MERCY Read online

  Sutton breaks the contemplative silence, “I’d like for you to attach your letter to Elijah to the balloon strings, and send him your thoughts and intentions. I truly believe he will receive your message, Mercy. It’s time you acknowledged your feelings about him, and about his death. Do you think you can do that?”

  I remain stock still for a few minutes. For some reason, the idea of my brother getting an apology letter from me feels as raw as a papercut. It seems depressingly like not enough, but also recklessly too much, and I’m suddenly not sure if I can.

  “Tell me a story about him, a happy one,” he prompts. I don’t need to ponder very long because I’ve actually been thinking about Elijah quite a bit lately.

  “I remember being so excited for him to be born. As my mother got closer and closer to her due date, I slept less and less—I didn’t want to miss his birth, and I didn’t know that it takes a long time to expel a tiny human from one's body. Anyway, my excitement lasted exactly ten minutes after he was born because I was so jealous of all the attention my parents gave him. I used to sneak into his room at night and whisper to him that they would never love him as much as they loved me. I would tell him how pretty soon, they would grow tired of him and forget all about him.”

  Sutton doesn’t say anything I expect, like, that is typical of a firstborn, or that’s pretty universal for a sibling to feel like that. He stays quiet, so I continue.

  “Before too long, my taunting whispers evolved into me crawling in his crib with him. It wasn’t long before I was cuddling him and singing him to sleep.” I am openly crying now and can’t seem to stem the flow. Lately, the flood of tears has been off the charts, but I don’t bother hiding it from Sutton anymore.

  “I loved him so much, Sutton. I loved him, and they took him from me! Worse than that, they made me believe he was evil. I wasn’t allowed to cry because I missed him, I wasn’t permitted to hate my parents for letting it happen, and I couldn’t stop the leaders from doing it to other little boys.” I sit up and face Sutton, whose legs are extended out in front of him while he leans back on his hands.

  “They turned me into one of them!” I scream before melting into my anguish. He runs his fingers through my hair and directs me to his lap, where I lay my head against his thigh.

  “You were never one of them, Mercy.” His words hang in the air above us while I cry, and he strokes my hair. Nothing but the breeze and my sobs break through the serenity of the beautiful overlook. Not for a very long time.

  By the time my tears and snot dry, and my sharp inhales morph into a regular breathing pattern, the sun is getting low in the sky. Sutton whispers, so as to not frighten me with the sudden noise.

  “I think you are ready.”

  He helps me stand and attach the letter to one of the balloon strings. Then holds the envelope up to my chest, where he takes my palm and presses it against the letter. Essentially, we are both pressing the letter to my heart.

  “He knows you loved him then, and he knows you love him still. You were never liable for his death. It was tragic, but your tiny, childhood hands had no part of it, nor could they have stopped it. It’s time to release the notion that you could have saved him or that you had any sort of culpability in his death.”

  I nod, but a fresh stream of tears are flowing as I lean forward against Sutton’s chest. He wraps his arms around me and holds me as if he is just as invested in this process as I am, and I adore him for it.

  “I’m ready,” I say after a sniffle. We’ve been standing like this for at least fifteen minutes, and if I’m honest, I’d mention that I want him to hold me close like this for a lot longer.

  “Take your time, Mercy, we are in no hurry.”

  I close my eyes against his chest and say a silent prayer to my brother. Then raise my hand, and let go of the letter. We stand here and watch the balloons on their journey until they are a tiny pinprick in the sky and then disappear altogether.

  “They’re gone,” I say on a tiny breath.

  “No, they aren’t,” he says as he cups the side of my face in his palm. When he continues, we are still gazing into each other's eyes, “Have you ever heard the poem, Standing Upon the Seashore, by Henry Van Dyke?”

  “No,” I can’t help but exhale a laugh. He always knows the right thing to say, and of course, in this tender moment—it’s a poem.

  “I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s about a ship that looks huge and mighty while docked, but gets smaller and smaller as it sails further away. Then Van Dyke goes on about how the ship is just as big as it was, it’s just gone from sight.”

  “Oh, how profound. You didn’t say it was a literal interpretation.”

  “Hold on, though, the end is the best part,” he chides with a sweet smile on his face.

  “Because, just as someone says, it’s gone—the voices from the opposite shore shout, here it comes!”

  Chapter 11

  It’s been a couple of weeks since they started weaning me off the antipsychotics, and the biggest changes have been the amount of energy I have and the lack of ringing in my ears. I’d like to say my nighttime torment is a thing of the past, but it has been happening on a more frequent basis. Sutton insists it has nothing to do with coming off the Seroquel, and everything to do with unlocking my past.

  The letter to Elijah was a huge breakthrough for me, however, it is but one step on a long journey. Sutton has helped me to begrudgingly realize my parents were victims in their own right, but my hatred for them still burns bright.

  My sessions with him have largely been focused around his rather enthusiastic belief that I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I don’t want to trivialize his convictions, but what I experience during my night terrors is so intense and crippling, I feel like the paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis is a much better fit.

  Don’t forget that I have been around people in the grips of psychosis since I entered adolescence. I’ve seen people scratch their faces bloody to rid themselves of the spiders. I’ve watched them wet themselves in fear. I’ve witnessed someone throw a chair through the TV so he could slit his own throat with the shards—simply to appease the voices. I’ve seen hell through their eyes, so I’m more at home with a label of paranoid schizophrenia because hell is more authentic to what I experience.

  I may be in a state of sleep, or suspended consciousness, but hallucinations can absolutely happen at night, and despite the conclusions of the medical panel I was paraded in front of, I’m not convinced I should come off the Seroquel.

  Lyla recommends benzos. She says I would sleep like the dead instead of being terrorized by the feeling of imminently joining them. I’m taking her thoughts under advisement because it would be nice to not have to wonder what will happen once I drift off to sleep.

  Anyway, since Sutton feels more comfortable calling it PTSD and I’d rather authenticate it by referring to it as debilitating hallucinations brought on by a paranoid schizophrenic, delusional mind, we have begrudgingly, yet amicably decided to refer to the incidents as, my nighttime sufferings.

  He doesn't want me all hung up on labels anyway—even though he spent days insisting that PTSD nightmares are every bit as intense and realistic as a schizophrenic hallucination, and perhaps worse because they are so often replicative nightmares or even exact replays of the traumatic event.

  I’ve rolled my eyes quite a bit at his talk of replicative nightmares because my hallu—nighttime sufferings involve me being burned with acid and my insides exploding. Kinda hard to explain away my lack of scars, and intact bodily systems if I’m “re-experiencing” or having flashbacks to actual events, right?

  Yeah, well, that’s what I thought. Until tonight. Tonight, my brother was in bed with me. He was coughing and choking and foaming at the mouth. As for me, I was standing on my bed, screaming for someone to help him.

  The night nurse walked away with a fat lip and a bloody nose, and when I kicked someone from the code team in the jaw, I was restrained. I’m not talk
ing, held down. I’m saying, I had several grown men lying across my body until my waist, wrists, and ankles were secured. Then, when I was still trying to bite them, they strapped down my head as well. I’ll hand it to them though, they followed Sutton’s explicit instructions, and they did not sedate me.

  By the time Sutton storms in, the circus has already left town, and I’m alone with one of the night nurses in my room. When I no longer felt like I could tear through my restraints, and I was inconsolably crying, the nurse had taken pity on me and removed the strap across my forehead, but otherwise, I’m still trussed up. Sutton takes one look at me and then growls a single word.

  “Out!” He sits down on my bed and is already undoing my restraints as the nurse exits the room. “Are you ok?” He missed all the carnage, but he’s not a bit worried I will lash out. In fact, once my wrists and abdomen are free from the restraints, he pulls me against his body and holds me while I finish draining the well.

  I’m not sure if I am crying for my brother, or for being strapped down and unable to even wiggle for over thirty minutes, or if I’m crying because of his kindness. At first, I think it is about Elijah and the helplessness, but the longer he holds me, it becomes more about the kindness—and him.

  “Was it the same? The screaming and burning?”

  “No,” I whisper.

  “Tell me,” he murmurs sweetly into my ear, which causes a weird sensation between my legs. Almost a tickle…or a strange pressure.

  “I was trying to get the foam out of his mouth so he would stop choking. I was desperate. Wild.”

  “I’m sorry you have to experience all that, are you feeling better now?”

  “Why do I have to experience it? Can’t I go back on the antipsychotics? Or even Benzodiazepines? It’s all too much.”

  “You have a lot of repressed trauma. In order to heal, we have to address all that ugliness. It won’t always be like this, I promise. Plus, I’ve told you, the antipsychotics were not helping you.”

  “Yes, they were,” I pull away so I can look him in the eyes, “All this nighttime bullshit is happening much more often now. You know that!”

  “Mercy, listen to me, it’s not because of being weaned off the meds. We are bringing some truly awful stuff to the surface. We have to. We need to drag it out where we can see it, so we can subdue it. It’s going to take time, but your mind is healthy…it just needs some serious attention. I want you to think of each night terror as one step closer to getting better. If I give you Benzodiazepines to sedate you at night, we will allow that trauma to hide forever, and attack at will. Now, it may be appropriate to treat your anxiety with Benzodiazepines down the line, but I will never prescribe them to knock you out at night.”

  What he is saying makes sense, I just don’t like it. I lean forward again, but this time my face is against the crook of his neck instead of directed at the wall. I can smell his skin, and it affects me so much I almost pull away—but he brings his hand up so his fingers are in my hair and he is cupping the back of my head. My heart rate picks up, and that surprises me too. Why is my body suddenly reacting to him so much?

  “Can you go back to sleep? Or do you want to talk through some of it—in my office, of course.” Sutton is always willing to hash out my crap. At this point, I've lost count of how many times he’s been roused from his bed and had to race back here to tend to me.

  “I’ll try to go back to sleep. Where is Lyla? That reminds me, they said they might have to move her to a different room for her own safety—can they do that? I don’t want them to take her away, I would never hurt her.”

  “They might have to move her for a little while, but not because you might hurt her. It’s not good for her own recovery to be frightened awake like she is. It’s also hard for her to fall back to sleep once she’s up, that’s all. I know you would never hurt her.”

  “I hurt a few of the staff tonight.”

  “They probably had it coming,” he tries to hold back his laugh, but I can feel his chuckle rumble against my body. It makes me press myself against him even more. I like how his chest feels against my nipples, his body against the cotton of my shirt makes them tingle a little, and I can feel them swell. What the hell is happening to me?

  Sutton finishes removing my restraints and helps me get into bed. For a second, I think he is about to kiss my forehead, but he doesn’t. He tells me goodnight and then walks out of my room.

  I still feel funny between my legs. It reminds me a little of that time I brought myself to orgasm. For the first time in ages, I move my hand down there, but this time it feels surprisingly different. This must be what everyone gets so excited about. My clitoris feels alive, and my nipples are literally pulsing. Touching myself feels amazing—the only gross thing is that my vagina is really wet and kind of disgusting right now. Not enough to stop me, though this feels too good.

  Chapter 12

  Something happened today in group that has never happened before, and I’m not super sure where to put my feelings about it. The new guy happened.

  I’m not really clear yet about his situation, but from what I can put together, his mental health is being evaluated because he was involved in a car accident that killed a young mother. The basis of his length of stay will, no doubt, be determined on whether or not he is suicidal.

  He doesn’t seem suicidal to me, just really smiley, and he looks at me a lot. I’d say he’s a few years older than me—maybe twenty-five-ish, and he is cute. Not handsome like Sutton, but he makes me feel shy when he looks at me. His name is Wes—short for Wesley, and he has strong arms with naked lady tattoos on them.

  Anyway, the thing that happened in communications group, was that he and I were asked to role-play. The situation was about some kind of conflict at a gas station—I honestly don’t even remember what—and he told me I was beautiful.

  The word literally took root and bloomed somewhere deep in my belly. It also made me feel warm inside…between the legs. Right now, I want to talk to my friends about it, but I can’t find Matty, and Lyla and Veronica are petitioning the staff for some sort of cross-stitch craft. I’d even talk to Tracy right now, except she’s chatting-up the same guy that left the flower blooming in my stomach. Wes. Wes-ley. The cute guy who thinks I’m beautiful.

  I guess I have to go to my session with Sutton before I discuss the new guy with my friends. I’ll need to be careful what I say in front of Tracy, though, because she looked all giggly and starry-eyed when she was talking to Wessss-ley.

  “Hi,” Sutton says as I glide in and sit down. He sees my smile, but he approaches it more like the pin on a grenade. Not that I never smile; in fact, I find myself smiling at him a lot these last couple months, but he must sense something about this particular grin because he looks at me with a big question mark on his face. He also looks really sexy the way his hair is still a little wet from his shower.

  “Did…did—you shower here?” I ask, my pulse picking up a bit.

  “No, I always shower at the gym before work. How are you feeling today?” He is not referring to my dopy grin, I’ve been through this line of questioning daily since my medication was adjusted, he is purely interested in my state of mind as it applies to the change.

  “I feel good, the ringing in my ears is completely gone, I don’t notice my mouth being so dry anymore, I have a ton of energy…”

  “Any new feelings or symptoms?”

  “Uhhhhh, yeah. I mean, sort of.” Oh, man, my cheeks are getting hot. I know he is my doctor, but this might be too embarrassing to mention. “Actually, never mind. Everything is fine,” I say as I quickly dismiss my line of thought.

  He continues to stare, and it makes me uncomfortable, so I picture him at the gym in the shower—head tipped back, rinsing out the shampoo, the water running down his chest and—

  “Mercy?” his voice sounds low and a little demanding. “That’s not how this works. I need you to be completely upfront with me about everything, no matter how small or insignifi
cant you think it might be. I’ve made some substantial changes to your treatment regimen, and I want to stay on top of everything.”

  “You’re so dramatic. It’s not a big deal, and it’s probably not even related to my med change.”

  “Lay it on me,” he says. Everything out of his mouth sounds so sexual, he wants to stay on top of things, he wants me to lay it on him… damn-it, now I’m sweating.

  “I just get this weird feeling deep in my stomach sometimes. Actually, more like my pelvis…my, like, low pelvis.” I can’t even make eye contact with him; it’s so awkward to talk about.

  “Weird how?”

  “It’s just a funny sensation between my legs.”

  “Ok.”

  “And it…the feeling—it makes my vagina wet.” Jesus-God-fuck, well…there it is.

  “Does it happen when you touch yourself? Or all the time?” he asks, completely tuned in. Dang-it, now I’ve hooked him, and he will never drop it.

  “Definitely when I touch myself,” Oh, hell, I just admitted to my doctor that I masturbate.

  “It’s ok, you don’t need to be embarrassed, Mercy. Most people masturbate. It’s perfectly natural.”

  “Do you, Sutton?”

  “It’s not exactly appropriate for me to discuss my masturbatory habits with a patient, Mercy.”

  “So, you have masturbatory habits then?”

  “None that I can talk about.”

  “Well then, how do you expect me to feel comfortable talking about mine?”

  “I’m your doctor.”

  “I don’t give a shit. All these weird feelings and sensations are all new to me. It’s not like I have a mom I can talk about it with—My mom left out the puberty and sexual tingles part when she dropped me like a hot sack of shit. So, all this is a little unexpected and scary for me! Do you know I can feel my nipples throb? What the fuck is that?”