I sat in my hospital bed, staring at my bandaged wrists. The nurses came in a few times a day to check and make sure I hadn’t loosened the bandages and the blood had stopped seeping so heavily.
My dad hadn’t left the hospital since my admittance. Leigh would come in and bring him food and give me a sympathetic smile with a small squeeze to my hand. I acted like I didn’t see her. That’s how I was acting with everyone. I was numb; frozen; stuck in a world where I was alone and away from it all.
My doctor kept trying ways to get me to talk or make a noise, to just get out of the phase I was in. Nothing was working though. If I did anything it was in the same daze I was constantly in.
I was barely eating and this worried the doctor and nurses. I’d been in there almost three days and I’d eaten maybe the total of one meal if you combined all the things I ate together. Leigh tried bringing in food for me to eat. She made things from my mom’s recipe book, but I only ever ate a few bites of it when she was gone and my dad had finally fallen asleep again in the chair.
The doctor talked about admitting me to the mental health wing of the hospital, but my dad said he couldn’t bear to see me go there. He wanted to be there to help me get better. He wanted to do everything he could to make me better. Being home with him and Leigh was what he thought would make me better. Little did he know that was the last thing I wanted.
A week went by and I had lost fifteen pounds, the nurses were concerned about my weight and the doctor was considering putting me on a feeding tube. She told my dad if I didn’t start eating on my own soon my stomach would start rejecting any food into it and I’d have to be admitted into the mental wing.
“Just give her a little more time,” my dad begged. “Please? I’ll try talking to her again.”
“I don’t think all the talking in the world will help,” the doctor said sympathetically. “But I’ll give you another day to talk to her. Otherwise first thing tomorrow I’ll send a nurse to give you the forms to admit her to the mental health wing.”
My dad bowed his head solemnly and shakily walked back inside my hospital room. He had only been outside the room talking with the doctor not bothering to shut the door or hush their voices. I knew everything that had just happened, yet I still wasn’t moving from my unnerved state.
“Odette,” he said softly, coming along side my bed and placing his hands gently on it. “Honey, I need you to listen to me.”
The desperation in his voice rang through me; I could feel it pulling at my heart strings. I couldn’t move though, my body stayed facing the wall in front of me.
“Dr. Heintz says if you don’t show some improvement by tomorrow, you’re going—you’re going to--” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He buried his face in his hands and sobbed. He sobbed like he did when my mother passed away. His whole body shook and you could hear the choking cries escaping his mouth.
“Mr. Green,” a nurse said gently as she entered the room. “I think you need to get a little bit of fresh air. You’ve been in here an awful lot this past week. Let’s go get a little air.” She put an arm around his shoulders, and he staggered to his feet and let the nurse lead him out of the room, his sobs slowly disappearing as he got farther and farther away from my room.
Still staring at the wall I felt tears flow down my cheeks. The first bit of emotion I’d shown in a week and it was tears. The last time I had cried it was when I had been sedated by Dr. Heintz when I tried ripping the bandages away from my wrists. This time though, I wasn’t crying for myself.
When he came back, he stood pacing around the room. He cheeks were tear-stained and the rims of his eyes were red. He rubbed his face a few times, letting out sighs of frustration. Pacing back and forth he swung his arms, as if he were warming up for a sport. Finally he turned to look at me, the desperation clear in his eyes.
“Why did you do it, Odette?” his voice was shaky from crying but he had a new determination in it. “Was it because of something I did? Were you that unhappy Leigh moved in with us? What made you unhappy?”
I flinched back from him as if the words had slapped me across the face. My eyes burned and my throat closed up. My body was shaking and finally my gaze at the wall broke and I crumpled onto my bed, sobbing silently.
“Odette, I need you to tell me what you want. I want to help you, but I don’t know what to do,” he came over and sat down o the bed rubbing my back, trying to sooth me. “Do you want to go to the mental wing? Do you want to come home? Do you want to get better?”
Shaking my head I kept it buried in the covers of the hospital blanket. The smell of bleach filled my nose and slightly stung my eyes, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t look at him while I cried. I couldn’t make him feel bad for something I did. Something I did so selfishly.
“Sweetheart, please answer. I want to do what you think will help you the most. I love you, and I never will not love you, okay? So please do you want to go home?”
Looking up at him I nodded my head, tears still streaming down my face. Right then, I made the first unselfish decision. I wasn’t going home for myself; I was going for my dad.
YOU ARE READING
Falling Colors
Teen Fiction"The unfixable; the shattered; the torn; the broken. They all come here. It's my job to remake them, because once its broken there is no going back to the way it was. It must be remade." Six individuals. Six unique stories. Five exercises. One...
