Teaching Willow: Session Four

by James, Paige

  “How do I know she’s not dead?” I almost don’t get the words out. The thought of Willow being dead, of her lying right there in front of me, on my bed, her life stolen by my selfishness…fuck!

  I swear to myself that if we get through this, I’ll make it right for her.

  My stomach twists into such a hard knot, I feel like puking.

  “Oh, she’s alive. I promise you that.” As if to illustrate her point, she raises a knee and thumps it into Willow’s side. She makes a very low murmuring sound that constricts my chest like a steely fist.

  “What did you give her?”

  “Oh, I just dissolved a few roofies into a tablespoon of Pepsi and stirred it into her coffee.”

  My heart lurches. “A few? How many did you give her?” She doesn’t answer me at first and I see red. “How many, goddammit?”

  “Not enough to kill her, but you’d better get to confessing, son. That’s not all I gave her and if much of what’s in this syringe hits her bloodstream, she’ll be dead before you can dial the ambulance.”

  I grit my teeth, making myself calm down before I do something stupid. “Will she be dead before I can strangle you? Will she be dead before I can bash your fucking head into that nightstand?”

  My fists are clenched so tight, my fingers ache. My arms are trembling and my legs are so taut with the need to race across the room and tear into her, they feel frozen.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” she says quietly, pressing the needle in far enough to penetrate the skin. Willow reacts, her body flinching the tiniest bit, like she’s trying to shy away from the needle.

  The next fifteen seconds happen so fast yet so slowly that they’re a blur of slow motion snapshots.

  I gasp when Willow moves.

  Flash.

  My mother jerks.

  Flash.

  The needle slips away from Willow’s skin for a heartbeat.

  Flash.

  My mother scrambles to regain her delicate position.

  Flash.

  The purely instinctive part of my mind registers my one (and possibly my only) opportunity to make a move. Without hesitation, I take one long step and throw myself across the end of the bed at my mother, my hand reaching out to grab hers as I crash into her.

  I hear her shriek. I smell her fetid breath. I feel her hit the nightstand.

  Noises run together in the frenzy of our struggle. The crack of the breaking lamp, the growl of my vicious mother, the snap of her bones as I wrestle the needle from her fingers. The cry of her agony.

  She crumbles into the corner, screaming and crying, as I lever myself off her. I’m blinded by rage. I take the needle and turn it toward her. I grab a handful of her hair and yank until I feel it give. I jerk her head back and bring the point of the syringe to within a centimeter of her watering eye.

  Through clenched jaw and gritted teeth, I address her. I warn her for the last time. “I could fucking kill you right now! Do you understand that? I could jam this in your eye,” I explain, spit flying as I pull her head to one side, exposing her neck, “Or I could empty it into your vile blood.”

  She’s perfectly still except for the rapid rise and fall of her chest. I lower the needle and drop my face to within an inch of hers, our noses almost touching. “Know this, mother, if I ever, ever lay fucking eyes on you again, I will take your life. I will take your life and I won’t give you another thought for as long as I live. You are going to prison, you bitch. You can rot in there as far as I’m concerned,” I say, my own chest heaving as I let her hair go and pull away. I want to see her full expression for this part. “You’ll have all day and all night for the rest of your miserable years to think about how you were here, trying to make your son fight your worthless husband’s battles while he was in Las Vegas dying, drawing his last breath while a hooker sucked his dick.”

  I see her eyes widen, shock marring her face. “No,” she whispers.

  “Yes,” I reply, my voice soft but deadly. “I stood in front of him and watched the light leave his eyes. I stared at him until he stopped seizing. My father. I watched him die and I was glad. I was glad he’s gone just like I’ll be glad when you’re gone.”

  She starts to wail hysterically, like a demented banshee. “You bastard! You ungrateful little son of a bitch.”

  “You’re exactly right, Mom. I am the son of a bitch. Or at least I was. I don’t have a mother anymore. She died today. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

  With that, I straighten, spitting on her leg before I back away. When I start to bend toward Willow, I see my mother shift.

  I stop. She stops, her hate-filled eyes driving knives into my skull. I know what she’s thinking, I know how her evil mind works. “You move again and I’ll break your fucking neck then swear on a stack of bibles that I thought you were an intruder.”

  I can see the indecision cross her face before she relaxes back into the corner. With half of my attention trained on her in my peripheral vision, I check Willow’s pulse. It’s weak, but she’s still very much alive.

  I reach into my back pocket for my phone and I dial 911. I give them my address and the nature of my call. The operator informs me that she is dispatching both an ambulance and two squad cars. I thank her and hang up, feeling more in control of my life than I have since I turned eighteen.

  “Did you hear that, Audrey? They’re coming for you. They’re coming to take you away.” It’s my turn to feel smug, satisfied.

  I keep her to my right as I bend to gather a limp Willow into my arms, love surging into my heart when she lists toward me ever so slightly, like she knows I’m not the enemy, that I would never hurt her.

  As I ease away from the bed, I make sure not to turn my back to my mother. From the corner of my eye, I see her cover her face with her hands. She starts to sob uncontrollably as the weight of what I told her really sinks in.

  I carry Willow to the couch, depositing her as gently as I can. I listen for any disruption in the sounds coming from the bedroom. I hear no movement, no changes at all until the crying starts to wane.

  Cautiously, I walk back to the bedroom door. There in the corner, with an empty syringe dangling from the inside of her forearm, is my mother. Dead. I don’t have to go check on her to confirm it. I know it in the overwhelming relief I feel in my soul.

  She’s gone.

  He’s gone.

  It’s finally over.

  THREE- WILLOW

  I wake slowly. There’s a whimper stuck in my throat and I’ve got that dark-cloud feeling hanging over my head like I’ve had a terrible nightmare. Only, this time, it seems more real. Too real.

  I hear the angry shouting of familiar voices. My heart aches, even though I’m not entirely sure why yet. Ebon and my father are arguing, but I can’t seem to wrap my head around the whys and the wheres of it all.

  “If you ever come near my daughter again, I’ll have you arrested for harassment.”

  “Sir, if you’ll just give me a chance to explain. It’s not—”

  “I don’t want to hear anything that you have to say and neither does my daughter. You’ve done enough damage and if you don’t leave, I’ll be forced to call security. Surely you don’t want to add the humiliation of being escorted from the hospital to your list of regrets.”

  “Look, I understand your anger. I really do, but you—”

  “You can’t possibly understand what I’m feeling. People like you don’t think beyond their own sick obsessions. People like you can’t possibly understand what it’s like to have a predator sneak in and violate your child, wreck her mind so badly that she needs professional help.” I recognize the rise of my father’s voice as an impending explosion. “Now get the hell out of my sight before I lose my temper.”

  There is a protracted silence that’s so tense, I can perceive it even in my sluggish state. Then, after the soft thud of footsteps, I hear my father mutter, “And stay gone.”

  Feelings of sorrow and injustice tinged with
angry resentment swirl through my chest. I hear another whimper and recognize it as my own. It’s the only sound I can force out. I try so hard to open my eyes, to speak out, to raise a hand, but nothing seems to be working right. Except my heart. And it’s breaking.

  FOUR- EBON

  Of all the emotions I have to work through—the loss of both my mother and my father, the guilt I feel over being so relieved that they’re gone, the accumulated bitterness of the last twelve years, the loss of my immediate job and my overall career—it’s the loss of Willow that preys on my mind and my heart more than anything.

  Her father is completely justified in his hatred of me. Hell, Willow would be, too. If I’d been strong enough to stay away from her and her family, none of this would have happened. I’d have suffered a bitch of a case of blue balls for a semester and then it would’ve been over. Life would’ve gone on. But that’s not what happened.

  After reading Willow’s words, I was a man possessed. She got under my skin, into my blood and, in the end, became a big piece of my heart. And look what that got her.

  She still might suffer ramifications at school, it’s caused a rift with her family, she was drugged and held hostage by my mother, her life was threatened and now she’s going to wake up in the hospital. Again.

  Getting involved with me was probably the worst mistake of her life. Unfortunately, the only thing I can do about it now is to get as far away from her as I can. She’s better off and the least I can do is put her welfare first, no matter how hard it is for me. She deserves it. It’s not her fault that I found her irresistible or that I made the mistake of falling in love with her, likely even before I fell in love with her as Sage. We had so much in common right from the start. I knew it, yet I did nothing about it. I should’ve broken it off with her sister, been the better person, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Well, I could have, I just didn’t want to.

  Selfish son of a bitch!

  I park in front of the police station. They hadn’t arrived by the time the ambulance was departing, so I went with Willow instead. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that it would probably be the last time I saw her. And it’s looking like I was right. Hell, for all I know, I’ll be arrested in the next few minutes. Who knows if they’ll believe my story, believe the truth? And without Willow to corroborate it…

  But still, it’s the right thing to do. And my karma needs a big shot of the “right thing.”

  I walk in and stop at the glass-enclosed reception area which is currently manned by an older woman who looks like her nickname might be something like “Battleax” or “Helga.”

  “Can I help you?” she rasps in a deep voice.

  “My name is Ebon Daniels. I need to speak to an officer about giving a statement.”

  “A statement about what?”

  “The death of my mother.”

  I see her frown. I’m sure she’s wondering why I’d be showing up here to talk about the death of my mother. “What happened to her?”

  “She killed herself.”

  “When?”

  “About an hour or two ago.”

  “Where?”

  “At my house.”

  “How did she kill herself?”

  “Drug overdose.”

  She eyes me warily. “Have a seat. I’ll call Officer Dunlap.”

  She doesn’t take her watchful gaze off me until a balding, middle-aged cop with a paunch and a sweat gland issue comes to take me back into the halls of the station.

  He leads me to a door labeled INTERROGATION THREE, which he pushes open and nods for me to precede him into. He waves me to a seat on the left side of the table, facing a plate of two-way mirror. He takes the seat opposite me.

  I watch as he methodically takes some papers out of a folder and begins filling them out. As he writes, he tells me in a robotic voice that this conversation is being recorded and asks me to confirm that I have come here of my own volition. It reminds me of the weight of what I’m doing, of what happened at my house this morning. A human being is dead. No matter how terrible of a person I knew her to be, the law sees only that a life has been snuffed out. And that it happened in my house under…questionable circumstances. But that’s why I’m here—to do my duty and to set the record straight.

  Over the next hour, Office Dunlap takes my statement, asking me pertinent questions and nodding a lot. When all is said and done, he has me sign my statement and then asks me not to leave town until I’ve heard from someone there at the department.

  I was expecting that.

  “I won’t be going far. But I won’t be going back to my house either.” I give him the name of the hotel I’ll be calling home for the foreseeable future. God forbid they think I’m trying to hide.

  As I walk back out the double doors into the parking lot, I ponder the surreal quality this day has taken on. Too much has happened too fast lately. Confusing things, tragic things, horrific things. I feel like the world has turned its back on me and I just need some quiet time to process. My house is a crime scene, but maybe that’s a good thing–being forced into a hotel for a while. A few days of hiding away, or even a few weeks, might do me some good. If I can manage to ignore the fact that I’m alone. With nowhere to go. No obligations. No plans. No future. No Willow. No…nothing. I’ve got nothing but time, time to figure out what the hell I’m going to do with my life.

  FIVE- WILLOW

  The fathomless placid lake of deep depression beckons. I hear what’s going on around me. I know the plans my parents are making, the case they’re building. I should fight it, but right now I don’t know how. And I simply don’t have the energy.

  I don’t respond when people speak to me. I don’t open my eyes or acknowledge that I even hear them. But I do. I know they think I’m crazy, that I’m unstable and a danger to myself. But they’re wrong. Right now I’m just…hopeless.

  They’ve taken everything from me. Granted, I handed a lot of it right over with my terrible choices.

  My life had become a bed of dry grass, just waiting for the spark that would start a wildfire. And by making such treacherous decisions, I was giving them a lighter, the only weapon they’d need to send it all up in flames.

  It’s strange because I was happier than I’ve ever been, but also more miserable. It seems implausible that the two extremes can coexist within the same body. The same person. But they can. And they do. Or at least they did. Now they don’t. Now the happiness has been burned up. It’s nothing but smoke and vapor, leaving nothing except charred remains in its wake.

  I’m the charred remains. My life. My heart. My soul. I’m nothing but ruins. The blackened skeleton of what used to be, what could’ve been. Of what won’t ever be now.

  Now, I have nothing. My parents seek to lock me away. My sister despises me. My college career is suspended indefinitely. And, worst of all, the love of my life hates me. I officially have nothing. So no, I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to talk or argue or explain. I just want to sleep. I just want to be oblivious.

  So I wait. I wait for the moment when they’ll begin filling me with medications designed to numb and equalize, designed to make me an unfeeling zombie.

  SIX- EBON

  It’s only been two days and already I’m going crazy. All I can do is replay the awful yet freeing events of that surreal twenty-four hours. That and think about Willow. Seeing her drugged with a needle pressed to her throat. Remembering what it felt like to be inside her. Knowing I’ll never get to feel that again.

  I pace the hotel room floor for the millionth time. I have to get a grip on this. I can’t just wallow for the rest of my life. I have to sift through the wreckage and find something meaningful to do with my…forever.

  Because, after what happened with my mother and then hearing Willow’s father’s words, I know that I won’t be spending it with her.

  Some part of me must’ve been dealing with the fact that I was in love with her. Or Sage. Whatever the hell she was calling herself. I know
now that it was Willow. And yes, I was falling in love with her. No, I wasn’t falling. I fell. Plain and simple. I didn’t give it much thought at the time because I didn’t think I needed to. There was no rush. I had time.

  Until time ran out. And now I’ve got all the time in the world again to miss her. And to regret.

  Fuck! If only I hadn’t…

  These days, so many of my thoughts start that way. I roll events over and over in my brain, evaluating how my different actions could’ve resulted in a different outcome. A better outcome. An outcome where I could keep Willow. Only those outcomes are moot because I didn’t make the right choices. Many of them were beyond my control, but the one that was well within my ability to choose, I fucked it up. Because I fucked Willow. Right in my classroom. None of this would be happening if I hadn’t been so determined to have her. Now I get to live with that choice, that regret, that delicious memory knowing that I’ll never get to taste it again. Just the regret, that bitter slime that constantly coats the back of my throat.

  I clench and unclench my fingers over and over until they’re stiff and sore. I spread them wide and stare down at my hands, hands that, by all rights, should be covered in blood. That’s when I decide to give my restless mind and body something to do. Something I once enjoyed. Very much enjoyed when I was with Willow.

  I’m going to write.

  SEVEN- WILLOW

  I have no idea how long I’ve been in the hospital. I only know that they transferred me to the psych wing a few hours after my arrival. Since then, I’ve been buried in my thoughts, trapped inside my own personal hell.

  The depression is still so thick I can almost taste it, like acrid smoke hanging in the air around me. For the first time since I was admitted, I raise my head and examine my surroundings. My room is very austere with its gray metal bed, white sheets, and reinforced window. The only other furniture is a single, functional straight-back chair. I know for a fact that there is nothing in sight with which I could hurt myself. All these psych rooms look basically the same. This one is no different.