“Hey, buddy, you have some visitors,” the orderly said, a gentle man in his early twenties by the name of Bryer.
I nervously set down my book, Call of the Wild, I think it was—simply one that happened to be available—and sat up, my stomach giving that familiar twinge that I had grown so accustomed to whenever I had was forced to give in to human contact. “Ah, Call of the Wild,” Bryer observed as I walked past him, clutching to the book as a means to ground myself and ignore the pain from the stitches all over my body. “It’s a good book. I think you’ll enjoy it a lot.” He hadn’t noticed that my bookmark was squeezed between the pages at the very end. As we walked, my mind began to approach that night—the night—that had been plaguing it for three long weeks. I quickly shoved it aside and focused my attention instead on the large, gold letters that stretched across the wall behind the front desk in the waiting lobby: Lunar Skies Psychiatric Hospital: Children’s Unit. Below them was an expensive-looking engraving of an old white man who had given them a large sum of money sometime in the seventies. I turned my head to see my uncle Max and Clay sitting next to each other on some stiff chairs in silence, Max reading an outdated issue of Rolling Stone. Both of them still had the same bandages I had over wounds that were far from healed. I noticed that Clay was wearing the same sweater from when we first left for the woods with the blue anchor on it. “Hey, buddy!” Bryer exclaimed when he laid eyes on Clay. “Couldn’t get enough of us, eh?” “Sure couldn’t,” Clay responded quietly, giving a strained smile. “Hey, maybe try to get Mike-o here to talk a little.” Clay’s nodded as his eyes scanned the floor awkwardly. Ever since I had first stumbled out of the woods and back into the safety of sunlight, I had not uttered a single word, not even within my own solemn company. For a week after I’d left the hospital, I stayed shut up in my room, and every night Max would have to yank a bottle from my hands, disappointment and sadness in his eyes, and every night he would lock it away somewhere new. But every afternoon once I got back from school while he was at work or to go help the search effort, I would find it and swim in my own misery and self-hatred. It was about a week later that Clay’s parents found a suicide note in his backpack. He had been planning on running away to Nashville and jumping off of the Sparkman Street Bridge into the Cumberland River and was admitted into the Lunar Skies children’s ward that night, though he had only stayed for a little less than a week, whereas I was now in my second.
When I heard about this the next day from Uncle Max, I waited until after he had already taken the bottle of alcohol from me and gone to bed to hang myself with some black paracord that I’d found in the shed. In my drunken state, I must have awoken Max, because as I was struggling to get the rope off of my neck he came rushing in and quickly cut me down with his pocket knife and drove me once again to the emergency room. Late that night, I, too, was a patient at Lunar Skies. I hadn’t even written a note.
Bryer led us back to a small room where we could all sit down and talk, with a window that looked out upon the courtyard—a peaceful sanctuary with clean little holly trees and a great myrtle in the center, though all the rose bushes appeared to be dead—one of the nurses told me that in the spring they used to shine a dark crimson red.
“You want a Pepsi?” my uncle asked after Bryer had left.
I nodded my head slightly, and he handed me a cold can of Pepsi from the vending machine in the lobby.
“So, how are you doing, Mike?” he asked.
I shrugged my shoulders, though barely so. My eyes stayed fixed to the legs of his chair, which was opposite mine, facing the door.
“I see. Your doctor says that you’re still not talking in therapy.”
I continued to stare at the chair legs.
He sighed. “How do you expect to get better if you don’t work through these things? What, are you just never going to talk for your whole life? What about our promise to work on our problems productively?”
He waited a moment for my response, during which I shifted my gaze towards the myrtle tree, my eyes passing over his.
“Hey, man,” Clay said softly, leaning forward slightly. My eyes became fixated upon the blue anchor on his shirt. “You know you can’t get out of here if you don’t try. Hell, I know it’s no fun. Food sure as hell isn’t. Come on man, you gotta—”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to talk,” I snapped, my eyes still fixed on the anchor. “Maybe I don’t want to get better. Maybe I’d rather just sit here and rot. Or maybe I’m too fucking scared to go outside. Maybe I’m too fucking crazy to know what r-really happened. Or maybe—maybe I… I can’t talk because it’s my fault that J-James is d-dead right now.” The last words caught in my throat, making it barely audible as I tried to hold the tears back and keep my chin from trembling too much.
“M-m… maybe I just want to…. Maybe I just want to be left here so th-that I can j-just b-be abandoned again l-like I d-deserve. My father left me for a hooker. My mother l-left me for money. Uriah w-wasn’t even the man I-I thought he w-was. He was m-my hero. Why… why sh-should I-I e-even have y-you guys when my own p-parents didn’t even wa-ant me? W-when my own grandfather w-wasn’t even r-real?” Tears were now flowing freely down my cheeks and my eyes burned, but I held my gaze onto that blue anchor.
“Mike,” Max said with a kind sternness, “I’m sorry about my sister and that coward she had you with, you know I am. But what they did has no reflection on you, only on them. And as far as I’m concerned, you’re my son now, and you can’t do anything to change my mind.”
I looked down at the chair legs again for a moment before looking into his face, his jaw locked in determination, but his eyes saddened beyond repair. My vision became completely obscured, and I leaned forward into his arms and I felt Clay hug me from my right.
I cried for the first time since I’d wept three weeks prior, though I’d come close many times between. I felt like the weight of the world was at once crushing me but also lifted with the love that Max and Clay were giving. That dark stone wall that I’d built up around myself was finally beginning to chip, and the thick vines that clung to the cracks were beginning to wilt.
I told them everything that I knew happened, from being possessed by the Maggot and the Wyrm to being instructed by the Mother, to taking too long and foolishly trying to save James. And I told Max about the drugs and the alcohol, and he simply patted my back and told me that it was okay. I’d been afraid that the whole ordeal had been in my head, that it had simply been a sick combination of drugs, alcohol, and some innate insanity. But everything I said both Max Clay could attest to, every last detail that they too had experienced in my memory. This both terrified me and soothed me.
By the end of the visit, I had resolved to communicate with my therapist and open up more, mostly for the sake of Max, Clay, and the painful memory of James. I never mentioned to my therapist what had actually transpired, though. Or at least, what I thought had transpired. If I did, I probably would have had a much longer stay than I did, which ended up being about an extra month. Instead, I stuck with the story Max had told the police, which was that we had been attacked by a stray mountain lion, and that Uriah and James had been killed in the process, after which we were forced to flee.
I continued life as normal, though I never did quite heal. I found new addictions to replace alcohol with and learned through trial and error to somewhat function. I don’t suppose that I’ll ever heal fully, not with the traumas that have transpired since, and I’m sure that I’ll always have an innate level of distrust and self-hatred. The memory of James, of that moment when my bullet went through his head, haunts me still. I can never forgive myself, but I’ve learned to get by despite the guilt. And though the summer of 1994 has been lurking under my bed since, I know that things will be okay. Because as I sat in that visitation room almost twenty-four years ago, when I looked out the window on the way back to my prison, I heard a faint hoot and turned to see a great horned owl perched in the myrtle in the courtyard.
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Written by Banned In CP
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