The Diary

by Julia Derek

  Then I realized that I knew this man and that he wasn’t dangerous, but I still didn’t know where I had met him before. Even so, the initial fear that had made me want to instantly escape faded and I calmed down slightly. It was only when he grabbed my arm and called out my name that it suddenly dawned on me who this person was—it was Jason, my husband. I had a husband and my name wasn’t Jenny. My name was Lexi Woods and I wasn’t a fired waitress living in the hood with a boyfriend who had thrown me out. I was married and I had a daughter who was dead now. A two-year-old little girl. The mere thought of her made my eyes fill with tears and I told Jason that I was here in Brooklyn in this awful place with Herman because I wanted to die. I didn’t deserve to be alive. Not when I couldn’t take care of my own daughter, when instead she had died while under my watch.

  As I sat in a chair while the doctor checked me out, my entire body was trembling, not just my hands. My teeth chattered and I was cold despite that the AC in the examination room was so poor the nurse who took us in there apologized for the space being so hot and humid. I was dizzy, my heartbeat erratic and fast. I was anxious and confused, and I had a fever that made me sweat so much I felt like I had just taken a shower.

  After the thorough examination I was put through, it was determined that I needed to go through an alcohol detox. Because I was already displaying so many withdrawal symptoms from the months of drinking heavily, I needed to go through my detox at the hospital instead of at home so my vital signs could be monitored.

  The first two nights were by far the worst. When I was not hanging over the toilet, vomiting or dry-heaving, I was lying in bed with several covers over me, sweating and freezing at the same time, trembling like a leaf in a storm. My heart kept racing in my chest and I felt horribly anxious. Herman came to talk to me from time to time. On occasion he was in a good mood and cracked jokes, but mostly he was mad, asking me how I could have left him like that when he took care of me, let me stay with him for so long. A couple of times he was so mad he was about to beat me and I screamed at him to please stop, I didn’t have a choice. Jason made me leave. I would have stayed with Herman if I could. I didn’t really want to go, I assured him.

  In the middle of my screams and pleas, a couple of male nurses came into the room. Standing behind Herman, who was glaring at me with a raised hand and ready to strike, the two men gazed at me with severe expressions.

  “What’s wrong, Lexi?” the short, bald one asked me. “Why are you covering your face?”

  What the fuck? Do they really have to ask? Are they blind? I was sitting up in the hospital bed, having raised my arms to protect my head from the beating Herman was about to give me.

  I blinked and suddenly Herman was no longer there, only the two male nurses. I turned my head in search of Herman. What happened to him? I looked and I looked, but he was nowhere to be found in the sparsely furnished hospital room we were in.

  “Herman was here just now and he was about to hit me,” I explained to the bald nurse, who was standing closest to my bed. He grabbed my arms and made me lower them to my sides. I hadn’t realized they were still up. My heart thundered and cold sweat coated my face.

  The nurse considered me with a neutral expression. “No one was in the room but you when we came in here. You were screaming and fighting the air.”

  I scowled at him. That’s ridiculous. I know what I saw.

  The other nurse, a pasty-faced man in his thirties, came up beside Baldy. Calmly, he wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my upper left arm and began pumping it with air while adroitly attaching a stethoscope to his ears. My arm was squeezed as the cuff expanded.

  “You were experiencing a hallucination,” Baldy stated and produced a bottle of bright yellow Gatorade that he handed me. “And it seems you’re having paranoia, too. No one is here to hurt you, only help you. Drink this.”

  I wanted to snap at him that he was wrong—Herman was here—but I was suddenly too exhausted to speak. Instead I just took the already opened Gatorade and brought it to my mouth to drink. All the vomiting I had been doing the last couple of days had left me badly dehydrated. I swallowed a couple of mouthfuls of the sweet, lemon-flavored drink. My eyes still searched the room, expecting to see Herman pop up somewhere. But he didn’t.

  Feeling a stick in my arm, I jerked my head in the direction of the two nurses and I saw that Baldy was injecting me with something. By the time I realized what he was doing, he had already removed the needle from my arm.

  “What… what are you doing?” I demanded. You can’t do that, I wanted to add, but already my tongue and lips had become too weak for me to form the words. A sense of calmness spread through my veins, causing me to relax. My eyelids became heavy.

  “I’m helping you sleep,” the man said. “You need to rest.”

  I tried to make my eyes stay open, but it soon became too hard and I drifted away into a soft cloud of nothingness.

  The third day was not quite as difficult to get through as the first two and the next two were even easier. I finally accepted the fact that Herman’s angry visits had just been a figment of my imagination. It was hard not to when Jason got him on the phone for me, telling me the man had no idea what had happened to me or where I was. Even if he had known, he would never have been allowed into my room.

  I was still doubtful as Jason handed me the phone with what he claimed was Herman at the other end. Reluctantly, I took my husband’s smartphone out of his hand.

  Putting it to my ear, I said a defiant, “Hello?” I expected to hear someone faking the sound of Herman, which I of course would be able to tell immediately.

  “Pumpkin, is that you? Where did you go? You alright? I was looking for you.”

  I removed the phone from my ear and stared at it for a moment. It was no question that was Herman’s voice, which is very distinct, melodious yet hoarse. No one was that good a faker. I put it back to my ear.

  “Yes, it’s me, Herman. I’m okay. Were… were you here?”

  “Where? I don’t know where you are. Where are you?” The sincerity in Herman’s words was unmistakable. I supposed he really didn’t know where I was then.

  I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling guilty. I should have told him I was leaving. For good. “I had to go back home. I’m sorry, I should have told you.”

  “You with your boyfriend?”

  I tried to remember what I had told Herman about my life. My time with him was all a big blur since I had been drunk pretty much always. Had I told him I had a boyfriend? Yes, I probably had. I think I told him my boyfriend threw me out and that I was fired from my job as a waitress at a diner. I know I told him my name was Jenny Smith. After some time, I myself had started to believe I was this person, forgetting all about Lexi Woods and her life. It was strange how quickly I had slipped into my new identity, fully become Jenny Smith. The only thing that didn’t change was the deep pain in my chest that only lots of alcohol helped to soothe, the pain that I deserved to feel for some reason. Even though I now knew who I really was, I didn’t see a point for me to set Herman straight. It seemed better to keep my two identities apart for now. So I replied, “Yes, I’m with my boyfriend. He came to get me.”

  “Is he good to you?”

  I looked at Jason then. He was staring at me with those clear blue eyes full of worry. I couldn’t help but fill with gratitude then, gratitude that I was so lucky to be married to a man who loved me so much as Jason did. After all that I had put him through this past year, he was still by my side, not having wavered once in his support of me. He came to find me when I had done everything in my power to go missing on him and everyone else in order to drink myself to death. He may not appear like it, but I knew that he was just as devastated by our daughter’s death as I was. He didn’t deserve all the additional pain my actions had undoubtedly caused him. That my death would continue to cause him. Obviously he would eventually have found out about that. My cheeks heated with shame when the extent of all that I had done to him da
wned on me. How could I have been so selfish? It was time to stop, time to stay strong for Jason. He loved me.

  I reached for my husband’s hand and pulled him closer to me.

  “Yes,” I finally said into the phone and smiled, squeezing Jason’s hand. “He’s great. I’m very lucky.”

  “That’s good. Alrighty then, pumpkin. You take care.”

  “You too, Herman. Thank you for everything.”

  “No problem. It was fun times.”

  “They sure were fun,” I lied. As more memories came back to me now—fuzzy or not, many of them were still clear enough for me to remember how our lives had been—I became cold and discomfort seeped through me. There hadn’t been much fun about the times we had shared. But there was no point in mentioning that. Herman obviously felt differently and, what’s more, he didn’t seem particularly upset that I was gone. That was the best part. I was glad that he didn’t seem to miss me more.

  “Well, I gotta go, Jenny,” Herman said. “Glad you’re back home.”

  We said goodbye and then I gave back the phone to Jason. I gazed up at him.

  “So does that mean I’m crazy?” I asked him, matter-of-factly.

  He tilted his head to the side. “What do you mean?” His eyes went cold just as I was about to ask him if he actually didn’t get what I meant by that—obviously I was referring to the fact that I had been having hallucinations. “For hanging with a bum like Herman for so long, you mean?” he asked. There was a definite edge to that last sentence.

  That warm, fuzzy feeling that had been expanding within me came to a sharp halt. I was not about to complain about Jason acting grouchy, however. I would have felt the same way had he been with another woman. No, scratch that. I would have been more than grouchy; I would have been furious. When I had told him in the cab back to Manhattan that I had been living in Herman’s studio, sharing the same bed with him for at least a couple of months, Jason had taken it much better than I could imagine that I would have ever done.

  “No, crazy for having hallucinations,” I replied calmly instead.

  He looked at me for a long moment. “You better ask Dr. Meyer about that. But as far as I’ve been told, hallucinations are common during alcohol withdrawal, so probably not.”

  ***

  Ever since Jason had found me in Brooklyn and brought me back home, Dr. Meyer insisted that he and I come to therapy together once a week in addition to the two separate times I went on my own. While I felt much better after my detox and in the weeks that followed immediately after, I was still not back to normal. I still had a lot of work to do to get there, but I believed that I would get there one day. The only thing that really changed after I was back with Jason was that I no longer felt like I deserved to die for my daughter being dead. I had finally managed to forgive myself for what I had done. I had accepted that it had been an accident and that it could have happened to anyone. But I was still mourning and I needed help getting through that.

  When Jason came to Dr. Meyer with me, he sat next to me on the brown canvas couch, stiff like a rod most of the time. He hated having to come there, not truly believing we needed therapy to get through this year of horrible events. But both Dr. Meyer and I did, so he came. Needless to say, after he found out that I had been living with another man under a fake identity, our relationship had not been the same. I can’t say I blamed him. I’m not sure I could ever get over him having been with another woman. At least he was trying. If you could call sitting quietly beside me as I talked about all that had happened and how I felt about it trying. The most he ever did was reply yes or no or shrugging to Dr. Meyer’s questions.

  Dr. Meyer had promised me it would get better. Jason loved me and was willing to do the work it required for our relationship to heal. He just needed time. Today I was seeing her alone, which was a relief because I was not in the mood to deal with Jason’s surliness.

  Wearing one of her many cashmere sweater sets and a pearl necklace, she peered at me over wire-rim glasses riding low on her slender nose. Her red hair was neatly gathered into a French twist. She had always reminded me of my principal back in high school, even though my principal had never worn clothes anywhere near as girly as Dr. Meyer did. “How are you today, Lexi?”

  I didn’t know why I was feeling so fragile today. The mere fact that she was asking me how I was doing caused me to burst out in tears. Not that I hadn’t spent many, many hours in this office crying my eyes out, but that had been in the months right after our little girl had died. I spent most of the months that followed her death a blubbering mess. After that I told Jason that I needed to spend some time on my own, be away from him. Seeing him reminded me too much of her. She had looked so much like him with her dark hair and big, clear blue eyes and charming little smile with dimples at the ends.

  We had both thought that it would do me good to be on my own for some time. Well, Jason had only come to see things my way when I had accused him of being overprotective. I wasn’t a child; I could take care of myself. I also accused him of suffocating me and if he kept it up, I didn’t think I’d be able to stay married to him. Only when I agreed to call my mother every night to check in had he let me go. My plan had never been to one day take the Greyhound to Brooklyn and try to drink myself to death. That had just been something that I thought sounded like the only possible solution to what I had done after a couple of months down in Florida. Being there turned out to have the opposite effect on me than the one I had intended, but I had been too stubborn to admit that to anyone, not even to myself. It had been as though a voice within me had told me not to tell anyone about my plans. So I hadn’t; I just did what the voice wanted me to do.

  When I told Dr. Meyer about this, she had said that sometimes grief makes people do strange things. Especially when accompanied by alcohol, which I had drunk plenty of even before I left for Brooklyn while alone in Miami.

  Silently, Dr. Meyer handed me the box of Kleenex that was next to her. I took it from her and wiped at the many tears that streamed down my cheeks. They didn’t seem to ever want to stop coming. I kept blowing my nose. Finally, I was getting somewhat of control over myself.

  “I’m sorry,” I managed to say.

  “That’s okay. You cry for as long as you need to.”

  With her permission, I kept crying for another few minutes. Then I said, “It might have something to do with Jason having all the photos of her removed…”

  Dr. Meyer cleared her throat. “So he did do that finally.”

  I gazed up at her and the tears suddenly dried in my eyes. “Did you have something to do with that?”

  “I told him a long time ago that maybe it was better if you hid the photos for some time. Until you both had dealt with the worst of the grief. What happened was just so incredibly traumatic for both of you, so I thought it would only make it worse if you kept seeing her every day. For Jason as much as for you. You and he need to stop thinking about it. Especially you, give yourself a break. So that was why I suggested it.”

  I nodded. Well, I can’t argue with that, I thought bitterly. I might have forgiven myself for what I was guilty of, but I was still sad every day, still cried most every day. The grief seemed to insist on keeping me in a stronghold. But this morning, when I discovered that all the photos of our daughter were gone from our apartment, I had gotten furious instead of sad. I instantly called up Jason at work and screamed at him, accused him of disparaging our daughter’s memory by hiding her photos from the world. It was all we had left of her, how could he do such a thing? Suddenly not having the photos around felt like her dying all over again to me when I walked around in our apartment.

  I told Dr. Meyer just that.

  She nodded, looking pensive. “I can see that, but it isn’t the same. Right now it’s important for you to stop dwelling on her and try to simply live. Not seeing things that remind you of her. That was the reason you thought it would be a good idea for you to spend some time away from home and Jason, remember? That id
ea was good, but didn’t work since you were so isolated. This approach is much more sensible.” She smiled at me. “Just try it for a few days and see if you don’t feel a little better.”

  I sighed, feeling both despondent and defeated at the same time. “Do you think it will ever stop hurting thinking about her?”

  She didn’t immediately answer.

  “I really don’t know,” she finally said. “But I do think that with time, it will hurt a little less. It will become bearable. But you need to give yourself time for that to happen, however long that will take. Don’t push yourself so hard to feel better so soon.”

  She stood up from her chair and walked around her table. Leaning against it, she crossed her arms over her chest and contemplated me. “Have you been writing in your journal?”

  “No,” I said and then I blew my nose. It was hard to breathe with all the snot in it.

  “Did you ever write in your journal?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” Dr. Meyer looked sincerely surprised. “Well, I think it’s time that you start then. It may be more helpful than you think.”

  Chapter 25

  NOW

  Unless Lexi has been kidnapped— the cops and Rutherford doubt this is the case or they would have heard from the kidnapper by now—Jason feels certain that she is wandering the streets like she did the last time, looking for a place to kill herself. Of course, she could be dead already, but he keeps telling himself that this just cannot have happened yet. He won’t allow for it to be so. Besides, if she has already used the gun on herself, wouldn’t someone have found her by now? Her father’s gun doesn’t have a silencer, so even if she did it in an obscure place, you’d think that someone would have heard her fire it. But according to Officer Garcia there have been no reports of such a situation, so he believes she must still be alive somewhere. It’s also possible that she only intended to kill herself and then, after changing her mind, some whacko abducted her for reasons other than money. That scenario, while awful, is still better than her turning up dead somewhere.