SICK: Psychological Thriller Series Novella 1 (6 page)

“I say I need a shot. Now give me my fucking shot, Susan!”

His voice stunned me. I couldn’t move for a moment. He never yelled at me like that–at other people, yes, but not me. I was shaky, flustered. I didn’t know what else to do but obey.

Vaguely conscious that I had no time to act out an elaborate distraction so that he wouldn’t know the drugs were now in the bathroom, I closed the bathroom door and prepared a syringe and put it in the front pocket of my shirt. I placed the vial back inside the roll of toilet paper and stacked another roll on top. I thought if I tried too hard to hide it, it may be more obvious.

He glared at me as I approached him. I kept my eyes downcast while I removed the syringe from my pocket, pulled his arm from the sheet, and injected him directly into the vein bulging in the crease of his right elbow. I felt his angry stare on me until the drugs circulated through his body. Then he exhaled and relaxed. But it wasn’t over. When I finally had the nerve to look at him, I was horrified to see he was focusing on me with a cloudy, smug stare–like some sort of threat. I capped the needle, threw it in the trash, and left without saying another word.

Downstairs, as I slipped on my nursing shoes, a throbbing pain reminded me of my sore toe. The cockroach. The hammer. I forgot to ask John, but I couldn’t go back into that room again.

My eyes ached, and the glare of a sunny day made my head throb. Old Pete was raking underneath the Sycamore tree. “Mr. Peter,” I tried to say, but I hadn’t recovered from the argument with John, and my voice was stuck in my throat. “Peter,” I called more firmly this time.

“Yes, ma’am.” He stopped working and rubbed his jaw as if to warm it up for its involuntary rotating.

“Did you fix anything in the house recently?” I asked.

“No, ma’am.” He began raking again.

“I found a hammer,” I said.

He stopped. “My ball peen hammer?” he asked.

“I can’t say. It’s just a hammer,” I said. “Did John call you up to fix something?”

“No,” he scratched his head. “But I’ve been looking for that thing everywhere.”

“Then how would your hammer get in our bedroom?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Did you go into the house while we were gone?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I told you that you no longer have permission.”

His face soured, and he squinted up at me.

“Maybe you don’t remember?” I said.

“I would remember that,” he said. “I’m not a dimwit. I’m not.”

“Well, I’ll bring it down after work. If it’s yours, then you have some explaining to do.”

I walked away and closed myself in my car. I peered up at the upstairs window of the ugly duckling. The curtain was parted. John was up? What was he doing? I watched for a minute. Then the curtain fell back into place. I told myself it was just the wind.

*

Work
was boring, quiet, clean, and orderly. The monotony was soothing, and it diluted the unsettling dread that pulled on my nerves. John’s hostility, his outburst, wounded me, like the time I nursed a diseased feral kitten. Once it was strong enough, it went into a fury, scratching me with its tiny claws and etching lines of blood across my forearms. I felt so betrayed I cried. I also wanted to smash that kitten into the wall.

Dr. K, Dawn, and the other staff members went out to lunch at some trendy café across the street, a place with five-dollar coffees and sandwiches on ciabatta bread. I told them I was on a diet, but truth was I couldn’t afford it. It was for the better. I had nothing left in me for small talk or office gossip. I ate in peace behind my desk: a peanut butter and honey sandwich and a mealy apple I found in the back of the fridge. I chewed and stared at the wall, wondering what John was doing now.

As I put my things back into my soft cooler, my cell phone rang. I was afraid to look. Sure enough, it was Greta. “Everything okay?”

“Suzie. You must come quickly. Mr. John is vomiting everywhere.”

“It may be his medication,” I said. “It can make him nauseous.”

“No, no,” she said breathlessly. “This is violent. He’s shaking and seems to be in terrible pain.”

I heard an inhuman moaning in the background. It didn’t even sound like him.

“Please hurry!” Greta shouted.

I hung up the phone. No one was in the office, so I had to leave a note on the desk and lock up. All I could think of was what John had told me the night before, and his spiteful face before I left him.
The big shot.

I flew to the car and drove as fast as I could, but I caught every red light and got stuck behind every slow person on the road. I tore into the driveway, slammed the car door, and took the stairs two at a time. I heard his heaving long before I arrived at the top. I looked to my left, and there was Greta doing her best to hold a trash can under John, who was slumped over his crumpled legs on the filthy tile floor. His complexion was pale, jaundiced. His eyes were rolled back and fluttering. His head wobbled, and then his body contracted and vomit ejected from his mouth. It was bright green and bloody.

“Oh my god! What is that?” I squatted beside them.

Greta was in tears already. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t even move. I couldn’t leave him.”

“It’s okay,” I said. I got behind her and let her slip out so I could hold John. “Call 911,” I told her. I shook John. “Sweetie? Sweetie? Can you hear me?” He was unresponsive. His body was still awake, though, and determined to empty his innards out through his mouth, but hardly anything came out except electric-green bile. The smell was vile, sweet and chemical.

The paramedics arrived amidst the blur of chaos. They happened to be the same two large men who brought us home from the neck surgery, and familiar with the layout of our house, they went straight upstairs and got to work. They injected him with antinausea medicine, strapped him to the stretcher on his side, and within minutes we were speeding through town with John dry-heaving and gagging, his body trying to curl into a fetal position but the restraints preventing him from doing so.

I couldn’t think of anything except that he might not make it. John was unconscious. He wasn’t with me. This is what his death would be like. I’d never felt so alone.

I broke down and wept all the way to the hospital, emotionally replete and beyond self-consciousness. The tears and snot dribbled into my lips, and I didn’t have an ounce of composure left to even wipe my face before the mucous ran into my mouth.

I left him alone. He warned me. It’s my fault.

The paramedics removed John’s shirt to attach electrodes to his chest. His bruises were turning colors again: blue, green, brown, some yellowing. At least the paramedics knew him and I didn’t have to explain the scars.

I looked at his pathetic, convulsing body, and an unexpected loathing unfurled inside me, black thoughts that jarred me. The man in the stretcher … he was a diseased organism. A waste. Not valid anymore at all. Some Darwinian instinct erupted and took over.
Weakling. Parasite
. I prayed that he would die just as hard as I prayed that he live. I prayed that he would free us both. When I became aware of these thoughts, they horrified me.
What is wrong with you? You don’t really feel that way.
I was tired. Just so tired.

Once in the hospital, John was swarmed by an army of nurses in blue scrubs and soft white shoes who spoke in whispers of restrained urgency. They whisked him from me, and I was left alone in the hallway to shuffle back to the waiting room I knew all too well.

I was given a lukewarm cup of coffee. I can’t remember how I ended up with it, but it was suddenly in my trembling hand. I sat down in the waiting room and looked up at the TV. One of those afternoon talk shows was blared, crowds of fat housewives applauding. No one else was waiting there. I had every opportunity to change the channel, but no will to do so. Then Doctor Sheffield found me.

“Mrs. Branch, your husband is suffering from acute organ failure,” he said. “We can’t determine the reason. Do you have any idea what caused this?” The doctor’s clear, green eyes were enlarged by the lenses of his glasses. He was shorter than me, which was extremely short for a man. He was balding and overweight, but I always thought his intelligent and concerned manner made him very handsome. His presence had a calming effect. “Mrs. Branch? Has he had any mix-up with his medication? Any exposure to contaminants?”

“Not that I know of, doctor.” I couldn’t look him in the eye. I thought of how I allowed John to mix his painkillers with massive injections of stolen Demerol, all because I wanted to get some sleep.
It’s your fault, Susan.

“We’re running some tests,” he said. “Maybe it has something to do with the idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura.”

“The what?” I asked.

“The ITP,” he said. “His blood disorder.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“He’s still unconscious,” the doctor continued, “but stabilized. It looks like he’s going to pull through.”

“He will?”

“He’s one tough guy,” the doctor said. “I just want to identify the problem before releasing him.”

I noticed his immaculate lab coat and thought it so fitting that doctors wore white. They were either the angels that saved you or the ones that ushered you to heaven. “Will he be here long?” I asked.

“I can’t say exactly. Could be a week. Could be a month.”

Moving back into the hospital. Again.

All of my emotions of shock, worry, hope, and relief were replaced by pervasive, numbing exhaustion. I had the most bizarre urge to collapse into the kind doctor’s embrace. I just wanted someone to take care of me, to soothe me for once, but I shook the doctor’s hand. Everything would continue the way it always had.

“Thanks Dr. Sheffield,” I said. “I’ll run home and get some things and be right back. Could you tell John if he wakes up? That I’ll be right back.”

“Of course, Mrs. Branch.” He patted my shoulder and held the door open for me. Then he told the nurses at the desk to call me a taxi so I could go home.

*

The
taxi dropped me off in front of the ugly duckling. The evening was swirling in, gray and windy. Fallen leaves scoured the sidewalks, and bare tree limbs tapped and scraped each other without rhythm. The songbirds silenced, and only the occasional caw of a crow pierced the breeze.

I went upstairs to the bathroom. Greta must have cleaned up the vomit because everything was spic and span, though a sweet, acidic smell lingered with the disinfectant.

I knelt on the floor to reach into the bathroom cabinet. The Demerol was there. Untouched. That meant John wasn’t overdosing. He didn’t give himself the suicide shot. But if this wasn’t an overdose, what was it? An overdose meant at least there was an answer. Now there was none.

I pulled off of my nursing shoes and removed my socks. I noticed my pinky toenail was black from dead blood trapped beneath it.
The hammer.
I scanned the room. It wasn’t where I’d left it on the chair.

It couldn’t have been a dream. I went to look back in the same spot it had been when I hit my toe. I lifted the dusty bed skirt and felt around underneath the bed. Among the clumps of dust bunnies and shed hair, I found moldered dress shoes, a box of yellowed photographs, and more of my candy wrappers. As I slid my hand toward the headboard, my fingers thudded against something large, smooth, and cool to the touch–a plastic bottle. I pulled it from underneath. It was yellow and squarish with a handle. Auto coolant, the label said.

I twisted the cap. The seal was broken. It had been opened, but the bottle was nearly full. This situation with Old Pete was going from weird to making me angry. I set the jug aside to take with me on my way out.

I took a quick shower, just the essentials: face, feet, crotch, underarms. I threw my worn scrubs and traded them for a slightly less dirty pair of jeans and a wrinkled T-shirt from the laundry pile. I packed a small bag of toiletries, John’s favorite books, and a Sudoku booklet I usually just stared at to avoid talking with other hospital visitors. I stuffed a handful of mini Nestle Crunch bars in the bottom of my purse.

I gathered my things and ran downstairs. I put my bags in the car and then took the coolant with me to the garage. I looked up at our old home that had been so full of color and dreams early in our marriage. I knew John wasn’t healthy when we got married, but I had expected my love to cure him and that we’d live happily ever after in the mother duck, just like a fairy tale. His wealth and stature impressed me, and I fell partly for the story–the lonely, sickly prince in need of a bride. I would be that gentle-hearted heroine to care for him, despite his undesirable condition, and win his undying gratitude for eternity. It wasn’t that I loved him for money, or out of pity for the illness. The wealth, the disease: they were part of him. I loved him for who he was. Now it was beginning to feel as if God was punishing me for chasing a foolish fantasy.

A silhouette caught my eye. The Arab wife peered at me from the window, the golden light of the crystal chandelier glowing behind her black hair. John and I used to dine under that glow. I knew she must have thought we were pathetic. Freaks. Beggars. If only she had seen John’s family before this mess.