Losing Jack

Chapter 16

By 5.30am Mary Lynne was up, dressed in practical travel clothes, packed and ready to make her trip to Mt Barker. She thought about how at first she had considered making up all sorts of excuses to Bob to get out of going, or simply declining the offer and finding a new job. She could keep on running away from her past, but at what cost. She knew that wasn’t the right thing to do, it was time to make a stand and face her fears head on.

She was so nervous, but after the initial shock of everything she had done some soul searching and decided that maybe this was what she was meant to do. To help Jack find the right place now his mum and dad had died.

Ultimately she would be the one deciding what was best for him. This was her chance to give something back. Wasn't she here doing this job for that very reason.

Her resolve grew as she realised she owed this to Jack. Maybe if she did this one good deed it wouldn’t erase that night from her conscience, but in some small way it may help her to sleep easier at night -just knowing he would be looked after.

Still going back to her old home town after so many years was overwhelming. But at the same time it made her feel a pang of homesickness, longing not so much for the town itself, but for all of her childhood friends. The happy carefree times, the old high school, their favourite hangout places, and Michael of course. But she knew he would be long gone.

She wondered what Michaels life was like now. Did he have a great job, maybe he moved on and had a family. It made her feel sad that he may be off somewhere having a wonderful life, experiencing all of the things that she had dreamed they would have together. But another part of her hoped that he did have all of those things, that he was happy somewhere and everything that had happened was just a distant memory. The good and the bad stuff.

Her childhood had been great, but  her journey into adulthood had been very hard for her everything was just so damn complicated and not in the least bit how she had envisaged it to be. Here she was in her thirties, single, all alone, married to her job, going nowhere fast. Admittedly though, her job was the one good thing that she did have and she guessed that was what made her decision to go back and set things straight for Jack so much easier. If she didn’t have her job what did she have going for her?

After a quick visit to the office to gather a few things she needed and to touch bases with Bob, she would be on her way. She expected to arrive in Mt Barker early in the afternoon, check into her motel room and relax. Then she would be ready to meet with everyone at Whispering Vines the next day.

She smiled into her rapidly cooling cup of coffee thinking to herself how excited her parents had been for her about her new promotion. Then how they had been so worried about her going to Mt Barker. She couldn’t bring herself to tell them the rest of the story, her mother's words still echoed in her ears “Oh Linney, that place is no good for you, it almost destroyed you once, look how far you have come, please don’t go back there.”
That  was probably the truth of the situation, but it was too late for that now.

Besides it was about time that she took responsibility for her own life and her own decisions. She loved her parents very much and they had been her rock, but they worried too much about her.  Ever since that night. It was about time she stood on her own two feet and stopped letting them wrap her up in cotton wool.

The open road beckoned her and as she flew along the highway, music from her iPod sent her back to 1994, the morning after the car accident sitting up to find herself in a hospital bed. How did I get here, she had asked herself, then like a lightning bolt it had all hit her.

Everything that had happened come flooding back, the party, the engagement, her and Michael sharing the back seat, the accident. Every little part of those few traumatic seconds. Then the after math. Poor Jack, with blood everywhere motionless, arms outstretched over the steering wheel…

She relived the emotions and confusion in her hospital bed, what had they done? This had been all her fault; she kicked Michael, which caused the whole thing! Was Jack still alive, where was Michael? She had wondered as she began to cry.

The arrival of a nurse, in to check on her vitals answered some of her questions. Michael was fine, apart from a few broken ribs, he had been sent home, to rest. Jack wasn’t so lucky. He was in critical condition, which the nurse explained, meant that the odds were not stacked in his favour.

Mary Lynne wondered why Michael hadn’t come in to see her. Was he angry at her, maybe he blamed her for what happened. Terrible nasty thoughts kept eating away at her, all those what if’s. That’s when it had happened, something inside of her snapped, it was all too much to take in, her mind gave up, and she lay there motionless. She stopped hearing, thinking, seeing and retreated to a quiet safe place far away from reality..

It was diagnosed as Traumatic Stress Disorder and a complete mental breakdown. Mary-Lynne was taken to Perth where she spent 5 years in a mental facility. She didn’t remember much of her time in the loony bin, and would never talk about it, even to her best friend, if she had one that is.

Mary Lynne worked with people that had mental as well as physical disabilities and she couldn't bear the thought of others knowing about her mental illness and judging her. She hated that there was still the stigma that surrounded them. Nobody liked to talk about it, yet it still surrounded mentally ill people.

From all of that time she was institutionalised there was very little she remembered. It was a wish wash of grey walls, grey carpets, white ceilings with cracks running through the plaster.

She didn't remember her feelings or thoughts while she was there, except for small periods of time when she felt confusion. It had been a time of her life when she remembered glimpses of things, one day blending into another. The only way to tell the time was through light and dark.

Then there was the relief, only felt at medication time. Those little white pills promised peace from her demons, in there she had felt safe, with the predictable haziness of the medication.

Gradually after a lot of therapy, she got better. She learnt how to manage again, and they let her out and even gave her a silly piece of paper saying she was legally sane, which she kept in her secret shoebox.

She had come out of the facility somehow different, like something in her was missing. She had lost it somewhere along the way. She realised now what it was, she had lost her spark, her mischief, in its place was an older, more brooding person. Mary Lynne had become one of those boring grownups they used to poke fun of when they were kids.

She often wondered quietly to herself about sanity, although she was too scared to ask. But to her it was the ability to conform to another person’s ideals of what normal was, it just didn’t make sense to her.

As a child she had been taught that being an individual was a good thing, yet here she had a piece of paper stating that she was just like everyone else. Because different, when you were an adult was wrong.

Mary Lynne had never gone back to Mt Barker. Not even to see Jack because she was scared that seeing him like that may send her off the deep end again.  But mostly she realised that she had stayed away because of Michael.  For two reasons the first was because she couldn’t bear the thought of him rejecting her once he found out about her breakdown.  Worse still, was facing up to the blame, and her part in the car accident.

Five years of institutionalisation and even to this day therapy had taught her to feel detachment from what happened. Her therapist had discussed that night with her in great detail, explaining to her that instead of seeing and feeling it with her heart, she should imagine that she was describing what happened in a movie, and telling him what the main character, was feeling and seeing. They discussed how she thought the main character should react to her situation. This tactic had worked well for Mary Lynne and she still used it sometimes when she felt herself in an overwhelming situation.

While she distanced herself from it all and told herself that it never really happened she was safe. After they let her out of the loony bin, she had settled in Perth, got a job, and found an apartment. Her high school, carefree years may well have been a lifetime away, that was until now.

Very soon she would have to face Jack, look him in the eyes and own it, and that scared the hell out of her.

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Thanks for reading this chapter,  I hope you are enjoying Losing Jack so far.  Please vote and comment if you think this chapter deserves it.  :)