Chapter 16 #2
He sat down beside her and suggested, “Let’s try this then. Have you ever been to an Origin before this one?”
“No, I’ve never heard of such a thing before,” she muttered, “and I’m damn glad because I don’t even want to think about there being another one.” She snorted, rubbing at her face in frustration. “This stuff gets into your psyche and makes a mess of your mind.”
“Yeah, it absolutely does,” he agreed, looking at her. “I can see how this is affecting you, but I’m just not sure how to help you.”
“You can’t help me,” she declared, frowning at him. “And I don’t know why you would even want to. You’ve been hell-bent on running to this place ever since you got that woman out.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “I know I messed up that part, but whatever you have going on is something completely different, and it has nothing to do with me.” She glared at him, and he leaned back, raising both hands.
“I admit that I messed up opening this Origin, but we have a lot of other stuff on our plate, and apparently we’re very short on time to deal with it. ”
She sighed. “That’s what my grandmother told me too.”
At that, he raised both eyebrows, waiting for her to continue.
Eden shook her head. “At the time, my mother was dying of breast cancer. She was in the hospital at the end stages, and the hospital staff could do nothing more for her. So my grandmother thought it would be a good idea for me to spend every waking moment with my mother before she was gone.”
“And you didn’t agree?” Eric asked.
“Let’s just say, watching your mother fade away, agonizing breath by agonizing breath, was not a memory that I would ever put on my child.”
“I can’t imagine that was very easy.”
“Not only was it not very easy,” she stated, “it was terrifying. She was always in pain, and the machines around her made unbelievable noises.”
“How old were you?”
“I was only six, almost seven, I guess,” she shared, wiping her eyes, “and there was no getting away from the horror of what was happening. Yet, as far as my grandmother was concerned, I needed to spend every waking moment with her because I was about to lose her.”
Eric watched Eden silently, letting her vent.
“While I now understand the basic philosophy of closure,” she added, “it was not a memory that I hold dear. Though I absolutely adored my mother, the dying woman on that bed was not the mother I knew. Not in any way, shape, or form. And that made it even harder because I felt horribly guilty. Nothing about that time do I want to remember.”
She took a deep breath and added, “I didn’t want to be there, and everything about it tainted me, convinced me that I wasn’t the person I should have been.
On top of that, my grandmother told me to stop being foolish and to focus on spending the quality time that I could with her.
Plus, I was being beset by …” She let out a long exhale.
“Just get it out and tell me,” he said firmly.
She shrugged. “This is where you’ll think I’m absolutely nuts,” she began, “but it felt as if every dead or dying person in that hospital was swooping around me, coming to visit, trying to talk to me, trying to touch me, wanting something, screaming at me, yelling at the world around them, wanting help or to let them go or something. I didn’t even know if they were dead or alive, if that was their spirits, their souls, or whatever. ”
“When did you figure that out?”
“Not soon enough,” she stated curtly. “I ended up crying so loud, so hard, so heavily that my grandmother ended up pulling me away from the hospital. Everybody decided I was beset by grief, but it wasn’t just grief.
I mean, obviously I was horrified and paralyzed by grief over the impending loss of my mother, but it had far more to do with the fact that I was being tormented by every ghost-like thing out there.
Honestly, I don’t know what half of them were. ”
“Wow,” he muttered, stunned.
“Believe me that I never wanted to know any more. Not a one of them was saying, Hey, little girl. How are you today? They were all screaming and yelling at me, outraged over something, wanting something. To this day, I don’t know exactly what the hell that was.”
“How long were you there?”
She stared at him, a haunted look on her face.
“Days and days. I was traumatized for a long time afterward, but my grandmother didn’t believe me.
She thought it was just, you know, foolishness, because I was trying to cope with the loss of my mother.
And I was trying to cope with the loss of my mother, but I was also trying to cope with whatever madness had happened while I was there.
Unfortunately that part didn’t matter to my grandmother. ”
“Do you ever talk to her about it?”
“I tried to, but she was all about telling me exactly what I should and shouldn’t do and how to do it.
I was not very good to her either afterward.
In the end, I checked out. I stopped speaking, stopped communicating.
She put me in a special place because I was too traumatized over my mother’s death to handle living, at least according to her.
I don’t even know how long I was there,” she muttered.
“I don’t know that anybody even knew why I was there, though I’m sure I was diagnosed with everything under the sun.
Nothing they were treating me for was accurate because none of them understood my trauma, because I couldn’t explain anything to them,” she shared.
“It just became one of those nightmares that I could never quite get free from.”
“Good God,” he murmured.
“Yeah, well, now that you mention it, for the longest time I didn’t think there even was a God.
” She stared around her. “I may have been there a year, maybe two. I ended up in the foster system, as my grandmother had passed away by that point in time. She’d been beset with grief over my mother’s death.
Me being in a mental hospital didn’t help either.
And whether it was because of me or a lack of capacity to handle me, I don’t know, but whatever her reasoning was, Grandmother never came back. ”
“So, what then? You never saw her after that?”
“Nope, I don’t remember a time that I ever saw her after I was institutionalized,” she stated.
“I blocked out as much of that as I possibly could, and apparently I blocked it out just fine.” She stared at the madness in the ethers around her, and something was stirring, brewing just on the brink of spilling over. “Until now.”
He reached out a hand, massaged her shoulders, and then pulled her up close so she leaned against his chest. “It would have helped if I’d known all that.”
“No, it wouldn’t have,” she snapped. “You couldn’t have done a thing about it, and all this craziness still would have happened.”
“Probably so, but regardless, I’m sure Stefan would say there’s a time and a place for things to happen, and it happens in its own time. At least that’s my understanding.”
“I spent quite a bit of time researching and studying all this—not with any great success, mind you. And Debbie? Debbie was a very good friend who didn’t really know much about what I did or what happened to me because I never told anybody.
She had her own problems and kept searching for ways to contact her parents.
I could have helped her but I didn’t. I couldn’t.
” She groaned. “I wasn’t planning on telling anybody ever. ”
“Things have changed now,” he noted. “And Stefan believes you are very important to whatever is going on here.”
“Stefan is wrong,” she declared.
Eric gave a bark of laughter. “I think there are probably times when Stefan is wrong, but somehow I don’t think this is one of them.”
She stared daggers at him. “You’re wrong, and I know it because I can’t have anything to do with this. It’s just not possible.”
He smiled and nodded. “I understand your perspective, but that doesn’t mean I believe it.”
“Yes, it’s my perspective, and that is what I’m going with. I’m not letting this be twisted around into something.”
“No, of course not,” he said. “Yet it does explain a little bit why Stefan thinks you’re involved somehow.”
“No, it doesn’t explain anything. There is absolutely no reason for Stefan to expect me to be part of anything.” She stared at him. “Why would there be?”
He frowned, then shrugged. “I’m sure, if we brought him into this conversation, he would have answers. However, I don’t have them myself.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know what is happening here today. I do know that I felt somebody watching me. I don’t like that feeling, and I just want to go home.”
“I understand that you want to go home, but what makes you think that particular feeling will just go away, won’t just follow you home?”
She stared at him, swallowed hard, and closed her eyes, aware that he was right.
Whatever this was, it’s bigger and nastier.
“Thanks for reminding me that this may never go away. I don’t really have the energy, the tolerance, or the patience for that,” she snapped.
“I really just wanted to have a normal life, but apparently I won’t ever get what I want. ”