Instead of You(39)

     



 

I found my jeans on the floor and dug around in the pockets for my phone, the darkness not helping. When I finally got hold of it and powered up the screen, my heart immediately started pounding in my chest. Ten missed calls. Twenty-seven new text messages. Something was wrong.

Every single call and text was from Mrs. Harris. I didn't bother listening to the voice mails or reading the texts, I simply called her back. The phone rang as I stepped into the hallway, but it only rang once.

"Hayes?"

"Mrs. Harris, what's wrong?"

"Oh, Hayes," she cried. Immediately my lungs shut down and my heart skipped a million beats. "It's your mom … ." Her words trailed off because she was crying too hard to continue.

"What is it? Is she all right?" I was panicking, pacing the length of my living room, but also flashing back to the night Mr. Harris had called me and told me to come home. The night Cory and Dad died. "Did she …  is she … ."

"She's alive, Hayes. But you need to come home. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital. I don't know if she'll … ."

"I'll leave right away," I said hastily, heading back into my bedroom. "Please, promise me you'll keep me posted." I flipped on the light, sorry I had to wake McKenzie that way, but unable to move slowly. "I can't handle driving home again not knowing if she's dead or alive. Please, Mrs. Harris."

"I'll text you when I know something." Her words sounded sad, I knew she didn't want to have to tell me my mother had died. I was hoping she wouldn't have to either.

"What happened?" This came from McKenzie, who'd been woken up by the light and my voice. She sat up in the bed, her hair falling around her face, her eyebrows scrunched inward with worry. I pressed the speaker button on my phone.

"My mom was taken to the hospital," I said as I pulled on my jeans.

"McKenzie?" Mrs. Harris asked. I was definitely focused and panicked, but not enough to at least consider how odd it was that McKenzie was naked in my bed and her mother was on speakerphone. But it was a minuscule part of my brain concerned with that, and the majority worried about getting back to my mother, making it to her before something catastrophic could happen.

"I'm here, Mom," she replied, sliding off the bed and pulling on her clothes.

"I need you to drive Hayes home, sweetie. He shouldn't be driving right now."

"Mom, what happened?"

I heard Mrs. Harris take in a deep breath, could hear it shaking even through the phone, but I was relieved when she continued talking. "I checked on her around 5:00 p.m. and she was asleep. A few times throughout the night I heard her get up, but she never called for anyone or came into the living room, so I assumed she was just using the restroom or something. I didn't want to bother her because I know she's been having a hard time … ." Her voice trailed off as she started crying. "I fell asleep on the couch, and when I woke up around midnight, I went to check on her."

I heard her sniffling and sobbing, and my panic started to intensify. I needed my mom to be okay. I needed to get to the hospital and see my mom sitting up in bed with a smile on her face, apologizing to everyone for scaring us. I needed her to live and thrive because I didn't think I could handle being the only person left alive.

"Mom," McKenzie said, trying to calm her mother from such a great distance. "It's okay. Everything's going to be okay."

"She was lying on her bed, but she looked strange. Her head was hanging off the edge and it looked uncomfortable. I didn't understand, I just walked in to try and help her, and that's when I saw the bottle. And the pills."

No.

No.

"Oh, my God," McKenzie said, her hand coming to cover her mouth, her eyes darting to me, wide with fear and understanding. I felt my legs give out and luckily I was near the bed, landing with a thud, my elbows coming to rest on my knees while my head fell into my hands. Immediately Kenzie's arms were around me, her face pressed into my neck, one hand running up and down my back.

"She still had a heartbeat when the paramedics took her away, Hayes."

I scrubbed my hands over my face, adrenaline pumping through me so thoroughly, I could feel my knees starting to bounce. "We have to go," I whispered.

"Okay," Kenzie said, her hand threading through the hair at the back of my neck. "Which hospital are we headed to, Mom?"

I listened as McKenzie took the lead. She gathered information, soothed her mother, brought me the rest of my clothes, hung up the phone, finished dressing herself, and then led me to my car. She drove us through the night, the two-hour drive seeming as though it were stretched out to days and days. We got four updates from McKenzie's mom, but none of them lifted the weight off me or made me feel any better.         

     



 

**She's still back with the doctors. Haven't heard anything.**

**Nurse came out to update me, said she was still unconscious, they're running blood tests.**

**She's finally being admitted.**

**She's upstairs in the ICU. Room 415. I haven't been able to see her since I'm not family.**



McKenzie drove fast, not slowing down for anything, and it was amazing she never passed any cops as she would have been pulled over for sure. We were both mostly quiet, but every once in a while she'd say something to try and make me feel better.

"She's going to be fine, Hayes."

"Everything will work out. We just have to believe she'll be all right."

I said nothing. I stared at the road, watching the lines on the pavement pass us by, a steady rhythm, a pulsing that kept me grounded. If I were quiet, if I were still, I could upset nothing. Everything, my entire life, seemed to be dangling from just my fingertips, flailing over a dark abyss, and I knew if I moved, if I spoke, I risked upsetting the cosmic balance. So I stayed quiet and still, the only thing about me in motion was my brain.

When we pulled up to the hospital, McKenzie stopped at the front doors, put the car in park, and then leaned over to me.

"No matter what you learn when you walk in there, I am here, Hayes. I'm here, I love you, and I'll be here to walk with you through whatever happens next."

I turned to look at her, silently grateful for her words and simply for her. I kissed her, but still spoke no words, before I climbed out of the car and walked into the hospital, wondering if tomorrow would be the first day I'd wake up without a mother.





Chapter Twenty-Five

Hayes

The time passed just as slowly in my mother's room as it had in the car: painfully so. Each beep of the machine, each thump-thump of someone's feet as they walked past her room, each tick of the clock above the door, all the noises only intensified the fact that everything was happening in slow motion.

I'd inquired about my mother at the registration desk of the hospital. The woman behind the desk gave me instructions on how to find her, and I'd listened, but I was surprised I'd retained any of the information. I'd managed to find the ICU and the nurse there had led me to my mother's room once verifying our relationship.

I opened the door to her room and was both shocked and relieved by what I saw. My mother was sleeping-the same thing she'd been doing for weeks now. Sleeping. But this time she was sleeping in a hospital, her wrists restrained, cuffed to the side of the bed.

"That's for her own protection," the nurse had explained when she'd seen my eyes go wide. "She's been unconscious since she was brought in so we haven't been able to evaluate her mental state. We don't want her to wake up and do anything to harm herself."

I nodded because it made sense, but I wanted to cry from the logic.

My mother had swallowed enough sleeping pills to kill herself.

Enough sleeping pills to slow her heart rate to the point of near death, to cause the hospital to pump her stomach, to fill her veins full of drugs to counteract what her system had already absorbed.

The nurse explained everything she could, but then left us, telling me she'd let the doctor know I was there. "It's a waiting game now, honey," she'd said with a softness to her voice that felt a lot like pity.

When the doctor had showed up, he'd not really told me anything new or worthwhile.

Mom would pull through, but the effects of the drugs she ingested weren't the real worry. The real and immediate danger was the fact that she'd taken them to begin with. She was breathing on her own, they'd been able to get her heart rate up, she'd been intubated, but after receiving medication from the hospital, she'd quickly started breathing over the machine, so they took her off it. Now, they were just waiting for her to wake up on her own.

I sat in the uncomfortable chair just to the side of her bed, and I watched her sleep. I hoped she wasn't dreaming, hoped that she was, for just a moment, blissfully unaware of all the pain she'd obviously been living with. I hoped she was just resting. Existing. Perhaps healing. Because she'd done none of that so far.

And I was partly to blame for that.

How many times had I left her? To what? To finish a degree? To continue to live my life like nothing had happened while she obviously lost her mind? I thought back to every time I pushed my mother's problems aside, every time I passed her off to someone else, every time I told myself she'd be fine.

It was all my fault.

Eventually I fell asleep in that uncomfortable chair, and when I woke up, it was to my mother's frail voice calling my name.