Page 21

“You can’t do that. You need that tube, Meré!” I tell Mother as she tries her damnedest to rip her feeding tube out again.

Soon, they’ll come in and put her back in a medical coma. They told me they’d tried to wake her this time to see how she’d respond.

If she left things alone, they’d let her stay lucid.

But she’s confused, so she fights.

Which I can’t fault her for.

She tries to yell at me, but it comes out as angry, incoherent noises around her breathing tube.

They say the state of her mental capacity lately is because of all the damage the cancer’s caused, and all they can do is keep her comfortable, but I keep holding out hope that something will change.

That I’ll come here one day, and she’ll be healed.

I sigh and push the call button for the nurses.

“Yes? How may I help?”

It’s Alice. The night nurse.

“Hey, Alice. It’s Elias. Mother’s trying to pull her tubes out.”

“I’m on my way,” she says.

I know when she says it, she means it, so I settle back into my chair, wiping away an escaped tear as I watch Mother continue to fight like hell.

The door swings open, and Alice and the doctor on shift rush in to put Mother back to sleep. I drop my head in defeat, feeling as though I’ve just told on her. I wish she could stay awake and alert, but she doesn’t understand…

I sit up in bed abruptly. Sweat drips off me in buckets, and I wipe it away, swinging my feet over the edge of the bed to the cold floor, which grounds me to the land of the living once more.

The hospital left its mark on me.

Mother’s been gone for years now, but still, the dreams come like the tide each day. Sometimes, the reveries are good, and sometimes they aren’t.

I spent years wishing they’d fade, but I haven’t been so lucky.

The hardest part had been her losing her speech. They always said it was a side effect of the rigorous treatment she underwent, since her cancer was from smoking and had already caused damage all its own, but it wasn’t.

It was a side effect of Father’s fists.

I move to the kitchen, fill a glass with water from the fridge, and guzzle it down to shock my system back to life.

The sun hasn’t risen yet, and I can’t imagine going back to sleep.

Tonight’s nightmare was rough.

I look at myself in the sheen of the microwave door, shaking my head that I can’t just pull it together.

I’ve been the walking poster boy for parental abuse my entire life. Now, I’m a millionaire, but I am still stuck in the past in my mind. It’s like I’m Mother, comatose and unable to handle the world around me without fighting, so no one’s woken me yet.

I swipe open my phone and check for anything I missed while it was on Do Not Disturb.

When I struggle to communicate effectively, I don’t. I hide my phone away, where I can’t hurt anyone with unkind words.

I learned long ago that words hurt more than fists. They never leave you, and you can never take them back.

There’s a text from Kyrin, so I open it.