Chapter One: Ambulance

The rain was pouring, smashing against the windshield so that it was impossible to hear anything else. Just the pounding of the water trying to lash its way into the closed compartment, and the fight of the wipers as they tried to keep the glass clear. The road was useless to see, at this point we had been driving based on memory and the taillights in front of us. In the intersection everything was too bright, the colors of the stoplight lit the standing water on the street with hues of green and red. The streetlights were surrounded by a yellow halo as the rain absorbed their strange glow. Everything was too bright, and too dark at the same time. The gaps in between the shimmers of light were the equivalent of black holes.

I remember Michael telling me to keep my head up. Keep my eyes open. The bandages that he had half-hazardly wrapped around my forearms were soaked, and he was pressing on my left arm with a towel that was already muddled in my own blood. I was exhausted, and feebly angry at the fact that once again things had not gone how they were supposed to. I should be dead, oh I should be dead. But instead, here I was, sitting at this stop light – the longest stoplight of my life - waiting to be taken to the emergency room. Waiting to get stitched up and to see another look of disappointment on my mother’s face. Another expression of choking fear bit back by my father as he would run his fingertips over the bandages. I knew they would ask why. Why did you do it? Why wouldn’t you tell us? How can we make it better? What can we do? In that moment, facing them seemed worse than the death that I had attempted to embrace. The desire was still there, cold and lonely. I was not glad to be in this car, staring at this rain, hot pain licking up my veins as the liquid that kept me alive gurgled out.

Again, I was told to keep my head up. Keep my eyes open. His voice was becoming more desperate now, and I wasn’t surprised when he hit the accelerator with the attempt to run the light. But the squealing of wheels came first, slicing through the pounding rain like a crack of thunder. It all happened too fast. Our car lurched forward, only to stop again as a white SUV came shooting through the intersection, a flashing blur of a bullet, from the perpendicular direction. Recognition settled in too late, and the breaks were smoking, and the SUV was hydroplaning. A semi-truck had pulled out for a right turn. There was no time for either to react.

My eyes were open. My head was up. I watched through the pounding rain as the SUV smashed into the driver side corner panel of the semi. Heard the sickening sound of metal twisting, shrinking, and breaking under the weight of impact. Watched as the momentum flung the SUV off of the semi and back into the street, spinning the vehicle on the slick pavement and causing it to roll. It was then that I noticed the license plate on that white SUV. Suspended in the blurring air, for just one brief moment of clarity. It was then that I realized it wasn’t a white SUV at all, but the Mercedes GLK my father had bought my mother for her birthday.

That was when time unraveled, the world tilted on its axis and cracked in two. I was on the wrong side. I had always been on the wrong side. There was no conscious decision when I shoved my way out of the car’s door. I left it open behind me, standing and staring at the twisted hunk of metal as it hissed and whined, finally coming to a stand-still. The windshield was shattered and impossible to see through. The wheels were bent in, the axis snapped, just like the world’s. The roof was crushed down so that the windows were broken out, flattened out to nothing more than slits. That was when I saw a hand. Her hand. Her fucking hand.

My screams filled the intersection, drowning out the pouring rain. Drowning out the hissing of the radiator. I was running toward the obliterated piece of metal before it had even registered to the rest of the intersection what had happened.

“Mom! Mom!” I screeched, my feeble legs not carrying me fast enough. I fell once, my knees dragging across the slick and water-logged pavement as I hauled myself back up with bleeding fingernails and searing wrists. My throat was already raw with my screaming, my lungs unable to get enough oxygen. No, no, no. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end!

My screaming continued despite the fire that licked up my throat, my entire frame shaking as I collided with the metal that made up the driver’s side door. I took her hand in mine, grabbing the warm fingers, sobs racking through my chest and down my spine. I didn’t want to see the crimson blood that matted the broken glass and oozed from her palm. I was calling her name. I was screaming for help. Begging for help. Begging for her to hear me, to say something. To tell me she was okay. She had to be okay! Panic was overwhelming, reality unacceptable. My body was rejecting the truth as it was. The truth that I was too weak to help. The truth that I was half dead, and that I had lost too much blood. The truth that all of my energy was being spent in this blubbering nonsense, this limbo between what was right and true and what was wrong and evil and death.

But I was too late.

Waking up is still a shock my body doesn’t understand how to react to. The memory is suddenly gone, all that is around me is utter blackness, my body painfully aware that it is alert and breathing, or at least attempting to. My throat is raw from screaming, my hands shaking and breathing coming in rasping gasps. I sit up, desperately trying to get my eyes to adjust and the reality of this room to be restored. But it is the opposite of comforting. The tears come, and I cannot help the hitching breaths and overwhelming sense of panic as I remember where I am and just why I was put here. I hug my arms around my thin torso, rocking in the paper sheets as the cavern of my mind opens and screams with the truth that I worked so hard to numb.

I didn’t want it to be true, anymore.

The tears rolled pointlessly onward, streaking my face and staining my plain cotton outfit. My skin was covered in sweat as the sobs racked down my spine, the nightmare too real in my mind to shake. It was bad enough that it happened. A horror that it happened, but did I really have to relive it every night? Yes. It was what I deserved. I deserved worse.

That was what was so disgusting about the whole thing. Why I hated the white sheets, white walls, white ceilings, and white faces of this place. Because my hands were stained black and crimson with their deaths, I carried the weight of them on my back and I didn’t deserve to get better. There was no getting better. There was no righting the wrong.

A scream cut through the night, the silence. It was my own and even to my ears it sounded foreign and desperate. I was no longer holding myself, but clawing at the thick pink scars that gnarled my wrists. I wished violently that they were fresh, wished violently that they were still threaded with the thick black stitches so that I could have the satisfaction of unthreading them. It was all very spiteful. Selfish. But this misery inside of me was poison and the guilt even worse.  I wanted escape. I wanted hell to burn me from the other side.

My crying became deranged. Hysterical. My fingernails were clipped down to the bed of the nail, rendered useless to my digging. Rendered pointless just like the rest of me. And here I was, trapped in this white room that looked black at night, letting my nightmares play vividly on repeat even through my waking hours. I wished for the fluorescent lights to blink on and burn my eyes. I wished for a nurse to come in and demand I quit my squealing. I wanted confirmation that the world spun in spite of me. That time stood as it always had and that I was still irrelevant to the course of things. I wanted separation from this haunting that consumed me.

But I knew no such release would come. I knew the policy here was that during the long hours of the night there was no interaction. No interference. But as the mind reaches its darkest corners there is no sense of reason. I found myself out of bed, across the room, my balled fists pounding against the painted metal of the door. Twisting the doorknob with the false hope of thinking maybe just one night it had been left unlocked. But it was always locked. In the darkness, the memory was un-ignorable. It clawed at my brain ruthlessly, the image of the vehicle flipping over and over. My mother’s hand falling from the crushed window, bloody and lifeless.

And there was the whispering that accompanied the darkness. The voices that reminded me it was all my fault. The ones that told me there was a debt to be paid. Mumbling that I was breathing and they were not. They were not.

“I’m sorry,” I choked, letting my head rest against the cool metal and my hands drop to my sides. There was no escape, and again I reminded myself that I deserved this torture. One quick tap against the door with my forehead, just enough to send pain splitting through the front of my skull. The voices cleared for a moment, and the horrific silence restored. I sucked in a breath, my hands still shaking, my throat aching more than ever. I don’t know how long I stood like that, or whether I was really inside my body or not. I was trying to hold back another wave of tears, biting my lower lip and finding comfort in the dull pain that flared from it. The pain that told me I was real, even inside this lightless room. Eventually, I slide down to the cold concrete floor, my back and head resting against the door.

The voices came back, but this time I listened with the measured and accepting nature of despair. 

(c) Shelby Williams 2015