The phone buzzes yet again and I grit my teeth to keep from
screaming, largely because I’m afraid once I start I’ll never stop. I’ll keep
screaming and screaming and screaming until they come and take me away to some
hospital for movie stars and rich people, an insane asylum disguised as a place
for plastic surgery and rehab. Considering where my mother ended up all those
years ago, I’m intimately familiar with such establishments.
I am not her. I am not going to end up in one of them.
And so I keep my jaw locked against the screaming and the nausea and
the betrayal so fresh that it burns like acid. I shove it all down as deep as I
can get it, pretending as I do that it doesn’t make me sick. That it doesn’t
make my stomach churn and my mouth taste like vomit.
The phone buzzes again—it’s vibrating this time, as whoever has been
calling suddenly switches to texts. I moan, start to roll over to get away from
the sound. But my body is heavy, lethargic. I can barely get it to move. In the
end, I settle for grabbing a pillow and dragging it over my head to block out
the noise—and the light.
Except the pillow is wet. Sticky. Salty. I shove it away with a
gasp, struggling to open my eyes against the overwhelming lethargy that continues
to pull me down, pull me under.
My face is wet from the pillow and I bring my hand to my cheek, try
to rub the stuff away. I finally manage to get my eyes open and I glance down
at my fingers, trying to see what’s on them.
I’m so out of it that what I’m seeing doesn’t compute for several
long seconds. When it does—when I register that my hand is stained with
something red and thick—my adrenaline finally kicks in. I stagger out of bed,
staring in horror at the pillow I’d just pulled over my head. At the crisp
white sheets and blankets that I’d been under.
They’re doused in blood, covered with the thick, viscous liquid. And
so am I, my gown heavy with the stuff. My arms and legs streaked red with it.
I stumble backward, desperate to get away, but I get my foot tangled
in the comforter that’s on the floor and go down hard—right in a puddle of
blood. That’s when I start to scream, loud, high-pitched shrieks that can
probably be heard in Mexico.
Over and over and over again I scream, my mind racing. My body
working of its own volition, crab-walking backward away from the bed. From the
blood.
But I’m dragging it with me, can see the smears of it left in my
wake—wet and red and terrifying.
There’s a tiny part of my brain that’s still working, that’s telling
me to breathe. To calm down. To think. It’s almost impossible to hear it over
my strangled cries and the frantic beating of my heart. But I try to listen
anyway, try to stop screaming long enough to take a deep breath as the room
swims around me.
It’s not blood, I tell myself again and again. It’s not blood. It’s
not blood. It’s not blood.
It can’t be.
But it’s in my nose now, in my mouth. Salty, coppery, thick and I
know—I know—that it’s exactly what I’m afraid it is.
Oh my God. Oh. My. God. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.
I don’t stop shuffling backward until my hand brushes against
something sharp. The sudden prick of pain cuts through the hysteria and I lift
my hand into my lap and stare at the new, jagged cut running across my palm.
It’s bleeding now, my own blood mingling with the rest of the mess. Bright red
mingling with dark.
I glance around wildly, trying to figure out what cut me. Trying to
figure out where I am.
The last thing I remember is my mother helping me to bed. That’s it.
There’s nothing after that. Nothing to account for what’s happening now.
Nothing to account for all of this.
I can’t stop screaming any more than I can stop the blood pouring
from my hand.
There’s a small part of me that knows I should get to the bathroom,
that knows I should wrap a towel around my cut. But I can’t move. I can’t
think. I can’t do anything but sit here and scream.
Suddenly, I hear footsteps thundering down the hall, fast and hard.
The door to my bedroom crashes open and Ian is standing there, eyes wide and
wild as he takes in the state of the room . . . and of me.
It only takes a second, and then he’s next to me.
Crouching in the blood.
Hands gripping my shoulders.
Face next to mine.
He’s saying something—I can see his mouth moving, can hear the words
falling into the sudden silence between us. But I can’t make sense of them.
Can’t get them to compute in my jumbled brain. All I can think is that Ian is
here. Ian, my love.
No, no. Not my love, I remember abruptly. Ian, the liar. Ian, the
user. Ian, the traitor.
There’s a tiny part of me—the one bent on self-preservation—that
tells me he can’t be here. He can’t see this. He can’t write about this.
Go, I try to tell him, but my mouth isn’t
working right. Nothing is. I want to shove Ian away, but my arms are so heavy I
can barely lift them. My whole body feels like it’s slogging through quicksand.
Like I’m drowning in plasma and can’t work my way out of it. Whatever strength
I had, I used up just getting here.
Ian grabs my hand, holds it up so he can look at it. Then he’s
shrugging out of his T-shirt and wrapping it around the wound.
He’s glancing around now, eyes dark with horror, even as he elevates
my arm and holds pressure on the cut. He’s talking again—I can see his mouth
moving—but the words still sound tinny and distorted. Like they’re coming
through water.
I look back at the doorway as my mother comes skittering through it.
She freezes much like Ian did, then screams, her hand pressed to her mouth.
“Damn it, Veronica. Focus! I need you to answer me. Are you hurt
anywhere else?”
The words he’s saying finally arrange themselves in the right order
and instinctively, I do what he commands. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
He grabs my nightgown in the center of the bodice, then rips it away
with his bare hands. Thank God. I don’t think I could handle him trying to pull
the bloody thing over my head.
Then his hands are on me, running over my shoulders, my back, my
ass. Doing the same to my chest and stomach and sex. “Let me see your legs,” he
orders, and I stick them out obediently. I’m so confused, so lost, that it
seems smart to let him have control, at least for a little while. He seems to
know what he’s doing.
“It’s not yours,” he says after a minute, relief ripe in his voice.
“What?” I finally manage to force a word past my dry lips.
“The blood. It’s not yours. I don’t see any other injuries.”
“But where’s it from then?” I clutch at him, still too groggy and
panic-stricken to think clearly.
“I don’t know,” he answers grimly. And then he’s sitting down next
to me, right in the middle of the mess.
“Be careful,” I warn him, my words sounding garbled to my own ears.
“I cut myself on something back there—”
“This,” he says, his voice dark and foreboding. “You cut yourself on
this.”
He holds up a black and orange bow saw.
“Oh my God.” I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. “Oh my God.”
It’s the same saw that Belladonna used to dismember that poor girl.
The same one I used in the bloodiest scene in my entire career.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” I look
around at all the blood. “What’s happening to me? What did I do? What did I do?”
Copyright © 2016 by
Tracy Wolff
