Eluding Nirvana (The Dark Evoke Series Book 2)

by Brock, V. L.

  I thought I was dreaming when the orderly approached me that morning, the sound of the soles of her flat shoes squealing and sticking to the polished flooring. I tore my melancholic stare from the window as she knelt in front of me and asked if I was feeling up to having a visitor. When the name Walker slipped from her mouth as a whisper, for the first time in eight days of being locked up, I felt hope. I felt an unfamiliar smile steal across my face and as I nodded my answer, she disappeared back to where she came, leaving behind a sliver of faith which I had long ago forgotten.

  Eight days I had been locked up there. Eight days without a visitor. Eight days to attempt to see sense. Eight days to hit reality with a bang and accept what I had done and somehow, allow the professionals to get me better. Even if it did mean that I was dosed up to the eyeballs with anti-depressants and tranquilizers.

  “Kady,” the woman in white scrubs was standing over my shoulder as I slowly and cautiously craned my head around to face her. “It’s time to go down to the visitors’ room.” The warm and friendly smile she displayed helped me find a little energy of what I had left, to rear up from the seat and follow in her wake.

  She steered me through the echoing corridor. It seemed as though those black cameras were stationed at every corner of the institute, always keeping an eye on you. The way they sometimes shifted angles and the grating noise as they did so, did nothing for my paranoia. Still, I was glad to escape the ramblings along with sudden cursing and shouting from the other patients.

  Patients? It felt as though we were inmates…

  My fingers found and toyed with a loose thread dangling from the bottom of my pajama top, as I stepped into the small, white painted room and took the seat next to the window. The breeze had picked up some, sending tulips bowing as though they were worshipping each grass shoot they were sitting amongst.

  “Hey.” I jolted at the sensation of a hand on my shoulder, the legs of the chair grated under protest. “It’s okay,” the familiar voice told me, as I redirected my rapt attention from the garden beyond the window, to the man skirting my body and taking a seat in front of me. He offered a wistful grin, his brown hair as sexy and disheveled as always, yet his attire was immaculate. A crisp white shirt tucked neatly into navy suit pants. “How are you feeling, darlin’?”

  I merely stared at him, unsure of what to say, what to do. I couldn’t open my mouth because if I did, my dam was going to break. Walker gazed at me with a bountiful compassion that I knew damn well I didn’t deserve. I was the one undeserving.

  Hanging my head low, I felt the wrinkles of stretching skin gathering when I pulled my eyebrows in and downward. I swept my tongue over my parched lips and sniffled. “I went for him, Walker,” I finally admitted, sorrow and regret mixed with overt perplexity encased my tone, as I pulled my head back and met his caring gaze.

  Seeing his broad shoulders sagging and his face tumbling on his outbreath was another kick in my gut. “Kady,” he shifted to the very edge of the seat, my knees caught between his thighs. He took my hands in his warm, calloused possession.

  “I attacked him, and I can’t even remember it.”

  Although the walls were thick, you could hear each and every tortured soul. Night after night the screams were my lullaby. And I knew this was going to be a big confrontation, hearing the screams, the banging and smashing from down the hall, in the room that only a few moments ago, I was in.

  “Oh my God,” the woman gasped; still I held my head low.

  The next thing I know, I saw Walker in my peripheral vision looking up at the door behind me. “It’s okay, we’ll be fine,” he said.

  Strengthening sounds of commotion vibrated through the room as the door opened, and soon faded to a degree which was easier to disregard if you were familiar with such things.

  “Kady, listen to me,” now we were alone, his voice was somewhat pressing. “You did not attack him. Do you understand me? You did not attack him.”

  Flailing my head in a fraught attempt to shake his words from my mind, I muttered ‘no’ over and over. Eight days I’d had to realize and acknowledge the verity of my actions. I had just come to accept it––acceptance is the first step of getting better––and now Walker was making me question myself all over again. I couldn’t allow him to do that.

  “You didn’t attack him, Kady. You’re not that sort of person; you don’t have a combative bone in your body.”

  “How do you know, Walker? People live next-door to rapists and child abductors, but they always say the same thing, ‘We never realized, it’s come as such a shock, he/she was such a lovely person’.”

  His features turned sturdier with his resolve. “No, Kady, that’s enough. You didn’t do what he’s made out you’ve done.”

  Faintly shaking my head, my overthrown words were unfettered as a whisper. “Then why would he say it?”

  He breathed a troubling, vexing sigh. “I don’t know, but we’re working on it––”

  “We? Whose we?”

  He smiled, one that sent shivers up my spine as I witnessed the degree of his determination. “Let’s just say, the FBI has nothing on me and Laurie at the moment.”

  The flower bowed down into the grass once more as the breeze intensified for all but a second. “Today was the funeral,” I muttered, the vision before me awash with a painful, burning accumulation of warm droplets of grief over glassy eyes. I heard the snarl emitted from Walker’s throat, one that screamed knowledge and clarity. Still, I found myself lost in the visual of the dancing flower, and in the barrenness of my own dark mind. “I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye and now I never will.”

  Craning my head to Walker as he answered me with silence, I silently cursed the tear which had escaped and was being pursued by countless more. “He deleted my voicemail, Walker. The one from my mom and everything else after that is a complete blur.”

  His minty breath collided with my face. Leaving my hands on my lap he halted himself from chewing on his chewing gum while his gentle, tender touch rose to my face. My tears were dried by his thumbs before he pulled my head closer to him, until our brows were resting against one another. “Please don’t cry, darlin’,” he whispered. I swore I heard him sniffle before he repeated his plea. “Please don’t cry.”

  When he finally drew his head from me, my brow felt cold and bare, Walker’s hands were still framing my face. The look in his eyes as he searched mine…that look was teeming with anger and fortitude, like a parent who was about to lift a car off their child. “I need you to listen to me, Kady. Do you remember the night you stayed with me on your birthday?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you remember breakfast at Tiffani’s the following morning?”

  I nodded again.

  “I told you to make me a promise, and you did. I told you that I wanted to help you and to let me be your anchor. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes,” I whispered through the lump in my throat.

  “So I am going to be your anchor. Say after me, Kady: I didn’t attack, Liam.”

  “No, I’m not saying that. Refusing to believe it is why I’m here, Walker. I’m not saying that. I did attack him. I did. He has the cut to prove it, I’m a nut-job, I’m delusional––”

  “Yes Kady, you are delusional. You’re delusional because you believe his lies, his deceits, his fabrications call them whatever you want, it all comes to the same thing.” His breaths came in tiny, shallow, uneven gasps, while my mind was haunted by the mere intensity of his eyes as he bored them into me. He was riled, that was clear. “Kady, you told me not to say anything to you when I saw your ribs. I’m not doing it any longer, I’m not keeping my mouth shut so you can continue with this twisted world that he’s made you believe you deserve. I’m done.”

  “No, no, no,” head shaking, frenzied, my own inhalations were sucked up into my lungs in wild, pleading pants. I tried to shift away from his hands which were framing my face, but it was fruitless. He was determined, and I was terrif
ied of the truth he was compelling me to listen to.

  “He is abusive, darlin’. You are in a physically and psychologically abusive relationship, Kady. That is the truth and you know it, you just deny it over and over. But look where it’s got you, darlin’,” His words of truth were hitting me full force in the face.

  I had known this, I had known it for a while, but justification and plausible deniability always won hands down. Countless tears swept down my cheeks at his words, and I watched as his own eyes began to shimmer and glaze.

  “You’re in this place, taking medication you don’t need, questioning your own sanity, Kady, this isn’t right. You’re worth so much more, darlin’.” He faltered for a brief moment, but when he spoke again, his voice was both pained and sincere, “I can’t offer you the world at your feet like Liam can, but if you were mine, I would offer you a world of happiness, a world of safekeeping and respect where you wouldn’t have to walk on Goddamn eggshells. I’d never treat you the way he has.”

  I couldn’t keep listening to his truths. I needed him to stop. “Walker, you have to stop, please stop.”

  “Repeat after me, Kady: I didn’t attack, Liam.” When I remained quiet for an age, and twisted my head a margin to peer back at the flower on the lawn, his insistent hands which had been framing my face for an age, tugged me back, holding me steady to focus on him and the words he spoke. “I don’t have time, Kady, please, repeat it––say it, say: I didn’t attack, Liam.”

  “I didn’t attack, Liam,” I whispered just to shut him up.

  He shook his head before tipping it forward to brace himself on my brow once again. “Do you trust me, darlin’?”

  “Yes.”

  “With trust, comes belief. You didn’t cut him. Say it, Kady, please––” his voice shattered beneath the straining of his unrelenting words. “Just say it, say it for me, say: I didn’t attack him.”

  “I didn’t attack him.”

  “Again…”

  “I didn’t attack him.” He told me to repeat it once more, and with each time I repeated it, I felt a little resolve filter into my statement.

  “I want you to do something for me. Tell the shrink whatever you think he wants to hear, simple yes and no in the right places. Slip the pills under your tongue, I don’t care where you put them just don’t take them, you don’t need them. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “One more thing,”––my eyes fluttered closed as his thumbs skated over the arches of my cheeks––“cling onto this conversation. Hold on with everything you have, keep replaying it and keep remembering these words. Don’t lose yourself, Kady. I couldn’t bear it.”

  When I opened my eyes, his brow was creased and lips quirked. Staring blankly into his eyes, his left hand fell from my face, to pinch the bridge of his nose.

  I heard the handle of the door behind me squeal as it was pushed down, and a slight breeze filtered into the room. “Is everything okay in here?”

  I saw him nod as he glanced up and put the orderly at rest as he assured her. “I gotta go. Keep remembering,” his words came tersely and he set a quick, chaste kiss on my forehead before quickly shunting himself from the seat in front of me, and left.

  The coolness of her flesh journeyed through the fabric of my pajama top as she wrapped her hand around my upper arm and guided me once again on shaky, lifeless legs back to the dayroom.

  The chairs and tables were set as they normally were, the TV on mute, while a woman sashayed from each black tile, avoiding the white ones, to the softly emitted music from the radio. There was no evidence of an uproar, everything was as it was. And once again, I was alone on my seat, gazing longingly out of the window to my left; there was no evidence of any visitor. No staff saying goodbye, I didn’t even hear the door close.

  The transition was done so quickly, too quickly for my head to acknowledge. That alone prompted the worrisome thought in my mind: was Walker even here in the first place? Or was it just the mere voice of denial manifesting in the form of the only person I could truly trust, in a bid to sway me back after I admitted defeat?

  Like the saying goes: the truth is hard to swallow.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “There she is,” I heard his voice echoing from the furthest end of the corridor, beyond the painted iron gateway and check in desk.

  Being escorted down the corridor, I couldn’t stifle the fixed, overawing sense that I was being escorted down The Green Mile and the bald, coffee skinned mammoth beside me, discharging me into the arms of the person who put me in here in the first place, was more like the guard walking me to my fate…my death.

  Axle, as we came to name him, never cracked a smile, and he was one strong bastard. In my first two uncooperative days, it only took him, and him alone, to pin me down on the old, thin mattress covering a squeaky metal frame as the nurse stabbed me with that Goddamn needle full of liquid relaxant.

  However, peeking up at his towering, beefy form at my right as we approached the gate to the outside world, he was grinning down at me. It was like watching a dog walk on its hind legs. That alone bred an inward giggle.

  “Kady baby,” Liam mouthed while Axle opened the gate, the loud groaning and squealing of old hinges journeyed down the hallway. It felt like I was being freed from prison. Out of one, into another, I thought to myself as I stepped over the hold.

  In an instant, Liam’s arms crashed around me, swallowing me whole with a tight embrace that had me tapping out on his arm to loosen up. Finally, arms outstretched, he held me at length, giving me a once over perusal. “I’m so happy to have you back,” he grinned and placed a kiss on my forehead.

  I couldn’t bring myself to smile; I couldn’t reciprocate his level of eagerness at getting me home, or leaving this place. I didn’t know what it was, but it was something about spending just over two weeks locked up, drugged to the eyeballs that had me realizing how vulnerable I had been. Even worse, people who knew me on the outside saw my vulnerability before I did.

  “Mr. DeLaney, here is Kady’s medication.” Liam took the bag handed to him by Axle. “She must take them. I can’t stress that enough. The stabilizers will keep her mood exactly that…stable, so there should be no repeat of her aggression or anxiety. The tranquilizers are to be administered if she grows agitated and distressed. The doctor will continue with a follow up appointment which will be sent to you.”

  Liam nodded.

  “The tranquilizers will knock her out, so Kady,” turning his beefy attention back to me, I couldn’t help but notice the rolls at the back of his neck over the white scrubs. “There is to be no driving or operating machinery once you have taken them, you understand that don’t you.”

  “Yep, I’ve already heard it. No need to lather, rinse, repeat,” I joked, my mouth caving in to a lopsided grin.

  I was gestured to the gate, “Go on, get outta here, girl.”

  Tossing the friendly giant a wave and a forcing a smile over my shoulder, I did what I was good at: I did as I was told.

  Hand in hand, we made our way through the entrance, down the steps and into the parking lot. The sun was beaming, the breeze light and refreshing against my flesh. Breathing in deeply, I delighted in the scent of wildflowers from the patients’ garden which housed the odd scattered benches, as it drifted along the gentle breeze. I peeked back at the structure, which was now growing smaller as we moved further away.

  It was a strange feeling. It wasn’t a place I’d particularly want to visit at the best of times. I most definitely didn’t want to go there against my will. But, for just over two weeks, that place had been a little haven for me, a place where I could hide away, lick my wounds and discuss how to get better. In Pinewood, I was surrounded by other patients who were in the same boat as me, who were vulnerable and couldn’t see it.

  Now, I was being dragged away from that distorted form of security, where no judgment was passed, back into a world full of people who do nothing other than pass judgment, criticize
, and frown upon the sick and diverse…

  That scared me.

  “Come on, baby, in we get,” Liam held the silver door open as I stood stock-still in the gravel driveway frowning at both him and the car.

  “What happened to the BMW?”

  “Oh, we needed a new car; Liv needed a car, so I bought this and gave her the BMW.”

  My eyes widened with blatant cynicism, my jaw fallen open. He did what? “You gifted her with a BM-fucking-W?”

  “It’s okay, I got you a gift too, baby,” he smiled a little too happily. His gifts were one thing I had learned to have great apprehension about. Either, it wasn’t a nice one or it was going to come at a price. “But you need to get in the car.”

  Fixed in place was the wide grin on his face. So much hesitancy stewed in my body. I was unsure how to cope with the ever changing colors of Liam DeLaney’s attitude. If I was to be truthful, I was on tenterhooks in his presence, and my paranoia knew that dreaded fact. In spite of my worries, I reluctantly did as I was bid and slipped into the Mercedes.

  Thirty minutes of deafening silence proved too much for the man at my left. A hand, which I grew used to cringing from, crashed down on my denim-clad thigh, causing me to jolt with the expectancy of an uncongenial, harmful touch.

  “Hey, why are you so jumpy, baby?”

  He thought that was jumpy? That flinch had nothing on how the beating mass in my chest was functioning. Lips moistened with a sweep of my tongue, I faintly shook my head. “I…umm…I…”

  “For God sake, Kady, what’s the matter?” My body quailed at the sound of his scaling voice as my mind worked overtime. He was going to blow his fuse if I didn’t talk.

  Out of one prison, into another, the small voice in my mind echoed.

  “I’m just feeling like a burden.”

  “Burden?” his attention was torn from the road ahead, to me then back again.

  “I couldn’t see that I was sick, Liam. You could, and I’m sure everybody else could. I…I just feel like I’m spreading my wings again, entering the big wide world, and knowing how people judge and frown upon people, I just…”