Don’t Let Me Die
Alex Sinclair
alexsinclairwrites.com
Copyright © 2017 by Alex Sinclair.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Free Short Story
Thank You
About the Author
One
I can’t sleep anymore. Then again, living inside a psychiatric hospital against your will tends to do that to a person.
As I lie on my appointed bed, eyes wide open, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, I think about what has kept me awake every night since I arrived at this Illinoisan psychiatric hospital. Is it the conscious hours of endless wails never letting up for the briefest of moments? Is it the thought of the robotic, daily routine enforced upon every lessened individual that is niggling at my brain? Or is it the constant threat of a migraine slowly edging its way from the back of my head to the front of my pupils?
None of those things help, but the answer is simple: I don’t want to be here.
For three long weeks, I’ve been a prisoner at the Hopevale Psychiatric Hospital. Three drug-addled weeks of needles, therapy sessions, and long conversations wrapped in clichés like, “How does that make you feel?” and “Tell me about your father.”
I don’t know how much more I can stand.
For some, three weeks of this might not sound like much compared to the permanent guests of the hospital—the brain-dead therapy addicts who crave the endless cycle of the system. But to me, an actual person, this is hell.
I came into the involuntary ward of the department on a stretcher with both arms strapped down tight so they could no longer do any harm to me. The staff practically diagnosed me on arrival. The doctors said I was suffering from a psychotic depression brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder. The head shrink, whom I have spent hours each day studying from opposite his comfortable swivel chair, determined my illness in less time than it takes for a pizza to arrive. Without a second opinion, the man decided my fate in a heartbeat and set my three weeks of pain into motion.
There’s nothing I can do to leave. No amount of bullshit or telling the man in charge what he wants to hear from a broken woman will remove the array of red flags from my file. There’s nothing in my dwindling arsenal of feminine charms that can convince Doctor Felix Gaertner that I won’t harm myself.
It feels strange to admit it, but I tried to end my life. I never once thought in my thirty-seven years of existence that I would prefer to be dead and buried in the ground over being alive and conscious.
Then again, I never thought a killer in a mask would stalk my family and force me to choose who among them had to die: my husband or my son.
One of them is dead, and the other is alive. They tell me the psycho made me watch, but my brain will not allow me to remember who was spared. The thought, the only thought I ever produce anymore, stirs me from my bed to the floor of the cold, sterile building.
I sit on the ground and sense a beast brewing in the back of my head. It’s dying to get out and send me into an anxiety-fueled spiral of panic. Two eyes stare at me with a sting of betrayal, but I fail to determine whom they belong to.
“Here we have patient nine-zero-one-five-three, Emma Turner.” The voice of Doctor Felix Gaertner breaks into my thoughts as he approaches the reinforced door to my room. I jump back up to my bed and face away before anyone has a chance to witness me on the floor.
A few seconds later, the stoic professional is gazing in through the small observation window as if viewing a dozing tiger at the zoo. I don’t need to see him to confirm he is there, judging me with his stare.
A second voice rambles beside the doctor’s, indicating to me that at least two people are watching. Their words are not muffled to protect my nonexistent self-esteem. Instead, Gaertner speaks about me like he is a custodian introducing a new employee to a row of toilets that need cleaning.
“Mrs. Turner is under a strict suicide watch,” Gaertner says, his voice still audible. He only lowers it slightly, but I can still hear the contempt the man holds for me.
“I strongly suggest reading her file in full, Doctor Shaw. The acuteness of the trauma she suffered is the very cataclysm of her admission to the ward.”
There Gaertner goes again, speaking about the event like an emotionless news anchor announcing the death statistics of a natural disaster. It takes everything I have not to roll over in my sheet-free bed and hurl whatever abuse I can muster at the fifty-year-old asshole in his cheap polyester sweater-vest. But after ten seconds a thought hits me: why should I let him get away with it?
When I turn over on the creaky mattress, I am up and ready to fire, but I notice the face Doctor Gaertner is introducing to my room. Doctor Shaw stares in through the wire-frame glass with something I had yet to see in my entire three weeks here: genuine sympathy. The young woman’s face stares into my eyes in a way that suggests she might give a crap if I live or die.
I remove the anger from my mind and lock my eyes on Doctor Shaw’s until she gives me a slight wave. Gaertner breaks our silent connection by ushering Shaw along to the next patient in the row of wailers and moaners.
I find myself climbing out of bed and scurrying to the door to try to examine the new doctor before she continues her tour of the hospital. Of course, I am too late, despite pressing my face against the grimy film of the window.
I let my body fall backward and down to the floor again. The beast lurks behind. It always strikes at the worst of times, never passing on an opportunity to feast on my suffering. I get closer to the ground and find some comfort in the hard surface.
All I can think about is Gaertner trivializing the last moments of my life before I stopped being Emma Turner and became the husk of a woman I am today.
I lie there wond
ering what this new doctor will be like. The thought takes me back to a conversation I had with Gaertner the previous day. His words didn’t seem real, but he promised me that, with enough time and progress, I would be allowed a visit from the one I chose to save, that he would arrange for him to see me here, in this place.
I had no response to the idea. My husband or my son: one of them had died because of me. One of them was sacrificed to save the other, while I live with that decision buried inside my soul, waiting to be uncovered with therapy.
I don’t want the doctors to help me face the truth. If they do, I will be forced to meet the survivor.
Once again, two cold, dead retinas stare at the back of my head, burning a hole into my mind at the choice I made that day.
Two
The next few hours crawl by at the same agonizing pace that accompanies every minute spent in this hospital. My concrete-covered room is devoid of anything to occupy my time. A single window sits high above my bed in the form of a thin, horizontal panel to let in dust-filtered light. There is no TV, no books to read, not even a real mirror in the attached bathroom. In its place sits a fixed piece of metal, a precaution meant to stop me from harming myself.
Despite the efforts of the staff to prevent me from continuing what I regrettably started, the hospital was killing me slowly with solitude and boredom, leaving me to ask one question over and over: how does locking a sick person away in a cage help them?
An interruption breaks my thought. It’s the sound of my door unlocking. A stiff, uncaring orderly named Tom pushes his way inside and gives me the usual up and down stare that tears right through me. The slight sneer at the corner of his mouth raises his sleazy mustache and reconfirms what I already know about the creep: He is trying to figure out if there is anything fuck-worthy underneath my disheveled gray sweater and white, cordless pants. Tom is the typical asshole these places attract.
“Time to go, Turner. You’ve got a session,” he says with a Southern drawl.
The man gives me his best impersonation of a professional orderly as he gestures for the door. “Come on. I’ve got other people to process.”
“Sorry,” I say in a croaky voice. It has been twelve hours since I last spoke a word to anyone, myself included. Tom continues his stare as I move past him, both of my arms wrapped tight around my body. I can sense his pupils on the back of my neck. At any moment, I swear he is going to lash out and grab me by the throat. I close my eyes whenever he is near.
As Tom escorts me out the door and along the ward beyond the other lucky patients of the hospital, I can’t help but overhear the conversation he is having on the radio. The scumbags of the place mainly use the communications network as a means to update one another on the day’s findings.
“Wait till you see what’s happening in the East Wing,” a voice brags over the speaker.
“I’ll come see for myself. Just need to finish escorting this little patient of mine down to the shrinks.” Tom’s hand presses slightly against my back, lingering for a moment. A shudder runs down my spine as I inevitably cringe away.
“Now, don’t be like that, darlin’. I was simply helping you along.”
I shake off the temptation to turn around and claw his eyes out. He isn’t worth the fresh hell that would come my way if I attacked him.
If the doctors were to sit down with people like Tom and his buddies for a few minutes, they’d realize they all did indeed belong in a facility like this, only on the other side of the cell door.
Our slow walk eventually brings us to the row of doctors’ offices in a section patients aren’t privy to behind a few secured checkpoints. Gaertner’s office was the first room. Every day I have a session with the doctor for one long hour. Depending on my mood, it could feel like an eternity.
Tom walks me beyond the first door without stopping.
“I thought I was seeing Doctor Gaertner?” I ask.
“Not today, darlin’. You’re meeting with someone else instead.”
“But, I always—”
“Zip it,” Tom half shouts. “Not my problem, understand? Now, shut the hell up and walk.” He grabs me with a firm squeeze by the bicep, handling me like luggage as he raises a fist to knock on the door of the fifth doctor’s office.
A moment later, Doctor Shaw opens the entry.
“Doc, Turner’s here for her session,” Tom says as he guides me inside like a lost puppy. I almost don’t know what to think once I realize my meeting will be with Doctor Shaw. Her calm face gives me a smile that seeps into my brain the way it had only hours ago. Despite her kind appearance, part of me wonders if I will receive more than a hollow feeling from this next person in my life I am meant to unload my deepest, darkest thoughts upon.
I stare around the half-empty room as Tom places me farther inside. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing any other office besides Gaertner’s. Where he has plaques and achievements on the wall, Shaw has dust outlines of the framed documents of a previous occupant. She’d only moved in today, I had to assume. The only thing I find on her desk is a stack of papers I recognize as my file.
“Thank you. That will be all,” Shaw says to Tom. He nods, eyeing her up and down, giving out his creepy assessment before he leaves with half a sneer still covering his face.
I let a breath of air escape me when the smell of his aftershave begins to diminish. His odor lingers, though, helping to keep me on my toes and ready for the world to explode.
“Take a seat, Emma,” Shaw says, gesturing with an open palm as she settles into her chair on the other side of the aging oak desk that dominates the room. I sit down—despite hating when a person uses my name—with a plonk and wrap my arms around my body tighter than before as I huddle into the chair as much as possible.
“My name is Doctor Eva Shaw, and I will be taking over your case from Doctor Gaertner.”
I nod, while my eyes dance around Shaw’s face. “May I ask why?”
The corners of her mouth tighten with a smile I am yet to classify as genuine or not. “Yes, of course. As you know, Doctor Gaertner is the head of the department and ultimately responsible for all thirty-nine patients in this ward. Based on his time spent with you over the last three weeks, he has decided that you are ready to move out of his immediate care to someone like me for the next phase of your treatment.”
I grunt my understanding to Shaw. “So, you’re saying I don’t need to see the leading expert on crazy anymore. I’ve been downgraded, so to speak.”
“That’s one perspective. Think of it more as progress. Yes, I am still a qualified and experienced psychiatrist, like Doctor Gaertner, but I am not the head of this department.”
Just the next cog in the machine, I think. I give her a forced smile before I speak. “Okay.”
“Don’t worry, Emma. With time, we will come to understand each other well enough for there to be a genuine comfort between us.”
I nod as I think about Gaertner saying those same words when I first started with him. I could never forget the ever-present icing sugar stain that accompanied his cheap outfits during our late-morning sessions. It was as if he had been forced to fit me in between doughnuts.
Doctor Shaw, on the other hand, didn’t seem the type to let a single piece of her appearance allow you to believe she was anything other than a professional. Appearing to be in her late twenties, the brunette wears thick-rimmed designer glasses, a tailored suit jacket with a white business shirt underneath, and matching pants to complete the look. I feel ugly just being in the same room with her.
“Why don’t we start. Would you like to take a seat on the couch?”
I half turn toward the therapy setup in the corner Doctor Shaw must have insisted upon using. Gaertner always made me speak from the discomfort of his guest chair. I often wondered why he required me to sit on that seat. Maybe he didn’t want his patients to relax. The thought keeps me from replying to Doctor Shaw in an appropriate time. It’s a habit I am starting to develop.
“Emma? We don’t have to move over there if you’re not happy with the idea.”
“No, I am. I just wasn’t expecting it, sorry.”
“Perfectly fine. Take your time.” Shaw waves her hand toward the couch. I get up, arms still around myself, and walk over to the sofa. I sit on the edge as if I am covered in mud, not wanting to stain the doctor’s furniture.
“Get comfortable, Emma. I want you to think of this space as somewhere you can relax and be yourself.”
Myself? I thought. I doubt the doctor is ready for the current version of myself. It took everything I had not to be the new me every minute I spent in the hospital.
Once Shaw settles into her armchair opposite with a pen and notepad, I ease back into the couch. Its absorbent padding lets me melt back into the soft material as the weight of my body sinks me into the depths of comfort. It is the first time in three weeks I relax my tense muscles. The reaction evaporates the second Shaw speaks again.
“Emma, I want you to understand that I have read your file in full. I know everything: the event, the choice you made, the aftermath, every session spent with Doctor Gaertner. But those are words on a page. What I want is to listen to you tell me everything again from the start.”
Don't Let Me Die: A gripping psychological thriller Page 1