The Poison in Your Blood

I do spend some time in bed with Austin, letting him cast his spell on me and my eyes dry up for a while because honestly I’m so stoned off his whatever that I can’t think to cry. I just lay there wishing he had a heartbeat. Wishing just for one moment he was actually as alive as he seems. But then if he was, Fred would still be alive.

It’s probably been two hours when Anna knocks on the door. I open it feeling much better until I see the look on her face. “What is it?” I ask.

“Mom hasn’t come out of her bath yet. I went to check on her but she isn’t answering when I knock,” she says. I can mentally hear the turn of the lock on the door to Blair’s bathroom and my heart starts pounding in my chest. I suddenly feel like maybe telling her about Fred was a bad idea.

“Let’s go see,” I say.

“No, Lana, you don’t understand,” Anna says. “She isn’t answering the door and it’s locked. The water is still running.”

I look back at Austin, who is sitting up. He’s alert and I can almost feel the shift in the air and he’s gone. Anna and I share a look before running wildly down the hallway. Zoe is growling at the bedroom door and I don’t know how I feel about this whole thing. Something just seems wrong.

Anna and I both go into the bedroom but I’m surprised when the bathroom door is still shut and I don’t see Austin. Maybe he’s calling 911. I don’t know. But I go and see that the door is still locked and I throw myself at it like I did last night.

“Blair! Blair are you alright?!” I scream. There is no answer, all I can hear is running water and the carpet under my feet is wet. I throw myself at the door again. “Blair, you’ve got to let me in! Please Blair!” I scream.

The door suddenly bursts open, but I know it wasn’t my miraculous strength that did it and I fall forward into a puddle of water. I feel Austin lift me up but I’m out of his grasp before he has a chance to check me for bruises and I’m trying to drag Blair’s body out of the bathtub. She’s still got her night gown on, it’s slicked against her body and she’s slippery and heavy dead weight.

“Lana, her heart is still beating,” I hear him say, but it hardly register is as I try and pull her out. The ground is wet and slippery and I fall once. She’s just too heavy and I start to cry. I’m pushed out of the way and I hear the water slosh around and then Blair and Austin are both gone from the bathroom. I hear Anna panicking in the bedroom. I get to my feet and I hurry to where he’s laid her on her bed and I see Anna pushing the blond hair out of her face and trying to feel for a pulse.

“How good a chance is it?” I ask Austin. He looks at me.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But her heart is still beating…barely but it is,” he says. He seems uncomfortable with the whole thing. I look down at my hands. I’m soaking wet, and my pajamas are stuck to my skin in unflattering ways. But I’m so thankful he was there to get her out of the tub. I can hear the sirens and noises in the distance.

I am suddenly very regretful of my choice to tell Blair what was going on. I should have been able to tell it wouldn’t be a good idea, that she’d take it too hard. She was already in a fragile state and I feel completely responsible for the mental break. When the ambulance gets here and the people come in its chaos again and there are people surrounding Blair, moving her from her bed to their stretcher, putting oxygen masks on her face.

Anna comes to my side when the paramedics leave with Blair and she looks at me with sad eyes. “We should have waited,” she says. “But I never thought she’d blame herself. Blair is…everything a mother should be.”

Anna’s biological mother was a cocaine addict. Annalise never really knew her well and when she was about 12 she found out her birth mother had died around the time she was 5 from an overdose. She never thought about it again. Blair has always been her mother she said. Even though she hadn’t given birth to her she’d always been her mother, destiny made sure of it.

She’s standing next to me and for the first time since we came out she looks like a frightened little girl. I put my arm around her shoulders and I kiss her on the side of her head. She gives me a flat smile and I feel my heart hurting. I know what it’s like to lose your parents at 15. All I can do is hope that Blair makes it out of all this.

“I’m going to end up in a foster home,” she says and wipes her eyes.

“No you aren’t,” I say. I look her over for a second. “I would never in a million years let that happen. If anything happens and you don’t stay with Blair you’ll come to California with me and that’s that.”

“We should get to the hospital,” Austin says. I turn to him and nod.

On the ride over Anna puts in her ear buds and she withdraws for a while, sitting in the back seat with her knees pulled up to her chest just staring out the window. I turn my attention to Austin and he takes my hand in his and gives it a squeeze.

“I never should have…”

“Its okay, Lana,” he says. “It wasn’t your fault, and when Blair is back together she’ll be glad you finally told her. It was just too much for her all at once today,” he says.

“She questioned her motherhood. Before she went into the bathroom she said she was sorry. Oh man, Brad is going to freak out.”

“Who is Brad?”

“My brother,” I say. “He’s a couple years older, so by the time the molestation started with me he was at college. He doesn’t know, and he’s going to freak out when he finds out his mom tried to kill herself in the bathtub because of that. He’ll probably blame me. He and I never really got along. He hated me.”

I think back to when Brad was still in the house. He would sit there and glare at me all through dinner, his jealousy was always so clearly present. I was the “new sister” he never wanted. I was 15 and I had a world of issues I was going through and Blair devoted her attention to me for a long time because I’d just lost my real parents and I was dealing with that on top of teenage hormones and everything. I was a wreck and Blair only wanted to help me. Brad only wanted his mother to pay attention to his problems. She was a single parent then, her husband, and Brad’s father, Raymond had left her years before for another woman and she was determined to live through it.

I feel Austin’s hand on my arm and I snap out of my thoughts. I look at him and he sighs. “I don’t want to see you cry, Lana,” he says. “It hurts me when you cry.”

“I just have so many things going on in my head,” I say.

He doesn’t respond. He just drives and then we pull up at the hospital where Blair is. We all three get out and I feel heavy. I feel so heavy, like I can hardly hold myself up. I feel him put his arm around my waist and I’m so thankful for the support. We walk in and a lot of things happen in a kind of blur before we are sitting in a waiting room.

We are in the waiting room for a long time, the three of us sitting close together. I’m sure the reason I’m so calm is Austin and his smell and whatever he does to me, but I’m honestly so thankful for it. We passed a woman in a different waiting room who was crying so hard I thought her head might explode. I know that would be me if not for him. Anna is calm too, and she’s leaning on one side of him and I on the other.

“Thank you,” I say in a whisper.

“I’m with you, babe,” he says.

The doctor finally comes into the room after what seems like hours and hours and he looks at us. “Unfortunately,” he starts and I feel tears pushing on my eyes and I only notice I stood up because I feel like I could fall.

“Your mother was under for a long time,” he says. “She’s stable, but it’s likely she won’t make a full recovery. Right now she’s in a coma. She had an overdose on Oxycontin.”

My attention moves to Anna for a minute and she looks at me. “Dad has prescription for that because he hurt his back last year. He only took one once in a while. Said he didn’t like how they made him feel.”

“How bad is it?” I ask. “Is she going to be a vegetable?”

“It is possible she comes out of this and she’s perfectly fine. She will always have some residual brain damage, but at this point we aren’t sure how severe it might be. She was unconscious for a great deal of time, and her oxygen was limited. If you wouldn’t have found her when you did…she probably would have died within the half hour.”

I hear Anna let out a little gasp and I feel like my heart just went into overdrive. I remember myself lying on the bathroom floor trying to pull Blair out, never even thinking to call an ambulance. If I’d been alone she probably would have died. As it stands she may never fully recover.

“She is likely to regain some of her regular life. I don’t think she will stay in a vegetative state. However, there is a possibility the damage to her brain is greater than it looks,” he says in a tired voice. “If she recovers she’ll need to go through a great deal of therapy in order to get back up to her regular self. I understand this is difficult for you,” he says.

I must be crying, because the comment seems so out of place. I nod once but I have to try and suck it in because I have to take care of Anna if she needs me. I look at Austin for a second and he stands up and takes my hand.

“I also understand that she has a minor child in her custody?” the doctor says.

“That’s me,” Annalise says and stands up also. She’s tired and scared and I can tell she feels just as guilty about this whole thing as I do. The doctor nods.

“Because your mother will have to remain hospitalized for some amount of time, it would be best if you had some family member you could stay with until she’s recovered. Even when, and if, she wakes up, it’s going to be some time before she can be responsible for a child.”

“Annalise will come to California with me,” I say. “I’m the only person that’s around here.” I know I should have gone over it with Austin first but I can’t just leave Anna. I might not be the best person to take care of a young girl but at least I’m better than foster care.

“She’ll come with us,” Austin says and he gives my hand a little squeeze. It’s possible he’s thinking about my tiny apartment with only myself and Piggy and where are we going to put a teenage girl in there. “I’ve got a house in California where Lana and I can take her in until Blair gets out of this.”

The doctor nods and looks us over. “I’m very sorry.”

“Do you know if we’d be able to move Blair to a hospital in California?” I ask. I want her to be close to us. I want to be there through her recovery and if she doesn’t get better enough to take care of herself I want to have her near me until she passes. I don’t know how I’d afford all the things I want but I’ll figure it out. If I have to sell my soul I’ll figure everything out.

“Perhaps in a few weeks you could have her transferred so long as we were able to find a hospital willing to take her in,” he says and nods.

I take a breath and let it out slowly. “Okay, thank you,” I say.

At the end of our vacation time we have to leave Arizona. It’s driving me crazy to leave with Blair in the hospital but Austin has to get back to what he does and I need to find a new job because I have just taken a teenage girl on and I can’t live on peanut butter and Campbell’s anymore. For now she’s just brought a suitcase with her because the corvette is pretty limited space. Next week we are going to come back and get her stuff and the dog with a bigger car.

The ten hour drive is long and quiet. Nobody is ready to resume normal life yet. How can we when we still don’t know what’s going to happen with Blair? But we have to go on and it’s so hard.

We get back to Austin’s house late, and the sky is dark and cold and we go into the house. All of us are tired and I’m just not feeling like I can stay up any more. I haven’t had a chance to just lie down and really relax since the whole thing happened and made such a bad turn. I lay in bed next to Austin and I close my eyes. For the first time in what seems like forever I really try hard to say a prayer.

God, I know I don’t talk to you often enough. But please be with Blair through this and help her make a full recovery. Annalise needs her…and I need her too. Amen.

I close my eyes and I fall asleep.

I wake up the next morning feeling better than I’ve felt in days. I look at my phone and see I have a message from Madison and I’m so thankful because I really need somebody to lean on for a minute besides Austin. I feel like I’ve put a lot of pressure on him that he never asked for.

I open the message, and it just asks how my trip was and if I’d like to meet for coffee and I take a breath. I call her because I just can’t bother with texting and all that. She answers quickly.

“Hey, Lana,” she says.

“So much shit happened,” I say.

“That doesn’t sound good,” she says and her cheerfulness has kind of depleted a little. “What’s going on?”

“My mom’s husband ran off…that’s a long personal story I can’t really share. But, my mom had a little bit of a mental breakdown and tried to kill herself. We got her to the hospital in time but the doctor’s don’t know…don’t know how well she’s going to do once she comes out of the coma if she comes out of it.”

“Oh my god, babe, I’m sorry,” she says. “Do you want to get some coffee…or would you rather stay at…”

“I think it might do me some good to get out. I need to get out and get some air. But I’ll have to bring my sister with me. I brought her home because she would have been alone up there and she’s only 15,” I explain.

“Okay,” she says. “Where are you?”

“I’m at Austin’s place,” I say. “I’m going to be moving in here pretty soon, like within the next couple of weeks.”

“You’ve only known him for like two and a half months Lana,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “But I can’t keep Anna in the apartment, and I love him.” There is a pause.

“Just be careful this time, Lana,” she says.

“He isn’t like Jon,” I say, feeling annoyed at the reminder. “He can say he loves me too.” Then I’m reminded that I need to talk to Jonathan and tell him to move on and let me be. His “friendship” only fucks me up and I’m finally going to be happy…once all this bullshit gets cleared up, or at least becomes routine.

“I just don’t want to see you get hurt again,” she says.

“We’ll talk later,” I say and take a deep breath. “I need to get back to work.”

“We’ve missed you here,” she says about the cosmetics business. I’ve been working for her since I quit at the recording studio. But I don’t make a lot of money there and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I know Austin will help me out, and he seems to have a lot more money than I originally thought he would. I don’t know where he gets it nor do I care. The point of the story is I hate to ask him to pay for all this when it’s really not his problem. “Anyways, meet me at Starbucks with your sister. I’ll buy you both a coffee.”

“Okay babe,” I say. “I’ll see you in a few.” I hang up the phone and lay back on the pillows. Austin left a little while ago, said he was going into the studio and needed some time to himself. I don’t blame him, and honestly wouldn’t blame him if he came back and told me to get myself and my drama out of his life. I hope that doesn’t happen though. I really need his strength.

I don’t know why I can’t just lead a normal life. I’ve always been the one with excess drama and bullshit. I just for once want to know why I can’t just live a normal every day, get up make breakfast for your husband and 2.5 kids, feed Spot and go to work, kind of day. Instead my parents died when I was young, my step father raped me, my first two boyfriends were shit heads, and my live in boyfriend is a vampire. This kind of shit can only happen to me.

Fuck this. What the hell am I gonna do?