“Audrey,” I call and knock again, worry beginning to crawl up my spine and prickling the hairs on my arms. There’s a chance that she woke up and accidentally locked the door when she left the room. Maybe she’s downstairs with the others. They could be watching a movie or drinking. Maybe they’re reminiscing about old times when she and Cline were inseparable.
These scenarios play out while I take the stairs two at a time and skid into the living room where Cline and September are asleep on the couch. Whatever movie they were watching finished a while ago, and the DVD is continually playing the menu music over and over, the sound of which is putting my nerves on edge. Audrey is nowhere to be seen.
“Hey,” I yell just a little too loudly and watch them both jolt awake. “I can’t find Audrey. The bathroom door in the guest bedroom is locked. The light is on, but it doesn’t sound like anyone is in there. Did she come down here with you?”
“No. We watched the movie after you went up to bed and just fell asleep a bit ago. I didn't see or hear anything.” September gets up and checks all the doors then returns with worry etched into her features. “Everything is locked. Are you sure she’s not in the bathroom?”
“Do you have a key?” I ask, my hands sweating and stomach turning in knots.
She grabs one of the all-purpose keys from above the door frame, and we all head upstairs together. Cline is mumbling something to September, and I crane my neck to hear what he’s saying.
“What?” I ask, turning toward him before we get to the guest bedroom door.
His face is pale, and his eyes are wide as he looks beyond me into the darkness. “I was telling her about Audrey’s confession at the tree. She said that the reason she stopped talking to me was because she’d tried to kill herself when she was fifteen. She’s in therapy now, though. And she’s been so happy this whole trip.”
“You’d be surprised how easily people can fake it,” September says matter-of-factly as she slips the key into the lock. When the door opens, her hand flies to her mouth, and she turns directly to Cline. “Call an ambulance. Elliot, I need you in here now.”
The sight of Audrey splayed out on the bathroom floor surrounded by pill bottles, white foam pooling at the corner of her mouth, lips turning gray, is an image that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
“Lift her up,” September instructs, and I gather this lifeless girl in my arms, pressing an open palm to her chest to feel a faint heartbeat beneath my hand. September raises the toilet lid, and without any pretense whatsoever, she opens Audrey’s mouth and sticks two fingers down her throat.
There’s nothing at first, and then suddenly Audrey’s entire body convulses and she gags, retching into the bowl. Her heart slams repeatedly against my hand, and she claws at my grip on her, but I will not let her go. September will not stop trying to empty her stomach. We will not stop trying to save her from herself.
“How many, Audrey?” She’s asking, and there’s only a choking sound and moan in response before she gags again.
Cline is in the doorway, phone in hand, white as a ghost. “Five minutes. They’re five minutes away.”
“Pick up all of these and put them in a bag. They’ll want to know what she took. Get her purse. And here …” She slides Audrey’s phone my way. “We’ll need to get in touch with her emergency contacts.”
September takes over for me, and I let Audrey go, watching her lay her head in the other girl’s lap. Her eyes open just enough to focus on me as I press the home button on her phone. I bend down and use her thumb to grant access to her contacts and she whispers, “I found out about my dad. Miranda told me everything.”
The paramedics arrive faster than I can fathom, and within minutes, she’s on a stretcher and being rolled out into an ambulance. September jumps in with her, and I’m left holding Audrey’s phone and standing in the driveway with a shaken Cline and a stomach full of bile that empties onto the grass as soon as the sirens turn on and the ambulance drives away.
I don’t want to look, but I have to, so once I’ve composed myself, I begin to scroll through the texts between Audrey and Miranda. The ones I had seen earlier were Miranda telling her that she was irresponsible for being at the lake house and that it was no longer her property to use. The next came to say that she was ungrateful for the amount of money they had put forth for the care she was being provided. Not to mention the money for school. There was one about calling her dad. Then, when she wasn’t getting a response at all, Miranda had said that she was tracking the phone and knew where Audrey was. If she didn’t call home immediately there would be hell to pay.
Audrey responded that she’d been on a trip. Said she would call her dad in the morning.
Miranda demanded to know where she had been, and I’m not quite sure why she did it, why she felt like telling the truth, but Audrey’s text was honest. She said that she had gone on the trip to find out more about her mom. And in doing so, she thought maybe she would find out about her dad.
This is when Miranda’s rage hits the roof. It’s hard for me to read the words. I can’t bring myself to understand the level of pain it must have caused Audrey in that moment.
YOUR FATHER? YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FATHER? WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE MAN WHO RAPED YOUR MOTHER AND RUINED EVERYONE’S LIVES BY GETTING HER PREGNANT?
There’s no response from Audrey after that. I check her call logs to see if she tried to contact her dad or her therapist or anyone, for that matter. Nothing. Why didn’t she wake me up? How alone must she have felt after reading that?
The hardest part to grasp is whether she believed that Miranda had told her, in no simple terms, that everything she had hoped wasn’t true, was. Her mental illness is hereditary. From a man who did something so vile it ruined three generations of lives with one horrible act.
Cline has the truck running, and I’m still looking through her phone as I climb into the passenger seat, buckling myself in while I try to find the number I’m searching for. He answers on the second ring. Patrick Byrd must not be used to getting phone calls at 3 a.m. from his daughter’s phone.
He’ll be even more surprised with the screenshots of the conversation I’m sending him between his daughter and his wife.
“They pumped her stomach. I think we got to her just in time.” September is holding a cup of coffee in one hand, and her forehead is resting in the other. Audrey is in ICU, and we’re all in some sort of limbo because we are not next of kin, so there’s no entry. “We won’t get to see her. You know that, right?”
I shake my head. That can’t be true. I don’t think I can bear to leave this state without seeing her and making sure she’s okay.
“It’s true. Once they get her settled and leveled out, she’ll be in here for a couple days. Then they’ll put her on a seventy-two hour hold. We won’t be allowed to see her.” She says it quietly like we just need to accept it, come to terms with it early, so that none of us are surprised when it happens and we’re dismissed.
We wait until the sun begins to rise, and just as my eyes drift close and my head nods forward, I hear a man asking for Audrey. He’s demanding to see her. My attention is immediately on the tall, thin man with light colored hair and wire-rimmed glasses standing at the desk. Given the amount of time it’s taken him to get here, Audrey’s dad must have flown in from Tennessee.
He’s handed some paperwork, and he speaks sharply to the nurse behind the kiosk before turning and slumping into a chair to fill out the insurance paperwork none of us had the information for. Cline is the first to stand up and go to sit by his side. The look of relief that crosses Patrick Byrd’s face when he sees his neighbor causes my chest to hurt. When my friend points over to me, and the older man’s gaze lands on my face, I am struck still until he nods his head and waves me over.
“Mr. Byrd, I’m Elliot Clark. It’s nice to meet you.” I extend my hand and he takes it, squeezing once before letting go.
“I wish it were under different circu
mstances.” He glances down at the paperwork in his lap. “You’re the one who sent me the messages from Miranda?”
“Yes, sir. I would apologize, but—“
“Nothing to apologize about. If I had known it was going on, I would have put an end to it much sooner. As it is, she’s packing her things and moving out of my house right now, with the instructions to be gone before I bring my daughter back home.” He’s furiously writing on the paperwork, focused so that he can get it over with as fast as he can. He pauses momentarily and looks over his shoulder at Cline. “How did she find out that she’s not mine? I never told her.”
“That’s a good question. She just told me the answer yesterday, actually. I’m not supposed to know about the last time this happened … with the car …” They are staring at one another in silent understanding. “That day she came home from school early to ask you about her mom because she’d been feeling depressed, I guess. But when she walked in, she heard Miranda talking to you about having kids, and you were arguing about how you could never have kids, and then Miranda said that Audrey wasn’t your daughter anyway, so what did it even matter.”
The silence lasts for much too long, making me feel uncomfortable, like I’m intruding on an intimate moment between the two of them that I shouldn’t be a part of. Mr. Byrd’s eyes are fixed across the room as he takes in what he’s just been told and Cline is just staring at the side of his face, terrified.
“Six years of therapy, and we never got an answer for that day. Two weeks with the two of you, and she’s an open book.” He nods and presses the pen to paper again.
“She thinks she was a mistake,” I tell him quietly.
He chuckles and draws a hand down his face, clearly exhausted. “She’s a miracle is what she is. You know, Wendy always wanted a child, and I couldn’t give her one. After she was attacked, I blamed myself. I should have been there. I should have protected her. And then she found out she was pregnant, and she just smiled and said, ‘Look at the good that can come out of something so terrible.’ Like this tragedy had been an answer to our prayers. When she slipped into the coma, I thought they’d both die, but Audrey wasn’t going down without a fight. When she was born and Wendy died, there was no way I could let her go. I never expected things to be like this. Genetics are cruel in so many ways. But they’re incredible in so many others.”
“Like how?” Cline asks, leaning forward to rest his elbows his knees.
“She looks so much like her mother. The best parts of her. The only thing I have left to remember her by. I’ll be damned if I let her take that away by her own hand over something we can fix, starting today.” He slips the pen into the clipboard and stands. “It was nice to meet you, Elliot. Good to see you, Cline. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go see my daughter.”
As he’s allowed entry to visit her, I know then and there that it will be a long time before I see Audrey again.
I want to write a letter to my father, telling him that I believe in God. I believe in heaven. And now I believe that hell exists in more than one place. It’s not just the one we read about in the Bible, or the one under base camp in a foreign country. Hell can exist in your own mind.
I’ve seen it firsthand.
What kind of man raises another man’s child as his own?
I have asked myself this question more times than I can allow myself to count anymore. Each time, the reason behind it was self-serving or because of some twisted guilt he must have felt. But while Patrick Byrd sits at my bedside, reading The Giving Tree, his voice, a touch louder than the steady beeping of my heartrate monitor, I now know all of those thoughts to be lies.
A baby made from violence, born in despair but raised with hope, I am not the child I always imagined I had been. My biological father may have given me DNA, but my dad kept me alive all those years. Pushing him out and turning my back on him to distance myself from whatever I thought was going on only served to make me weaker, embittered, as the years wore on. I thought he didn’t love me, but I was wrong. He loves me more than I could fathom loving myself right now.
Had I believed my own worth and spoken up earlier, Miranda wouldn’t have been allowed to treat me the way she had. But my own self-hatred and the belief that I deserved it or that she was right, kept me from saying anything. These things inside my head are a constant battle, and the majority of the time I lose; though it’s usually in the silence of my own mind, behind closed doors.
I know I keep people at a distance because I don’t want them getting too close. Most of my relationships since high school have been superficial, just for a fun night or two, and then the insecurities creep in and I remember how hard it is to be friends with someone like me, and it would be better in the end to let them go before they have to take on my burden. It’s easier to keep it that way so I don’t get hurt. So I don’t feel the pain of losing someone. There is no greater anxiety than wondering exactly why you’re not good enough to be in someone’s life. What you’ve done or said wrong. Exactly what happened—trying desperately to pinpoint the minute that you crossed the line and made someone turn against you. And there is no greater sadness than having your depression listen to your anxiety’s thoughts about why you’re not good enough and then agreeing with all of it, because deep down, you truly believe you’re not worth it in the end.
My dad believes I’m worth it. He sits in this chair while they check my fluids and nurses come in and out to change their names on the whiteboard, hanging by the generic flower painting that’s been glued to the wall.
He reads to me or just watches TV. But mostly, he talks. We finally discuss everything that I’ve ever wanted to know, and hearing him say that I’m not a mistake and that I was wanted, regardless of the circumstances, causes all of those memories in my mind to shift and take on a different hue.
He says he’s sorry, and I say it, too, wondering which of us means it the most. There are no tears in his eyes when he tells me that Miranda won’t be at the house when he takes me back home once they release me. He’s already spoken with Dr. Stark, and we’ll begin therapy together once I’m settled back in. My father and I have a lot of work to do.
“What about school?” I ask, my mind wandering to the two boys I’ve ridden across so many states with in such a short amount of time.
My dad’s glasses slip down his nose while he closes the book and places it on the stand by the bed. “I’ll go get your things from the apartment. We’ll bring you home for the rest of the summer, and once you’re feeling better, we’ll get you back in classes. But let’s take it step by step. We have a little time.”
A young nurse appears in the doorway, opening the curtains and checking the clipboard before writing her name and the time on the whiteboard. ANGELA is scattered across the board before she begins speaking to the both of us about the next steps. The seventy-two hour hold and psychiatric evaluation. I know this part; though this time I’m frightened, because I’ve now come to realize how much my dad means to me and how alone I will be for the next three days while he waits for me in some hotel while he tries to get some work done. While he tries to make some plans for me after I’m released.
She has a soft smile and wide blue eyes, and her light brown hair is pulled back into a low ponytail. Her slender wrists look so dainty in comparison to mine as she works her cold fingers across my arms and hands. “How’s your throat?” She asks, barely looking up.
“Sore. It hurts.” The tube and what I was later told were September’s fingers have left it hard to swallow without a constant reminder of that night’s decision.
Angela nods and steps away from my bed to add more notes on my chart. “The doctor will be in shortly to talk about the transfer. You’re doing well, Audrey.” There’s a knowing look in her eyes like she’s seen my kind before, and I’m not a false alarm. When she clears the doorway, I can hear her speaking to another nurse right outside in the hallway, and she says just loud enough for me to make out, “Had she taken the other ones, she
wouldn’t be here. It’s a good thing she reached for the bottle she did. That’s a ridiculous cocktail to have a girl on at her age. But what do I know? I’m not a doctor, right?”
Chills erupt all over my body in the silence that hangs after her words. Had I shoved a handful of another prescription down my throat, I wouldn’t be here to know the truth about my mom. About my dad.
About my entire life.
It took two weeks to change my whole life. So it came as no surprise that it should take two weeks to even start to put it back together again. After the hospital stay in Mississippi, there was a flight home by my dad’s side. Settling back into my old bedroom in the basement of my childhood home was bittersweet in so many ways. Each time I looked out the window into the backyard, I was reminded of a memory with Cline.
Each time I looked out the front window, I could see his house, and all I could remember was the night I stood on the lawn and asked Elliot to come to that party at the lake house.
We went back up there one weekend, Patrick and I. He claimed it was for a little rest and relaxation, but I’m smart enough to know that when your therapist adjusts your medication and says it may take a little while to get into your system—and she’s worried, so you should be watched closely—a trip to the lake is the easiest way for a parent to keep you within fifty feet of them at all times.
We swam and fished, though I couldn’t bear the thought of keeping anything I caught. Patrick would just smile and look wistful. “Your mom was the exact same way,” he said while unhooking a fish and setting it free. The words didn’t sting in the least. We were nothing but a work in progress, one day at a time.
My contact with Cline was minimal, but it was there. After all I’d done to try and set things right, I couldn't allow myself to let him go again. We mostly text, and they are brief, just check-ins to make sure everything is okay. He’s the dose of reality that I need, and I am a little more grounded each time I get a chance to talk to him.