Beautiful Dreamer

Chapter 26

Chapter Twenty-Six

According to everyone that mattered, I had attempted to kill myself.

It was the grief, they said. After finding out I'd had an older sister who'd been murdered years before, the belated sadness was enough to drive me over the edge. Some unexpected streak of madness had possessed me to trek through the forest in the middle of a rainstorm and go for a swim with a broken arm—broken, they said, by a fall I could no longer remember.

All things considered, they told me I was lucky. The impacted fracture in my forearm was a doozy, but it would heal. There was also glass to be pulled out of both my feet and some stitches needed on my forehead where I'd somehow bashed it underwater, but those, too, would get better with time. It was just that on top of all of that, my stint in the lake had left me with a particularly nasty case of hypothermia. They told me that I should feel blessed to have been rushed to the hospital so quickly, because, as my nurse had so gently put it, “If you hadn't gotten immediate care, you'd be lying in a coffin right now, not a hospital bed.”

As much as I hated the hospital, suffocating under six inches of blankets was infinitely better than six feet of dirt.

So many words were said in those first few days, as I drifted in and out of consciousness and learned to live off of much-needed painkillers, but none of them were the truth. The true story of what had happened that night was one that the doctors and nurses could never hear, and would never believe. The official story left me tangled in a million lies; lies to physicians and therapists, lies to police officers, lies to the countless busybodies who drove an half an hour into Butler just to nose around in my dramatic and anguished life.

My mother was a frequent visitor, of course; she practically lived at my beside for most of the time. Father Lucas made a trip up too, telling me that the town was keeping me in their prayers. Aubrey called from Boston to give her get-wells, and made me promise to give her the full breakdown of what had happened that night when she came down for Christmas. Even Mrs. Hummel made a trip up with Svana to hear the whole story, and she cried when I told her about my sister. (This threw Svana into a fit, so our visit didn't last very long).

The one person I didn't see during those few days of recuperation was the very boy who'd made sure that I was alive to even wonder about him. Logan never showed up, never called, and never returned a single text. When I asked my mom and his sister, they both said they hadn't heard from him. Spending all day in a hospital room staring at the wall leaves a lot of time for thinking, and I found myself worrying in every spare moment, trying to think of what I could have possibly done to warrant his completely ignoring me.

It was driving me just a little bit mad.

By my fourth and final day in the hospital, everything had been mended and all the questions had been asked, and I had all but given up hope of Logan coming to see me. My mother was at work, so I was trapped in my room, flipping through the most useless selection of channels I had ever had the misfortune of seeing. The television on the wall barely had enough connection to manage a visible picture, though, so perhaps I wasn't missing out on much. All I wanted was to get out of the suffocating hospital and saw the uncomfortable gown off of my body so that I could go back home and be miserable in peace.

“Parker.” One of the nurses poked her head into my room as I was trying to determine whether the fuzz on the screen was Toddlers in Tiaras or Keeping Up With the Kardashians. She was speaking to me in that soft, pitying voice reserved for puppies and babies: the tone that had become the soundtrack of my days ever since I arrived. “You have a visitor,” she continued, smiling slightly.