“I’m sorry, I love you.”
“Olivia, stop.” I moved away from her and over to the sink to rinse off the towel. When I turned back around, she launched herself at me, pressing her lips to my chest, which was still covered in chocolate frosting. “Olivia, stop!”
“Let me make it better, Brody. I love you. I’ll make it better,” she said as I grabbed her shoulders and held her back. Her hands reached out for my shorts, and I put more distance between us. “Please!”
“We need to talk, and you need to put some clothes on.”
Her blue eyes flashed up to mine, and I instantly recognized the heat in them. “We can talk after. Come on, baby, I want to make you feel good.” She grabbed my wrists and tried to move my hands from her shoulders, but I didn’t let them budge.
“Liv, you need help. Let me get you help.”
The coy smile instantly vanished, and the heat in her eyes was replaced with the anger I was so used to. “Help? Help?! You want to get me help? For what, Brody?!” Her voice was already back to the same octave it had been at before she’d left the kitchen, and it made me grit my teeth.
Keeping my voice calm, I released her shoulders and took another step back. “For your depression, to start. Olivia, you’re bipolar, you need help. Do you not realize you went from trying to seduce me to screaming at me to seducing me again, all within ten minutes?”
“You think I’m depressed? Is that what you want? Maybe I should be! Maybe I will ask Daddy to pay for a goddamn shrink since you can’t afford one! I’ll tell him all about my feelings and about how I’m forced to live with my husband even though he murdered my son!”
“Olivia!” I barked.
“I’ll tell him all about how you’ve been abusing me. How you tell me I’m not good enough for you!”
“Abusing you? Are you fucking kidding me? You’re gonna start with this shit again? Again, Liv, when have I ever touched you?”
She threw her arms out and screamed, “Good question! When was the last time you touched me, Brody?”
I was so confused. I wasn’t sure I even knew what she was talking about anymore.
“So maybe I had it wrong. Maybe you brought these home so I would get fat so you would have a reason not to touch me!” Taking a step back to the island, she grabbed one of the last two cupcakes and shoved it in her face. “Is this what you want?” she screamed and smashed it in her face again before throwing it on the counter. “You want me fat and ugly, Brody?”
“Jesus Christ, Olivia! This is what I’m talking about. You. Need. Help. Please, let me get you help!”
“I don’t need anything, you selfish bastard!” she yelled, her face and teeth covered in chocolate frosting and cake pieces.
“I can get you—”
“Help!” she screamed louder than before. “Help me! Someone, please! He’s trying to kill me!”
My eyes widened and I grabbed for her shoulders. “Olivia!”
“He has a knife, someone help me, please!”
Taking large strides, I propelled her back until she was pressed against the wall and covered her mouth with my hand. “Olivia, what are you doing? Stop!” I hissed.
She tried yelling against my hand, but the noise didn’t travel far.
“Are you trying to get me arrested? What the hell is wrong with you?”
Her eyes watered before tears were rolling down her cheeks and over my hand, and her body stopped trying to get away from the wall and me. Releasing her mouth, I instantly wished I hadn’t when she opened it. “That’s what you deserve! That’s what murderers deserve! You didn’t have to pay for what you did to Tate! You didn’t care!”
“You think—you think I don’t fucking care? You think I’m not paying for what happened on a daily basis? I feel like I’m dying because of what happened to Tate. I will pay for it, and grieve for him, every day of my life. But you saying this, you using what happened against me, has got to stop, Liv! You are killing me more every time you blame me. I blame myself enough!”
“Until you’re dead too, it will never be enough!” she sobbed. “I wish it’d been you instead of him!”
My arms dropped like deadweight, and she moved away from me seconds before I stumbled back and slid down the wall opposite where I’d had her.
I wish it’d been me too.
My eyes glazed over, and a strangled cry worked its way up my throat. Pulling my knees up, I rested my elbows on them and covered my face as I once again wished for my son to still be here. To be able to hold him one more time.
I was still sitting there sometime later, my head back on the wall, my legs sprawled out on the floor, when Olivia was suddenly sitting on my lap.
“Get. Off. Me.”
“Let me take it all away, Brody. I’ll make it better.”
I grabbed her bare shoulders and pushed her back and to the side until she was off my lap. “All I want that has to do with you is to get you help. You are sick. There is something wrong with you. Let me get you the help you need.”
“I know what will help me.” Her hand snaked out toward my lap, but I stopped her advance.
“You need doctors,” I growled and looked over at her. I was surprised to see her face cleared of the cupcake, not surprised she was still naked. “A shit ton of them. You have to know that, and you have to realize I’m trying to help you.”
“I don’t need help,” she said with a confident voice.
“You do.” I stood up and took a couple steps toward my room before looking back at her. “And I’m not stopping until I get it for you.”
11
Brody
June 16, 2015
RESTING MY ELBOWS on the counter, I let my head fall into my hands as I waited for the coffee to finish brewing the next morning. I’d barely gotten any sleep as thoughts of Olivia’s behavior went through my mind over and over again. Something wasn’t adding up, and a part of me was getting ready to just give up on trying to get her help.
Her mood swings were off the charts. I had never thought too much about the fact that she’d always gone back to being her normal self when we were out in public until the night she’d threatened to kill herself. Coming home to find her perfectly fine and telling her father that she was afraid of me was what had me looking deeper into every encounter with her.
No bipolar or depression case was the same, I knew that. But whatever Olivia had been suffering from over the last several years couldn’t be defined as any one thing. What was going on with her was both everything and, at the same time, nothing. Unfortunately, I’d overlooked this paradox until now. And now I was beginning to notice the weird patterns in Olivia’s brand of crazy.
I’d wanted to get her help when I thought her reaction to Tate’s death was the same as any normal mother would have, but now it had changed into something else entirely. With the inconsistencies in her behavior, and the brief flashes of the scheming girl I’d known so well in high school, suddenly I was no longer so sure I wanted to get her help. Had she just been playing a game with me to see how far she could push me? And had it taken me this long to catch on to what she was up to? She was constantly telling me she didn’t need help, and I was beginning to wonder whether that was true. Was Liv just being Liv, someone who didn’t need a goddamn thing from anyone other than her dad’s money? If she was still the old Olivia I’d fallen for in high school, she was just putting on an act and then sitting back and enjoying the show.
I straightened and breathed out heavily when those thoughts went through my head again. She can’t be playing a game. She can’t be faking grief over Tate’s death, I told myself for the hundredth time since last night.
I was so confused, so torn . . . and such a fucking dick. I wanted to be with Kamryn so bad that I was now making up excuses for Liv’s behavior so I could justify leaving her without getting her help first.
The house phone rang, jolting me from the inner scolding, and I turned to grab it from the counter. I ground my teeth when the name I’d br
iefly seen on the caller ID registered, but I’d already pushed TALK.
“Hello?”
“Where’s my daughter?”
“How are you today, Mr. Reynolds?” I asked as I turned to walk out of the kitchen and toward Liv’s side of the house.
There was a pause before he huffed. “We don’t do small talk, Brody. Put my daughter on the phone and tell me why she wasn’t answering her cell.”
I rolled my eyes and suppressed a huff of my own. “I’m not sure, you can ask her when you talk to her. Liv,” I called out as I walked down the hallway.
Letting my arm drop so I wouldn’t have to play nice with my father-in-law anymore, I called out her name two more times as I let myself into her room and looked around for her. Rounding the corner into her bathroom, I froze for two seconds before I ran to where she was lying on the floor.
“Olivia!” I shouted and grabbed her limp body. “Liv!”
Pressing two fingers to the inside of her wrist, I grabbed the phone I’d dropped near her body, hung up on her dad, and called 911.
“Jeston Police Department, do you need fire, medical, or police?”
“I need an ambulance to 9709 Tuscany Way. Twenty-six-year-old female unconscious, I just found her with an empty pill bottle next to her. Breathing is very shallow, her body is still warm, though.”
The line beeped as Olivia’s dad continued calling me back, but he’d have to wait.
“Is this Brody?” the dispatcher asked cautiously.
“Yes. It’s Olivia . . . my wife.”
The dispatcher cursed softly. “Okay. What kind of pill bottle?”
I grabbed for it and read random things off the label. “Uh . . . duloxetine. It’s for thirty pills, the prescription was filled . . . four days ago.” I said the last few words with dread as I looked down at Liv. “Olivia, I need you to wake up!”
“Okay, the ambulance is already on its way. You said she’s still warm?”
“Yes, I don’t know when she took these. I walked in here to give her the phone and found her. Is there something I can do until they get here?”
“Are her lips or fingers blue?”
Grabbing her limp arm, I brought her hand closer before gently releasing it. “No. Come on, Liv!” Shaking her shoulders, I looked for some kind of reaction, but there was nothing. “I hear the sirens,” I said to the dispatcher. “I’m going to open the door. Thank you.”
As soon as he acknowledged my thanks, I ended the call and ran to the front door, threw it open, and waited for the EMTs to follow me back to Liv’s bathroom. They asked countless questions about her health, her mental stability, and if she’d shown signs of being suicidal in the past as they loaded her onto the stretcher and took vitals. Once she was loaded into the back, I got in my SUV and pulled out my phone as I followed behind.
“Hello?”
“It’s Brody.”
“You worthless piece of shit,” Mr. Reynolds growled. “Tell me where my—”
“She’s loaded up in the back of an ambulance on her way to Memorial because of you and your wife. Thought you’d like to know.” Without waiting for him to respond, I ended the call and focused on getting to the hospital. There would be time to yell at them later.
I STOOD AND held back an eye roll when Olivia’s parents walked into the waiting room almost two hours later. They lived fifteen minutes from the hospital, and they were both so dressed up, they looked like they were ready to go to a race.
“What have you done to her now?” Mr. Reynolds bellowed, and the other people in the large room looked between us.
My face heated, but not with embarrassment. Clenching my hands into fists, I refused to speak until they were standing in front of me, and when I did, I spoke so that only the two of them could hear me. “What have I done? That must be a joke considering Olivia is going to be put on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch once they’re done because she overdosed on antidepressants that were prescribed to your wife!” I hissed.
Mrs. Reynolds scoffed and crossed her arms. “Now you’re trying to lay blame on us?”
“What antidepressants?” Mr. Reynolds asked.
Grabbing the bottle from my pocket, I tossed it at his chest and said the information from memory. “Duloxetine, otherwise known as Celexa. Thirty pills prescribed to Cathy Reynolds, filled four days ago. All thirty were gone, and the bottle was next to Liv when I found her unconscious in the bathroom this morning.” I turned and took two steps toward the chairs before turning back around to face them. Throwing my arms out, I leaned forward and whispered sardonically, “Which, by the way, is probably why she wasn’t answering her phone.”
Mrs. Reynolds took a step closer to me. “Those are in my name because she was too scared to get them herself. She was afraid of what you would do to her if you knew she needed them.”
I laughed, but I didn’t know if it was because Olivia’s parents were so blind, or because I was just that much closer to breaking down after all this time. “Are you—are you fucking kidding me?” I said through gritted teeth. “I have never hurt Olivia. I told you she was suicidal, and you didn’t listen. I have been trying to get her help! I have been trying to get her to realize on her own that she needs help. The other night she called me saying she needed to be with Tate, that she couldn’t live without him anymore, and then she hung up on me. When I got home, she was talking to you on the house phone like nothing was wrong except for the fact that I scare her and shattered her phone. When she got off the phone with you, she told me she broke her cell herself because she wanted a new one. How do you not see that there’s something wrong with her? How do you not see what she’s doing? She’s trying to turn you against me because she knows you’ll give her what she wants. I’m the only one who’s trying to fucking help her! And how do you repay me? You put in a formal complaint with my chief?”
“Excuse me, sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step outside if you want to continue this conversation.”
I turned to look at the security guard standing there with one of the nurses, and my shoulders sagged. “It’s fine. I said what I needed to say.”
We sat on opposite sides of the waiting room for another two hours until the director of a psych ward in a hospital in Portland called me back. Stepping outside, I talked with him for well over an hour about Olivia, what had been happening since Tate passed, the escalation in the last few weeks, and what had happened that morning. He told me about how things were run on his ward and the benefits for Olivia of being treated there; once he got the report from Olivia’s doctor, he told me, we could talk again about the possibility of her going to his Portland facility for care.
Once the call was over, I hovered over Kamryn’s name for a few seconds before putting my phone in my pocket. I wanted to tell her what was happening, but I wanted to be able to hold her when I did. I was finally going to get Liv help, but I’d almost been too late. And my stomach dropped every time I remembered how last night and this morning I’d been wondering if all this had been a game to her.
Walking into the hospital, my steps quickened when I saw Liv’s parents speaking to the doctor. He eyed me warily, and my forehead creased in confusion. We’d spoken twice that morning, and he hadn’t been back out since the Reynoldses arrived. I didn’t know why he’d be talking to them and looking at me like I had no place in being there.
“What’s going on? How’s she doing?”
Mr. Reynolds’s back stiffened, and he turned to glare at me. “You disgusting piece of trash. What was this going to accomplish for you?”
“What?”
“You think throwing a childish fit and trying to make us believe you’re the only one who wants to help her would make any of us believe that our daughter would have done something so tragic?”
I shook my head slowly as I tried to comprehend what he was saying, and why his wife looked like she was about to kill me. Looking past him, I asked the doctor, “What the hell happened?”
He glanced at Liv’
s parents, and her mom urged him to tell me. With a slow breath out, he squared his shoulders and looked at me. “Your wife’s toxicity report came back. There was no trace of the antidepressants, or any narcotic for that matter, in her system. We’re running tests to see why she fainted. There’s always the possibility of a seizure, that kind of thing.”
My jaw dropped and I shook my head once. “No . . . she was completely unresponsive. Her breathing was too shallow. I was with her for five minutes trying to wake her up, the EMTs couldn’t wake her up. And if she didn’t take the pills, then what did she do with them so that they were all gone and the bottle just happened to be there next to her?”
“Or what did you do with them,” Mrs. Reynolds said under her breath, and my head jerked back. “She said she was afraid of what would happen if you knew she needed them. I find it disturbing that we get her help, and she winds up in the hospital just days later.”
“This has got to be a joke,” I said, breathing hard.
Kamryn
June 16, 2015
“I THINK it needs to be Sunday every day of the week,” Kinlee blurted out.
Laughing, I dipped my spoon back into the pint of ice cream and ignored her laughing when I moaned through my next bite. “Shut up,” I grumbled.
“Oh, whatever. It’s cute!”
“Lee, it is not cute! You try moaning like this when you eat sweet stuff! Think about never being able to try something sweet when you’re out. Never being able to try flavors at the frozen yogurt shop, just having to hope you’ll like it. Think. About. It.”
Kinlee’s face morphed into a look of horror. “No fro-yo samples?!”
“Exactly.” I pointed the spoon at her.
Jace was working, so we’d spent all day at her house in our pajamas, doing nothing but eating and watching movies. I felt so sick. So fat. So lazy. And so ridiculously happy.
Putting the half-eaten pint on the coffee table, I rubbed my eyes under my glasses and sat back into the cushions on the couch. “You’re trying to kill me with sugar.”
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