Chapter 14 #2
Night again. The room dims to the kind of dark that isn’t frightening, just real.
Doc comes and goes in soft shoes. Head Case sits on the floor and tells me how to name the things I can feel when I think I can’t feel anything name what brings me comfort.
I begin simply with the weight of the blanket, the cool of the water, the fan’s breeze on my palm, and then I allow myself to go deeper, my comfort is the sound of Tommy’s breathing like a steady engine.
“I can’t do tomorrow,” I whisper once in our session, sudden and raw.
“Do now,” Head Case says. “That’s the only piece of time humans can actually touch.”
“Now hurts.”
He nods. “Yes. And you’re still here inside it.”
I turn my head and look at Tommy. “You came,” I remind myself, because I need to keep saying it until it fits.
“I told you I would be wherever you needed me,” he says simply. “Even when you didn’t want me to.”
The apology leaps to the back of my tongue. He sees it coming and shakes his head once. “Don’t,” he warns, gentle. “Not yet. You don’t atone for this shit when it’s still raw and tearing you up inside.”
Bleeding without blood — that’s what this is. I close my eyes so my body can work without my mind trying to narrate it to death.
By the third day, I know the room well enough to name it with my eyes closed. The small table with the pitcher and the clean cups. The stack of washcloths. The basket of socks because Head Case says warm feet trick your body into remembering it’s allowed to be alive.
My body remembers other things too — the pull like gravity toward the familiar quiet that wasn’t quiet at all.
The ache under the ache. The thought snake that says just one line and you can sleep.
I tell Doc when it slithers in. She doesn’t look disappointed; she looks like a woman who understands how crafty snakes are.
“Cravings crest and fall,” she says. “You don’t have to do anything about them. They’re weather. They pass.”
We weather them. Tommy sits me up and puts a cool cloth on my neck.
Head Case gives me a trick: find five square things in the room, four round, three soft, two rough, one that makes a sound I like.
I point them out like a child showing off a classroom.
It feels dumb until it doesn’t. Until the snake gets bored and slides back under the door.
When I can stand without the floor swinging, Doc walks me to the bathroom with a hand under my elbow. The mirror is covered with a towel. “I’ll take it down when you tell me to,” she says. “Not before.”
“Leave it,” I whisper. “I’m not ready to look yet.”
She nods. “You’ll tell me when you are.”
She waits outside the door until I rinse my mouth and splash my face. The warm cloth smells like soap that doesn’t pretend to be anything else. My hands tremble a little less when I dry them.
Back in bed, I watch the window. A thin slice of sky shows through the shade, blue lifting to a paler blue. Morning feels different here, like it’s not trying to blind me.
“Tommy?” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Were you scared?” It’s a foolish question. Of course he was. I ask it anyway because I need to hear his version of the truth.
He takes a breath like he’s lifting something heavy. “Yeah,” he shares honestly. “Scared in a way I didn’t know I could be. When I saw you—” He stops and swallows. “I was scared your eyes wouldn’t find mine. I was scared I was too late.”
“I thought I died,” I expose my truth, and my voice shakes on the last word.
He squeezes my hand. “You didn’t,” he says fiercely. “You didn’t.”
“I promised,” I whisper, eyes stinging. “Before it went dark. I promised if I lived, I’d go back. I’d choose the light.” The words feel melodramatic and exactly right.
He nods like I’ve said the most practical thing in the world. “Okay,” he says. “Then that’s the plan.”
“The plan,” I echo, bemused. “Like a grocery list.”
He grins, a brief flash of teeth, relief making him boyish for a second.
“We are absolutely making a grocery list for your life,” he smiles.
“Item one: keep breathing. Item two: water. Item three: more water. Item four: Doc’s orders.
Item five: call Jenni when you’re ready.
Item six: rehab — if that’s where you want to go.
I’ll drive you. I’ll sit in the parking lot and learn to knit. I don’t care. I’m there.”
The laugh turns into a sob I can’t swallow this time.
It rips out of me, ugly and real. The kind you only make when the body can’t carry the weight alone anymore.
He doesn’t shush me. He doesn’t tell me to be strong.
He gets his arms around me without jostling the IV and lets me cry into his shirt until it’s damp.
He breathes like he’s willing his lungs into mine.
When it passes, there’s a clean feeling under the raw. My head aches less. The light through the shade looks like possibility instead of interrogation.
“I did terrible things,” I say into his chest, the words more air than sound.
“I know,” he says. “And I’m not leaving.”
“You should.”
He lifts my chin with a knuckle, eyes steady. “You don’t get to make that choice for me.”
I close my eyes. “Okay,” I say, because I don’t have the strength to fight the one good thing in the room.
The fourth day is the worst and then the best. The feverish swings calm, then spike, then calm again.
The restlessness is a swarm under my skin; Head Case teaches me to stomp my feet lightly against the mattress, to give the bees somewhere to go.
We do it together and it feels ridiculous but it works.
Doc brings broth. I drink it like it’s soup made of prayers. I keep it down. We all celebrate that like champions of a small league and it makes me smile for the first time without it hurting.
We make a list for real, not a joke. It’s on a legal pad Doc leaves by the bed.
JAMI’S LIST
breathe
water
tell Doc if the craving comes
ask for Jenni
shower when steady
call a place (Head Case to bring options)
if I go, I choose it
if I don’t go, I build structure with the Doc/HC/meetings
eat a piece of toast without negotiating with it
let Tommy keep holding my hand without apologizing
I add an 11th in shaky letters: forgive myself in pencil, daily.
Head Case reads it and nods, like a teacher who recognizes a kid’s handwriting from miles away. “That’s a good list,” he says. “Pencil is smart. It means you can erase a line and write it again tomorrow without calling it a failure.”
“What if I can’t do 10?” I ask, eyeing the last line. It feels like the heaviest lift.
Tommy squeezes once. “Then we bump it to number 12 and do it later or erase it all together. We’re not grading you.”
I cry again, but this time it’s less like falling apart and more like water finding a new path through rock.
By late afternoon, the room smells like clean hair and lemon again because Doc let me shower with her sitting on a stool outside the door and Tommy posted like a guard on the other side of the hall.
I cried when the water hit my shoulders.
Not because of shame. Because my body remembered the safety of this life.
When I come out in the soft cotton shorts someone found and a t-shirt that smells like the dryer at home, Jenni is in the hall with her hands in a fist against her mouth.
Her eyes are enormous. She doesn’t move until Doc nods once, and then she does — like a wave breaking — and the next thing I know her arms are around me and we are both sobbing like the world is ending and beginning.
“I’m sorry,” I say against her shoulder.
“Shut up,” she stammers, crying. “You’re here. That’s all I care about.”
Crunch is behind her, eyes glassy, jaw tight like he can hold the whole building up with it.
He doesn’t touch me — not because he doesn’t want to, because he waits for me to lift my hand.
I do and he steps in and puts his palm against the back of my head the way a brother does when words are stupid.
We don’t talk about details. We say I love you and I’m here and they remind me “we got you, Jami.” That’s the entire language for now.
They sit a while, then Doc kicks them out with a kindness that doesn’t negotiate. “She needs sleep,” she says, and they obey like people who trust someone with a scalpel.
Back in bed, I look at Tommy. “When I sleep,” I ask him, “stay?”
He doesn’t nod like a hero. He nods like a man who has packed a go-bag for love. “Yeah,” he says. “As long as you want.”
“Okay.”
I fall asleep with our hands laced together on top of the covers, the fan turning and the list on the table and the towel still over the mirror because there are some things I don’t need to look at to know they’re true.
Night edges out the corners. Somewhere down the hall, Red laughs at something Tank says and it sounds like home. The beeping that counted my heart earlier is gone because I don’t need the machine to tell me it’s still there. I can feel it. It’s a little stronger now. A little more mine.
I wake once to the soft scrape of a chair. Tommy is up, leaning over to tuck the blanket back around my shoulder because I must have kicked it off. He doesn’t know I’m awake. He presses his mouth to my hairline and whispers, “Proud of you. And I love you, Tiny.”
It threads itself into my sleep like a stitch.
Morning brings toast and a new light through the shade. I manage half without negotiating and the room applauds like I climbed a mountain. It embarrassed me for half a second and then I let it in. Letting in good has always been the bigger fight.
Head Case brings a folder. “Options,” he explains. “Local inpatient. Out-of-town residential. Partial programs. Schedules. Pros and cons. We don’t have to pick today. But let’s hold them in our hands so they feel real.”
We go through them slowly. I cry once because the word intake makes my throat close. Tommy puts his hand on my back and rubs circles he must have learned standing in a kitchen with his mother who has always been gentle. Doc sees my struggle and orders, “Break,” and we take one. Then we keep going.
By noon, the list on the legal pad has a new line in pen (not pencil): Call: Sandhills Recovery — ask about beds, women’s track records, no-narcotic protocol.
Head Case will dial. I will do the speaking. Tommy will listen. That’s the division of labor. It feels possible.
I look at him then, really look. The bruises that were blooming when I opened my eyes the first time have softened at the edges.
There are lines at the corner of his eyes I don’t remember and a grief in his mouth I put there.
I want to kiss it away and I don’t. Not because I don’t want him.
Because my body is mine today, mine in a way it hasn’t been for weeks, and I want to keep it that way until I hand it to him on purpose and not because the world took its hands off for a minute.
He seems to hear the thought because he doesn’t lean in. He just holds my gaze and nods once, like a promise to meet me on the road I pick.
I sleep again in the afternoon, and the dreams are loud but the room is louder. When I wake, the towel is still over the mirror and I don’t hate it for that.
I ask for Jenni for ten minutes and she appears like a magician who lives in the hallway. We cry less and talk more. She says she loves me in every season — past, present, future — and I believe her. She squeezes my hand and leaves before the light changes, because Doc says transitions are fragile.
When it’s just Tommy and me again, I find the list and tap line ten with my fingertip: let Tommy keep holding my hand without apologizing.
He watches my finger. He doesn’t move.
“You can,” I say, and the permission is a door and a vow. “Hold my hand.”
He does. Our fingers slide together, palms warm. We breathe at the same pace without trying.
“Okay,” I say into the quiet. “I’m more than okay.”
It’s the smallest word and the biggest. It holds: I lived, I will try, I will go, I will fail and try again, I will love you when I can and let you love me when I can’t love myself. I will keep choosing light even when the room goes dim.
I’m still here.
That’s the whole chapter for today.
Tomorrow we write the next one.