“Leave it alone love. It’s helping you breathe.”
I force my eyes to focus so I can make sense of my surroundings. I think I’m in an ambulance, an EMT flicks a light in my eyes, causing me to recoil slightly, as he asks me who I am.
“Paige,” I say, my voice muffled by the mask on my face. “Paige Larsen.”
“Ok Paige. You’re in an ambulance on your way to the hospital. We’re going to take care of you ok. Do you know how long you’ve been pregnant for?”
“Pregnant? I’m not…” I mumble, confused.
“It’s alright. We’re almost there.”
Pain radiates through my middle again, and I start crying. “Make it stop!” I wail.
“Paige, we need you to tell us what drugs you’ve been using.”
“I don’t… I don’t… argh!” I yell again. “What’s happening to me?!”
“You seem to be in premature labour.”
I let out a howling cry as my abdomen screams again.
“It’s alright Paige. We’re almost there.”
***
When we arrive at the hospital, I’m wheeled straight through, as the EMT’s tell the doctors and nurses everything they know about me. I get asked again what drugs I’ve been taking, and I’m really not sure. But I don’t think I’ve had any for a day or two. Not since I found Maxine.
As we burst through a set of doors, my pains are getting closer together, and my back feels like it’s locked into one big painful knot. These feelings can’t be normal. I feel like I’m dying.
Through my painful moans, I’m poked and prodded. Checked and questioned. Although, I don’t have any answers. I’ve been living in a drugged out state for so long now. I don’t know anything…
A doctor comes to stand beside me. “Paige, it seems as though something is wrong with your baby. It’s coming far too early. Is there someone we can call who can come and be with you? The father? A friend or family member perhaps?”
“I don’t…no. I have no one.” I think back, trying to recall who the father might be. Numerous grunting male faces flash through my mind. I squeeze my eyes shut tight. Blocking them out. I feel sick.
“Ok,” is all she says in response.
Another pain rips through me, and I clutch at the cool metal edging on the bed as I scream out. The sound more akin to the soundtrack of a horror movie.
“It’s coming,” another woman says as she looks between my legs.
“No!” I grunt through the pain. “No. Please. No.”
“I’m sorry. We can’t stop it.”
I drop my head back, and grit my teeth, unable to stop the primal moans and grunts from escaping my throat. But my eyes are closed as I wish for this all to stop. It’s too much.
I have no idea what day it is. I have no idea what month it is. For the first time since I was taken to Reggie’s I’m completely lucid, and I’ve awoken to a nightmare.
The reality of what’s happening hits me like a ton of stone that lands firmly on my chest. How could I not know I was pregnant? I’m ashamed. Ashamed that I was so busy getting high, that I didn’t even notice my body changing.
“Argh!” I growl through my clenched jaw, as my body forces me to bear down. Tears burn a hot trail of despair as they stream out of my eyes. I feel it, I feel everything.
“No!” I scream as I feel an exiting from my body. “No!”
When it’s over, there’s nothing.
No crying, no gurgling, nothing.
“Show me,” I whisper.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse whispers, as she hands me my child, wrapped up in a blanket that dwarves its body. “She didn’t make it.”
“Oh,” I breathe as I look over my daughter’s tiny blue face and raise a shaking hand to gently stroke her nose, so perfectly formed.
I carefully unwrap her and touch every part of her body. Her fingers, her toes. Everything is perfect, and small, and… still.
“What have I done?!” I gasp, my vision blurs as torrents of tears flow from my eyes. I hold my little girl to me, and I howl. The noises coming from me are the primordial wallows of a woman who just lost the final piece of her soul.
No one in the room says a thing as they move about, quietly doing their jobs. The nurse beside me wipes at her eyes as she pushes back my hair, stroking me like a mother would her child.
It makes me ache even more.
Chapter Thirty-Three
While I sleep it’s easy to forget where I am and everything that has happened, but the moment I wake and hear the constant noise of the hospital ward, I remember.
I’m a murderer.
Tears fall silently from my eyes, as I roll over onto my side and press my face into the pillow.
Why wasn’t I the one that died?
Why did it have to be an innocent child?
Chapter Thirty-Four
Over the coming days, I’m given a wealth of information about my own health, my baby’s, and why she didn’t survive.
Of course, it was the drugs. They tell me this, like it was actually possible it could have been something else.
A woman comes to visit me to talk about my ‘options’. She is trying to be reassuring, by telling me that I’ll still be able to have more children in time. But I don’t want to have children. I don’t deserve to have children.
I’m told that I’m lucky I didn’t catch any other sort of disease from my drug use and promiscuity. I wonder if that’s true. Is there anything about my situation that’s ‘lucky’?
I ask if I can have a hysterectomy, but I’m told I can’t make that decision until after I’m eighteen, and even then, they’re unlikely to do it.
It turns out that I spent over six months as one of Reggie’s girls. All that time and I have very little memory of it. When I think back, it’s just a lot of flashes involving faces and acts I’d prefer not to think about.
I’m being transferred to a rehab facility, so I can get the ‘help I need’. Really, I just want to lay down and die, but there’s something in this world that wants me to live – as long as I live miserably.
Finally, I am officially in the system and so is my baby. She was developed enough that I had to name her. I also have to bury her.
I’ve called her Phoenix, in the hopes that one day she will be born again to another mother, who is far more capable of nurturing her than I ever was or could be.
I need to have hope in that. Otherwise, what was the point in all this?
The clothes I came in wearing, never came back to me. I have a feeling that they were so disgusting they took them somewhere and burned them.
Standing in the small hospital bathroom, I dress in some clothes I’ve been given and ready myself to leave. The girl I see in the mirror, now holds very little resemblance to the girl I remember. This one is pale, with large sunken eyes and colourless lips. Her hair is long and matted, and her bones can be seen clearly through her skin. This isn’t me.
When I step out of the bathroom, there is a woman out there waiting for me. She carries a clipboard and a small travel bag and introduces herself as Justine.
“I’ll be taking you to your new home today,” she tells me, smiling broadly. I suspect she is trying to gain my trust, but I’m all out of that. I should have stopped trusting the moment my parents kicked me out of home. But I was stupid. I trusted, and I trusted like I actually believed I might belong somewhere. That someone might actually want me. But it was all a bunch of sordid lies. I was naive - now look where it’s got me.
I’m nothing. I’m no one.
I nod my head curtly, and follow along behind her as she leads the way out of the hospital. I notice a sad look some of the nurses give me as I leave the ward, they feel sorry for me. I really don’t think they should.
Justine tries to make conversation with me during the hour it takes us to drive to the facility. But I don’t give her much in response. I seem to be all out of words. There’s simply nothing more to say.
“We’re here,
” she says, as we pull up in front of a large white brick building, surrounded by neatly kept gardens.
I get out of the car and look over what Justine called my new home. It isn’t much of a home at all - it just looks like another hospital. As we walk through the front doors, it’s more of the same. Everything is white and sterile, and it seems like misery radiates off the walls. I don’t want to be here.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“How do you feel after laying your child to rest?” my therapist asks me, the day after Phoenix’s funeral.
I blink rapidly as the memory fills my mind.
I’ve only been in rehab for a couple of days, but I was allowed to say goodbye to the daughter I’ll never know. I was escorted off the premises to attend her publicly funded funeral.
I stood there. On my own, staring down at the tiny coffin that held her body. No one was there, no one cared. They didn’t know her, or even know of her existence.
Her burial was witnessed by myself, my case worker, and the minister presiding over the service. That’s it. That alone is devastating to me. Her death is so significant. I feel like the whole world should be mourning in the streets.
With a bunch of flowers purchased from the service station on the way, I farewelled my precious girl, and vowed to never take another drug again and never to bed another man. The cost is just too severe.
“Paige?” my therapist prompts me, my eyes come to focus as a drop of water slips from my cheek and splashes on my hand. I touch my face to find I’ve been crying.
“I’m sorry,” I say, wiping at my tears and frowning slightly. “Um… what was the question?”
“I asked how you feel about the funeral yesterday.”
I move my eyes so they meet his with a steady gaze. “Nothing. I feel nothing.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Group therapy. I’d love to know who the genius is that came up with this one. I feel like I’m sitting in a room competing for the title of ‘The Most Fucked up’. But we’re all fucked up – just in different ways.
“Paige?” Our group counsellor, Edith, calls on me. “Do you think you’re ready to tell us how you got here?”
“In a car,” is all I say in return. It’s been almost a month, and I’m yet to speak up. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to share my experience. I sit here, listening to others breakdown and cry, as they tell their stories. Each one is sad. Each one is hopeless. I don’t want to add mine to the mix. It’s hard enough listening to theirs.
“How does it make everyone feel when Paige gives us an answer like that?” she says to the group.
“It makes me feel like she thinks this is all a joke. That she doesn’t take this seriously,” says Vicky, a small twenty-five-year-old Islander girl, whose voice is thick and gravelly and betrays the fragility of her size.
“I think she’s just being honest,” Liam, a nineteen year old high school dropout, says. Everyone calls him ‘Poor Little Rich Boy’ because he comes from money. But he’s just as lost as the rest of us. “By car is exactly how she got here.”
“Yeah, you would think that. You’re not exactly the best sharer here either,” another girl, Kerri, says.
“I just don’t have anything to say. I took too many drugs. End of story.”
“What? You think you’re better than us. Just ‘cause you’re some rich kid who’s had an easy life?”
“You don’t know anything about my life,” he spits.
“Yeah. ’cause you’re too chicken shit to say anything about it.”
“Fuck off Kerri. We can’t all be tortured souls like you.”
“Alright. Alright. That’s enough,” Edith calls out, holding her hands up to tell everyone to quiet down. “This isn’t actually helping anyone.”
The argument continues regardless. People are on edge in here. It seems like we all took drugs to forget something. Remembering is painful. It’s easier to be angry.
Liam stands and points his finger, moving across everyone in our haphazard circle as he speaks. “Just because you all have a ‘woe is me’ tale to tell. Doesn’t mean I have to as well. I’m sick of listening to your bitching. I’m sick of listening to your fucking judgement. If I don’t want to talk. I don’t fucking have to, and neither does she.” His finger lands on me, and I wish I could shrink down in my seat. I don’t want to be singled out. “I’m sick of this fucking place!” he yells, kicking his chair back from the circle and walking off.
“No smoking indoors Liam,” Edith calls after him.
“Fuck you,” he throws over his shoulder, lighting a cigarette anyway. He thumps his hands against the glass doors and pushes his way out into to the garden, blowing a lungful of smoke inside through the gap as it closes.
“Well, I think we might let that be the end to our session for the day,” Edith announces, as he walks out of view.
Relieved, I stand to leave, picking up my jacket from the back of my chair and swinging it around my body as I slip my arms inside.
“Don’t think you’ve gotten away with not sharing Paige. Eventually, you’ll need to talk. If it isn’t in here, then you’ll need to do it in the private sessions. You won’t recover properly without it,” Edith informs me quietly. Although, I don’t respond beyond staring at her blankly.
Pressing her lips together in a tight smile, she squeezes my arm gently before turning her attention towards Kerri, who’s complaining about the way Liam spoke to her.
I lean down to the ground and pick my book up off the floor. Reading is my one pleasure. There is a small library in the facility, where we can check out books to read in our down time. There is a lot of down time. Books help me escape and avoid talking to anyone. I don’t want to make friends. I want to do my time here and get the hell out.
I’ve noticed few of the girls reading romance novels. I can’t even think romantically right now. Instead, I read big heavy fantasy novels. I like to be transported to another world where magic is a possibility, because this one just plan sucks.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
When my ninety days are up, Justine returns to collect me. I’m free from drugs. I’ve put on some weight, and I’m about to be taken to my new accommodation.
“Happy Birthday for last week,” she says to me, as I get in the car.
“Thanks I guess,” I reply, clicking my seatbelt across my body.
She starts to drive and make small talk along the way. Inwardly, I roll my eyes. I’m not interested in going through this again.
“I’m told you weren’t very cooperative in therapy,” she says after a while.
I bounce my shoulder in reply and look out the window. It’s something they were constantly on my back about. They wanted me to talk. They wanted to hear all about my past and get to me spill my guts about everything I’ve done.
But, I didn’t want to talk about anything that’s happened to me in my life. I still don’t want to talk about it. It’s a darkness in my soul that no amount of talking is going to turn light. So I don’t see the point.
But everyone in there talked. Even Liam started talking after a while. They all talked about the things they did to get their hands on drugs, and what they did while on them. No-one’s story is quite the same as mine.
I didn’t share. I didn’t make friends. I preferred everyone to think I was a standoffish bitch, instead of having those people, who have gone through addiction the same as me, actually look at me with pity in their eyes. I don’t think I could recover from that.
The more I listened to them talk, the more I realised just how unforgivable everything I’ve done is. I don’t even want to think about it.
“I’m sure this sounds like a broken record Paige, but you’re going to have to talk eventually,” she reminds me.
“Where are we going?” I ask her in response, hopeful of a subject change.
“Lemongrove. Now that you’re eighteen and officially an adult. You’ll be living on your own in a flat there. You’ve been set up with some furnitu
re, and you’ll be going to TAFE to complete your high school certificate. There are lots of programs that will help you get a job when you’re done. But for now, you need to stay clean, go to school, and meet with me once a week.”
“What if I don’t do any of that?”
“Then you lose your assistance. Simple as that.”
I can’t believe I’m going back to school. Just the thought of studying again feels a little overwhelming.
I have no idea what I’m going to do when the time comes to find a job. I’m still not sure my life is worth living.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Have you made any friends yet?” Justine asks me during one of my home visits. She comes to visit me once a month now as my progress is very good in her books. I have to show her everything I’m doing, and I have to pee in a cup for a drug test to prove that I’m still clean. But other than that, my life is becoming pretty normal.
“No,” I reply.
“Paige, you need friends.”
“No I don’t. I’m fine on my own. Trusting people is what got me into this mess. I won’t be making that mistake again.”
She sighs and moves on to her next question. “How are your NA meetings going?”
“I haven’t been to one,” I admit, looking down at the toe of my shoe. I know I’m supposed to go, but I just don’t want to spend my nights sitting in a room with people telling me their sob stories – I had enough of that in rehab. There is no way I’m touching a drug again. I just don’t feel like I need to go.
“It’s a part of your program Paige. You have to go.”
“Fine I’ll go,” I lie. I won’t go. I don’t want to go at all. The meetings are anonymous, how are they going to know if I’m there or not?
“That’s excellent,” she grins. “It just so happens, there is one on tonight at the Community Centre. I’ll take you.”
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