Leaving Eva (The Eva Series Book 1) (14 page)

BRYNN WAS
GRATEFUL
that she was adopted, and that she didn’t share her mother’s genes.

It was an awful thought that she repeated to herself often, but she was sure to never speak it aloud knowing it would make her sound like a terrible person. While she didn’t often care about what others thought of her, she loved her mother and would never want to hurt her. So she kept it to herself as she did with many things.

It was Alzheimer’s, and due to a stroke, Rose was now in a coma.

The fluorescent light of the hospital room was hurting her eyes. Her contacts were so dry.

Her head was starting to pound. The blip, blip, blip of the heart monitor was keeping time with the pound, pound, pound in her head. She rubbed her face and was disgusted with the grease and oil that had built up over the past thirty-six hours. But there was nothing that could be done until she had a proper shower. There was no point in just washing her face when she could feel the dead skin collecting on the rest of her body. Her teeth felt filmy and sugary from the numerous cups of sugary mocha vending machine coffee, two packages of M & M’s, and a pack of Starburst. She needed a shower and she needed to feel clean.

Please live!
She didn’t know why she needed her mother so much, but she did. Her heart felt twisted and heavy as though her own life were dependent upon the blip, blip, blip of the machine.

They did not have the typical nuances of any mother daughter relationship. Her mother had always needed mothering, and as she got older, her eccentricities made it worse. Initially, she undertook her responsibility out of love and devotion, but now she found that she did it more out of necessity and obligation. After all, Rose had no one else. It took a great deal of patience and energy to deal with her mother on a daily basis, and even in her slumbering state, this time was no exception. Brynn felt the ever-present guilt that went hand in hand with her frustration, and she futilely tried to suppress both with no success. She had learned to accept that the frustration, guilt, irritation, and inexplicable anger were simply part of what defined their relationship.

Up and down, up and down the cursor goes,
Brynn thought, exhausted. The heartbeat of the woman who raised her as her own, loved her as though she had grown in her womb, continued in its same uneven rhythm. Brynn had studied it for hours. The jagged lines on the screen told her that the heart was still beating, and that was all she cared about. She loved Rose.

She looks at peace as though she doesn’t have a care in the world,
Brynn marveled, despite the tubes jutting out of Rose’s throat and nose. Brynn stroked her hand. Rose’s eyes were closed and her skin was pale, but her face was relaxed and serene. She looked as though she were content to sleep and not wake up again. She looked younger somehow in her coma-induced slumber than she did when she was alert and awake.

At fifty-seven, Rose looked aged beyond her years. Her husband and life had not treated her well.

She had endured enough, and Brynn thought that this might be her way of escaping a hard life that she no longer wanted to live. And Brynn could relate. She felt the same.

Brynn stretched, and she tried to curl herself up as best as she could to try to rest.

She drifted into a restless sleep. Her mind falling back into a time when she was a child and there was a lot of yelling, a lot of screaming. She felt desperate and fearful and wanted to hide. But Brynn found that she was moving closer to the sounds, instead of further away. There was a man in her dream and his voice was angry, and had a dangerous edge to it. She could hear him swearing, using words that scared her with such a mad voice. She could hear him yelling words like “hit” or “hurt” though she wasn’t sure which one. And she could hear the stifled cries of a woman—
Stop. Don’t. She will hear you.

She awoke with a start.

Her head felt fuzzy and it still hurt.

A nurse was in the room. She was quiet, efficient. “Go back to sleep, honey. I’m only checking her vitals. So far, so good.”

Brynn knew the nurse was trying to be encouraging, but there was a look of pity in her kind green eyes as she regarded her. She was a short, plump, pretty blonde woman with puppies all over her purple scrubs. She even had a bejeweled little puppy pin that held her pen to her pocket with a matching pink chord. Brynn guessed she liked puppies.
Adam and I were going to get a puppy.
There were so many things that they didn’t get around to doing, yet. And now they never would.

She felt the sadness that cut through her when she thought of him, and tried to shake it off. There was enough to be sad about right now and she couldn’t think of him and their lost life now, or she would lose it completely.

She turned her attention back to the canine loving nurse. She guessed that the nurse’s name was Cindy from the board where her name was written with smudged blue dry erase marker. Cindy was checking the lines of her Rose’s IV and checking her over in a very business-like manner. She lifted the bag to check urine, she felt her pulse, and she noted oxygen levels.

“Any changes?” Brynn croaked out.

“No, honey. She’s still the same.” Cindy tried to sound somewhat cheerful, but did not succeed. “Sometimes it takes a couple days for them to come out of it.”

Brynn was immediately annoyed. If Cindy were doing her job, she would know it had already been a couple of days. If Cindy had read her chart, she would know that she was on her third night. She scowled to herself, her dark eyes blurry. She tried not to make eye contact with Cindy. She knew that her eyes would tell Cindy that she was full of it. Thankfully, Cindy left the room before Brynn’s eyes could tell her she thought she was incompetent. Brynn’s eyes always told the truth whether she meant them to or not. It was both a blessing and a curse.

If Cindy were a good nurse, Rose would have woken up when she was touching her tubes and checking her vitals. She would have opened her eyes. Brynn knew she was being ridiculous. Cindy had been one of several nurses, none better or worse than the other. They had all been equally efficient and genuinely concerned. But Rose never woke. It didn’t matter who was in the room.

It didn’t even matter that Brynn was in the room.

She still lay there quiet and unable to breathe on her own in her stubborn half death.

Brynn couldn’t take it anymore. She couldn’t sit in that sterile tiny room anymore with all of the beeping and blipping machines. She had to pee and she had to escape, so she decided to take a walk and look for a bathroom. She had to get out of the morbid silence of the ICU.

I’m free,
she thought briefly as she stepped through the swooshing automatic doors.

She walked through the quiet, sterile halls of the hospital and marveled at the quiet.
It’s three a.m. and all’s well
, she thought happy to be out of the ICU.

After a little bit of walking, she found a bathroom not that far away. She was pleased to see how clean it was. The floors were clean and the lights were bright, even the toilet was sparkling.
Thank God
, dirty bathrooms always grossed Brynn out.

She clumsily pulled off the seat protector and sank down on the toilet seat in exhaustion. She knew that she could fall asleep there. She tried to keep herself awake. She wanted pajamas, a soft pillow, and a nice warm bed. She wanted to sleep, like Rose, completely unaware of the world around her. She just wanted to be comfortable. She didn’t want to have to think anymore. She actually felt that her mother was being a little selfish in her slumber, and for a moment, she was jealous.

She grimaced at herself for being so irrational, but as she became more exhausted, she found her thoughts heading more in that direction.
Mad, as in crazy
, that’s what I am. She splashed water on her face after she washed her hands for what seemed like five minutes. She tried to avoid looking at her face, but couldn’t.

She was more tired than she ever remembered being in her entire life. Her dark hair was starting to look and feel greasy and she wished she had a rubber band or something to pull it back with. It was limp and lifeless. She readjusted her bobby pin hoping to give it a little lift. She readjusted repeatedly until she gave up. There was no point, and she laughed at herself for even caring about her appearance.

Whom am I trying to impress anyway? I’m certainly no prize!
Sadly, she thought about how lonely and desperate someone would have to be to want to take her home.

She allowed her eyes to wander to the empty space on her left hand where her wedding band had been. She hesitated for a moment, but then rubbed it absently. She was missing the hardness of the metal, and the reassurance it had once given her. Brynn looked at her reflection in the mirror as she often did when she was rubbing her finger. She missed him, her Adam.

It had been nearly six months since he left her but it felt like so much longer. She was beginning to feel as though life was somehow playing a cruel joke on her.

Thomas must be laughing now, from Hell. He always enjoyed my misery
, she thought wryly.

Thomas died when she was in high school, and the only good thing that came out of his death was the insurance money for Momma. For some strange reason, he was ridiculously generous in his death, and she was well taken care of for the rest of her life. Brynn thought that so strange considering how much he must have hated her to hurt her the way that he did. But Brynn never understood and had long since stopped trying. Her only goal in life was to stay far away from him and his memory, in every way possible.

She had detested nothing more than sitting at the funeral with everyone going through and saying how sorry they were for their loss. Brynn hadn’t even cried, not one tear. Her mother told her time and time again how much she despised him, yet she sat at his funeral and cried. Brynn thought Rose was such a hypocrite after how abusive he had been to them. She hadn’t thought of him as her father for a long time, he was only Thomas to her, now and forever.

Brynn bit her lip and winced. Her lips were dry and she had forgotten to bring her lip balm with her. Her mouth was a little wider than she liked, and her lips were considered “pouty,” even though she thought they were her best facial feature. She rubbed her eyes as she saw the mascara rub off on her hands. She sighed.

Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes and the familiar tightness in her throat started to squeeze her neck slowly cutting off her air. She stared hard at herself.
Stop! Y
ou
can’t do this now. You can’t lose it now! Don’t freak out! Rose is dying.

Rose is dying!

Brynn’s heart jumped for the wrong reasons and suddenly she realized that this was her excuse. Her face gave away a hint of excitement.

Now she could call him because she had an excuse. Surely, Adam would care. She could call him and tell him about Rose. Wouldn’t he want to know?

Oh my God, I should be so ashamed of myself for even thinking to use Rose as an excuse!
She felt flush with anticipation and she couldn’t contain herself with the thought of hearing his voice. She loved his deep strong voice, and she missed it. His voice had always been able to reach inside of her like a powerful song, and she missed how it made her feel.

He
had
been trying to get in touch with her a lot lately, but she avoided him. He never left a message, and she figured that after what she saw at Stacy’s memorial, he was just calling to tell her that he wanted a divorce. She couldn’t bear hearing it, and she wasn’t ready. She had only just taken the ring off because she figured he was never coming back.

She rolled it around her brain for a while trying to figure out what to do with the thought of calling him.

No! No! No, you idiot! He left you. He doesn’t care about Rose, and he doesn’t care about you.

“Stop trying to find reasons to bring him back into your life!” She chastised herself loudly, her voice echoing against the tile and the porcelain.

“He walked out on you and he doesn’t want you anymore! You made him leave because you’re pathetic, and now you want to call him? Now you want to pull him back into your life? You’re disgusting!”

Brynn knew that she must look so sad because once she started crying she couldn’t stop. Her eyelids were already getting puffy and her cheeks were getting red. She hated how distorted her face looked when she cried. Her wide mouth and generous lips were pulled tight as the tears fell rapidly down her smooth cheeks. The first signs of crows’ feet were starting to appear which was more evident as her eyes squeezed tight as she tried to stop crying.

She felt bad for being so angry with the woman she had become, the one who had let her husband go. At times she even loathed her, hated her even.

But she was angry with him, too.
How can I miss him so much when he left me?
She wondered how repulsive and sad she would be to him now. Where was her pride? Where was her self-esteem?

If he ever loved me so much, he never would have walked out on me
.
If he ever loved me, he would have called to try
to make amends. He would have fought for us.
How could she care about him now when he made it so clear that he no longer loved her or wanted anything to do with her?

She was so devastated by the loss of his love that she barely even recognized herself anymore.

Her shrink called him “her first big love.” In truth, he was her only love. She didn’t see how she could
ever
love anyone else. She didn’t want to love anyone else. She only wanted to love him but now he was gone.

“He does not love you. He left you. Let him go.” she hissed at herself, hating her weakness, and her neediness for someone who clearly did not want her any longer.

Brynn took deep breaths. That is what her shrink told her to do. She had been practicing that in her yoga class, while she was driving, when she was in the shower, while she was eating dinner, or even emptying the dishwasher. When Brynn felt she was drowning, she would try to breathe. It felt ridiculous. But she was desperate to breathe, so she sucked as much air into her lungs as she could and blew it out slowly. She repeated this over and over, until she almost felt lightheaded. She could feel the sensation that she was coming up above the water, and she didn’t feel as though she were drowning any longer. This worked for her, at least for the moment, most of the time.