Away From Everywhere (38 page)

Clyde, benevolently, as if he was looking at his own son. “Are you feeling all right now, Owen? Can I get you something?” He came closer and sat in the chair Lillian had abandoned.

It hurt to talk. It didn't seem worth the effort to form a whole sentence. “Thirsty, water?”The pain surprised him more than waking up in a hospital.

“I dunno, my son, you've got your throat and stomach all torn up. We'll have to wait and see what the doctor has to say about food and water.”Clyde motioned to the IV bag draining into Owen's arm. “He shouldn't be long now. Lillian is off to get him.”

Owen couldn't argue. Instead he looked at Clyde, perplexed and a little pissed off.
What's that supposed to mean? You've got your throat and stomach all torn up? Emily poured this goddamn Drano-Comet-Aspirin cocktail I drank. It was an accident.
He calmed himself. “Me? I didn't–”

“Shh …” Clyde put his index finger to his lips. “Your aunt will kill me if she sees me letting you talk with your throat gone like that.”

They both fell silent when they heard Lillian's unmistakable voice whispering loudly outside the door. The second voice was male, quivering, and familiar.
Alex?
He shot an inquisitive look in Clyde's direction, and Clyde put his head down and walked out of the room as a doctor walked in.

The doctor poked and prodded Owen, adjusted some of the machinery, the tubing attached to him, explaining how the morphine drip worked, and asked him everything except how he was feeling. He had an obvious, unmistakable contempt forOwen, like he felt attending to an attempted suicide case was a waste of time better spent saving a life, not postponing a death.

Owen looked to his left and noticed the dialysis machine. His eyes followed the blood-filled tubing leading deep into his arm. He almost threw up when he saw it: he audibly heaved. The doctor explained everything they had done to keep him alive and how long they'd have to keep him under observation, to keep an eye on his stomach and kidneys and liver. But Owen wasn't really paying attention to the doctor, he was too disturbed by the sight of the tubing running into his arm. When the doctor left him alone, Clyde and Lillian swooped back into the room as if they were his parents.

Lillian sat in the chair next to him, and Clyde sat in the windowsill, with his head down. Owen knew Alex was out in that hallway. He could feel him there, the same way he could feel hot or cold with his eyes closed. He heard that clicking sound his brother made his whole life, by nervously plunging his tongue down into the floor of his mouth, over and over. He wasn't going to mention that he knew Alex was out there, and he wasn't expecting Alex to step into the room. It was enough that he flew back home with Lillian.

Lillian and Clyde were clearly trying to summon the courage to share some bad news with him. Lillian would take a deep breath – her chest puffed up – and purse her lips to speak, but then she'd just exhale, slowly. Like she was deflating, like she was rethinking her wording. Like the words on her tongue were bullets and she refused to shoot him point blank. He assumed the bad news was about Emily, that she'd died. What they didn't know was that he was already expecting this news. He'd held her cold lifeless body, and he'd checked her pulseless neck with his own two hands before he called the ambulance.

He tried his voice again, limiting his sentences to as few words as possible, every word like vomiting up a razor blade, “Emily okay?”

Clyde looked at Lillian and their heads slung down in unison, their eyes closing for seconds before re-opening.

“Lilly …is Emily okay?”

Lillian looked up at him, biting her lip, one eye not able to hold a tear back and it fell straight down onto her lap. She looked back down at her lap, at the wet spot, ran a thumb over it, like she didn't want to be the one to finally break him beyond repair. Clyde jumped down off the windowsill and made his way over to Lillian. He laid a sympathetic hand on her slumped shoulders. Exhaled slowly.

“I can do this if you want,Lillian. Why don't you go buy us a round of soft drinks and bottled waters?”

She shook her head, and Owen watched Clyde walk out of the room and shut the door behind him. Turn and pull it to.

“Owen.” She grabbed his hand and held it in a show of support. She was letting him know that she was there, and going nowhere without him. “There is no … Emily. You did this to yourself. You are sick, Owen, like your father. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

She was talking to him differently than she usually did. Long drawn-out words spoken a little too loudly, as if he was stupid. He shook his head.

“What do you
mean
, there is no Emily? How would you even know about her?”The intensity in his long, sharp sentences cut into his throat like a meathook. He sank back into the bed. He almost turned on her, blamed her for the pain.

“Owen, don't talk, not until your throat heals. Just think about what I am saying, let it sink in for a while. I'll be right back, sweetie. You are not alone, okay?We aren't going to leave you to go through this alone. Don't worry about that. You can come up home with me, or I will come back here to be with you.”

Desperate for more of an explanation, he was terrified. “Lillian! I didn't do this. I drank whatever Emily drank. By accident.” He felt frightened now, inexplicably frightened, like he was in a tank full of sharks. He wouldn't contemplate what she was implying. He felt exposed and unaccountably humiliated.

She sat back down. “If there is an Emily in your life, then where is she now,Owen?Why wasn't her body found with your body…sweetheart?”She cupped his hand in hers again, and he felt weak. He felt dizzy.

“Owen, on the morning you did this to yourself, Clyde caught you talking to yourself in your truck. He assumed you were just drinking, heavily, and having it out with yourself. But when he came down and talked to you, you claimed you were talking to someone, a girl named Emily, who no one in town had ever seen or heard of, or knew anything about. He stayed calm. He asked around, asked the staff at every B&B and the golf lodge about her. He tracked down your brother. He had no idea about you and Alex's falling out, so he called him out of concern, because he knew about your father's illness and suspected it in you long before you started talking about this Emily girl. He wanted to be sure he was right before he contacted us. He left you in the truck that morning, and he ran home to call us. By the time he got back to your house to check back in on you, the ambulance had taken you away and the neighbours filled him in on what you'd done to yourself. He was devastated. And what you need to know,Owen, irrefutably, is that only one body was loaded into that ambulance, and that body was yours. Only one person attempted suicide in that house that day, and that was you.”

He refused to believe it.

They'd go back to his father's cabin, her and Lillian and Clyde. They'd find Emily there on the bathroom floor. Why would the paramedics, or anyone else, think to have looked in there, in the bathroom, where he held her cold, solid body in his arms, felt the weight of it. Saw the hair bend where it hit the floor. Saw his tears soak into her shirt and dissolve into the shapes of stars.

His heart was thudding off his ribs and his mouth felt filled with salt. Still, he shook his head. Maybe Emily got up and out of there before the ambulance came, or maybe her body was still there, undiscovered. It was too much, all at once. The room got smaller, darker: it spun a little. He felt every breath he was taking in, felt it against his teeth and his raw throat, felt it slide along his gums, cooling his saliva, and he was breathing faster, and faster. His heart was beating so unsure of itself, questioning its function.

He could deny it all he wanted, like he'd watched his father do, but it wouldn't change anything. And that's when he noticed the bottle of pills on a table next to Lillian's purse, and a pamphlet titled “Caring for a Schizophrenic Loved One.”He remembered the day he opened the medicine cabinet in his parents' bathroom and saw the clear orange bottle of CPZ next to a green can of shaving cream and a pack of disposable razors. It caught him off guard, like he'd opened the cabinet and a bird was in there. And then he just stared at it: a bottle full of little yellow discs that might or might not save his father.

The doctors had already diagnosed him. Probably medicated him. There was likely CPZ in that IV bag right now, if that was possible. Maybe they were right, or maybe Emily was still lying on the floor of his bathroom, or maybe she was up and wandering aimlessly around town looking for him. And this was all a horrible mistake, an accident.

“And if you didn't do this, Owen, if this was an accident, how do you explain the note? That scatterbrained apology to your nieces we found on your father's desk in the office?”

He pictured Emily in his mind now, and realized she had looked exactly the same
every
time he saw her. She was always impossibly exact in her appearance. Her clothes were always the same; they were even wrinkled in the same places, and folding around her in the same way. Her hair was always a mess in the same way, covering half of each ear like that. He thought about all those things she knew about him before he'd told her about them, like the names of everyone in his family, or where to find that bottle of Drano and all those pills. And he thought of Hannah now, and how similar her and Emily's stories had been. How they were
too
similar.

He sank back into what was essentially his deathbed, and stared at the white ceiling tiles, the infinite constellation of dots in them. He lay there in an unnerving silence. Too much existed in that silence. His thoughts were too loud and frightening. He would end up like his father, he knew it, despite the optimism Lillian had.

“This is a lot to take in, sweetie. I need you to relax, let it all register. They say you are lucid and coherent and intelligible and that's a good sign. It may be a high-functioning form of schizophrenia. So let's start with that for now.”

Lillian caught him staring at the bottle of pills, the pills that couldn't save his father. “You can't take these now, but you'll have to …later.” She smiled feebly. “I'll hold onto them for you.” She tucked them into her purse.

He felt like a slave to something, and rabid with fear. He felt cheated by life: always waiting for something to happen, and now this. So suddenly.

According to Lillian's logic, nothing he'd known was definite now. Was Clyde even real? Was he actually in the corridor? Some of his life had to be real, for him to exist and be physically present in the room, he knew that much. He knew some things where unquestionable, like the definite consistency of his mother's chicken and rice casserole, the sweet-salty smell of it. The way he felt when he watched her body topple over and convulse that day, in slow motion, and the way his breathing skipped that night in the hospital when he fell back against that wall and watched her body recoil against the defibrillator after each shock. The fingers threatening to snap out of their joints. Her dead, but her body still there.

He knew his betrayal of Alex was real, because he could so easily recollect the way his head cracked off Hannah's gravestone that day, the sharp burn of the kinked neck, the pinch of it, and the grip of stone as it tore flesh from his face.

He thought of the signs of schizophrenia in his father in the beginning. How had he not seen them in himself? The desire for seclusion, for one, to be so utterly alone. Away from it all.
Social withdrawal
, the doctors would call it. He knew the psychological toll of losing his father was real though, the crushing hope his father would conquer it, fight it off like a flu. He knew that was real by the hundred different ways it tortured him as the schizophrenia tore his father further and further away from him, further and further out of reach. He knew his father was real because of the bits of unprompted advice he would dole out after too much wine. The flashes of conversation that came back to him at random throughout his life. Mere sentences he couldn't place, couldn't attribute to a when and where.

Know one thing,
his father had promised him.
And the rest of it doesn't matter.

But what about when that one thing is gone, absent, unavailable, forcefully ripped away from you, died right in front of you, maybe because of you? The rest of it mattered then, the crushing sadness that he'd never see her again. Never catch Hannah at an angle he hadn't seen her in before, never kiss an inch of her he hadn't kissed before, never see light accentuate some minute feature of her: the curve of her forehead, unique to her, the diamond-shaped knuckles separating finger bones. He'd never loved a woman so deeply before, to see the skeleteon that carried her. Never saw the kink of a woman's hair in a way that made the world make sense.

He thought of that piece of paper he'd found in the typewriter, back at his father's cabin:
Regret, what you've wanted and denied yourself, is the only way to put your life into perspective.
The only way to know what has mattered.

His one comfort, lying in that hospital bed, ready to lose himself, was an utter lack of regret.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am forever thankful to Rebecca Rose and Breakwater Books for so fully supporting an emerging writer. I thank Annamarie Beckel for her diligent and open approach to editing, and for her patience in allowing painstaking structural changes at the last minute. I thank Rhonda Molloy for making this book look the way it reads; I was worried no one would understand the "mood" I wanted, then was shocked at how easily she did. I thank Anna Kate MacDonald for her pep, patience, and insights regarding this novel, which all bettered it, and I thank Jackie Pope for her enthusiasm to sell this novel, and for sharing her mother s top-notch baked goods.

I thank Peggy Tremblett for her contagious faith that I would be a published novelist by thirty if I kept at it, and for being the first set of eyes on anything I write (every draft of it).