does he hate me?”
“No!” I shouted. Dad was an asshole sometimes, but he loved her. I knew that he did. He just had a shitty way of showing it. “Don’t ever think that—”
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I grabbed it and glanced at the screen—and speak of the devil.
“Dad,” I answered quickly. I had been waiting to hear from him for a while. I wondered if my brother had told him to call, or if he really had been that busy and just didn’t know until now.
“I can’t make it,” he said. “I have a lot of work to do, and we can’t coddle and encourage this sort of stupid behavior.”
I stiffened when he said that, but instead of ripping into him, I said, “Fine.”
I was tired of fighting. If he didn’t want to be there, he didn’t have to be. But I really had to wonder what the hell his problem was. This was his baby girl — and he always bitched about how his family wasn’t what he wanted it to be, how it didn’t live up to his expectations. His actions showed me that he didn’t deserve any better.
Hell, as far as I was concerned, he didn’t deserve the family he had.
I felt broken. And when I glanced over at Claire, I could tell that she knew — just by looking at my face — that Daddy Dearest was going to be a no-show.
Someone yanked open Claire’s curtain.
“I’ve got to go,” I said to Dad, and ended the call.
The doctor stood before us, clipboard in hand. “Hey guys,” she said as soon as she came in. I watched and listened as she began talking to Claire.
Claire nodded as the doctor explained what was coming next. Honestly, Claire looked worried. Scared, even. I knew that I’d hear bitching every step of the way, but I was in it. And she was going to be in it too — even if I had to drag her, kicking and screaming, into the therapist’s office every single day.
“Kate, I’d like to have a word with Claire alone, if that’s okay?” the doctor said.
I nodded, and took a final glance over at Claire and flashed a half smile her way. “I’m going to go in search of a good ol’ crappy hospital cup of coffee,” I said.
“Good luck with that,” the doctor said with a laugh. “If you find a ‘good ol’ anything in this place, be sure to let me know.”
I smirked and continued on, perking my ears to listen as I walked toward the curtain.
“Your sister has made an appointment with a health-care professional, so we’re going to release you to her.”
I turned back around, a fistful of the curtain’s fabric in my hand. I caught a glimpse of the doctor nodding gently to herself as she jotted a small note down on her pad.
I closed the curtain and sighed.
It was going to be a long road, and it was going to be a tough one.
I just hoped we could get Claire the help that she needed and deserved.