My Sunshine (24 page)

“Let’s go back to the house for a while. I’ll tell you

everything I know, which isn’t much.”

John
shook his head. “I want to stay here. Can I see her?”

“She’s sedated,
John. She won’t know you’re here.”

“I’m staying.”

“Okay,” she relented. “I’m going to go by your place and see if I can find her pill bottles.” She looked at Bright. “You staying here?”

“No,”
John answered for him. “You go on home.”

Bright
dug his car keys out of his pocket. “Here, I’ll leave you my car.”

“Thanks,”
John said, taking the keys.

“I’ll be back later,”
Jane said as she hugged John. “Give me a call if you need anything.”

John
watched them leave. He turned around and was greeted by Dr. Paul. “Can I see her, Doc?”

“Let’s get a cup of coffee first. They’re moving her up to
the fifth floor - the psych ward. I’ll take you up there.”

They found their way to the cafeteria. “So I guess you have
a lot of questions,” Dr. Paul said after they were seated at a table.

“I don’t know.”
John fiddled with his cup. “I don’t know anything about it. What does it mean? Is it like a split personality?”

“No, not quite. No one is sure of its exact cause. It’s a
complicated disease. There’s no cure, but the symptoms are treatable. If she takes her medication like she’s supposed to, there’s no reason that she can’t lead a perfectly normal life.

Now granted, I don’t know
Chloe’s case, but I have to imagine that her meds have been working since you didn’t know.”

“She seemed so normal.”

“And she will again.”

John sat by Chloe’s bedside holding her hand in both of his. He had his head down ad his eyes closed. His head hurt and his heart ached.

“
John,” Jane whispered, coming into the room.

He looked up. “Did you find her medicine?”

Jane nodded and sat the bag she was carrying down on a table. “Yeah, and she had plenty. She didn’t stop taking it because she was out.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t know, John. Hey, I brought you some supper.”

She pulled a large m
eatball sandwich out of the bag along with a thermos of ice tea.

“Thanks, Case.”

“Has she woken up any?”

John
shook his head. “No, she’s hardly even moved.”

“I think they’ve got her pretty sedated. They don’t know
what she’ll be like when she wakes up, so they want to try and get as many fluids and meds in her as possible before she wakes up. They don’t want her pulling out her IVs or anything like that.”

“That sounds so unlike her,”
John said, shaking his head.

“Why would she have not told me? I love her
Jane. She could have told me.”

Jane
shook her head. “I brought something else, too.”

She took a book out of the bag and handed it to him. “I stopped
by the mall on my way over.”

John
accepted the book from her. He read the title: Understanding Schizophrenia. “Thanks.”

“So do you want to tell me what you fought about?”

John ran his hand through his hair. “Oh, It was so stupid.

Monica
Williams.”

“Hmm,”
Jane grunted.

“I know,”
John said. “I wish I had never agreed to do her video.”

“Is that what the fight was about? Because she’s known
you were going to do that video. You had to.”

“No, not really. We were talking about it as I was packing
and she asked me if I had ever slept with her. I didn’t lie, and she got all angry. She thought I was going to go up there and sleep with her again. I thought she finally trusted me.”

“She hasn’t been taking her medicine. She’s not herself.”

“I guess.”

Jane
stood up. “Well, I’ve got to go.”

“Thanks,
Jane, for everything.”

Jane
smiled and walked over to him. She planted a kiss on the top of his head. “Why don’t you come on back to the house? She’s not going to wake up tonight and if she does, they’ll just sedate her again. I’ll get you up in the morning early.”

John
nodded. “Maybe I will, but I’m going to sit with her for a while longer, I think.”

He was just nodding off in his chair when
Chloe finally made a noise. He squeezed her hand. “I’m here, Chloe.”

“Don’t touch me,
Trevor,” she mumbled. “Get away from me.”

John
pulled his hand away. “It’s John.”

“You’re hurting me,
Trevor!” She screamed. “Leave me the hell alone!” It was loud enough to frighten John and make the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

She began writhing around on the bed, as much as her
restraints would let her. “Get the hell away from me!” She screamed.

John
backed away from her bed until he hit the solid door behind him. He turned and opened it, scared to stay and scared to leave. He stepped out of the room, bumping into Kelsey, the nurse assigned to Chloe’s room.

“What’s wrong,
John?”

“
Chloe’s screaming.”

Kelsey pushed past him and called on her walkie-talkie to
Dr. Stan, the doctor now handling Chloe’s case. John waited at the door while Kelsey, then Dr. Stan tried to talk to Chloe.

The screaming continued. Dr.
Stan said something to Kelsey that John didn’t understand. Kelsey left the room, returning momentarily with a large syringe. Kelsey injected the contents of the syringe into Chloe's IV. Within seconds, Chloe lay motionless again.

Dr.
Stan walked over to John. “We had to sedate her again.

We can’t let her wake up and be so violent.” We’ll give the
meds more time to work and we’ll back off the sedative slowly again in 24 to 36 hours. You should go home and get some sleep.”

John
nodded. He knew the doctor was right. He hadn’t left the hospital since Chloe was checked in. He drove home.

There was an unfamiliar car in his driveway, signaling that
Daniel had arrived.

Daniel looked at his hands. They were the rough and permanently stained hands of a mechanic. He looked older than twenty-six, and John hoped it was from the stress of owning his own business and not because of Chloe’s illness.

“What has she told you about her growing up? About our
parents?”

“She said that your dad left when she was little, and you
were raised by your mom. She got remarried when Chloe was a teenager and she didn’t like her stepfather. So she moved in with you. Is that not true?”

“No.”
Daniel shook his head. “It’s partly true. I don’t

know why she wouldn’t have told you about
Peter.” He looked at John. “Did she tell you about Peter?”

John
shook his head.

“Well, it’s like this. Her father, her biological father, took
off right after she was born. She was sick baby and was in the hospital for a while. Anyway, a year or so after she was born, my mom married Peter who adopted us. Peter Boston was our father, legally and as far as I’m concerned anyway. He died when I was sixteen.”

Daniel
paused and shook his head. “Less than a year later, Mom got hooked up with Duke. They didn’t get along very well at all.”

“So she came to live with you?”

“It wasn’t like that. She got sick first.”

John
wanted to ask the details, but at the same time he didn’t want to know. “What happened?” He asked, his concern and curiosity winning out.

“It was like she was two different people. One day she
would be sad and depressed and wouldn’t come out of her room or eat, much less talk to anyone. Then there would be other days when she talked non-stop -- no, she yelled, and she screamed, and she broke things. She cussed and hit. And you never knew what you were going to get from day to day, minute to minute. She would seem perfectly fine and the smallest thing would cause her to go one way or another. I actually preferred when she was the mean Chloe.”

“Why?”

“Because sad and depressed Chloe would lock herself in her room and barricade the door. She would stay in there for days. I was terrified that one day we would have to force open the door and we’d find her dead.”

John
shook his head. “This just doesn’t sound like her at all.

“How long did this go on?”

“From the time she as about twelve until she was diagnosed when she was seventeen.”

“Why so long? If it was so bad, why did it go on so long?”

“I tried to get her to go to the doctor, but she would refuse.

She’d promise me she’d be better, and for a few days she would
be. But the older she got, the worse she got. She really had it in for our mom and Duke. She used to go into their closet while they were gone and cut up their clothes, and she would pour out their booze all over their bedroom. One time she even slashed the tires on the car and scratched up the paint with a knife. She destroyed that car.”

“Did they have her arrested?”

Daniel chuckled. “Naw. Duke had a crop of pot growing out by the edge of the woods. They didn’t want the cops out there.” He laughed harder. “She set fire to those pot plants.”

His face fell. “That was the same day of her first psychotic
episode.”

“What happened?”

Daniel shook his head. “I’m not real sure. I was at the shop. Evidently, she set fire to the pot and then went back into the house. I guess the fire and the smoke and all confused her and she thought the house was on fire. She jumped out of her bedroom window on the second story. She broke an arm and a leg and was in the hospital for about a week. Of course, Canton is a small town and the rumors spread. People  already thought that she was weird. Now, she was just plain crazy.”

“Was she diagnosed then?”

“Oh, hell no. She got out of the hospital and came to live with me above the shop. Mom and Duke had left town on the run. That’s the last I’ve seen of her. I guess she’s here, now, according to Chloe. Anyway, Chloe dropped out of high school and just kind of hung out in a daze until right before Halloween.”

“What happened?”
John asked. He was entranced, as if Daniel was telling a story about a stranger.

“She and
Rebecca drove to Asheville to Walmart. They went down the isle of Halloween costumes and decorations and she just lost it. She thought the costumes were real and they were monsters trying to get her. It took three security guards to hold her down until the ambulance got there. She was admitted to a hospital in Asheville and the doctors there figured it out.