Off the Deep End (14)
“I wouldn’t be able to live if something happened to Ruthy,” my best friend, Amanda, said when her baby was suddenly struck with a skyrocketing fever that they couldn’t locate a cause for. We all nodded as we huddled around her in the emergency room, passing her endless cups of coffee and stale doughnuts while we waited for the news, agreeing that we wouldn’t be able to live if something happened to our children either.
That’s exactly how I felt. Living in a world without Gabe was like living in a world with no color. No air. Lots of mothers had other children, who finally allowed them to reach somewhere deep inside themselves to find a way to go on. I understood that motivation. I got it. I did. If I had another child, there was no doubt in my mind that I’d find a way to put the fractured pieces of my psyche back together again and move forward. Trouble was, I didn’t.
I had no reason to go on. Even Shane wasn’t enough to keep me from putting myself on those tracks outside Kwik Trip on Easter morning, which is probably part of the reason why he hates me so much now. You couldn’t have been more perfectly positioned than I was to get the job done. And it worked. That train smacked me in a perfect T, pushing the car down the tracks. I cracked my head on the windshield and knocked myself out pretty good. It left a three-inch scar across my forehead, a continual reminder of what I’d done. But I’d healed from my other physical injuries without any permanent damage. Everyone else called it the train accident, but something isn’t an accident when you do it on purpose.
“We don’t know how she survived,” the doctors said over and over again each time they led a new attending into my hospital room. “Her car was flattened. The paramedics needed to use the Jaws of Life to get her out. Nobody expected to find her alive. Let alone this.” They’d always motion to where my very much alive body sat upright in the hospital bed, despite the traction holding up my right arm and both legs in full casts, as if I was the closest thing they’d ever see to a miracle.
A walking, talking miracle—that’s what they called it on the KDWB morning show.
Local Woman Escapes Death Twice
She Must Be Highly Favored
Those were just the headlines from the newspapers and magazines. I was social media famous for a while too. Lots of memes were created in my honor. My favorite was a picture of me walking out of the hospital after the train accident with a cat photoshopped in next to me. The bubble above my head read, “You ain’t got nothing on me.”
I’m supposed to feel lucky that my life got spared twice. But I don’t. Not even close. I’m just really pissed off. It’s like a cruel cosmic joke. I must’ve done something awful in a past life to deserve this kind of unrelenting karmic punishment. Or maybe God just hates me.
But that’s not what all the therapists and counselors that regulate my life have to say—think of yourself as a survivor. That’s the advice they throw at me in the group therapy sessions. Still mandatory by the courts if I want to stay out of the hospital, which I do. Pretty much the one thing keeping me going right now is making sure I never go back to that place. Locked psychiatric wards are as scary as I’d always imagined. I haven’t spent much time in psychiatric facilities even though I was a therapist, but my work never put me anywhere near them. I only did outpatient counseling, and I’d had the same private practice for over ten years.
Every scary thing I’d ever seen or read about psych wards was true. But it was so much more than the physical facilities themselves, although those weren’t great either. It was being stripped of all my rights. They can do that after they’ve labeled you unstable and a threat to yourself. The scariest part was how easy it’d been for them to strip them away. Maybe being treated like an animal turns you into one. Has anyone ever thought of that?
How do you expect someone like me, who’s never had anything bad happen to them, to react when their child dies? Putting your car on the train tracks sounds pretty reasonable then. How do I get Dr. Stephens to see that?
“I know you’ve seen all the stuff written about me in the last eight months, and I get that I look like a complete train wreck—” I burst out laughing. I didn’t even mean to say that. It just came out. Totally inappropriate—all of it—but I can’t help it. He doesn’t crack a smile. I quickly regain my composure so I don’t look totally insensitive. “Anyway, you can’t expect people like me to go through something like that and not fall apart.”
He picks up on my choice of words immediately. “What do you mean by ‘people like you’?”
“The ones that have had an easy life. I’ve never had anything bad happen to me ever. Nothing. The worst thing?” I pause for a second, building up the suspense. “I didn’t get into my first-ranked college. I’m not even kidding. That was the worst thing, and even then, it wasn’t so bad, because you know why?” I don’t wait for him to answer. “That’s where I met Shane. If I hadn’t gone to Moorhead, then I never would’ve met my husband. So even the one bad thing that happened to me turned out to be the best thing for me. That’s the world I used to live in. The world before all this.” I motioned around us, the brown metal door and the concrete floors. The peeling paint on the dingy walls. “You’re not equipped to go from nothing bad ever happening to you to the worst thing that could possibly occur happening to you. It’s like being hurled into the deep end of a pool when you don’t know how to swim. That’s what it feels like. And all of it is dark. As if every light in the universe has been turned off.”