Shadows of Yesterday

Chapter 32: Scissors to String

When I'd heard people talk about big, life-altering moments, I had heard of all sorts of reactions. Anger. Fear. Sadness. Uncontrollable tears. I had seen it all before, late one August night in a hospital outside of town. I'd even heard of the one nobody liked to admit they felt: numbness. Absolute, all-consuming nothingness.

What people had said about numbness was that it was natural. That it was a response to trauma, and that those who felt nothing shouldn't feel bad. What they hadn't told me about was the only feeling stronger than that numbness: guilt.

Nobody talked about the fact that when dramatic things happened over and over, the numbness started to feel more like normalness. Every life-altering moment became just as emotional as any other Tuesday. 

Even death could feel normal in the moment, if it happened enough. They hadn't told me that when another awful thing happened, the thing gnawing at me wouldn't be the event itself... but the fact that I didn't feel anything about it. They hadn't mentioned that loss would become so normal that I would question if I even had a right to call it traumatic at all. They hadn't mentioned this. 

When I heard what my mother had to say, I should have been shocked. I should have been frantically scrambling to get to the hospital to meet my family, breaking down into tears for the second time tonight. I shouldn't have had the frame of mind to comfort my own mother over the phone, and I definitely shouldn't have calmly turned to the boy in the seat next to me and flatly asked, "Hey, can you take me to the hospital?"

I felt like the worst person alive. My mom had been practically falling apart on our call, and from the sounds in the background, it didn't sound like my dad was much more composed. Anyone normal in this situation would have been terrified... so why wasn't I?

There was no dread in the pit of my stomach. No quickened breathing or shaking limbs. My pulse was as steady as it had always been, and I felt awful about it. 

"Don't worry," Liam said hurriedly, his car racing down the streets faster than it probably should have been, "I'm getting us there as fast as I possibly can. We'll be there soon."

I swallowed, but I wasn't sure why. The only thing making my mouth dry right now was overwhelming shame. "It's okay; I'm fine." 

It was true. I was fine. 

That was the problem.

We got halfway to the hospital, and I still hadn't felt a thing. Pulling into the parking lot didn't change anything, either. Not even walking into the ER waiting room--a sterile place filled with broken people, awful memories, and my own weeping parents--managed to activate my humanity. I was lifeless. An old mannequin in a store window, watching life happen around me with no heart of my own.

Pathetic.

If Aunt Jane had been here, she would have told me to stop being so hard on myself. That was her job as my unpaid therapist, wasn't it? To get me out of my own head? Bring me back to reality where everyone else was waiting?

But she wasn't here. My parents were. My parents, who I had seen a total of three hours this week. Who had shipped me across the country just to make me someone else's problem. My mother, who didn't have the emotional bandwidth to deal with her own children, and my father, who had, not hours ago, blamed his own son for the death of his own sister. 

No wonder I didn't know how to feel, being raised by two voids.

The details of what happened went in one ear, settled briefly in the space where my heart should have been, then floated out the other ear. Declan had gotten drunk. Really drunk. So drunk that they hadn't even needed to test his blood for alcohol when they brought him in, because they could smell it on his breath, even unconscious. He'd gotten behind the wheel. Drove. Crashed head-on into a tree. Now, he wasn't waking up.