Tiptoe Through the True Bits

People say that marriage changes you. That you sacrifice so much of yourself that it drains you. I never found that to be the case. We existed in conjugal bliss.

Marriage didn’t change anything for us. We were still very much in love. We still kissed like we used to. We still cuddled on the couch to watch documentaries and slasher movies. We still made love.

It wasn’t marriage that changed us. It was tragedy.

It was the last day of March that it happened. I was working a late shift at the coffee shop and it was business as usual. We had the occasional drunken idiots and rowdy kids but mostly the shop was dead. The manager called at ten and I said that the place was empty so he told me I could close an hour early. I was all too happy because it meant I could spend another hour watching CSI with Gerard.

As I drove home, I had the radio on. The song playing was Hotel California. I’ll never forget it. I was singing softly along as I pulled up to a stoplight.

And still those voices are calling from far away.

The lights at the intersection turned to green. I pulled off.

They wake you up in the middle of the night...

There was a bright light coming towards me. A really bright light. It entranced me as it got whiter.

Just to hear them say...

It all happened so fast. White turned to black.

Welcome to the hotel California.

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The next thing I remember was noise. Very loud noises, and very bright lights. I tried to open my eyes but they were swollen shut. Everything hurt. I groaned. I couldn’t move.

“Miss? Miss, can you hear me?” It was a man’s voice but I didn’t recognise it.

The back of my eyelids flashed orange and it was hot. There was a screech like somebody was cutting through metal. I felt a hand on mine.

“Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

I tried to squeeze. Honestly I did. I’m not sure if he felt it but I groaned again anyway. It was getting hotter. My head felt like it would explode.

“Miss? Are you awake? Can you hear me?”

I wanted to scream. But I went back under.

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It was very dark. There was no tunnel of light, like they say. There was no Christ. There were no faces of people I had known and loved and lost. There were no flashbacks. There was just blackness. Just me and the blackness. I kept walking around but there was nothing there. Nothing below my feet and nothing above my head. No clouds or harps or gates. It was just dark, and I was scared.

I wondered if this was death. If I was fated to walk around in the nothingness forever, just hoping for somebody, someday, to join me. I wondered if there was a way out, or if this was it for me.

I sat down and closed my eyes and waited.

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Nobody was around when I woke up. The room was white and there were lots of machines attached to me. I craned my neck to find a call button but it hurt too much. I had casts on both legs. My vision was blurry. I was scared and confused and alone.

“Hello?” I called into the nothingness. My voice was dry and raspy. It hurt to even speak. I coughed.

A large black woman in a nurse’s uniform came into the room. “Well hello, Mrs Way,” she smiled warmly, walking over to one of the machines. She had a strong Jamaican accent. “Awake at last.”

I blinked at her and she carried on smiling. “Shall I send your husband in?”

I tried to nod but that hurt, too. “Yes please,” I croaked.

She nodded and pressed some buttons and wrote something down on a chart and then left. Within seconds, Gerard was by my side and I was crying.

“What happened?” I kept asking him, over and over. “What happened to me, Gerard?”

He looked tired and grey. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and his hair was in tangles. He wouldn’t speak to me. He just held my hand and kissed it and looked at me. This made me cry even more until I was almost screaming at him.

And then a doctor walked in. He was tall and he had a kind face and a white beard. He was smiling, which made me feel a little better. Gerard didn’t move. He just stared into space.

“Ahh, Elise,” the doctor said, in a booming doctor-type voice. “Nice to see you awake, my dear.” He picked up the chart and sat on a chair at the side of my bed. “I’m sure you’d like to know what you’re doing here.”

I nodded, suddenly deflated. Gerard’s hand was limp in mine. Something was bad.

And just like that it slotted into place. The baby. I’d lost my baby.

“You were brought in by medics three days ago, Elise,” the doctor told me, his voice now solemn. “You were in an awful state. A motorcycle crashed into your car. They had to cut you out. You have seventeen bone fractures and a punctured lung and lots of contusions. We thought you wouldn’t make it. You’re very lucky to be alive, Elise. The motorcycle driver was not so lucky.”

I fought back my tears and licked my dry lips. “The baby?” I whispered, my sore arm instinctively reaching for my sore stomach. A flash of pain shot up my ribs and through my heart as I did so.

The doctor shook his head slowly. He looked very sad. Gerard rubbed his hand over his face.

I pursed my lips together and closed my eyes. The tears fell. The doctor left. Gerard still didn’t say anything. I cried and cried and cried until eventually all the tears were gone and I fell back to sleep, back into the darkness.

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Nothing was the same after that. My broken bones healed but my pain never went away. I spent six weeks in the hospital and every single day was a struggle. Every morning I wished I hadn’t woken up. I didn’t want to eat. Eventually they gave up trying to make me eat and just fed me through a drip. I cried every day. They called it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I wondered what kind of person wouldn’t have cried if they’d been through the same thing.

They put me on meds. Psychiatric drugs. I wondered what Dr. Gould would have to say about that. Gerard didn’t say a word about it. He visited every day but I never felt like he was really there. He was like a ghost. I thought maybe he was on drugs, too.

I learnt that we’d had a little boy but at 20 weeks there was no way he’d have survived the trauma. They’d had to cut him out of me. They kept him alive for ten hours on incubators but his lungs weren’t fully developed. Poor guy didn’t have a chance. Gerard had named him William, after my father, and had him buried in a tiny little coffin at the church where we’d gotten married, while I was still in the hospital. The grief was unbearable. I’d never even got to see him.

On May 16th, the doctors let me go home on the promise that I would eat properly and take my medication. I arrived back to my apartment to find my oceanscape watercolour still unfinished in the corner of the living room. I threw it out of the window and sat down and sobbed. Gerard just stood there.

Depression is like a fog. You try as much as you can but you just can’t seem to find a way out. It feels as if you’ll be there forever. And you feel so alone. They give you drugs but they don’t seem to do anything. I didn’t want to try any more therapy. That’s what got us into all of this in the first place.

It’s not like death was a stranger to me. I thought I’d had enough bad luck but apparently not. I wondered how much sadness somebody could take before they just gave in. I thought I’d been hurt before, but now was something else entirely. I had lost a piece of me. I had lost my baby.

And in a way, I lost Gerard, too. I cried a lot, and slept a lot, and he just went about life as usual. He went to school in the morning and came home late at night and went to sleep. I never knew where he was going. We barely spoke anymore. I was in pieces and he was just acting like nothing had happened. Like he had never had a baby in the first place. I hated him for that.

For the most part I just wandered through the days. For a while I tried going back to work, to try and busy myself and take my mind off things at home, but it didn’t work out. Something small would stress me out and I would just break down in tears and cry.

Sometimes Amber would come over in the evenings while Gerard was out, wherever he went. We would watch classic movies, often in silence, but it was nice just to have somebody there.

Later I would find out that Gerard was still going to work at the comic book store. He was doing 8-hour shifts there most nights. Saving up. It killed me that we hardly spoke to each other. By the time I woke up in the morning he would have set off for school, and I’d be in bed when he got back. It was as if we were living two different lives. We still slept in the same bed. But that seemed to be all we had in common these days.

It was easy to forget that we were just kids. Sure, we were married and we had our own house and we had been through a lot, but at the end of the day we were both still teenagers in way over our heads. We had all of these responsibilities and we led our own lives and I guess we coped with the grief in different ways. But knowing all of this didn’t make it any easier.

It really bothered me that we never talked about William. He was a big part of my life and I hated having to act like he never even existed. He was our son. How could Gerard just forget about him?

“You never cried,” I said one evening, breaking the silence as we ate. It was about three weeks since I’d been dismissed from the hospital and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I longed for my husband to take me in his arms and kiss me and tell me that everything would be okay, that we would get through this together just like we got through everything else together. But he hadn’t touched me in months. He could barely even look at me.

He looked up but he seemed to look straight through me, as if I weren’t even there. He didn’t say a word. Just looked back down and shovelled some more spaghetti into his mouth.

“It’s like you’re not even sad,” I continued, pushing my bowl away. “It’s like it never happened.” Still nothing. “Why don’t you talk to me, Gerard? Why are you shutting me out? I feel so alone.”

He carried on as if he’d never heard me. When I stood up, he didn’t even react.

“Gerard, please,” I choked desperately, my eyes hot with tears threatening to fall.

Finally he glanced up at me. And then he sighed. And then he ran his fingers through his hair. And then he stood up, too. And he looked at me properly for a few seconds. But he still didn’t say a word.

He looked pathetic, standing there. As if he had been stripped down to the bare bones. He looked vulnerable and small. There were black rings around his sunken eyes and his skin was almost translucent. He was thin. His lips were dry. His hair was matted and dirty.

I just wanted him to say something. Anything.

But nothing came.

I wiped my eyes and shook my head. I stepped closer towards him. He didn’t move.

“I just can’t do this anymore,” I whispered as I headed for the door.