“No, I’ve just been really busy.” He smiled.
“Everything’s just fine – I’ll call you this afternoon.” But he didn’t.
I stared out the window and leaned out just enough to smell the air. The Green was full of students, studying and hanging out, and no one really noticed me. I closed my eyes and, for a moment, I just got caught up in the unbelievable rush that had come over me. I didn’t realize it, but I had started crying, thinking about Jonathan. I had tried three times again this week to call him, and he hadn’t returned any of my phone calls. Did he have a new girlfriend? Had he decided after we slept together that I was not the kind of girl that he wanted to be with?
I stepped back to lean on the windowsill, but forgot that I had left a spray can of furniture cleaner and the rag I was cleaning with on the floor behind me. All I could think about was Jonathan. Should I try to find him in person again? Maybe I should just come clean and tell him everything – that would explain the wild, crazy night. Maybe he thought that I was experienced and that’s what ran him off…
My foot caught the polish can and I slipped. I tried to catch the windowsill, but in a split second, but for what seemed like an eternity, I lost my balance and began to teeter. I didn’t realize that I was as high as I was on the meth that afternoon, but I was. The wind was still blowing in the window, but my focus was on the can that my foot was balancing on. Time stood still. The can went flying across the room and hit the wall. I watched it fly across the room. My foot came out from under me and my torso landed on the windowsill; and then my body followed, falling out the window. I saw the window above me, but never thought about the ground beneath me. Slowly, slowly, I fell – floated – to the ground beneath me. All three stories down onto the concrete patio on the first floor. It seemed like it took forever. I remember looking at a cloud that was surrounded by a million stars. I tried to count them and then, as if in a dream, I heard people screaming. My body slammed hard on the back. My head broke wide open. I could feel it open. I tried to move my arm, but it wouldn’t move. I saw blood in my eyes and then – blackness. Peaceful blackness. Nothingness.
Chapter Fourteen
I was asleep, but I was faintly asleep. I was aware of people around me, talking, but my eyes were closed. My head was buzzing and I could faintly hear voices, but I didn’t want to open my eyes. It felt so good just to be asleep. I reached up to scratch my nose, but my hand was restricted by something…
I opened my eyes and glanced around. I was in a hospital room, in a bed, and had two IV’s in my arms. I saw Sabrina lying on the foot of my bed, and the sun was just coming up outside my window. I couldn’t see very well – everything was really blurry, but I tried to look around the room. I turned my head and
“OW!! Oh God…” I thought to myself, turning my head felt like someone had taken a vice, put it on my head and twisted it as tight as it could go. I could see people on the other side of the room but I couldn’t make out who it was. I kicked my foot to try and wake up Sabrina – I just didn’t think to call out her name. Talking wasn’t even something that came to mind.
Sabrina stirred a bit and looked up at me.
“JASMINE!! Oh, my God…guys look…NURSE!!” She stepped outside the hospital door and started screaming for a nurse or a doctor or anyone. As I started to see more clearly, I could see mom – you could always count on mom being there – I was sure she had a can of chicken soup hidden in her bag, ready to whip out the Tupperware and put it in a microwave. If I was laying in a bed, then obviously I was sick. The other person walked up behind mom and put his hand on my leg. It was Jonathan. All I could wonder was why he was here – he was still not speaking to me.
Sabrina had come back into the room at this point and a doctor came into the room. He was an elderly gentleman with a kind face and a “belly that shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly”. I remember thinking “Is this Santa Claus?” and then my stupid thoughts were interrupted by everyone talking.
The doctor asked them to be quiet, but no one could quiet Sabrina or my mother.
“Jasmine, you had us so worried!!” Mom was crying and Sabrina was squeezing my feet.
I started searching my memory but really didn’t’ have time to think about how I had gotten there or who was standing with me. The doctor, followed by two other doctors, a nurse and an orderly, quickly took control of the situation and began checking monitors, IV lines, my vital signs and talking among each other.
“Hello, Ms. Stanton. My name is Dr. Broughman. I’ve been taking care of you for a few days – how are you feeling?”
I looked around the room. Monitors were everywhere. My body hurt all over and I tried to sit up and look a little bit, but couldn’t move.
“Hold it there, Seabisquit,” Jonathan laughed and patted my hand. I couldn’t see very clearly still, but as my eyes started to clear, and my mind began to comprehend, it was very clear that I was in a hospital room. I tried to scratch my eye, but my hand wouldn’t move. Nothing would move. I tried to talk, but my mouth was full of…of…something…for a moment I had a very scary flashback – unfamiliar for a moment, familiar for a moment – and I started to whine, wondering where I was, why I couldn’t move or talk and why I felt so fuzzy. Oh, God, not again. Tears started streaming down my face, but somewhere in the far recesses of my mind, I was able to reach logic and realize that I was somehow in a safe place where I was being cared for.
Jonathan continued to speak. “Sabrina, sweetie, how do you feel?” I looked at him and he was smiling, but it was a smile that you give to someone who has lost a loved one or been diagnosed with cancer – a condescending, pitying smile and that scared me worse.
I tried to talk again. “I….ccccc….” I was trying to say that I couldn’t talk, but he finished it for me.
“You can’t talk because you have a breathing tube down your throat and another tube down your nose, into your stomach, to feed you.” It was then that, like a baseball bat in the head, it hit me that I was in a hospital bed. Why a hospital? How did I get here? How long had I been here? I tried to look around the room and there was a whiteboard with names and numbers that looked like dates, but I couldn’t make them out.
About five minutes, five decades, I’m not sure how long went by before the doctor spoke.
“Ms. Stanton, you were in a very serious accident.” He stopped. I watched and several people left the room. Some of them I recognized, others I didn’t. He looked at Jonathan and Jonathan looked at me.
“I’ll be right outside the door, and I’ll be right back in once the doctor talks with you, OK?” I looked at him, my eyes teared up again, and the doctor wiped the tears very clinically, with almost no empathy at all. When the room was cleared, he sat down in the chair next to me. He sighed and opened my chart. He was writing down information from the monitors next to me, as well as some other notes.
Several unfamiliar doctors stayed in the room and a nurse who continued to tidy up and take care of medical business.
“Ms. Stanton, I know you can’t talk yet. But, I am going to put my hand near yours. Pat once for yes, twice for no. Do you understand?”
I patted once.
“Good.” He hesitated again, but began slowly with the pragmatics of my health first as well as some generic identity questions. He asked if I knew where I was, what the date was, who I was and other similar questions.
“I understand you’re a journalism student at Tennessee State University.”
I patted once.
“I’ve heard from your family and friends that you are somewhat of a super-student, but some things are not matching up and I just want to clarify a few things, but I wanted to do it in private, OK?”
My brow furrowed and it hurt. I continued listening.
“First, you have been in this hospital unconscious for nine days now. We have been running tests to watch and your brain waves have been inadvertently active, but this is the first time you have actually been in an awake state.”
NINE DAYS. My God. What had happened to me? I continued listening.
“You were found lying on the sidewalk below your dorm room at the college nine days ago unconscious and injured. Is any of this sounding familiar to you?”
I continued thinking and I remembered the dorm room. I remembered studying alone. I thought about Jonathan and how bad I missed him. I remembered Sabrina and how she and I had sort of gone our own ways and how everything had changed. It was all coming back to me in bits and pieces, but I was very tired. I continued listening.
“Do you know how you fell out the window?” I hesitated. I thought about that evening, but couldn’t remember very much. I had not patted anything the last two questions.
“Ms. Stanton, did you hear me? Can you still hear me?” I patted once.
“Do you know what happened to you?” I patted twice.
He shook his head and looked at the doctor next to him.
“From what we can tell, and from the initial police investigation, there was no forced entry into your room, so we’ve ruled out anyone breaking in. We looked around your room, taken fingerprints, and the only ones in the room are yours, your roommate’s and your boyfriend’s, but they were faint and several have verified that they haven’t seen your male friend over in several weeks .”
I patted once. As if I needed that rubbed in.
“There was a can of furniture polish that had been slammed against the wall facing the window that you fell out of. It looked as though it had been thrown. Do you have any idea about that? Is any of this sounding familiar?”
My eyes got as big as saucers. I FELL OUT OF A WINDOW???? Only I couldn’t say it. My hand started patting non-stop. Of all the times to wish that I had chosen sign language as an elective language, but of course I couldn’t even move my arms so that wouldn’t have been much help anyway.
“Calm down.” He stopped. “I take it you don’t remember falling out the window.” I patted twice. I patted twice again. And again. He held my hand still with his.
“I gotcha.” He looked at the other two doctors.
“It wouldn’t be surprising considering the amount of drugs in your system.” The room got deafeningly silent. I stopped breathing for a moment and my heart rate went up.
“Ms. Stanton, do you have any knowledge of methamphetamine in your system? Do you know how it got there?”
How do I answer this? Yes, I use illicit drugs regularly, but just don’t tell anyone?
“Ms. Stanton, there was a substantial amount of meth in your bloodstream. We know that it was there. Do you routinely use this drug?”
I just started crying and stopped patting the bed. Everyone in the room knew what the answer was. My first thought was ‘God, Please don’t tell my mother.’ But I knew that they couldn’t because of privacy laws. ‘Or Jonathan.’ We hadn’t spoken since the night we were together and I couldn’t help wondering why he had been dodging my phone calls, but he was here by my side now. All I could think about was what was going to happen next. The doctor was reading my mind.
“As far as your injuries, you’re pretty beat up.” He opened the chart. “Minor injuries, relatively – your left arm is broken completely in two right above your elbow. You are going to require surgery after you are well enough to withstand it but we’ll discuss that later. Your right thigh is broken on this side…” he pointed to my outer thigh, “a crack about eight inches long. You have three cracked ribs, and your head cracked open, but you only suffered a concussion concerning your brain – the majority of the blood was peripheral from the arm and leg injuries, so we haven’t detected any permanent brain damage at this point.” He continued flipping through a chart that seemed to be two inches thick. “You have thirty two stitches in your head and you bit off about a half inch of your tongue on the left side, so your mouth is going to be sore. But there is one important thing that we need to discuss. Do you think you can handle just a little bit more?”
I patted once and waited.
“I’m sure you know that the use of illegal substances is eventually going to involve the police, but we all want to protect your privacy as much as we can. Under usual circumstances, your health issues would be protected by HIPAA privacy laws. But because methamphetamines are an illicit drug, illegal, the authorities are already involved.”
I was in shock. Police? The law? Was I in trouble?
“They’ve done a search of your dorm room and I’ll let you talk with them about that much… you seem like a nice girl, but at this point, you almost died because you didn’t know what you were doing and you dove head first out of a window in front of a crowd of people.”
The room was silent. I stared away from them and continued to listen.
“At this point, you have a clean record, you were a volunteer, you were an excellent student…. I understand that not long ago, you were the victim of a sexual assault in which this drug was used and, my guess is that, like most victims and addicts, the drug itself became bigger than you.”
“You probably also never followed through with therapy, but dealt with your problems by continuing to use the drug because you were sure you could handle it. Am I right so far?”
I didn’t know how he knew so much, but it was like he knew my life story. I patted once.
“ Ms. Stanton, now, it is a police issue and has become a legal issue.”
Knowing that I had a million questions, he continued to talk.
“Your vitals look good. If you continue to progress at this rate, we will be able to remove the tube in the morning. Would you be comfortable talking to a detective at that point?”
My eyes teared up. Is this really necessary? Can’t we just pretend this didn’t happen? Am I going to jail? What are my friends and family going to think? What about college?
Again, as if reading my mind, he said, “This gentleman – the detective - is only here to answer questions. He will be accompanied by a social worker who can discuss rehabilitation with you.”
Rehab? Like a drug rehab? For addicts? Am I an addict? Was he talking about one of those places where people who shoot up heroine go for thirty days? Would I be locked up and given sedatives for all that time against my will? What????? What would people think? All I could think of was that I had gone beyond the point of no return. One five minute mistake. One cup of tea. My whole life, everything I had dreamed of forever, the person that I was existed no longer. Now, I was having a conversation with doctors about having skydived out of a third story window with no memory of it and almost dying, because of a drug that I had taken, by choice, without thinking of it as “doing drugs”.
I patted once. The doctor said, “Good idea.” He patted my hand and said, “I know this was a lot of information, but I promise this will be an informative and positive visit in the morning. They will be able to answer all of your questions, OK?”
He left and all I could do was consider the ramifications of what had just been said to me. My whole life had been changed. I felt used and changed. I felt sabotaged.
Chapter Fifteen
The rest of the day was spent, smiling and listening more than anything to visitors, my mother rave on and on about how I had escaped death, how God’s hand had been on me, how I had worked so hard that I must have fallen asleep at the sill of the window and fallen, and on and on. She raved and raved about my grades, my lifelong accomplishments, and painted a picture of a perfect, brown-haired girl with big china-doll eyes who had always had a vision of a future far better than the one that she lived in. She made me sound like a true visionary, someone who was going to change the world.
Jonathan and I spent some time alone and, obviously I couldn’t talk. He talked about school, all of our friends, all of the concern, the flowers in my dorm room, the signs outside of our hall, and mostly just “here and there” talk. Then, he got silent.
“I guess you wonder why I haven’t returned your phone calls lately.” I just lie there, silent and still, as if I was unable to respond at all,
even with hand pats, but my eyes stayed glued on him. He continued to stare at the floor.
“Jasmine, I don’t know how to tell you this, but that night was the most amazing night of my life.” He wrung his hands together. “I haven’t been able to concentrate in class, think about anything else…” and then he looked up quickly – “not that it was just about sex or anything like that.”
He paused again and then just said.
“I love you. I’m certain of it. I don’t just love you. I am in love with you. The kind of love that you read about in books. The kind of love that I have never believed in and now it has happened. To me, right in the middle of college.” Trying to make light, he looked up
My heart stopped beating. I couldn’t physically smile, but I kept looking in his eyes and he into mine, and we could actually see into each other’s souls, just for a moment.
“When you fell out of that window,” he started to cry, “I didn’t realize it – not really until then, but I was certain then. I mean, I knew it, but I kept denying it. That’s why I kept not returning your phone calls. I just figured that if I just kept studying, the thoughts of you would go away. But the greatest mystery of all was that the more I denied myself to you, the greater the need for you became. I hope you can forgive me.”
Jonathan loved me. Jonathan was in love with me. Everything in my life was absolutely falling into place, just like in a dream. Except that the amazing sex that night was fueled by a drug that he knew nothing about – a law student at that – and I was being questioned by the police in the morning. The assault had been big enough news around the campus and even though the gossip died down, people always had it in the back of their minds.
But even during the news of the assault, there had never been mention in the papers of the drugs having been placed in my drink and now, there would be public notice in the Memphis Newspaper that I was a convicted drug user and I would also probably have to either serve probation or even worse, jail time. College would be affected – any college application, any job application, any application for a credit card even would always ask “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” Forever, for the rest of my life, this would be a part of who I am. Just like my brown hair and my big brown eyes. I was also a methamphetamine buyer and user.
Girl Seduced (The Girl Interrupted Trilogy Book #1) Page 7