Control Freak

by Brianna Hale

  Don’t be dead. Please, God, don’t let her be dead. I cradle her in my arms, searching for any sign of life, and I’m shocked by the change in her. There are dark circles under her eyes and I can see the orbits of her eye sockets through her skin. When did she lose all this weight? How did I not see this was happening?

  I hear ambulance sirens, and then there are hands on me. They’re trying to take Lacey away from me. People dressed in dark green and fluorescent yellow jumpsuits speak urgently to me, and I finally realize they’re paramedics. I get shakily to my feet as they get to work on her. A moment later they’re strapping her onto a gurney and loading her into the ambulance.

  I go to follow them, but one of the paramedics stops me. “Are you her father?”

  Thin and weak as she is, Lacey looks fifteen, not twenty-five. “Yes.” Whatever it takes to get me into that ambulance. I don’t care.

  A voice speaks behind me. “I’m her father.”

  I turn and see Petrou behind me, his face blank with shock as he looks at his daughter unresponsive on the gurney with an oxygen mask over her face. He pushes past me into the ambulance, and the doors slam closed behind him.

  I run back to my car and tailgate the ambulance to hospital, running every red light and hearing the honking of angry drivers. I don’t fucking care. I’m not letting that vehicle out of my sight. I can’t let Lacey out of my sight. Look what happened to her in just two days without me.

  At the hospital, the ambulance disappears into a bay and I pull into what I think might be a parking space and run into the ER. Lacey’s not there, and neither is Petrou. I see a set of double doors and I start toward them, but a security guard steps toward me, his thumbs tucked into his belt.

  I swear under my breath, wondering what to do next. I speak to the triage nurse, but because I’m not bleeding or passing out, she snaps at me to get out of the way. I try calling Petrou, but there’s no answer. I pace up and down inside the ER waiting room, clutching my phone, dialing Petrou’s number every other minute.

  Where’s Lacey? What’s happening? What are they doing to her?

  A woman comes hurrying into the waiting room from the street, her eyes wild with fright and worry. I recognize her dark hair and the shape of her face even though I’ve never met her. It’s Lacey’s mother. Petrou himself comes through the doors that were barred to me, and the woman cries out and hurries into his arms.

  I stride over, and Petrou sees me over his wife’s shoulder as he embraces her. He looks as terrible as I feel.

  “What’s happened to Lacey?” I demand, at the same time as Mrs. Petrou.

  “They think she had a heart attack,” Petrou tells his wife, and she starts to sob. “The doctors are examining her now. She was unconscious the whole way here.” He glances at me. “Thank you for coming along, Stian. I guess they wouldn’t have let you in the ambulance if you said you were her boss.”

  This isn’t the time or the place, but I haven’t got a choice if I want to get nearer to Lacey.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” I say hoarsely. “We’ve been seeing each other for the last six weeks.”

  Petrou and his wife both turn to me in shock. An accusing expression slides across Mrs. Petrou’s face. I think she must have suspected something was going on between us, and now Lacey’s been taken to hospital. She thinks it’s my fault.

  I don’t blame her, because I think it’s my fault, too.

  A heart attack. She’s only twenty-five. She’s too young to die. It should be me in there. Why isn’t it me?

  A man in scrubs comes through the doors, looking for the Petrous, and Mrs. Petrou grabs her husband’s arm. “Chris, the doctor.”

  I follow them, terrified of that door closing and being stuck on the other side. Mrs. Petrou starts to flat out tell me to leave them alone, but Petrou hushes her and then clamps a hand on my shoulder, leading me through with him.

  I take back every unworthy, critical thing I ever thought about Petrou. I take it all back.

  Mr. and Mrs. Petrou sit with the doctor in a waiting room, and I stand against the wall. The doctor flicks me a curious look before turning to the Petrous. He talks calmly, but the words strike me like daggers. Mitral valve prolapse. Heart surgery required.

  Mrs. Petrou asks a question and I hear, complications of damage to the heart common in anorexics.

  I bury my face in my hands, the blood roaring in my ears. She’s only twenty-five and she’s trying so hard. She doesn’t deserve this.

  The doctor leaves the room. I can hear someone pacing up and down, but I can’t look up.

  A short while later the doctor comes back, saying that Lacey is awake if we want to see her. I follow the Petrous down the hall and into a private room. Lacey is in a hospital gown and propped up against the pillows. She’s awake, but her face is ashen. There’s a drip with a needle going into the back of her hand, and it looks frail and small beneath the medical tape.

  Ruefully, like a child who’s found herself in trouble yet again, Lacey says hello to her parents. Then she looks past them and sees me.

  “Stian,” she says in a cracked voice, and her eyes filled with tears. I step forward and reach for her—but Mrs. Petrou moves in front of me and angrily addresses her husband.

  “Get him out. I don’t want that man anywhere near her.”

  Over her shoulder, Lacey and I look at each other. Neither of us are surprised by her reaction, but I have to ball my fists to control my temper. That’s my girl in the bed, and I have to go to her.

  “Let’s not cause a scene, Faye. For Lacey’s sake,” Petrou says in a placating voice.

  “It’s his fault she’s even in here!”

  “I want him to stay.” Lacey speaks quietly, but it’s enough to silence both her parents. I step around Mrs. Petrou and go to Lacey.

  Lacey’s mother glares at me, her face flushing red. “We’re not going through what we went through last year all over again. You’re ill, and that man has made you worse. I’ll call security. I’ll have him thrown out!”

  “Mum, I’ll have you thrown out if you don’t do as I say. This is my hospital room.”

  My mouth twitches as I look at Lacey. Even weak and pale as hell, she still has loads of fight in her. I sit down on the chair next to her bed and take her hand, and she grips mine back, hard.

  Good girl. We’re going to get through this together.

  Petrou puts his arm around his wife and draws her to the side of the room, where they talk in whispers, hers angry and his soothing.

  “You get your spirit from your mother, I see,” I say softly, and Lacey gives me a crooked smile.

  The doctor comes back and tells her what he told us. Watching her face as she listens to him speak, I find it easier to take in what he’s saying. After complications of damage to the heart common in anorexics I hear what I didn’t hear before.

  No increased risk of heart failure. Positive prognosis and full recovery.

  I groan and sink over Lacey’s hand, relief flooding through me.

  “As I told your family earlier,” the doctor says, “mitral valve prolapse occurs when the valve doesn’t close tightly. The pain and dizziness it causes can be very frightening, but it’s not a life-threatening condition. We performed a scan, and we’re going to take you into surgery as soon as possible. It shouldn’t be longer than a few hours.”

  I sit up breathlessly. Tack gode gud.

  “He’s only happy because he feels so guilty,” Mrs. Petrou says after the doctor has gone. I don’t give a damn. Lacey’s the only one who matters to me in this room, and she’s gripping my hand back as tightly as I’m holding hers.

  “You can go now,” Mrs. Petrou says icily. “Now that you know you haven’t killed her.”

  “Faye,” Petrou says sharply.

  Even though I don’t want to, I should give the three of them some privacy. “I’ll go outside for a little while, käraste, but I won’t be far away, I promise. I’ll see you after the surgery.” I kiss Lacey�
�s forehead and stand up.

  But Lacey doesn’t let me go. She glances at her parents. “I want to talk to Stian. Alone.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Lacey

  Mum doesn’t want to go, but I appeal silently to dad, and he finally persuades her out of the room. They haven’t gone far, though. I can hear them talking just outside the door, which they haven’t closed all the way.

  I look at Stian, and pain and worry are etched all over his handsome face.

  He squeezes my hand and sits down again. “Were you in a lot of pain when it happened? I saw you collapse, and I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

  I reach out and touch Stian’s cheek, which is covered in blond stubble. It looks as if he hasn’t shaved all weekend. I wasn’t in pain. I was in the blessed oblivion of that dark void. I can’t tell Stian or my parents that, because they’re already so afraid for me.

  “You saw me?”

  He nods, shifting his chair closer. “I was on my way to see you. I needed to see you so badly.”

  My insides ache with the desire to be in his arms, and tears fall down my face. “I told you so many lies this week. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I know it’s not your fault.”

  I shake my head, because as much as I’m grateful for his forgiveness, it doesn’t work that way. “It does matter. I’m not a child. I did this to myself.”

  “I’m the one who pushed you too hard.”

  “You didn’t, Stian. You were so patient with me. No, you have to listen to me while I’m still myself.” It’s the shock of being here, I suppose. She’s quiet for the moment.

  I look at our joined hands, knowing that I have to confess something painful. “There are two sides to me, Stian. One that wants to get better, and one that doesn’t. That other half of me hates you so much. She hates anything that I love more than her. When I hear the things she says about you, I’m so ashamed because you’ve only been kind and good to me.”

  Stian shakes his head. “It’s not you. It’s your disease. You’re going to get better, and you’re going to be my girlfriend. I won’t let her take you from me.”

  “It’s too late. I don’t know how to be anyone’s girlfriend, and you deserve someone who’s got their life together.”

  He keeps shaking his head and grips my hand tighter. “I’m not giving up on you.”

  “You say that, but you will! You think I can go on dates with you? Go to a restaurant? Sit on the sofa with a movie and eat popcorn and ice cream? I can’t do any of that. You have no idea how much having a social life revolves around food, and all of that is shut off from me. You don’t know. I know.”

  Stian leans back and glares around him, as if he’s searching for the patience to deal with what I’m saying. “Lacey, that’s not—”

  “I knew it wasn’t going to work when you drove me home. It’s not your fault. The part of me that’s good knows you only wanted us to be happy.”

  “Stop saying that,” he says fiercely. “All of you is good. All of you, no matter what she says.”

  Quietly, lazily, she laughs. I was wrong. She’s not silent because I’m in shock. She’s settled back and is enjoying the show because she knows she’s won.

  I pull my hand out of his grasp. “Thank you for coming. But I’d like you to go now.”

  “I want to talk to Doctor Loftin. There must be something we can do together to—”

  “Stian, you have to go.” Tears leak from my eyes, and I start to shake. “I swore that I’d never end up back here. I’m such a fucking disappointment.”

  “Don’t say that. You’re not. It’s just a set-back.”

  I know all the platitudes. Recovery isn’t linear. Fail up. But this time I’ve hit a brick wall, and he’s on the other side.

  Mum has come in, and she’s standing on the other side of the bed, her expression reproachful. She thinks all of this is Stian’s fault because I was getting better before I started working for him. It’s not true, though. I wasn’t getting better. I was only existing.

  “Please, just go away and leave me alone.”

  Stian looks up and notices mum, too, and the specter of her motherly disapproval finally convinces him, and he reluctantly gets to his feet. Mum goes to him and firmly shepherds him away from her daughter and out of the room.

  There’s nothing to do after that but lie there and wait. I don’t have to eat anything because I’ll be going into surgery, so she stays quiet. I doze for a while, and then I’m woken up by dad. There are several people in the room, nurses I think, and they’re adjusting my bed and rehanging the drip.

  “Time for surgery, sweetheart,” dad tells me, leaning over the bed to stroke my hair. “You’re going to be just fine.”

  I grip his arm. “Please call Stian after, and let him know I’m okay?”

  He nods, his mouth a thin, tense line. “Of course. Your mum and I will be right here when you get out.”

  The nurses wheel me out, and I watch the neon strip lights pass by overhead. I’m not like some anorexics. I don’t deny I’m sick, and I know the steps I have to take to get better. I can feel my world shrinking down to what it was before I met Stian. A teacup-sized existence. A small world. A little life. The water can’t get too deep, otherwise my head will go under.

  In the operating room, the anesthetist attaches something to the needle in the back of my hand and asks me to count backward from ten. I reach eight when the drug washes over me, and I slip into unconsciousness.

  A moment later, or what feels like a moment later, I hear mum saying my name. Everything’s jumbled and foggy, but she and dad tell me that the surgery went well, and not to worry if I feel strange because I’m on strong painkillers.

  I fall back into something far denser than sleep.

  I half-wake sometime later in the darkness with the sensation that someone is standing over me. I feel a warm kiss against my forehead, and hear a few soft, deep words in a strange language. Or maybe I just dream it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Stian

  The Laxos exhibition opens four days after Lacey’s surgery. There’s a drinks reception at the museum on opening night. I don’t want to go, but I force myself to attend. No one at the museum knows about Lacey and me. I thought that would make it easier, but it’s draining, pretending that everything’s normal when my strung-out heart is with her.

  The exhibition space is packed when I go downstairs. The guests are admiring all the artifacts and reading the descriptions that Lacey wrote. I don’t want to spend too long with any one person, so I make up a lot of things I have to check on and then after forty minutes I slip away.

  I get home to a house that feels even emptier than usual and consider calling Petrou. I haven’t heard from him since he called to say that Lacey came out of the surgery just fine. I already knew she had because I saw her myself and talked to the surgeon before I left the hospital. He’d seen me with the Petrous and assumed that I had the right to ask.

  Everywhere I’ve gone since, I’ve carried the haunting vision of Lacey in that hospital bed, unconscious from the anesthesia, needles in her hand and wires connected to her body. Deathly pale and weak, with an unfathomable darkness in her head. She should be a happy and healthy woman with worries no greater than getting her best marks in her Masters course. Instead, she’s facing weeks, maybe months, of pain and struggle. More therapy, more weigh-ins, more darkness.

  I meant what I said to her in the hospital. I’m not giving up on her, but right now I don’t know what to do that won’t screw things up for her even more.

  My phone rings suddenly. It’s in my hand, and I answer it without looking at the screen. “Blomqvist.”

  “Well, hello to you, too. Fancy a pint?”

  It takes a moment for me to place the voice. “Adam. Hi. Sorry, not right now. I’m busy with…”

  “Stian? You sound like shit. Is everything all right?”

  I rub my eyes. “Not really, no.”
>
  “Meet me at the pub in half an hour.”

  I suppose I could use a drink. “All right.”

  The evening is the first chilly one of the new season, overcast and gray, though the leaves on the trees are still green. We sit out the back away from the twenty or so people watching a sports game in the bar. Adam gets us pints and then sits down across from me, his face creased with worry.

  “What’s happened?”

  I don’t even know where to start. How do you tell someone you nearly killed a girl? “My assistant, Lacey. We got involved.”

  To his credit, Adam doesn’t crow or say, I knew something was going on. He just nods and waits for me to continue.

  “She’s a recovering anorexic. We got involved very slowly, but very intensely. I thought we were both managing. The work we had to do, but also…” I make a vague gesture, not wanting to go into all the details about the nature of our relationship. “Us. She was seeing her therapist, and she was even able to eat lunch in the same room as me. That’s one thing she’s extremely sensitive about. She can’t stand people seeing her eat.”

  I know I’m rambling. I’m punch-drunk, unable to figure out where it all went wrong.

  “I thought we were doing so well, and that I was being so patient with her. She wasn’t experienced with men at all, because of the anorexia.”

  I remember her sitting next to me on the sofa, asking for time to think. I should have known then there was something fatally wrong. I didn’t see how terrified she was about bringing what we had into the real world until it was too late.

  I take a deep breath. “We slept together, and she wound up in hospital a week later, underweight and with heart problems.”

  “Jesus,” Adam says quietly.

  I scrub my hands over my face, wishing I could obliterate all the things I did wrong. “I thought she was going to die.”

  “She’s all right, though?” he asks sharply.