Instead of You

by Anie Michaels

  “It feels so right to be with you. But it’s so right, so perfect, I sometimes feel as though it’s temporary. Like a bright, hot-burning star. The brighter the star, the shorter the lifespan.” He rested his forehead against mine, running the back of his fingers down my cheeks and over my neck. “I’m afraid you’re going to slip through my fingers.”

  “Then hold on to me tightly.” It could have been an off-the-cuff remark, could have just been the silly reply in the heat of the moment. But, no. I begged him. My hands came up to grip his wrists. “Please, whatever you do,” I said, my voice still a soft panic. “Don’t let me slip away.”

  He kissed my forehead, breathing me in, then pulled back. “Let’s go.” I stared up into his eyes for a moment, then slid away from him and climbed into the car. The drive to his apartment was quiet, but his hand was wrapped in mine the whole way there. My main focus was the future. We had to have a future. We needed to make plans. I knew if we sat down and discussed what would come next, it would ease my mind a little.

  Once inside his apartment, I watched as he looked through a stack of his mail then walked to his fridge. “Do you need anything? Water? I’ve got beer, too. Nothing else, really.” He looked at me sheepishly.

  “I’m fine. But, do you think we could sit and talk for a minute?”

  He closed the fridge and gave me a concerned look. “Sure. Is everything all right?”

  “Yeah, I just have a few things to tell you.” I tried my best to give him a confident smile, but on the inside I was being torn up from all the nerves. He led me to his bedroom and we sat on the edge of his bed. I couldn’t help but glance behind me, looking at the place we’d been together the last time he’d brought me here. Memories of that night flooded my brain and I could feel my cheeks blushing. His fingers gently gripped my chin and he brought his eyes level with mine.

  “Don’t fade out on me now, Kenz. What’s up?”

  I took in a deep breath and then decided to just spit the words out. “I got accepted to Central Florida University, and I just wanted you to know. I don’t know exactly what your plans are for next year, or the next four, but it looks like I’ll be here. I’m not expecting anything from you, but I’m hoping there’s a way to make this work because I’m not ready to give you up just yet.”

  His fingers tightened on my chin slightly, not allowing me to look away from him. “You got your college acceptance letter? Babe, that’s amazing. I’m so proud of you.” He leaned in and kissed me gently, his hand moving from my chin to cup the back of my neck. “That’s a big deal, McKenzie.” His words were warm and sincere, and I let out a small breath of relief. “You’re going to love it here.”

  “What does this mean for us?” I asked with more bravery than I realized I had. “Whatever your answer is, I’ll accept it. But I can’t sit on your bed kissing you if I don’t know what’s happening down the road.”

  “You’re going to go to school here and I’m going to try to find a job here. Nothing will change, Kenzie, except that we’ll be able to really be together.”

  “What if you can’t find a job here? What if the only job you can get is far away?”

  “We can’t think about the what-ifs, babe. You asked me what my plans were, and the only thing I see in my future is you. I’ll stay in my apartment, you’ll live in the dorms with your girlfriends, and next year is going to be great. The best year of your life, I bet.” He played with a loose tendril of my hair, then said, “We just have to be sure to always make our relationship a priority. You’re going to get busy, and I’m definitely going to get busy, but we need to try to remember us, right now, worried we’ll grow apart, and make sure it doesn’t happen.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Hayes

  A loud buzzing noise woke me, startling me from sleep. Kenzie’s warm body was draped over mine, our legs intertwined, her face resting on my chest. It was the best way to wake up—aside from the buzzing. I gently eased out from under her limbs, trying hard not to wake her. I made it off the bed and she rolled away from me, her hair trailing across my pillow, bare back on display, blanket only covering her from the waist down. It was practically every fantasy I’d had since I was twenty—to wake up next to McKenzie Harris. To be allowed to see her uncovered and bare. The gift she gave me every time I was allowed to touch her, to be with her, was something I’d never be able to repay her for or give back to her. The simple gift of her was priceless.

  I found my jeans on the floor and dug around in the pockets for my phone, the darkness not helping. When I finally got hold of it and powered up the screen, my heart immediately started pounding in my chest. Ten missed calls. Twenty-seven new text messages. Something was wrong.

  Every single call and text was from Mrs. Harris. I didn’t bother listening to the voice mails or reading the texts, I simply called her back. The phone rang as I stepped into the hallway, but it only rang once.

  “Hayes?”

  “Mrs. Harris, what’s wrong?”

  “Oh, Hayes,” she cried. Immediately my lungs shut down and my heart skipped a million beats. “It’s your mom….” Her words trailed off because she was crying too hard to continue.

  “What is it? Is she all right?” I was panicking, pacing the length of my living room, but also flashing back to the night Mr. Harris had called me and told me to come home. The night Cory and Dad died. “Did she… is she….”

  “She’s alive, Hayes. But you need to come home. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital. I don’t know if she’ll….”

  “I’ll leave right away,” I said hastily, heading back into my bedroom. “Please, promise me you’ll keep me posted.” I flipped on the light, sorry I had to wake McKenzie that way, but unable to move slowly. “I can’t handle driving home again not knowing if she’s dead or alive. Please, Mrs. Harris.”

  “I’ll text you when I know something.” Her words sounded sad, I knew she didn’t want to have to tell me my mother had died. I was hoping she wouldn’t have to either.

  “What happened?” This came from McKenzie, who’d been woken up by the light and my voice. She sat up in the bed, her hair falling around her face, her eyebrows scrunched inward with worry. I pressed the speaker button on my phone.

  “My mom was taken to the hospital,” I said as I pulled on my jeans.

  “McKenzie?” Mrs. Harris asked. I was definitely focused and panicked, but not enough to at least consider how odd it was that McKenzie was naked in my bed and her mother was on speakerphone. But it was a minuscule part of my brain concerned with that, and the majority worried about getting back to my mother, making it to her before something catastrophic could happen.

  “I’m here, Mom,” she replied, sliding off the bed and pulling on her clothes.

  “I need you to drive Hayes home, sweetie. He shouldn’t be driving right now.”

  “Mom, what happened?”

  I heard Mrs. Harris take in a deep breath, could hear it shaking even through the phone, but I was relieved when she continued talking. “I checked on her around 5:00 p.m. and she was asleep. A few times throughout the night I heard her get up, but she never called for anyone or came into the living room, so I assumed she was just using the restroom or something. I didn’t want to bother her because I know she’s been having a hard time….” Her voice trailed off as she started crying. “I fell asleep on the couch, and when I woke up around midnight, I went to check on her.”

  I heard her sniffling and sobbing, and my panic started to intensify. I needed my mom to be okay. I needed to get to the hospital and see my mom sitting up in bed with a smile on her face, apologizing to everyone for scaring us. I needed her to live and thrive because I didn’t think I could handle being the only person left alive.

  “Mom,” McKenzie said, trying to calm her mother from such a great distance. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “She was lying on her bed, but she looked strange. Her head was hanging off the edge and it looked uncomfortable. I
didn’t understand, I just walked in to try and help her, and that’s when I saw the bottle. And the pills.”

  No.

  No.

  “Oh, my God,” McKenzie said, her hand coming to cover her mouth, her eyes darting to me, wide with fear and understanding. I felt my legs give out and luckily I was near the bed, landing with a thud, my elbows coming to rest on my knees while my head fell into my hands. Immediately Kenzie’s arms were around me, her face pressed into my neck, one hand running up and down my back.

  “She still had a heartbeat when the paramedics took her away, Hayes.”

  I scrubbed my hands over my face, adrenaline pumping through me so thoroughly, I could feel my knees starting to bounce. “We have to go,” I whispered.

  “Okay,” Kenzie said, her hand threading through the hair at the back of my neck. “Which hospital are we headed to, Mom?”

  I listened as McKenzie took the lead. She gathered information, soothed her mother, brought me the rest of my clothes, hung up the phone, finished dressing herself, and then led me to my car. She drove us through the night, the two-hour drive seeming as though it were stretched out to days and days. We got four updates from McKenzie’s mom, but none of them lifted the weight off me or made me feel any better.

  **She’s still back with the doctors. Haven’t heard anything.**

  **Nurse came out to update me, said she was still unconscious, they’re running blood tests.**

  **She’s finally being admitted.**

  **She’s upstairs in the ICU. Room 415. I haven’t been able to see her since I’m not family.**

  McKenzie drove fast, not slowing down for anything, and it was amazing she never passed any cops as she would have been pulled over for sure. We were both mostly quiet, but every once in a while she’d say something to try and make me feel better.

  “She’s going to be fine, Hayes.”

  “Everything will work out. We just have to believe she’ll be all right.”

  I said nothing. I stared at the road, watching the lines on the pavement pass us by, a steady rhythm, a pulsing that kept me grounded. If I were quiet, if I were still, I could upset nothing. Everything, my entire life, seemed to be dangling from just my fingertips, flailing over a dark abyss, and I knew if I moved, if I spoke, I risked upsetting the cosmic balance. So I stayed quiet and still, the only thing about me in motion was my brain.

  When we pulled up to the hospital, McKenzie stopped at the front doors, put the car in park, and then leaned over to me.

  “No matter what you learn when you walk in there, I am here, Hayes. I’m here, I love you, and I’ll be here to walk with you through whatever happens next.”

  I turned to look at her, silently grateful for her words and simply for her. I kissed her, but still spoke no words, before I climbed out of the car and walked into the hospital, wondering if tomorrow would be the first day I’d wake up without a mother.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Hayes

  The time passed just as slowly in my mother’s room as it had in the car: painfully so. Each beep of the machine, each thump-thump of someone’s feet as they walked past her room, each tick of the clock above the door, all the noises only intensified the fact that everything was happening in slow motion.

  I’d inquired about my mother at the registration desk of the hospital. The woman behind the desk gave me instructions on how to find her, and I’d listened, but I was surprised I’d retained any of the information. I’d managed to find the ICU and the nurse there had led me to my mother’s room once verifying our relationship.

  I opened the door to her room and was both shocked and relieved by what I saw. My mother was sleeping—the same thing she’d been doing for weeks now. Sleeping. But this time she was sleeping in a hospital, her wrists restrained, cuffed to the side of the bed.

  “That’s for her own protection,” the nurse had explained when she’d seen my eyes go wide. “She’s been unconscious since she was brought in so we haven’t been able to evaluate her mental state. We don’t want her to wake up and do anything to harm herself.”

  I nodded because it made sense, but I wanted to cry from the logic.

  My mother had swallowed enough sleeping pills to kill herself.

  Enough sleeping pills to slow her heart rate to the point of near death, to cause the hospital to pump her stomach, to fill her veins full of drugs to counteract what her system had already absorbed.

  The nurse explained everything she could, but then left us, telling me she’d let the doctor know I was there. “It’s a waiting game now, honey,” she’d said with a softness to her voice that felt a lot like pity.

  When the doctor had showed up, he’d not really told me anything new or worthwhile.

  Mom would pull through, but the effects of the drugs she ingested weren’t the real worry. The real and immediate danger was the fact that she’d taken them to begin with. She was breathing on her own, they’d been able to get her heart rate up, she’d been intubated, but after receiving medication from the hospital, she’d quickly started breathing over the machine, so they took her off it. Now, they were just waiting for her to wake up on her own.

  I sat in the uncomfortable chair just to the side of her bed, and I watched her sleep. I hoped she wasn’t dreaming, hoped that she was, for just a moment, blissfully unaware of all the pain she’d obviously been living with. I hoped she was just resting. Existing. Perhaps healing. Because she’d done none of that so far.

  And I was partly to blame for that.

  How many times had I left her? To what? To finish a degree? To continue to live my life like nothing had happened while she obviously lost her mind? I thought back to every time I pushed my mother’s problems aside, every time I passed her off to someone else, every time I told myself she’d be fine.

  It was all my fault.

  Eventually I fell asleep in that uncomfortable chair, and when I woke up, it was to my mother’s frail voice calling my name.

  “Hayes,” she whispered, obviously afraid, sounding terrified. “Hayes.”

  I sat up and moved the chair to her bed, as close as I could get, and rested my hand over hers still strapped to the bed.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said, my voice wavering, throat tightening, and eyes welling. “I’m glad you’re awake.”

  “Where am I?” Her eyes were flitting around the room with panic.

  “You’re in the ICU at the hospital. Mrs. Harris found you unconscious last night, so she called an ambulance.” I watched as my mother tried to mentally piece together what I was saying. I reached forward and pressed the button on the side of her bed and in just a few seconds a voice rang out.

  “Nurse’s station, can I help you?”

  “Yes, my mom has woken up. Can someone please let her doctor know?”

  “Of course.”

  I grasped my mother’s hand and felt her try to grasp mine in return, but her grip was weak. “Someone will be here soon to explain everything, Mom. But I promise, everything is going to be okay. You don’t have to worry about that. Trust me.”

  She nodded silently, obviously still petrified, and I couldn’t help but feel like our roles were more reversed in that moment than ever before. I was her caretaker, and I had to make sure I did everything in her best interest. She needed to get better and I needed to help her. She obviously wasn’t going to be able to do it alone, and I felt like a horrible son for ever imagining she could.

  Mom was quiet for the few minutes it took for a nurse to come check on her. The door opened and a new face appeared, smiling brightly.

  “You’re awake,” she said as she approached my mother, looking at the monitor she was hooked up to. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m tired. And I feel like I can hardly hold my head up. My throat hurts a little. Other than that, I’m all right.” She looked at me for just a moment, but then glanced back to the nurse, who was wrapping a blood pressure cuff around her arm. “Why am I bound to the bed?”

  “You
’ve had a rough night,” the nurse answered as she studied the monitor, the cuff inflating with air. “The doctor will be in soon and he’ll explain everything.”

  My mother was either satisfied with her answer, or didn’t have the energy to ask more forcibly. Her head fell to the side, seeming to relax into the bed, accepting whatever was happening and that she was not in control of it.

  “Everything looks good here, Mrs. Wallace. The doctor should be here very soon to talk to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said as the nurse moved toward the door. She gave me a sad smile and then left us alone again.

  “I’m so tired, Hayes,” Mom said, her eyes closing.

  “I know, Mom. I know.”

  It was ten minutes later when the door opened again. A man walked in who looked exactly how I would picture a doctor. Tall, glasses, white lab coat, stethoscope around his neck, pens in his front pocket. With him was a woman who looked professional, but didn’t have the automatic designation of a medical professional. She smiled warmly at my mother while the man walked straight for the machines she was hooked up to.

  “Mrs. Wallace, we’re glad to see you awake and alert. My name is Dr. Stevens, I’m the attending on the floor today. This is Dr. Andrews,” he said, motioning to the woman standing next to him. “She’s the resident psychiatrist.” They both nodded at my mother, obviously not able to shake her hand, but they did reach out to me.

  “I’m Hayes, her son.”

  “It’s good that you have some support here,” Dr. Stephens said. “Let’s talk a little bit about why you’re here, shall we?” My mother nodded and he continued, using the mouse and keyboard to bring up my mother’s information on the screen. “You were brought in last night by ambulance, unresponsive, with low vitals. Someone at the scene said they’d found you with an open pill bottle and called for help. Upon arrival you were intubated, your stomach was pumped, and we administered intravenous drugs to counteract the pills you’d ingested. The pill bottle was provided by whomever was with you at the time.”