Tears, hot and reckless, streamed down my cheeks. The door clicked shut after the vet’s exit and it was quiet, but my ears rang and my heart thudded and I realized just the awful extent to which I hated surprises. I truly despised them. My heart could absolutely not handle them. This was it attacking me from the inside out.
“Oh, Herb,” I cried, pressing my cheek to the top of his head. My tears clung to his hair and stuck against my skin. “This sucks. This just completely sucks.”
He groaned contentedly, blissfully unaware. At least I hoped so. I knew that sometimes being ignorant was the best thing possible.
“How can I say a forever goodbye to you?” I sobbed as we rocked together. “How can I give you over when I know what they plan to do to you?” I knew he couldn’t answer, but I still had to speak it. “I couldn’t take care of you as well as most people could’ve, but I tried my best, and that has to count for something.”
Minutes went by and I filled them with ramblings and apologies, and then the door opened again, no knock this time.
“They’re here.” His tone and his expression brought on the rally of tears again. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Aberdeen. I truly am.”
Giving one last hug, I pulled Herb as tightly to my chest as our bodies would allow and squeezed him there, blanketing him. Then I slipped out from under his furry weight, rose to stand, and walked to the door.
“I tried my best,” I muttered again, but I didn’t know who I was trying to reassure with those final words.
Then I walked out the door.
I didn’t look back.
TWENTY-THREE
“How’s that?”
The nurse fluffed my pillow once more and then slid it behind my back. Each time I moved, my ribs felt like they were breaking all over again.
“A little better. Thank you.” It wasn’t any better, but she was nice and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I’d done too much of that lately.
She smiled. I liked her smile a lot. It was a pretty smile. It reminded me of Mom’s. “Is there anything I can get you, sweetie? More of that raspberry Jell-O you like?”
I nodded. “What about my mama?” I said quietly. My voice hurt to use. Everything hurt to use. “When can I see her?”
The smile dropped from the nurse’s face. “I’ll have to check on that for you, sweetie.”
“Another nurse was already checking, too.” And a janitor that came to clean the bathroom during the night shift. And the nice boy who brought lunch just an hour ago. I’d asked every person that entered through the door to find her whereabouts, but it was taking them all a really long time.
“I’ll be back with your Jell-O in a jiffy.”
She shuffled out of the room and then everything was quiet again. There was some beeping from a machine hooked up to me, but even that I couldn’t really hear anymore, especially when I hummed quietly to myself. Humming got rid of all those background sounds, like always. Plus, I was used to the noises of the hospital. In a way, it felt like a home away from home.
I closed my eyes to sleep and a little while later there was a soft knock on my door. Maybe it was Mama. Maybe she didn’t want to wake me by barging in. Mama was thoughtful that way.
“Eppie?” I didn’t recognize the voice, but it wasn’t hers. It was a man’s, but it wasn’t my dad’s, either. “Can I come in?”
I tried to scoot up in my bed to get a better look, but my body wouldn’t allow it. I supposed I would just let him in. I was safe at the hospital. At least that’s what they kept saying, ‘You’re safe here.’ But I felt safe at home, too. Safer than here.
The man slowly pushed the door open and stepped inside. He was a grown up, probably ten or so years older than my parents. His shirt was baggy and green and yellow plaid, and he wore khaki cargo pants that looked like the pockets were stuffed full, weighing them down. Pulling his sunglasses from his face, he tucked them into the collar of his shirt and smiled.
Everyone was sure smiling at me a lot.
“I’d like to talk with you for a moment, if that’s okay with you.”
A nurse followed in behind him. She skirted the edge of my bed and walked over to the IV that hung above me like a liquid-filled balloon. With a syringe in her hand, she pressed it into the port and then patted her palm lightly on my shoulder. Surprise, surprise. She was smiling, too.
“Eppie, I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you’re up for it.” His movements were delicate, not like he was a woman or anything, but like he was trying not to startle me. I didn’t figure I startled easily, though.
“Are you a doctor?” I asked.
The nurse was still at my bedside, scribbling something onto a chart.
“I’m a friend.”
I shook my head. Ouch. Even that made my whole body ache. “How can you be a friend if I’ve never met you?” That was a very funny thing for him to say.
“You have a point. I’m not a friend just yet, you’re right. But I hope to be one. And I’m not a doctor in the sense that you’re used to them. I don’t work on healing the body the way they do. I work more with the mind.” This guy sounded like a hippie to me. He kind of looked like one, too. “My name is Phil.”
“Is there something wrong with my brain, Phil?” For the past six months, the doctors in this hospital had told my parents this might be the case. I figured this man was here to finally make that official.
“Not with yours, no.” Phil pulled the chair he was sitting in closer to my bed. The metal legs scraped on the linoleum. “Eppie, I’d like to talk to you about your mother.”
Even though it was so painful to do it, I sat up as straight as I could, alert and at attention. “Do you know when I get to see her?”
“Eppie.” I didn’t like that he kept saying my name. “Eppie, there’s something going on in your mother’s mind that isn’t healthy.”
I blinked fast and shook my head. “You mean something in my mind,” I corrected. He was right, he wasn’t a doctor. I guessed that was why he didn’t have all the information. “They’ve been saying that for a while now. I’ve had lots of tests done.”
“No, Eppie. There is nothing wrong with your mind.” I couldn’t understand what he meant. He leaned back slightly in his chair and crossed his ankles. Then he sighed, hissing through his teeth. “Your mother has a condition called Munchausen by Proxy.”
That was a very funny word. I hadn’t realized Mama had even been sick. That made me feel bad that she’d had to take care of me so much when I was sick, and apparently she was sick, too. Dad should have helped out with that more.
“Do you know what that is, Eppie?”
“No.”
Phil nodded. “It is where a caregiver—often a parent—makes a child sick.” He looked me in the eye. “On purpose.”
“Mama didn’t make me sick.” Phil didn’t seem to understand any of this. He was a very confused man. And he didn’t dress very well. There was just a lot about him that didn’t go together. “Mama was the one who was trying to get the doctors to make me healthy.”
“This is very hard to grasp, I’m sure.” Phil looked like maybe he was a nice person, but I didn’t like the words that came out of his mouth at all. They weren’t nice in the least. “It’s a form of medical child abuse.”
“Mama didn’t hurt me,” I said quickly, defending her. I didn’t like the mean things he was saying about her. I didn’t like the lies he told. “She took care of me.”
I could tell that he was trying to form his words carefully, because he waited a lot longer to speak this time, like he was writing them out in his head first. “There are people whose brains don’t work quite the way yours and mine do, Eppie.”
Mama’s brain was just fine. She was so smart and so funny and so wonderful. There was nothing wrong with her brain.
“In your mother’s mind, it was important for her to gain attention by constantly having someone to care for. The attention of doctors, of her peers, of your father.”
I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t speak.
“Your mother has been making you sick, Eppie. For years. But she can’t make you sick anymore. That’s over.”
Panic spiked in my heart. “Where is she?”
“She’s in custody for now, Eppie.” Phil had a mustache that he kept biting with his lower teeth, almost like he was combing it with them. It was a weird thing to do. I didn’t like it. I wanted to shave it off of his face. “But she’s going to get help. Trust me. She’s going to get better. There are people who can help her get better.”
I couldn’t believe any part of anything he said. It didn’t make sense. Mama was always there for me. She always talked to the doctors, always told the other moms at school how worried she was, always held me at night when I didn’t feel good. She was the best mother anyone could ask for.
Phil made her sound like a monster.
I paused, looking him straight in the eye. I wanted his eyes to be scary and mean, but they were the opposite. They looked so nice and trustworthy. That made my stomach roll. “How do you even know that any of this is true?”
“Because she told us.”
Bile seeped into my mouth and I choked it back. Phil could see that, and he pulled the nearby trashcan to my side quickly.
But I didn’t throw up. I held it all in.
“She told you she made me sick?”
“Eppie.” Phil settled the wastebasket back onto the ground and it rattled quietly into place. “Some very bad things happened to your mother when she was a little girl. They are not excuses for what she’s done to you, but they are explanations.”
“So she knew what she was doing?” I didn’t want to cry in front of Phil. That would be embarrassing. I didn’t even know him. But I couldn’t help myself. The tears spilled from my eyes and skimmed down my chubby cheeks freely. I figured I would probably never see him again, so I didn’t waste time feeling embarrassed about the tears that soaked my face.
“This disorder is so complex and complicated. There are many underlying parts to it, but yes, ultimately your mother was completely aware of what she was doing. She was intentionally making you—and keeping you—ill.”
It was weird that for as often as I’d been sick in the past few years, I’d never felt as horrible as I did right now. This was the worst. This was so much worse than all of the stomachaches and the hospital visits and the tests and procedures combined.
“My father. Where is he?”
“He’s talking with some people about what happened. But he’ll be back soon.” Phil crossed him arms over his chest, the same way his ankles were crossed. His head tilted to the side. “Would you like me to wait with you until he comes back?”
I looked at him. “Yes.”
“Not a problem. I’m happy to wait with you, Eppie.”
I was surprised I didn’t have someone already waiting with me in the room. Last time I was admitted, there was a girl who was fifteen and couldn’t be left alone. Something about her being on “watch.” Her wrists had been bandaged tightly with white cloths and she stayed in a separate wing of the hospital, away from everyone else.
But no one was here to watch me. Unless that’s what they’d sent Phil to do.
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” I explained, needing him to know.
“I know.”
I didn’t believe him, that he believed me. Why would he believe me? I was just a kid.
“We don’t have to talk about that right now, Eppie.”
“But I need you to believe me,” I pleaded. The tears hadn’t stopped, and this only made them come down faster.
“I do believe you. And I will continue to believe anything you care to share with me. But for now, you really need to rest.”
That’s what they’d all said. I needed my rest. I couldn’t figure what I was supposed to be resting up for.
I tried to close my eyes, but all I could hear was Mama’s sweet voice in my head. Her whispers of I love you as she cradled me to sleep. Her angelic, beautiful singing as a soft lullaby. Every thought that ran through my head was in her voice, covered with her tone. I tried to think on my own, but it was all her. Everything was her because she was my mom, and that’s how it should be.
“Having trouble settling in?” Phil asked after long moments of quiet between us. I could hear a newspaper crinkle as he turned the page. The clock read twenty minutes since our last conversation.
“Yes.”
I knew he would think it was weird, but I did the only thing I knew to do. I started to hum, just a few bars at first, but Phil quickly joined in.
We hummed together and his voice was nice and strong. “I love that song. One of my favorites,” he said during a break in the melody. He placed the newspaper onto the bedside table and folded his arms behind his neck, angling his face to the ceiling, closing his eyes.
Then he started humming again.
He hummed me all the way to sleep.
TWENTY-FOUR
When I walked out of the veterinarian’s office, I studied each vehicle in the parking lot, trying to determine what kind of car a dog murderer would drive. I didn’t know what I expected, truthfully. It wasn’t like there would be a bumper sticker reading, “I kill puppies for sport,” slapped on its backside. But I needed to find something. Something that would clue me in to just how on earth someone could hurt a perfectly lovable, helpless creature.
I didn’t find anything, of course. There were just a bunch of steel facades parked in rectangular spaces.
When Lincoln’s tires rolled in front of my field of vision along the curb where I sat, I didn’t immediately get up from my post. I remained planted as the gurgling engine shut off, and I tracked his heavy black boots as they scraped across the pavement. His knees popped when he lowered, and he nudged his shoulder into mine as soon as he sat down. It threw me a bit off balance, but I’d been feeling like that already. This was just an added push.
“How long have you been out here?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Ten minutes?”
“Then there’s probably still time,” he surmised, his voice gaining speed. It was laced with an optimism I knew we didn’t have the right to hold. “I can go in there and talk to his owners and tell them we’ve got the money and then maybe—”
“Stop.” I pushed a hand to his arm. My eyes pinched closed and I breathed in painfully. “Just stop. Please.”
He did.
“He’s not our responsibility anymore, Lincoln.” I hung my head down, almost between my knees like you did when you were about to pass out, and tears dotted the pavement in damp circles as they dripped from my eyes. I smudged at the stains with the tip of my shoe but they stuck there, these little wet reminders mocking me. “He’s not ours.”
“So just because he belongs to someone else, that means we aren’t allowed to do anything for him?” Lincoln’s voice was uncharacteristically loud. “That we just stop fighting for him?”
“I don’t know, Lincoln. It just that... He’s their dog and... I just... I don’t know.”
To not even have any clue if Herb was alive or not in this very moment was too much. I couldn’t allow myself to think about it. To think about anything.
So I created a void in my head and my mind and took up residence in that empty, thoughtless space. It was like a big vastness of blank. I didn’t allow myself to feel because feeling was something. I didn’t allow myself to process because processing was doing. I just became blank. It wasn’t altogether too different from my whole ritualistic humming thing, just significantly quieter.
We sat in blankness for nearly an hour.
Every car that exited the parking lot could have been them. I studied their drivers, trying to see if I could pick out Herb’s owners, but each one was unreadable. Or maybe I was just horribly terrible at reading people. History would favor that second option.
After a while, the noises from the road started swishing past us in uneven intervals. A car here. The low rumble o
f a big-rig there. Their sporadic movements indicated it was quitting time, and the growl in my stomach echoed that, too. I was hungry, but to eat right now felt selfish for some strange reason. To do anything that had to do with living felt selfish. Dying obviously didn’t feel appropriate, but living felt like too much.
And I could tell Lincoln was angry, which left me with no appetite. Angry with me or the situation, I didn’t know. When he finally spoke, I sensed it was more with me, which was a very painful, unwelcome epiphany.
“So what if Phil had given up on you just like we gave up on Herb?”
I shook myself out of my blankness. “What?”
“What if you didn’t have a Phil? What would’ve happened to you, Eppie?” Lincoln fidgeted with the brim of his worn hat, rolling it between his hands and pulling it low over his eyes. “From the little you’ve shared with me about your past, it sounds like you were just as helpless as that dog, but you had someone willing to rescue you.”
“It’s not that I was unwilling to rescue Herb, Lincoln.” I couldn’t bring myself to be upset with him, though fighting would be so much more satisfying than whatever it was we were actually doing. “It’s that he belongs to someone else. He has a family.”
“But you belonged to someone else, too.” His eyes nailed into mine. His face was tired and his lips were chapped from sitting in the wind for so long, the air sucking the moisture from them. He licked along his mouth, then swung his gaze back out toward the street. “All I’m saying is sometimes the ones who have the right to you aren’t necessarily the ones who know what’s right for you.”
Love Like Crazy Page 15
