Code Name: Aries by Janie Crouch

25

Wavy

Every time I opened my eyes, I braced myself for the pain. I’d long since stopped screaming. It didn’t help, and my voice was broken anyway.

All of me was broken.

When I woke up and Ian was there beside me, I still braced myself for the pain. He’d been beside me before, for fleeting seconds, and the pain had still come.

But this time it . . . didn’t.

The longer it didn’t come, the more scared I got. It would be back. It always came back and was worse than before. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t—

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Ian was still beside me.

There was still no pain.

This time, there were other people around. Doctors, nurses. I flinched away when any came near me. I don’t know how I’d gotten back into the medical bed. I’d been on the floor for so long.

Ian crouched beside me. I still kept waiting for him to disappear. Kept waiting for the pain to return.

He touched my hand, but I didn’t flinch from him. I stared down at where our hands rested together.

“You’re not bound anymore, Rainbow,” he whispered, his voice so low I didn’t think anyone else could hear it. “You’re not alone. You’re not trapped. Let your senses tell you what’s really happening.”

I could feel his thumb brush across my skin. I could feel that. There was no pain anywhere.

“Think about what you can hear, what you can feel. Take it in a little bit at a time, at your own pace. There’s no rush. But you’re safe.”

I did take it in, but time still didn’t make sense to me.

I was in a hospital. There were doctors. Finn was here. And Baby, Mom, and Ian. But all of it seemed so far away. I could see them, I could hear them, but it was like I was inside a thick bubble.

I’d seen one out on the lake one time. A giant, plastic bubble. A couple of kids had crawled inside, then run around on the surface of the lake, spinning and flipping—the thick plastic keeping them safe and dry.

That was me now. Everyone outside the bubble was distant and a little fuzzy, but at least nothing in here hurt me anymore.

So I stayed.

I was aware when they moved me from one hospital to another in one of Ian’s jets.

I was back in Oak Creek. I knew that because Dr. Anne was here and my friends, and Leeann from the diner. They came in to say hello, but they were all as fuzzy as everyone else.

I was content to lay in my little bubble in my hospital bed where nothing hurt. It took me a while to realize that everyone was waiting for things from me.

So I tried to give them what they wanted.

They seemed so excited when I sat up by myself, when I fed myself, when I walked from the hospital bed over to the chair by the window, even though I couldn’t really see out of it.

I could, but it was too hard to focus on anything through the thickness wrapping my mind.

But nothing hurt. I kept the thought of the pain pushed far away. If I let that in, remembered the agony, I would—

I just couldn’t think about it at all.

I would keep the thought of it out of the bubble. I’d keep everything out of the bubble.

It took me a lot longer than it probably should have to realize what everyone really wanted from me. They wanted me to talk.

But my voice was broken in every possible way. I had screamed until my voice no longer worked, and now I was afraid it would never work again.

I wanted to explain it wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to them, it was that I couldn’t. But that was a lie. I didn’t want to talk either.

So, everyone continued to treat me like I was a toddler, all but applauding every time I did something very simple, asking me yes or no questions so I could nod or shake my head.

I was disappointing them. Or maybe not disappointing but hurting their feelings. No, that wasn’t right either. All I knew was they were worried about me.

In a distant part of my mind, I knew I should put more of an effort into breaking out of my bubble. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough. It would take more than I had.

So I stayed like I was. They moved me out of the hospital—I wasn’t taking any medicine so didn’t need to be there—to Mom’s house. That was good. My old bed was familiar. I didn’t have to do anything but listen as Mom talked to me from far away and people came to visit.

Ian came to see me. He was the hardest to see. The only one who caused me to question staying in my bubble. If I stayed in here, I’d never be with him again.

But maybe that was better. What could he possibly see in me now? I could barely get out of bed without assistance. I didn’t talk, didn’t feel. Didn’t have anything left to offer to anyone, maybe ever.

He’d sit next to me, try to talk, but I never spoke back. He would gently touch my hand, but then just as gently let it go, as if he wasn’t sure if touching me was okay.

Please don’t let me go!

The words screamed in my mind, but nothing came out of my mouth. I didn’t know how to communicate with him, so I turned away.

Each time. How many times had he come here? So many, it felt like. He was here more than anyone else. He was the one who encouraged me to walk around the house, to walk outside in the sun. Whispered to me to have sweet dreams.

* * *

Time became the last thing I was truly aware of.

Finn and Charlie brought me a new phone, and I opened the calendar app during one of the few times when there was no one in the room with me.

The red block date told me what today’s date was, and I couldn’t believe it. The last date I remembered had been more than five weeks ago. That had been the day I’d gone to see Louis Noeya, the “art dealer.” But he wasn’t an art dealer. He was Erick Huen.

It was the first time I’d let myself think about his name. I waited to see what would happen, if the pain would come back, but it didn’t. He couldn’t hurt me now.

How had five weeks passed? How much of that had been when I was taken, and how much of it had been since they’d found me? I didn’t know.

All I knew was that it was five weeks of my life I was never going to get back.

For a split second, the bubble around me thinned enough that I could see out of it. I was sitting on the corner of the couch in the living room, legs tucked underneath me. No TV, no book, just sitting here.

Mom was in the kitchen talking to Charlie. The baby—Thomas, my nephew Thomas—was sitting in a booster seat, banging away and eating faster than Charlie could give him pieces of banana.

I got up and walked into the kitchen. Mom and Charlie stopped talking and stared at me. I wanted to say something, but couldn’t find my voice. Instead, I picked up the banana and fed Thomas a piece. They started talking again.

Then the bubble snapped back into place. But that was okay.

Every time I looked at my calendar, the bubble thinned, sometimes for only a few seconds, sometimes for much longer. Each time it thinned, I did more. I went outside, even drove myself into town every once in a while. Everyone talked and smiled at me, although nobody seemed to expect a response.

Finn brought an easel and my paints and set it up in Mom’s guest room, but I closed the door so I couldn’t see it. I had no desire whatsoever to paint. My colors were gone.

I could see colors around me. I knew my eyes worked correctly. But the colors, the way I used to see them, flowing in patterns and mists and surrounding everything, were gone. And I didn’t think they were ever coming back.

My colors were gone. My feelings were gone. My voice was gone.

Who was I without those? If I never expressed myself or felt anything, was I still a person?

Day after day ticked by. Everyone got used to seeing me in town and waving and smiling at me, but nobody tried to talk to me anymore. Ian came to see me regularly, but I knew he had to be getting frustrated. He always asked me questions, ones that required actual answers, not like the questions everyone else posed around me to make me feel included. But I never responded. How long before he decided I wasn’t worth the effort?

How long until he started posing thenon-question questions like everyone else?

I wasn’t sure exactly when the anger began to creep in.

All I knew was that the anger disintegrated the bubble more consistently than anything else. The anger didn’t make anything better, but at least I could feel it.

Every time I looked at the calendar, I was mad.

I had lost weeks of my life because of what Erick Huen had done to me. But I had lost much more time because of what I was allowing.

I wanted to go to my studio. Not to paint. To rip it all down.

I waved to Mom, who gave me her slightly relieved look, like she was glad I was going out, but she probably ought to be concerned. I gave her as big a smile as I could muster, although it was nothing compared to how I used to grin at damn near everybody.

Mom had always been kind of fragile, and we’d taken turns caring for her since Dad died more than a decade ago. Being my caretaker was taking a toll on her. I was hurting her.

For the first time, it felt like the bubble was keeping me trapped rather than safe. But I’d let it surround me for so long, I wasn’t sure how to separate it from who I was. We’d melded together.

I drove into town and parked near my studio. I forced myself to walk up the stairs and open the door.

Everything looked the way it had the last time I’d seen it. The unmade cot in the corner. My sweater thrown over the chair by the tiny table. My blank canvases and supplies.

All the paintings with their colors so bright and cheerful.

They were garish to me now. So bright they hurt my eyes. I picked up the biggest canvas and threw it on the ground. Stomped on it, picking up the frame until the canvas ripped under my foot.

Then I did the same to another. And another. Destroying canvas after canvas until my weakened body could do no more.

Then I sat down in the middle of it all and cried. Sobbed. I answered the question I’d been afraid to ask myself—did my voice actually still work?

It did. I knew because the sobs poured out of me now, from the very depths of my being.

I wept at what had been taken from me, at what I’d lost, at what I’d given up.

For what I was afraid was gone forever.

Not just my paintings, but my relationship with Ian. I’d shut him out.

I needed him.

Just like that, the bubble snapped—gone. All of a sudden, I could see everything clearly, but I was naked and raw without its presence.

Baby and Finn came bursting through the door. Someone must have heard me crying.

I scrambled back from them, unable to explain that I couldn’t be touched, not right now while everything was so immediate and painful and raw. They stopped, unsure of what to do. Agony blanketed their handsome faces.

Baby, my younger, gentler brother, crouched on the ground. “Hey, sis, we’re just checking on you. Mom said you came to town and, well, we have security cameras set up. And when we saw you in here crying . . .”

I tried to force words out, I really did. I knew my vocal cords worked, but I couldn’t manage yet. So I held a hand out toward them and nodded.

Baby stood up and took a few steps closer. He didn’t pull me in for a hug, which had to be hard for him—he was such a hugger. But he knew I wasn’t ready.

I wanted to explain about how things were changing, how the bubble was gone, how everything, even breathing, felt overstimulating. About how I knew in the long run, it was probably for the better, but for right now, I couldn’t process everything that was happening.

I wanted to explain that I needed to be alone, but that I was afraid to be alone, that I needed a chance to figure out what my new normal was going to be.

I wanted to tell them that I knew I was hurting them, and that was not my intention. And that I was so sorry. That I would try harder, but that I had to figure out how to take those first steps.

Both of them kept murmuring that it would be okay. The same thing they’d been murmuring since I’d woken up in the hospital.

And although they meant it, it was a lie.

Because the truth was, here, where everyone coddled me and looked at me in sympathy and talked in non-question questions around me, I was never going to find myself again. Never going to reclaim myself.

So, for the first time since I’d woken up, I forced words out of my lips.

“I need Ian.”