Page 43 of Bloody Bargain
I’d suffered from deep cranial lacerations, a fractured ulna and wrist, a concussion, many scrapes, scratches, and bruises.
But no whiplash. No spinal cord injuries or rib fractures. No internal bleeding.
Nothing that suggested I’d been hit by a train. Instead, the spiral fracture in my forearm suggested I’d twisted. Everything from the print-shaped bruises to the cuts—theclaw marks—were consistent with a struggle.
You don’t struggle with a train.
But there had been a witness to say otherwise. A homeless man had come forward to say he was on the platform too. But I distinctly remembered him standing outside of the station when we first arrived.Yes,the details were murky, but he’d been standing with the others, listening to screams of a woman in labor. I was certain of it.
Poor Reed. He’d found me bleeding on the platform, unconscious near the edge. Apparently the woman had jumped and tried to take me with her. She was found smeared down the rails like pâté, but the station’s grainy CCTV had barely enough pixels to make out the sequence of events.
And it didn’t line up with the foggy memories that haunted my nightmares.
Pop, slurp, crunch.
Who would believe me though?
I’d pushed it from my mind and chalked it up to reckoning with such a traumatic experience. Maybe I needed to vilify the woman that ended her life so that I could rationalize why she tried to take me with her. I focused on healing and told my mandated therapist about the nightmares I had so that she could help me work through them and heal up strong.
Except those nightmares followed me into the day in slip-ups of reality. At first it was all teeth. Smiles with too many smashed together or laughs that showed rows of them in the roof of someone’s mouth like a lamprey. Then there were the looks. Patients that grinned at me from their hospital beds and old women who barked catcalls at me from across the street. I tried to write off the odd noises that came from empty alleyways and between parked cars, but the feeling of being hunted just kept escalating.
Some encounters were even worse. Depraved. I locked eyes with an elderly man standing next to his wife and heat plummeted between my legs. I was so hot, I could hardly breath, my pussy clenching on nothing with desperation. I caught myself a few paces closer to them, my hands on the buttons of my shirt, exposing my bra. The man smirked at me, then walked away. That wasn’t the only time that I felt the compulsion to strip in public or touch one of the hallucinations. All of them gave me some sort of feeling, and none of those feelings were bad, even if I was afraid.
Something was very wrong.
So four months after I was discharged from the hospital, I checked myself into the psych ward.
And I’ve never been more clear-eyed.
Other patients brought me drawings every once in a while, mostly of family and friends. At first, I hadn’t understood, but I’d kept them for the memories. I wanted my stay there to be a good memory. Admitting oneself to the psych ward was a positive choice. Proactive and self-healing. My brain needed time to learn to cope with what I’d been through. Collecting their drawings was a way to memorialize our goals. I planned to put them in one of those frames for kids drawings where I could choose different ones to highlight month to month and hang them in the hallway with photos of Uncle Jim and Jess.
Then one day, it clicked. A man with buzzed hair handed me a beautiful drawing of his mother smiling. I thanked him, then he took it back and filled her mouth with jagged red teeth right in front of me.
Maybe it’s because his mom and the pregnant woman both had brown hair, but suddenly, I understood. The handful of drawings people had given me weren’t just sweet pictures of their life outside of the ward like I’d assumed. They were victims. Stories that no one else would believe.
I wasn’t famous for what happened to me, but the little gathering of homeless people that had been there that night must have spread the word around the streets. As soon as they saw my patchy hair and the angry red scars like a halo around my face, they knew.
I gave that man with the buzzcut a drawing of the Ruggles woman and the train before the end of open art time that day. It was the only time he smiled at me. The next day, he drew me a picture of food in someone’s hand with a black slash through it. I gathered tidbits of information through whispers and song lyrics and interpretive dance during movement therapy sessions. I started journaling, hiding information for myself just in case the counselors and technicians read anything.
Glenn’s eyes flicked to my manilla folder of drawings and loose paper. His eyes crinkled at the edges. “You’ve made a lot of friends, huh?”
I smiled, patting the folder, nerves wound tight around my heart. “Yeah, a few. We like exchanging art.”
“Like cigarettes in the prison yard.”
I snorted. “Something like that.”
Glenn looked me square in the eyes and covered my hand with his. “I’m glad you’re doing so well. Coming here isn’t a choice people make lightly. Reed and I are proud of you.”
Glenn had always been handsome with a dusting of stubble and a square jaw. He was tan, fit, and capable. Nothing rocked his boat. It was a big turn on, which told me exactly how bad I needed to take care of myself. I wasn’t attracted to him at all, but there I was pressing my knees together over a friendly smile from my best friend’s husband.
He squeezed my hand, then let go and reached for the corner of a drawing inside my folder. I resisted the urge to snatch it back, breath frozen in my lungs. The paper scraped against the table, and he tilted his head at it.
“This must be from Liz,” he said. “She talks about her mom and dog all the time.”
I swallowed, curling my trembling fingers closed so he couldn’t see them shake.
“Yeah, she really loves them.”
