Forever Mark

by Jessyca Thibault

  “You don’t understand! I just need to see him!”

  Kellen was struggling against two doctors that were trying to hold him down. There were bandages wrapped around his head and I could see a small pool of blood seeping through above his left eye. I suddenly felt extremely lightheaded. As far as I could see there were no other major wounds, but that didn’t really mean anything. I knew all of the damage was internal, emotional.

  “Mr. Jordan,” one of the doctors started, “you need to calm down. You suffered trauma to your head and this isn’t helping.”

  “Calm down? That idiot over there just told me that my brother was… that he’s… Look, I just need to see him okay. Just take me to see Tony!”

  “Kellen,” one of the nurses tried softly, “Anthony is – ”

  “Don’t call him that!” he cried angrily. “He doesn’t like to be called that!”

  I didn’t understand how they didn’t get that they were upsetting him. I knew doctors had to focus on all the medical stuff – the surgeries and terminology – but they had to pick up on the common sense skills along the way. It seemed pretty obvious that if Kellen called him Tony then they should call him Tony.

  A sob from the corner of the room pulled my attention from Kellen. Lena was scrunched into a tight ball on a chair, crying. I didn’t know which sight was more heartbreaking.

  “What happened?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stuff them down and for a moment everything stopped. My voice brought everyone to a halt. The doctors and nurses looked at me with silent confusion. No one seemed to know who I was or why I was there.

  It was Kellen who spoke.

  “Carson?” he asked, his face full of shock.

  Lena lifted her face from her hands. “Carson.”

  One of the doctors holding Kellen down finally spoke. “Young lady,” he said, “I don’t know how you got in here but unless you’re immediate family then you need to be in the waiting room.”

  “I – ”

  “What are you doing here?” Kellen asked, still surprised. Suddenly his face turned cold. “You shouldn’t be here. I don’t want you here.”

  “Kellen – ” Lena started, but Kellen just yelled over her.

  “I don’t want her here!”

  The machines around Kellen started beeping and he struggled against the doctors.

  “Get her out of here,” one of the doctor’s said to a nurse. He then looked up at the other and nodded.

  The nurse came over to me. When I didn’t move she gently took my arm and led me towards the door. My eyes stayed locked on Kellen though and I watched as one of the doctors injected something into his IV. Kellen’s body instantly relaxed and his eyes went from being sharp and alert to unfocused. He blinked like he was trying to make sense of what was happening, but he stopped fighting.

  “Tony,” he mumbled. “I want to see Tony…”

  “Honey, we need to go now,” the nurse said to me. This time I didn’t resist her as she led me into the hall.

  “What did they do to him?” I asked when we were outside the door. I glanced back in the room. It looked like Kellen was sleeping.

  “They sedated him,” she said.

  “Was that really necessary?” I didn’t like the idea of Kellen being tranquilized like a horse.

  “Yes,” she said. “His blood pressure was rising and we really need him to calm down.”

  I glanced down at the floor. I had so many questions, but I wasn’t sure if the nurse would answer any of them. She didn’t seem completely unreasonable, then again, based on Kellen’s behavior she was probably a little wary of setting me off.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  The nurse glanced back into the room. I could tell she was trying to figure out how much she could tell me.

  “There was an accident,” she finally said.

  “And Tony?”

  “Are you related to the family?” she asked.

  “No. I’m Kellen’s… I’m Kellen’s girlfriend.”

  Part of me wondered if this was still true or not. The nurse was probably wondering the same thing.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t,” she said. “There’s doctor-patient – ”

  “Confidentiality, I know,” I said. “But he’s not a patient anymore. He’s…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word again. “His mom already called me, so I know what happened. I just want to know how it happened.”

  The nurse was quiet for a long time. In reality it was probably less than a minute but the seconds dragged on for what felt like hours.

  “It was a car accident,” she said.

  “A car… But Kellen doesn’t drive.”

  She shook her head. “They were on a bike, but they were hit by a car.”

  I felt my stomach turn over. I pictured Tony’s little body being thrown from the bike, defenseless. I was going to throw up.

  “Mr. Jordan – Kellen – is lucky to be alive. It’s a miracle, actually.”

  A miracle. Somehow I didn’t think Kellen would classify it as a miracle.

  “What happened to the driver?” I asked.

  “They never brought the driver in,” she said. “I’m assuming they fled the scene.”

  A hit and run. Somebody hit an eight-year-old boy and left him there to die.

  “I don’t know if this will help or not, but the doctors say the little boy probably didn’t feel any pain,” the nurse said. “He was most likely killed on impact.”

  I just looked at her, stunned. These people were unbelievable.

  “No,” I said through clenched teeth. “That doesn’t help at all.”

  Was that actually supposed to make me feel better? Did she really think that was going to comfort me in any way? This wasn’t supposed to happen. Tony wasn’t supposed to be taken away from this world in a single instant. He wasn’t supposed to be taken at all.

  “And how do you know?” I asked, my voice rising. “How do you know he didn’t feel any pain?”

  The nurse glanced down the hall. I knew she was looking for backup, but I didn’t care.

  “You people are fucking crazy!” I yelled. “They’re all just bodies to you. Toss one aside and pump the other one up with drugs. Who cares, right? Who cares because this was all one big fucking miracle!”

  Something snapped. I couldn’t see straight, overcome with a blind rage boiling inside of me. Nothing mattered anymore.

  “Who accidentally hits a person on a bike?” I cried. I started pacing around the hall, absolutely hysterical. Tears were flowing freely down my face but I did nothing to stop them. “He was only eight-years-old. Eight-year-olds aren’t supposed to have these kind of accidents. Eight-year-old accidents are falling off the swing and scraping knees and tripping on loose shoe laces and dropping ice cream cones…”

  I was rambling, my words reflecting the chaotic mess of thoughts in my brain. I couldn’t get Lena’s voice out of my head.

  You just missed him.

  If I hadn’t stopped at that stupid donut shop then I would have made it to Kellen’s house before he left. I would have been able to apologize and tell him I loved him and he never would have left. And if he never left then there would have been no accident. None of it would have happened. Tony would still be alive.

  It was all my fault. Whatever way you looked at it, it was all my fault. And now Kellen hated me. I hated me too.

  I didn’t hear the guards come up behind me and gently take me by the arms. They became slightly less gentle when I started kicking and screaming as they dragged me to an empty room. I sat, wondering what they were going to do to me. Would they give me some of the stuff they gave Kellen to calm him down? Part of me wished they would. If my brain could just shut down for five minutes then maybe I would wake up and find out that this was all just a horrible nightmare.

  They didn’t give me drugs. They gave me my mother. When my mom walked into the room I knew she was meant to escort me out. I’d overstayed my welcome as far as the hospita
l staff was concerned. I left the place quietly. I was out of words.

  In the car my mom asked me what happened but I just ignored her. If Kellen didn’t want to talk to me, and he’d made it pretty obvious that he never wanted to talk to me again, then I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I figured she would find out soon enough anyways. Our town was pretty small so this kind of thing was probably front page news.

  When we got home I went to my room. I would have locked myself away if there had been a door to lock, but there wasn’t. So I just sat in the open and cried for an hour straight. Surely I was going to drown in my tears, either that or dehydrate myself into oblivion.

  After I squeezed every last drop of water out of my eyes I had nothing to focus my attention on, nothing to distract me, so I decided to destroy every breakable object in my room. My mom didn’t want to hear me slamming doors so instead she got to listen to me smash everything else. I started with little knick-knack things I’d collected through the years, hurling them at my dresser until they crumbled into little bits on the floor. When those were all gone I caught sight of Kellen’s face on my nightstand table, on my dresser, on the wall – pictures we’d taken together all over town. A few of them featured Tony, laughing and smiling and not lying on some glorified butcher’s table in a hospital morgue. I lost it. I threw each frame at the wall until all of the pictures were lying on the floor among the shards of glass, beaten and abused. Unfortunately I hadn’t drowned in my tears, but it was possible I might drown in a sea of glass.

  I sat there, another object that was beaten and abused by life. I couldn’t help looking at all of the pictures around me. I picked up the one closest to me and watched as little gems of glass rained down on my hand as I took it from the wreckage. It was a picture Kellen and I took at the park. We’d taken Tony after school that day and spent a half hour taking pictures of trees and birds and an empty potato chip bag. We’d given the camera to Tony after he’d begged to have a turn at being the photographer. We’d asked him if he could take our picture on the slide. Kellen had sat behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist as we slid down. When we got to the bottom we’d both been laughing and I’d turned around to look up at Kellen. That’s when I’d heard the little click of the camera. Kellen had then leaned his head forward and kissed me, which had earned an “Ew, cooties!” from Tony.

  I ran my thumb across the picture. We were happy. We were in love. Tony was alive.

  This couldn’t be real.

  But it was. Tony was gone and Kellen was as good as gone too, and the pictures were all I had left. It was like being surrounded by a bunch of ghosts, each one a reminder that the real Jordan boys weren’t there. Tony wasn’t on this planet and Kellen wasn’t in my life. He wasn’t there to stop me from doing something stupid, something like taking one of the shards of glass and pouring my pain onto the floor, splattering scarlet agony all over the rubble. Nobody was there to stop me.

  I picked up a large piece of glass and caressed the edges gently. It would be so easy. Just one slice and then maybe some of the hurt would go away.

  You’re a fighter, Carson.

  “No I’m not,” I said, gripping the glass a little tighter, feeling the pressure against my skin.

  I can see it in your eyes. You’re strong as hell.

  “Go away!” I screamed, dropping the glass. “You don’t mean it!” I clutched the sides of my head. I didn’t want to hear Kellen’s old words, not then.

  You just have to use that strength to fight your demons, not yourself.

  “Stop! Stop! Stop!” I yelled, rocking back and forth on the floor. I was shaking and I could feel fresh tears streaming down my face. I was still mumbling a chorus of stop, stop, stop when a pair of arms gently lifted me up and led me out of the glass sea.

  I was too tired to fight the arms off, so I just let my mom lead me to my bed, where she set me down and wrapped her arm around my shoulder.

  “Shhhhh, it’s okay” she said, rubbing her hand up and down my arm soothingly like she used to do sometimes when I was a kid. I buried my head into her chest and completely fell apart, the sobs racking through my body violently. And my mom sat there with me, one hand moving up and down my arm and the other smoothing my hair back. All the while she continued to whisper “Shhhhh, shhhhh. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  Eventually I cried myself to sleep right there in my mom’s arms.

  Chapter 43

  Broken (Still)

  I tried to hide it

  Spent every day trying

  I smiled, I laughed

  Pretended I was okay

  It worked for a while

  But now I feel like a fraud

  I lived a lie

  I wasn’t better

  I’m not okay

  Smiling is impossible, laughing is harder

  And I don’t know how much longer

  I can try

  To hide it

  Especially now

  I’m not fixed

  I’m still broken

  Over the next week I did a lot of crying. Crying and staring at walls.

  My mom and I hadn’t talked much since it happened. I’d woken up the next morning to find that all of the glass had been cleaned up and my door had been put back on its hinges. Apparently my mom had decided she’d prefer to listen to me slam the door than break everything in sight, not that there was anything left to break.

  After that uncharacteristic display of affection though, my mom went back to normal, except she wasn’t nagging me nearly as much. Or maybe she was nagging me and I just hadn’t heard her. That was a definite possibility. I hadn’t heard much of anything that week.

  I spent most of my time in my room, hidden under a pile of blankets. I skipped school for two days before someone contacted my mom. She’d forced me to go the next day, driving me herself, but I’d just spent the day wandering around the halls like a zombie until some math teacher found me and escorted me to the office. They’d called my mom and had her come back to pick me up, which I don’t think she’d been too happy about. It’s probably why she didn’t say anything when I didn’t get out of bed the next two days.

  Despite being glued to my bed, I didn’t sleep at all. I hadn’t been able to since that first night. I was afraid of what would happen in my dreams, what I would see. Tony’s little body, bent and mangled under a car? Kellen screaming at me from a hospital bed, telling me to go away? I didn’t know what was waiting for me in dreamland and it terrified me. So I just laid there and cried.

  I was wrapped up in my blanket, getting a bottle of water out of the refrigerator when my mom shoved an envelope in my face. I waved her away and stared at the refrigerator. It was so bare – not at all like Kellen’s refrigerator. I wondered if all of the pictures of Tony were still up or if Lena took some of them down because it was just too painful.

  “Carson, it’s a letter from your school,” my mom said, holding the letter out to me again. “It says you get to graduate.”

  I took the letter, noticing the jagged top of the envelope where my mom had ripped through it already. I didn’t bring up the fact that opening someone else’s mail was a federal offense. I also didn’t bring up the fact that my school most likely did this out of pity. Whatever, my mom could pretend I did it all on my own if she wanted, but the fact was that there was no way I deserved to graduate and missing the last week and a half of school probably didn’t do much to help me out.

  I ripped the paper into little pieces and let them drop to the floor. “Who cares,” I said. Tony would never graduate high school. Tony would never go to high school.

  My mom huffed. “Carson, I know you’re upset – ”

  Upset? Try devastated. Try guilty beyond belief. Try on the verge of screaming until my lungs burst because the physical and emotional pain I was feeling was that debilitating.

  But, sure, we could say I was upset.

  “And I understand what you’re going through – ”

  “No, you don’t
,” I snapped.

  “You’re not the first person to lose someone, Carson.”

  She didn’t have a clue.

  “I didn’t just lose someone,” I said. “I lost two someones. I lost them both.”

  My mom opened her mouth, then closed it. She sighed. “Get dressed,” she said. “I’m taking you to therapy.”

  “I’m not going to therapy,” I said. I skipped the week before and I had every intention to skip again.

  “Yes, you are. You can’t keep walking around like this every day and you can’t keep missing school.”

  “Why not?” I asked, waving my hand toward the bits of paper on the floor. “I’m graduating, remember?”

  “You’re going to therapy,” my mom repeated sharply, losing her patience. “You can get dressed or go like that, it’s up to you.”

  When I didn’t budge my mom literally dragged me out the door all wrapped up in my blanket.

  An old man sitting across the waiting room gave me a dirty look. I flipped him off. His eyes went so wide I thought they might fall right out of his skull. Like I cared what he thought of me and my blanket.

  “Carson,” my mother hissed, swatting my extended finger down. “That is rude and inappropriate on so many levels.”

  “So is staring at me like I’m a freak.”

  I resented the fact that my mom was sitting there. She might as well have put a leash on me and tied me to the chair.

  “Carson,” Dr. M called from across the room. I walked towards her open door and slipped through without making eye contact. I took my usual place in my chair and waited. After a minute Dr. M sat down and sighed. I looked up. Her eyes were sad and I could tell she’d been crying. Some people might not have been able to tell, but I’d spent years covering up my face, so I knew all the tricks to hiding blotchy red spots.

  “How are you doing, Carson?”

  “Shitty,” I said. If those were the kinds of questions she was going to ask then I really should have left.

  “I didn’t see you at the memorial service,” she said.

  Tony’s service was held a few days after Lena called me and the world fell apart. I had planned to go, but that morning I woke up and just couldn’t do it. It surprised me a little that Dr. M had been there, although maybe it shouldn’t have. Maybe she’d gone to offer moral support for Kellen. Maybe Tony was just special. There was really no maybe about that. Tony was special.