When I wake up Lochan and Ben are sitting on the floor beside the bed, covered in blood, feasting on my heart in order to get it away from me and keep it safe. If they consume it it means no one else will and I'm suddenly grateful and ashamed all at once. My brain has been thrown off the cliff, far out where it can't come back on the tide, electricity neutralized by the saltwater, bloating it up into a balloon, plucked out of the waves by a seagull, carried to a different coast, never to be seen again.
God these pills are great. What would be someone else's abject nightmares bring me so much peace.
Not going to let him win, Lochlan says behind a mouthful of crimson pain.
Ben shakes his head and continues to feast. He's blocking the door. I notice this almost like an afterthought, an intrusive thought that sees this mess from their perspective. Lochlan is comforted somehow, by the simple facts that Ben is there, that I am alert and fully aware that my brain is trying to sabotage me, that prolonged grief, exacerbated by trauma and PTSD is an easy, obvious but fairly recent diagnosis and a likely one just by virtue of what we already know and have seen. It's simply too much. I can't handle this and I've been struggling so hard for so long and sometimes I slip and I can't do it at all anymore and at the same time, here I am. Fighting to be brainless, heartless and whole like I've never fought before.
It's very very hard and I hate it. I hate what it does to Lochlan. I hate what it does to Ben. I hate what it does to Bridget, most of all. She had so much promise and now she's a pretty prisoner and this is the home they have put her in and she'll be lucky if she ever gets to leave the house alone or earn back shoelaces or be able to slice an apple or pick a song ever again.
And that's infuriating but I can do mad. I can't do my brain telling me to go get Jacob because that's where I belong.
I don't belong there.
(Don't be stupid, Bridget.)
But my brain is so loud. Maybe being deaf is a psychological response (it isn't but oh how I wish it was and how grateful I am that my brain is muffled and easily drowned out).
I'm getting full. Get someone else. There's so much left. Lochlan protests. Red up to the elbows, blood in his hair. Blood on his teeth.
I can get Caleb, Ben says. Or Sam.
Nevermind, I'll do it, Lochlan promises and continues on. It's my fault. We didn't get the help we needed at the beginning. It's my fault. I'm so sorry.
You were a child too. He's off the hook. He did his best and then some. He continues to fight long after everyone else has given up and left.
It doesn't matter. I'm responsible for her.
We all are, Ben reminds him gently. You're not alone.
Lochlan's grief over me is going to be exactly the same. We should just get used to it, swimming in blood, tortured, ruined. Always a second from drowning in feelings. Always on high alert.
Eat faster, I tell them suddenly and they look up in surprise.
You're awake! It's been days, Peanut. How do you feel?
Afraid.
We're fixing it now. Just hold on.