There was a loud ringing coming from my head. I felt blood running down the right side of my head, especially from my ear. Everything spun. There was no longer light in the room.
Part 4
Chapter 26
My grandmother was clutching to me amongst the tubes and beeping machine in the hospital as her arms encased me in her fragile body and patina skin. She held me with immense caress, but I couldn’t help but feel paralyzed, as the mixture of concern and disappointment from her initial expression, had also conveyed the severity of the whole situation.
“Sam,” my grandmother kept whispering again and again, as if she was looking for the girl that she once knew, the girl that had once resided inside my deteriorated body, the girl that she had taken the responsibility to raise so that I could succeed in this world. She was looking for the content and healthy Sam that was once so familiar to her, the one that she was proud of. I felt as if I had hit rock bottom.
She kept squeezing tightly, as if she believed that if she squeezed hard enough, the smaller, younger, and happier girl that she knew, would emerge from this decaying vessel that was now my body. I felt feeble; my eyes felt heavy from the constant lack of sleep, despite having slept eight hours. And then there was the fact that my body was as thin as ever. And to top it off, there was a large bandage wrapped around my head that informed me that I had been severely hurt.
“Sam,” she slowly murmured to me repeatedly.
I stayed silent. Piece after piece of the night before and everything prior kept building upon each other in my head. From the summer course work, the series of continuous exams, doctor’s appointments, UC application, and finally, last night. Last night. I can only describe it as the epitome of a living nightmare. It was an immeasurable terror; it was a horrible nightmare that had come to life. I had trouble putting everything into words. It was like some haunted house gone completely berserk. It wasn’t something that belonged in this world—dark walls seeping hot wax and burnt humanoids, glistening embers and screeching throats, blood-dripping bodies and twisted ligaments.
I kept replaying everything, the bits and pieces that kept resurfacing and connecting felt so real and more unbelievable as I couldn’t make any sense of it.
“Grandma,” I finally said. “What happened?” I asked her, just to verify my own comprehension of the situation, as I had no means of explaining why the walls had begun to melt away or why I felt as if I had been attacked.
“Sam, sweetie!” she finally yelped in excitement, because I had responded to her. She placed both her palms against my cheeks gently, as if she was checking to reassure herself that I was still intact, despite the bandages and tubes filled with fluids that were attached to my skin. “Sam, you were screaming in your room last night. As if someone was torturing you. The screaming woke me up, and I rushed to your room, but when I got there, the door was locked shut. The only spare keys were in your room, so I couldn’t get in. I began trying to break down the door, but you only screamed louder and louder. But I couldn’t find a way to get in, and then I heard things getting knocked over, and I kept calling your name, but you wouldn’t respond. And then I heard something break,” she slowed down, as if she was beginning to hesitate. “That’s when I called the police. I was worried, because the whole time, I only heard you screaming and smashing things, and it didn’t seem like anyone else was in there with you.”
I remained silent. I could not even fathom a means to explain what I had experienced in that darkening room.
“By the time the police took down the door,” she continued, “almost everything was knocked down and scattered onto the ground, and you had a huge gash on the right side of your head. We can’t make anything of what happened, Sam. The police department has been investigating whether or not someone broke in,” she said in a serious tone.
She paused and pulled her hands away from me. She looked down, and then looked deeply into my eyes. She bit her aged lips and she trembled a little. She wanted to tell me something important, but she was hesitant. This was the first time I had ever seen her like this, and it hurt me to see her looking so distraught. It was a result of aging. And it hurt me to see her trembling physique, as she struggled to give me some sort of vital information.
“Sam,” she began. “I have something to tell you,” she paused, and her voice dropped, as if she sounded crestfallen. “There are detectives at the house right now. And they also came to see your injuries too. They told me two very important things,” she paused again. Her mouth was becoming dry at this point, from so much talking. “They have evidence to believe that some of your wounds are from self-mutilation.”
A knot formulated in my throat once she said this. Why would I hurt myself? I asked myself. What would make them accuse me of something like that? And how? I have no memory of anything that could have remotely been mistaken for self-mutilation.
“The detectives suspect that you locked your own door,” my grandmother continued, “and they also found pieces of porcelain in your palms as well as blood under your nails. They are waiting for the results, but they believe that the scratches on your shoulders could have been self-inflicted.”
I looked at my sides and noticed that, under my scrubs, there was something wrapped around my right shoulder. I reached over to it and assessed that it was another bandage, along with feeling a stinging sensation as soon as I touched it.
“Sam,” my grandmother said slowly, as if giving me a scolding, but it was almost silent and sounded more like if she pitied me.
We both remained in silence. She looked downward at the ground, and I crossed my legs under the thin hospital sheets and was now sitting up. I was careful not to disrupt any of the tubes.
Finally, my grandma added, “The second thing that I need to tell you, Sam,” she paused to pucker her lips along with her slightly trembling jaw, “is that police are currently deciding on whether to classify me as a suspect for your ‘injuries.' They don’t know who did it just yet, or how, and even why it happened. But since I was the only other person in the house, they marked me as a suspect, and I will undergo interrogation soon. I don’t know how long I will be able to stay with you, Sam. I don’t think they will let me see you anymore,” she said with a defeated and embarrassed tone.
I felt as if I had been suddenly struck ill. My throat was in a knot from the disbelief, but from the bottom of my stomach, I managed to pull enough strength to almost screech, “No!”
“No!” I repeated myself, “Grandma, I need to tell you something,” I said quickly. I felt that I had very little time to explain myself under the circumstances; I didn’t want her to vanish from me if the authorities decided that she could have been a danger to me.
“Grandma,” I reiterated, “something happened last night!” I couldn’t find a means to explain it to her in a calm manner, because I felt rushed—maybe because if I didn’t tell her about the night before, I might not have the opportunity to tell her again.
“There wasn’t a burglar!” I reassured her in a restless tone. “It was really late, and I was working on my UC application. I was filling in my extracurricular activities that I had been involved in and the positions that I held in those activities, when all of a sudden, I remember getting very unfocused, and something was trying to convince me that I should go to sleep. First, I thought I was just contemplating to myself,” I continued, as my voice was becoming tremulous, “—that I was just telling myself to go to bed already, but I didn’t, because I had to submit my application. And I tried to keep typing, but this thing—it was a voice, Grandma!” I exclaimed, as my speech increased in disorganization and speed. “There was this voice in my head that wasn’t mine, and it was talking to me! It was telling me to go to sleep, and all of a sudden, it started questioning me and making me second-guess myself. And then,” my tongue had seemed to have tied itself, as if the strange development had seemed to derange my speech, and more importantly, my ability to rationalize.
“And then the voic
e started insulting me! It started to tell me that I was withering, and that I was despicable, and that I was embarrassing, and it started telling me that I was inadequate. And then more voices started speaking to me, and they called me pathetic, and an imposter. And then all of a sudden, everything started turning into this terrible dream. The room started getting dark, and my window seemed to crawl with thick dark branches that barricaded me inside my room. And the door flew shut and locked itself. And I was going to go and open it, but that’s when I noticed it: The walls began to warp, and then these mouths and eyes began emerging from the walls. The mouths began to screech and groan—the noises weren’t human! It was the shriek of some sort of beast! And before I knew it, faces began to morph! And then they started to crawl out of the walls and they were like these deformed people crawling out of melting wax and they started screaming my name! And then—”
Suddenly, a door swung open and banged against the wall, cutting off my rushed and panicked explanation. There was an immense pressure mounted on my head, particularly in the temple area. And then that’s when I realized that there was this obnoxious beeping. It wouldn’t shut up, and it disrupted my concentration. When I made a second assessment that the door had swung open, a nurse had appeared in a state of rush, as if something of critical importance had occurred. And she dashed over to my grandmother and me so quickly, it seemed like she leapt towards us. What was going on? I remember asking myself. Then I became aware that the beeping machine was going unusually fast and seemed to have grown louder when I realized that that beeping machine was measuring my heartbeat. My palms were sweating and when I looked down, I discovered that I had been clutching to my grandmother’s forearm. And as I shifted my eyes up her arm and to her face, her expression finally broke through my mania. She was completely still and had this extremely concerned expression. It made me uneasy. Was she still disappointed, did she pity me, was she scared of me, was she skeptical, did she not believe me, or was she searching for that girl inside me that she loved? What was she doing? I demanded.
My heart was pounding against my thin ribcage. My heart was running wild, and so was my reasoning.
“Grandma!” I shouted, “Say something,” I begged as my voice cracked. My voice was fading, but I still shouted. I wanted to be heard.
The loud beeps seemed to camouflage the commands from the nurse.
“Ma’am,” the nurse echoed, “you need to let go. You are going to hurt yourself.”
I felt my hand being nudged and the nurse’s hand trying to peel my fingers from my grandmother. I don’t know how or why I had been clutching to her so tightly.
“Grandma, say something!” I demanded. What was wrong with her? I remember asking myself. Did she not believe me? Would no one believe my story? My nightmare?
“Don’t you believe me?” I shouted. I started crying, and finally I felt myself slipping from her.
“I’m not crazy!” I wheezed amidst the lack of air and the stream of tears.
More nurses arrived in my room. I felt myself becoming drowsy, as one nurse tinkered with one of the tubes connected to my blood streams. My head fell back onto my pillow, and I watched as a nurse and some sort of parole officer escorted my grandmother out of the room.
My eyes rolled back and I felt my cheeks covered in a stream of tears.
Chapter 27
I never saw my grandmother again while I was at that hospital. She never came back to visit, and I didn’t hear from her anymore.
The entire time that I was at the Chickadee Hospital, I had a question burrowed deep in the back of my head that ate me from the inside out, a question that the doctors or nurses could never find a solution for. Not with all their medicines or surgeries.
Why did she never come back for me?
Had I gone completely insane to the point that my grandmother lost all interest in me? Or had the police restricted her from seeing me?
When I finally got to talk to a real doctor and not just a nurse, I asked him why I had been admitted to a hospital.
He introduced himself as Dr. Chen, and he explained that I was in a general hospital known as Chickadee Hospital.
After reading over a report, he explained that I had been admitted to the hospital because of an injury, and that I was under 24/7-intensive care. He gave me a summary of my report—that I had stitches on the right side of my head, and that I also had shards of porcelain removed as they were embedded into the side of my head. There were also some minor bruises and cuts on my body as well, but they were not as serious. But most importantly, I was under intensive care, because they had been monitoring my brain activity. The nurses and doctors were not one hundred percent assured that I would be okay. They were running tests and checking for various complications. Through the course of my time there, they checked for any severe brain damage, excess fluid building up in my concussion, memory loss, or any other complications that could have arisen.
Within the first week of the incident, I spoke to two male detectives who were gathering my side of the story, not that there was any crime that had been committed in the first place. Our interaction was mostly a series of question and answer responses. They asked me where I had been and what I was doing. Why I had been up so late, and what I was working on. Why my door was locked, and if I remembered why I had been injured. I explained that I had been seeing and hearing unusual things. They asked me if I had consumed any drugs, and I said no. As the detectives continued asking questions, they became slightly reluctant to write my description of the ember creatures. As I explained what happened, they gave each other strange looks a few times, but they wrote it down anyway.
They also asked me about my relationship with my grandmother and suddenly, I felt overwhelmed by the idea that I had not heard from her in so long. I felt slightly desolate and hostile towards her, but I also wondered where she was and if she was okay. I explained to them that we had a healthy relationship and that she had never harmed me. When I asked them where she was, they were not allowed to disclose that information, or any information in general.
Later that day, the nurses asked me for a urine sample. The detectives must have asked for a urine test to make sure that I didn’t consume any illegal substances. But I didn’t mind.
When my results came back, nothing out of the ordinary came up.
Chapter 28
A week after I had talked to the two detectives, one of them came back, but this time with a different partner. The detective explained that the woman that he was working with was a forensic psychologist. Together they collected further information from me, but for the first time, they were willing to give me some information on my case.
The forensic psychologist informed me that her name was Dr. Sanchez and explained that she worked in the criminal justice system and civil courts. She also explained that she provided therapy to some of the victims that she met. If I remember correctly, she called it psychotherapy.
Dr. Sanchez explained to me that one of the main reasons that she was seeing me was because I was a minor and that any harm, either from a suspect or myself, was a serious issue that could not be taken lightly.
I told her that no one that I knew would hurt me, and she asked me if I had done the injury to myself, and I explained that I had attacked a creature with a lamp.
She, of course, had the report from the detectives that I met, but I suppose that she wanted to ask me more in depth about the creatures and also to hear about the incident for herself.
She asked me to tell her everything, and for the first time, I told someone the nightmare from start to finish. I wasn’t cut off half way, and it wasn’t a ‘we ask you questions, you tell us what we need to hear’ interaction. She let me talk about everything that night and encouraged me not to omit any important details.
I told her about how I was an intelligent girl and was an academic enthusiast. I told her about how stressed I was, and I told her about my UC application. I told her about anxieties, and I told her about the first
time I started talking to a voice late into the night. How I was struggling to complete an AP Statistics assignment, and how I suddenly begun talking to a voice that I had assumed to be my own, and I told her about the first time I saw a burnt figure walking outside my window, which I ignored on the account that I had been extremely exhausted. And lastly, I told her about the night of the incident, every last detail, from the moment the door flew shut, to the moment when I smashed a porcelain lamp against a creature crawling into my mouth, and how I felt blood running down my head before I passed out.
She wrote notes about almost every piece of information that I told her about.
She thanked me for being cooperative with her and told me that she would help keep me updated as more information came up. She was very comforting to me and treated me like a minor, and I felt odd; because, just this once, I liked being treated like a little kid—having people that I had never met before in my life care about me so much simply because I was young. It made me feel content, something that I have not had the luxury of feeling in a very long time.
Right as she left, I remember asking her, “Excuse me, Dr. Sanchez,” and a bit shyly too. “Have you heard anything about my grandmother?”
She looked over at the other detective, but at this point, I began having suspicions that he was a social worker. They gave each other a glance, and Dr. Sanchez finally said that several events had developed since I had seen my grandmother.
The detective then took the liberty of explaining the circumstances to me.
“Well, here’s the thing, Sam,” the detective said, “your grandmother, Cheryl Grey, is considered a suspect and is not allowed to visit you or communicate with you in anyway, and we advise that you do the same. Contact between the two of you is prohibited at the moment, especially if she is dangerous.”
I didn’t comment on the ‘dangerous’ remark, as I did not want to argue with them and they knew that I did not consider her a threat anyway. And also, there is the open-ended speculation that I did, in fact, hurt myself. Either self-mutilation or accidental injury, there was a high probability that I could possibly be a danger to myself according to their earlier reports.
Stand Tall My Sweet Dandelion Girl Page 12