Page 96 of The Way I Am Now
“Hey, hey, hey, Eden?” I try. “Eden, wake up.”
I touch her face, but she turns away from me. “Stop,” she says, her hand flopping lifelessly against my stomach. “Please,” she whimpers, crying with her whole body.
I touch her arm now, try to rub it gently. “Eden,” I repeat, louder this time.
She starts coughing, gasping, and then her hand goes to her throat, all the veins and tendons in her neck visible like she really can’t breathe. I’ve got to get her to wake up somehow. “Eden!” I shake her shoulder.
Her eyes fly open, and she bolts up, swinging at me. She scratches my neck with one hand, my chest with the other. I grab her arms. “Eden, stop.”
She screams, “Let go of me, let go of me!”
I do, but she hits me over and over. She’s breathing so heavily, gasping for air. I back up against the wall, but then she’s backing up too, about to fall right out of bed, so I lunge forward to grab her again. She’s kicking me with both her feet. This time she cries just one word: “Mom.”
“Eden, wake up!” I shout, but she doesn’t hear me.
She yells, “Stop.” I don’t know what to do—she’s going to hurt herself. But I let go of her arms, and I can do nothing but watch her fall. The sound is terrible—she hits the desk and her lamp crashes down, part of the glass shade breaking, but it’s still on, lighting her at this severe angle that makes her look haunted. She looks up at me like I pushed her or something, like it hurts her to look at me.
“Eden?” I scramble to get down on the floor with her, but she flinches away when I reach for her. She looks around the room: at the lamp, me, her skinned knees bleeding, the palms of her hands scraped. “Eden,” I repeat. I kneel next to her and she holds her arms out, but I can’t tell if she’s reaching for me or trying to keep me away. “Hey, it’s just me. It’s just me. You’re okay.”
“What?” her voice squeaks. “What happened?”
“You were having a nightmare. You—you fell out of bed,” I stutter, trying to give her the gentlest version of the truth.
Parker’s pounding on the door now, which makes her jump. “Eden?” Parker calls. “Eden, are you okay?”
Eden looks at me like she’s not sure how to answer, but I don’t think I should answer for her because I don’t know either.
“Eden!” She knocks some more. “I’m coming in.”
She opens the door, and her eyes go to the broken lamp, then to Eden, huddling against the wall, arms around her knees, then to me, crouching next to her. “What’s happening in here?” she says to me, then to Eden, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I—I’m okay,” Eden tells her.
Parker narrows her eyes at me. “Did you fucking hit her?”
“NO!” we both shout at the same time.
“Oh my God, Parker, no,” Eden says, seeming to snap out of it, the focus coming back into her eyes. “It’s okay, really. I was having a bad dream. I fell.”
“You were screaming,” Parker says.
Eden shakes her head. “I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t remember that.”
“I’m gonna go get something for these cuts, okay?” I tell her. “I’ll be right back.”
Parker follows me into the bathroom. “What the fuck, Josh?” she mutters under her breath.
“It’s like she said, she had a really bad nightmare. I was trying to wake her up, and I freaked her out even more. That’s all.” I open the medicine cabinet, where I’d found the bandages for her hand last week. I get Band-Aids and a tube of ointment. “I swear to you I would never hit her.”
“Did she hit you, though?” she asks.
“No!”
“Josh, look at yourself,” she says.
I close the cabinet and look in the mirror. I’m bleeding. Scratches on my neck, my chest. The red welts of early bruises on my arms and chest and stomach. I look down at my legs. Marks on my thighs and shins. “I’m fine. She didn’t even know what was happening.” I turn away from her to wet a washcloth in the sink. My hands are shaking.
“Josh,” Parker says. “Are you okay?”
