She Wouldn't Change a Thing

by Sarah Adlakha

  “Let’s give it a rest for today. I’d like to get another MRI to see if your brain has changed at all, but I think we should wait for a day or so before we go back there.”

  “I have to go back.” She laid her hand over his arm, and through the gripping pain that shot up her left wrist, her fingers tightened. “Please,” she said. “I’ll do as many MRIs as you want. I’ll do anything. Just take me back.”

  “I don’t even know what could happen to you if we did that again. You weren’t even under my guidance anymore. It was almost like you took over the hypnosis.”

  “I promise,” she begged. “This time I’ll do everything you tell me to do. I’ll listen to your voice and I’ll come back the second you clap your hands.”

  “I don’t know, Maria.” He glanced toward the door to her room again before he turned back to her. “I can’t believe no one came in here with all that screaming.”

  “Please, Dr. Johnstone. You of all people should understand my desperation.”

  “I do. But we can’t mess this up.”

  “Mess what up?” She loosened her grip on his arm. “I was there. I could feel it. It’s working.”

  “There’s one condition.” He raised his finger between them, just like Will had done on that fateful night when Maria promised she’d stay away from the storage unit. “You go where I take you,” he said. “And this time I’m taking you to the hospital where you saw your husband. To see if your family is there waiting for you.”

  Maria nodded. Her instinct was pulling her back to the storage unit, the last place she could remember going before she came back, but the lure of her family was too great. It was too much to resist.

  “We’ll use the same technique as last time,” he said, positioning his finger between her arms and talking her out of the ache in her shoulders. By the time her hands were forced together like magnets and she could see only the air bouncing before her, her mind was quick to void itself of sensation.

  “Good, Maria,” he said, his voice echoing in the abyss of her mind. “When I allow you to see, you will find yourself surrounded by the people you love. Your husband will be sitting by your bedside, holding your hand. Your daughters will be coloring pictures for you and taping them to the wall by your bed.” He paused briefly, taking in a sharp influx of air before sighing it away. “You see them now.”

  From above her body, Maria watched as machines and tubes pumped air into her lungs and fluid through her veins. Will stroked her hand, kissing each of her knuckles, while her daughters held colorful pictures over her seemingly lifeless body, begging her to awaken.

  Dr. Johnstone’s voice boomed through her mind, and despite her promises, she fought to block out his words, which pounded through her head. It was her family she wanted to hear; it was their touches she longed to feel.

  “Stay with me, Maria,” he commanded. “You’re surrounded by the love of your family, and if you listen closely, you’ll hear the voices of your children.”

  That’s not what Mommy looks like.

  Emily’s laughter filled the air as Charlotte held the picture up for Will to see. His mouth opened and spilled out laughter that her ears couldn’t hear.

  Here, Daddy. You draw a picture of Mommy.

  Will took the crayons, a smile dancing through his eyes as he glanced up at Maria from time to time, creating an image of her on the paper in his lap. She had forgotten what a beautiful father he was. A scholar for Charlotte’s incessant thirst for knowledge and a comedian for Emily’s insatiable hunger for laughter. He was a fatherless boy who had turned into the most intuitive and nurturing father Maria had ever known. Why hadn’t she ever told him that? Why did it take this tragedy for her to see it?

  “Good, Maria.” Dr. Johnstone’s voice reverberated through the room like an uninvited guest. “If you concentrate hard enough, you’ll feel the touch of your husband’s skin on your own.”

  With the picture complete, Will held it up for the girls to see, their giggles at their father’s drawing ringing through the air. He set the crayons aside before he reached for Maria’s hand, her skin prickling with anticipation. His touch was softer than any she had ever felt, and if Dr. Johnstone had given her permission to cry, she would have wept. Her eyes drifted shut, blocking out the image of her family so she could focus only on the sensation of Will’s skin upon her own. His hands swept through her hair and over her face, down her arms and into her fingertips.

  Mommy, look!

  Charlotte was standing before her when she forced her eyes open, Will’s picture in her hand.

  This is what Daddy thinks you look like.

  It was a crayon sketch of a woman with black hair, lying in a hospital bed, with her eyes shut and her family by her side. The covers draped over her body were flat against her stomach, with no signs of a baby in her belly.

  Where is he?

  Her voice pounded through her own ears, drowning out Dr. Johnstone’s and the racket he was making as he tried to force her back to him.

  Whack!

  An agonizing pain shot through her left arm as she grabbed at the covers, ripping them away.

  “Where is he?” she screamed.

  Whack!

  “Maria!” Her eyes opened to Dr. Johnstone’s arms shaking her wildly as his attention bounced back and forth from her to the door. “Maria, wake up!”

  “Where is he?” she yelled, and as her hands tore at her shirt, ripping it from her body, a nurse barged into the room, calling for Haldol. “Where’s my baby?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE ACHE IN MARIA’S WRIST CREPT up her arm and settled into her shoulder. The splint was back, and the solitary lightbulb that stared down at her from the ceiling blanketed the room in a strange glow. She pulled her head from the barren mattress and her eyes skimmed over the padded walls of the room. A sealed door with a tiny barred window offered the only view to the outside world. It was called a quiet room, or a seclusion room, and though she’d never been in that particular one, they were all the same.

  We’re not doing this to punish you.

  It’s for your own safety.

  That’s what she used to say to her patients who found the rules of the psych unit too restricting, but it sure felt like punishment.

  Her head throbbed as she walked her hands across the walls, the padding cool beneath her fingers. “Can I have some water, please?” She choked on the words, her throat parched and swollen, before a Dixie cup with a swallow of water found its way through the bars and into her hands. She pushed it back empty. “More. Please.”

  After five more gulps of water, she dropped the cup on the other side of the door and mumbled a thank-you, to which there was no reply. The Haldol, though diluted, continued to trickle through her veins, casting a haze over her thoughts that clouded her memory.

  She’d been at the storage unit. That she could remember. She’d wanted to go back, but Dr. Johnstone wouldn’t let her, instead taking her to her family, where she’d realized that whatever happened to her in that storage unit had also taken her son.

  “Did you get some sleep last night?” Dr. Johnstone’s voice floated through the bars before reaching her ears. A gray stubble had sprouted from his face, and his eyes were weary and bleak beneath the dark shadows that encircled them. Maria could almost pity him.

  “Probably too much, with that Haldol,” she replied.

  “Can I come in?” He fumbled with the lock until the door swung wide into the tiny cubicle of a room, and Maria shrugged, stepping over the sheetless mattress and sliding to the floor. The pain that pulsed through her head was intractable, and the light that gushed through the gaping door of her cell, merciless. Dr. Johnstone slid onto the concrete floor beside her. They were a ragged pair, unshaven and filthy, their lives veiled in secrecy and lies.

  “Bet you never thought you’d be locked up in one of these,” Dr. Johnstone said, his hyena-like laughter ringing through her aching head. Somehow, he’d managed to navigate with finesse
this world that was waiting to devour her, this world she had no interest in surviving.

  “You did really well yesterday with the hypnosis,” he continued. “I don’t think it will take many more sessions to get you home, but I’ll have to get Dr. Anderson to agree to back off on the psychotropic medications she’s prescribing to you, because they can sometimes block the mind from traveling freely.”

  Maria nodded, her eyes landing on the newly placed bandage on her arm. It was white and tidy, a stark contrast to the cyanotic and swollen fingers that protruded from it. They were fingers that belonged on a cadaver, not a seventeen-year-old girl, and as she studied the bluish tint of her skin, she couldn’t shake the image of Beth’s lifeless body lying in the grave. It was the fifth of May, and the little girl had only four more days to live.

  “What kind of a person would let a little girl die?”

  She could see Dr. Johnstone nodding out of the corner of her eye. They hadn’t talked about her purpose, other than to acknowledge that she had one, and Maria was ashamed to bring it up, like a vulnerable part of her was being exposed.

  “You’re having second thoughts,” he said matter-of-factly. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “My husband’s little sister is going to die in four days if I don’t do something,” she said. “And yesterday I was so consumed with getting back to my family that I was willing to just let that happen. What kind of person does that make me?”

  “The kind of person who wants her family back,” he said. “I don’t judge anyone anymore. Not when I’ve seen the decisions that some of us have had to make.”

  “But she’s just a child.”

  “People die every day.” He held his hands up before dropping them into his lap. “People of every age and sex and religion. You can’t save the world.”

  “But she’s not just some person. I was sent here to prevent her death, and I almost let her die. I have to go to Ohio and find my husband before you send me back. I have to warn him.”

  “You can’t.”

  “What do you mean?” she said. “Why not?”

  “It’s either your family or the little girl. You can’t do both. Changing just one person’s destiny will change the lives of hundreds of people around them, maybe even thousands, and it will rewrite a new destiny for you, too. If you make this change, if you do what you were sent here to do, you’re letting your other life go forever.”

  It took her a minute to hear his words, to really understand the implications of them and to comprehend what he was telling her, and while she didn’t want to believe him, she couldn’t stop her mind from seeing the truth. If she unwound the tangled threads of Will’s life that had landed him in her arms, she could see that her husband had faced one series of unfortunate events after another, all stemming from the death of his little sister. But it was those catastrophes that had led him to a life that included Maria. The death of his sister meant one fewer mouth to feed and allowed him to quit his job at the factory and focus on school. The suicide of his mother, a direct result of his sister’s murder, took him to a childless uncle who insisted that a college education was his only ticket to freedom. The death of that uncle gave him the motivation and the financial resources to make his dreams of medical school a reality.

  “It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” Dr. Johnstone said. “Having to make this kind of decision?”

  He sighed into his hands, which were folded together before him as if in prayer. He didn’t seem the praying type, but if someone had walked in at that moment, they would have mistaken him for a pious man. Maria wondered, for the first time in years, if perhaps there was a God listening and she should have been saying her own prayers all along. But why was He punishing her? What kind of a God would force her to make a choice like this? And in the end, who would she sacrifice, her family or Beth? She was a monster, either way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “I CAN TEACH YOU HOW TO crochet.”

  Maria pulled her eyes from the window and followed the voice to the little girl sitting in the corner of the dayroom with her. Dr. Johnstone had promised to return before noon so they could discuss the hypnosis treatments with her parents, but so far there were no signs of him. Her outburst during the last session, and her stint in the quiet room, had put everyone on high alert, and there was talk about putting the treatments on hold. Dr. Johnstone said he would take care of it, get everyone back on board, and Maria was ashamed to admit, even to herself, that she hoped he’d be successful. She wanted to go home. She didn’t want to grapple with right versus wrong, and she was thankful that Henry was no longer beside her in the hospital to judge her for it.

  “I can teach you how to crochet,” the little girl repeated, an unidentifiable mess of knotted yarn resting in her lap. “It’s really not hard, and my doctor says it’s therapeutic.”

  She couldn’t have been more than ten, with tufts of orange frizz sprouting from her head like weeds and skin so pale it defied nature. The silver braces on her teeth gleamed in the sunlight when she smiled. One day she would be beautiful, but adolescence would undoubtedly be cruel.

  “That’s wonderful.” Maria nodded to the project in her lap. “Is it a scarf?”

  “You can tell?” She held up the misshapen rows of uneven stitches, her eyes unable to hide her delight. “You’re the first person to figure out what it is.”

  Maria winked at her. “Of course it’s a scarf,” she said. “Anyone can see that.”

  The little girl went back to work with a newfound determination, her hands delicate and deft, as Maria looked on, her heart breaking for all the things she had yet to teach her children: to crochet, and to read, and to ride bikes, and to do all the things she was always too busy to do. If it was a lesson someone was trying to teach her, she had learned it. She was ready to go home. She would be better. She would promise, swear on her life, to do whatever she was commanded to do, just to get home. She was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t notice the nurse standing above her until she spoke.

  “Maria?” she said. “You have a visitor in your room. Your grandfather.”

  While the complexity of the news begged an explanation, Maria somehow had the prudence to bite her tongue. Even as she rose from her chair and followed the nurse down the corridor and back to her room, she knew better than to open her mouth. There was no way this woman could have known that Maria had no living grandfathers.

  The old man who was propped on the edge of her bed and staring out the window sat unmoving. The thin strands of white, downy hair that fashioned a halo around the crown of his head created a stark contrast to the mottled skin on his scalp, and the gathers of wrinkled skin that sagged off his bones looked like they had been folded and stitched into place. The bones themselves were so brittle, Maria wondered if they might break under the weight of a heavy gaze. When his eyes landed on her, though, she had no doubt that his mind was sharp.

  “Grandpa.” Maria draped an arm over his shoulder as she eased onto the bed beside him, her fingers running over the jutting edges of his scapula. The old man pulled her into an embrace with the strength of a man half his age.

  “Maria, my dear.” He breathed in her image as he held her at arm’s length. “Look at you.”

  In silence, they measured each other, the old man with the deceptively frail body and the middle-aged woman with the deceptively young one. The nurse paused at the door before she glanced back at the pair and smiled. “I’ll be just down the hall if you need me,” she said, pulling the door shut behind her and leaving the room to silence.

  Maria shifted her weight away from the man, rising from the bed and slipping onto the wooden chair across from him, neither whispering a word until they heard the click of the shutting door.

  “So,” she said, when she finally heard it. “Who are you?”

  His dentures glistened between them as his smile spread to his eyes, which were trained on Maria as if they were etching the details of her onto a canvas in his mind.r />
  “I’m George.”

  The chair creaked in the silence that followed, as Maria scooted herself forward on it. The man she’d written off as a mistake or a misunderstanding on the part of Dr. Johnstone was pretending to be her grandfather and was wearing an expression that could almost convince her they’d known each other forever.

  “How did you know I was here?” she asked.

  “You don’t remember me?”

  Her mind reeled with the explanation Dr. Johnstone had given her of the man named George who’d known where to find her. A man who was too sick to visit. A man he’d brushed aside as an afterthought. “Have we met?” she asked.

  “Once upon a time,” George replied.

  “Then why don’t I remember you?”

  “Give yourself time,” he said. “You will.”

  His eyes were the same deep brown as her daughter Emily’s, but rimmed with the blue halos of age, and as she sank into the depths of them, she could almost see her daughter sitting before her. Did this man know her daughter? Did he know the family she left behind? Had he come from the same world she’d been stolen from?

  “But why are you pretending to be my grandfather?”

  “No visitors allowed, per Dr. Johnstone’s orders. Except family. He told me when he came to visit me the other day.”

  The deceptions were stacking up in a precarious heap, threatening to topple like a house of cards built on sand, and warning Maria to back off. This was the man Dr. Johnstone was asking about when he wanted to know if she’d had any visitors. It wasn’t Henry, after all.

  “He doesn’t want me talking to you, does he?” Maria asked.

  “No,” George replied. “He doesn’t. He’s afraid I’ll convince you to do the right thing.”

  The right thing.

  There was a certain amount of shame to those words, and the guilt was suffocating. Did this man already know she was going to let a little girl die? She didn’t need to ask him what he meant by “the right thing.” She already knew. If Dr. Johnstone was trying to convince her to go home, then George was there to save a little girl’s life. She could feel the tug between the two men, the yin and the yang, each certain that his path was the one she should follow.