The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

I tried to pull away but he tightened his grip. “I can’t tell you. But it doesn’t matter now. It’s taken care of.”

  “Really?” I said. “Was kissing her like that in my driveway taking care of it?”

  “Yes. It was. It was a good-bye kiss.”

  Everything that coursed through my flesh erupted in one burst of strength. I wrenched myself from Wes and retreated to the other side of the room. As I bumped against the table I’d set with so much hope, a crystal goblet tipped into its neighboring plate and smashed politely into splinters.

  “Good-bye after what, Wes?”

  “It just happened, babe.”

  “How long?”

  Wes stood up but I stuck out a warning palm. This time he heeded it. For a crazy moment I thought he was going to put up both hands in surrender.

  “It just started out with us talking. I couldn’t get you to talk to me so I went to her—”

  “I changed my mind. Stop.”

  “Babe, come on, let me finish.”

  “No,” I said—in spite of the pleading in his voice and the desperation in his arms and the glistening tears that weren’t the ones I’d hoped to see tonight. I couldn’t let him tell me the rest. Not until I got a handle on myself.

  “I need you to go,” I said.

  “I’m not leaving until you hear me out.”

  “Then stay,” I said, and somehow made my way into the bathroom.

  A moment after I slammed the door, I heard my front door slam as well. I wasn’t sure which one shook the house—or was it me it shook? I was undoubtedly headed into a panic so strong I had to stop it before it quaked me over an edge I wouldn’t be able to come back from.

  I did something I had never done before, not in the seven years since I’d first dug a fingernail into my flesh. I acted without ritual, without a plan, without the certainty that all that was bad in me was about to seep from my bloodstream. I just snatched up the scissors I’d used in another life to make myself sexy and held them against the inside of my forearm. What did it matter now if I cut where everyone could see?

  I did take a breath, a long one that settled the wildest of the thoughts spinning in my head. With practiced pressure I let the tip of the scissors ease its way in until the first bead of blood escaped. Leaning against the safe bathroom door, I started the gentle pull in a fragile straight line—until the doorknob jiggled and Wes’s voice cut through.

  “Kirsten! Open the door, please! We have to talk!”

  I couldn’t answer. When I’d startled, the scissor blade had dug in deeper than I’d intended. The blood was coming out too fast. This wasn’t right.

  “Kirsten! What are you doing? What’s going on?”

  Wes banged on the door and it lurched open, slamming me against the sink. I felt the scissors stab into my arm—deep, and then deeper when Wes yanked me to face him. I stared in horror at the blade still embedded beyond the surface skin it was intended for. But my own horror couldn’t match the terror in Wes’s eyes. Before I could stop him he jerked the scissors free—and released a fountain of blood. Not the blessed blood of relief. Blood that was trying to drain my life from me.

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  Chapter

  TWO

  The night became a montage of blood and sirens and patches of blackness that sometimes gave way to figures from Edvard Munch paintings. Its soundtrack was chaotic—too many wails and shouts and the Munch figures asking, “Kristen, can you hear me?” I knew I should tell them that wasn’t my name, but it didn’t seem to matter as I sank away again.

  Then came the lights. Glaring, awful eyes that stared at me from a stainless steel face. All around me were words I didn’t understand. Severed the radial . . . losing the pulse . . . whole blood. But one phrase made its way to a clear spot in my mind.

  “Failed suicide attempt,” someone said.

  “No!” I said. And then again, “No!” Because it was all my tongue could manage.

  One of the painted faces came close to mine and I could see it was real.

  “Kristen, we’re going to save your life whether you want us to or not.”

  I didn’t care now what they called me, but I had to make them see they were wrong. Why didn’t Wes tell them? Where was Wes?

  I tried to call for him, but all that came out was, “No!” over and over until I once again went someplace dark.

  When I emerged from the cave of no-thought, I still couldn’t quite put anything together. An eerie calm had settled over me when I wasn’t looking. It was several minutes before I knew I was in a hospital with an IV in my arm, and several more before I figured out that the white-coated person standing over me wasn’t happy to be there.

  “Do you know where you are?” he said. Or perhaps it was his long, continuous eyebrow that said it. I couldn’t tell.

  “Hospital.”

  “Do you know your name?”

  “Kirsten Petersen. Kirsten, not Kristen.”

  I had the strange sensation that I was somehow talking like a caterpillar. How did caterpillars talk? Did they?

  “Hey, stay with me.”

  I forced my eyes open to look at Unibrow.

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  I let my eyes close.

  “Hey.”

  “It was just an accident,” I said into my eyelids.

  “You slit your wrist.”

  “No. No—I was only . . . ask Wes. He’ll tell you.”

  “That the guy who called 911?”

  “My boyfriend. Wes.” I struggled for his last name. “Rordan.”

  I heard computer keys. Then Unibrow was back.

  “Open your eyes, Kirsten.”

  When I looked, the hairy line had folded almost over his eye sockets, scolding me. Why was he scolding me?

  “You with me?” he said.

  No, I was with Wes. But where was he?

  “Kirsten—”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Dr. Giacomo. I’m a resident here in the ER.”

  “Okay.”

  “Here’s what happened. You slit your wrist with a pair of scissors and you would have bled out if your boyfriend hadn’t found you and called 911. The paramedics brought you here in an ambulance—”

  I shook my head, which was a mistake. The room went into a sickening spin. Dr. Unibrow was quick with the pan and all but rolled his eyes as I threw up into it. I didn’t even do that proficiently, a result of not having eaten anything for what now seemed like days.

  He set the pan aside and leaned on my table. “Look, we can see you’re a cutter,” he said.

  I cringed.

  “And evidently it wasn’t working anymore.”

  “It would have. Wes banged on the door and the scissors slipped. I didn’t mean to hurt myself this bad.”

  I thought we agreed pathetic isn’t effective.

  Nudnik’s voice was vague. Even she was having trouble getting through and for once I wanted her to.

  “Well, you did hurt yourself this bad.” The doctor lifted my arm, apparently so I could see the bandage that mummified my wrist. “You almost died. How old are you, Kirsten?”

  Why should you tell him? He hasn’t believed anything else you’ve said so far.

  “Twenty-two,” I said.

  “Were you ever sexually abused?”

  “I’m sorry, what? No!”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes!”

  “Physically abused growing up? Bad childhood?”

  “No. I don’t understand—”

  “Have a history of depression?”

  Who doesn’t?

  “Could you please tell me why you’re asking me all this?”

  He folded his arms across his coat, covering the name I couldn’t remember anyway. “I’m trying to find out why an attractive twenty-two-year-old with her whole life ahead of her would want to do this to herself.”
>
  “I didn’t want to die. Really, it was an accident.”

  “Even if it was, it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t had a pair of scissors pressed against your radial artery.”

  The door opened, and the room was invaded by the sound of someone crying out in pain. It was muffled as the door closed again.

  “Did you hear that, Kirsten?” the doctor said. “That’s somebody who didn’t ask for the suffering she’s going through right now—”

  “Okay, I think this conversation is over.”

  It was a female voice, and I didn’t care who it belonged to; I loved her.

  “Are we stable?” she said.

  “Physically,” was the answer. “The artery clotted so we didn’t have to do surgery except to stitch her up.”

  “Then I guess your job is done.”

  She was close enough for me to see her now—a strawberry blonde with a thick braid who was tall enough to tower over Dr. Unibrow. I loved that about her too. Her face remained impassive until the door closed behind him. I saw her eyes go into green slits before she turned to me with a professional smile.

  “Hey, Kirsten,” she said. “I’m Dr. Oliphant. And, yes, I got teased about that a lot when I was a kid.”

  Her tone made me grope for my sense of humor. “I was going to ask,” I said.

  “That’s a good sign.” She pulled a stool up to my table as if she and I were about to chat over café mochas. “I understand you had a bad night last night.”

  Understatement of the year, Doc.

  “The worst,” I said.

  “How are you doing now? Emotionally, I mean.”

  Peachy.

  “Right now I’m just frustrated because nobody will believe I wasn’t trying to commit suicide. It was an accident.”

  She nodded. I couldn’t tell whether that meant she believed me or not, but at least she didn’t tell me I was taking up space here when other people were really suffering.

  “They tell me you self-injure,” she said.

  “That doctor with one eyebrow called me a cutter,” I said.

  Her eyes returned briefly to slits. “We refer to what you do as SI. You’ll hear people say that up on the floor, although that isn’t to label you—”

  “What floor?”

  “The psychiatric floor, Kirsten.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I do. They’re taking you where the crazy people are.

  Dr. Oliphant folded her hands on my table. “When someone comes in with an injury like yours, hospital policy pretty much dictates that the patient—you—be admitted for observation for at least seventy-two hours. Is there someone you want us to call and let know—”

  “I’m going to be on the psych ward?”

  “Unless you can convince me that you had no intention of taking your own life and that you’ll be safe if I release you.”

  What do you have to do to convince her? Open a vein? Oh, wait, you already did that.

  I tried to sit up, but the room spun again. I didn’t throw up this time, probably because this doctor didn’t just shove a puke pan in my face. She eased me down and then adjusted the table so I was at a forty-five-degree angle.

  “Is that more comfortable?” she said.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be difficult, but I’m not going to be comfortable until I get home.”

  Right. Back to the scene of the, uh, crime.

  “I don’t know how else to say it: yes, I was going to cut, but that’s all. Wes—my boyfriend—shoved the door open and the scissors slipped and went into my arm, and then he jerked me away from the sink and they went in deeper and blood was just . . .” I begged her with my eyes. “It was awful, but I didn’t do it on purpose. Wes will tell you.”

  Dr. Oliphant stroked her braid. “That’s where we run into a snag. Wes—that’s your boyfriend?”

  Was your boyfriend. Have we forgotten that he had a little fling with your best friend?

  I pressed my hand against my throat. I could feel my fingers shaking on my skin.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Until last night.”

  Ooh, bad move, Kirsten. Now she’s going to think you had a reason to slice yourself open. As always, nicely done.

  Yeah, well, I was into it now. “We broke up and I was just trying to relieve some of the pressure, but he came back, I guess to try to get me to make up, and that’s when it happened.”

  Dr. Oliphant directed her green eyes at me. “Unfortunately that isn’t the way Wes explained it to the paramedics and the ER doctor.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he had to break into the bathroom because you wouldn’t let him in, and when he did get in, you had already slit your wrist.”

  “But that’s not true!” I said.

  Screaming is such a great way to convince her you’re sane. Go with that.

  “We all see different things in a crisis situation.” The doctor’s voice was far too calm for the crisis I was rising to right now. “That’s how Wes saw it.”

  “And what I told you is how I experienced it! I don’t need to go to the psych ward. Please—just let me go home!”

  Yeah, let’s go home so we can confront Wes with the fact that he is a liar in the first degree.

  By then things on me were shaking that had never shaken before—parts of me I hadn’t even known were there. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t form a thought beyond He lied . . . he lied . . . it was all lies.

  I didn’t realize I’d screamed it out loud until Dr. Oliphant put her hand on my arm and said, “All right, we’re going to get you to a place where we can help you deal with that.”

  “I want to go home!”

  “We’ll give you something to calm you down and then we’re going to keep you here for a little while.”

  I grabbed my knees and yanked them into my chest and shook and shook and shook, until someone said that ridiculous thing—“a little pinch”—and I shook slowly off into the dark again. But not before I heard the Nudnik say: I’m thinking I don’t love Dr. Elephant anymore. You?

  Somehow it got to be Monday. And somehow I was in a blue room where somebody had made an attempt at a serene décor that only mocked me. The staff never seemed to turn out the lights. They just left them on to expose me, but whenever I started to pull the colorless hospital sheet over my face, the Nudnik reminded me that would only make me look crazy to them. Although, frankly, she nattered in my head, I think that ship has sailed.

  I didn’t care now that they kept giving me medicine to maintain my calm. As deep as my hopelessness went, I wondered how I’d be acting if I weren’t, as Nudnik put it, completely loaded.

  So I slept and slept and slept, coming to only when someone came in to check my dressing or try to coax me to eat the unidentifiable things under the plastic lid. That only made me think of the rib eyes still drowning in marinade in my refrigerator, and that was one of many places I couldn’t be right now. So I slept and slept and slept some more.

  Until late that day—and who could tell what time it was in that endlessly blue room with no clock—when someone in pediatric-print scrubs woke me up to tell me I had a visitor.

  “If it’s Wes Rordan, I don’t want to see him,” I said.

  “We haven’t had a chance to get a list of approved visitors from you,” she said. “So, no Wes Rordan?”

  “No,” I said.

  Aw, come on, Kirsten. I want to see the boy squirm.

  “How about your mother?”

  I sat straight up in the bed. “My mother? Michelle Petersen?”

  “This lady,” she said, and flashed a photocopy of my mother’s driver’s license.

  It was her all right. Thin blond bob gone almost gray. Faded blue eyes. Lips in an obligatory smile. Only the puffy places under her eyes made her look any different than she had the last time I saw her. She’d aged considerably in four years.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Of course you know
. This is going to be a train wreck. No, actually the train wreck would be if your father were with her. Then I’m thinking more . . . Spanish Inquisition.

  “She said she flew all day from Missouri to see you.”

  What? A flight from Kansas City is a few hours max.

  “Okay,” I said. Because I had a glimmer of hope. If anyone could convince these people that I didn’t need to be here, it was my I-don’t-believe-in-nervous-breakdowns mother. “Bring her in.”

  “You’ll have to see her in the visitors’ room,” Happy Scrubs said. “There’s a bathrobe hanging on the back of the door.”

  The idea of leaving the room and finding out how bad it really was here was almost enough to make me change my mind. That and the fact that there was no belt with the robe.

  They want to make sure you don’t hang yourself.

  She was standing at one of the wide windows in the visitors’ room, overlooking the inevitable mountain range. The setting sun on the other side of the sky cast a pink light on the last of the snow, but I was sure Mother wasn’t making an appreciative mental note of that.

  I must have still been under the influence because the moment I saw her, it occurred to me that my younger sister, Lara, and I were probably the only people in our generation who actually called their maternal parent Mother. There wasn’t anything else you could call Michelle Petersen. Mom, Mommy, and Mama belonged to women who baked snickerdoodles and hung their kids’ funky artwork on the refrigerator with souvenir magnets from family vacations. Lara always said Mother with an inflection reminiscent of one of Cinderella’s stepsisters.

  Mother didn’t turn around until I’d passed three groupings of chairs. I wasn’t fast enough to get my bandaged wrist behind my back before she saw it. I knew she did because her pencil-thin brows went up. Michelle didn’t raise her eyebrows for just any little thing.

  “Hi,” I said when I reached her.

  She can’t argue with that.

  Mother gave me an almost-there kiss on the cheek and stepped back again to look at me. For perhaps the first time in my life I was glad she wasn’t a hugger. She had yet to say a word, but disbelief was etched into the bags under her eyes, which were even more pronounced in person.