23. Cass
CASS
PLAYLIST: LOVE THE WAY YOU LIE – EMINEM
Asqueeze on my arm wakes me.
It’s the doctor again.
“I’d really like to tell you about your friend, because she needs you right now.”
My eyes flash open.
“Addy,” I say.
The doctor nods.
“She’s here?” I croak out . “She’s—“
“Hanging on by a thread,” says the doctor.
“But she’s alive?” and tears shoot into my eyes.
“She is in a medically induced coma, due to the severity of her injuries,” says the doctor. “I don’t want to bring your hopes up too much; we don’t know if she is going to get through this.”
I sit up, and everything turns dizzy.
“I need to see her,” I say, swinging the legs out of the bed regardless of the pain.
I am gently pushed back.
“We’ll have a chat first,” says the doctor. “About you.”
“I don’t care about me,” I say. “She—“
“But I do. And the police I have to call the moment you are medically available to be interviewed.”
I swallow hard.
Close my eyes.
We fucked up big time.
I fucked up big time.
None of this would have happened if we had done it together from the start.
I am so stupid—
“I can delay that call for a small amount of time,” she says. “Provided your cooperation.”
I open my eyes and nod.
“Good,” she says, “Now, if you please follow my finger.”
She does a complete checkup with me.
Tells me about the minor burns on my hands and legs.
I didn’t even realize I had them.
“Looks as good as it can,” she finally says.
“Tell me about Addy,” I say, longingly. I have to know what is going on. “I need to see her.”
The doctor takes a deep breath in and slides a chair to the bedside.
“What I am going to tell you isn’t going to be easy,” she says.
“Life isn’t easy; this, however, is,” I say, something the doctor seems to appreciate.
“She came in unconscious, revived three times on the way here, probably by the body overload from severe burns. Adding severe head trauma.”
I am falling again.
“We tried to get her out of the coma, but the pain was unmanageable, and her body crashed. Right now, we cannot tell where it is going. Cases like this can go either way.”
“So she might die,” I say. Not as a question, but a fact.
“Yes. But she might make it.”
She might die.
“There is hope, hope I am not willing to give up on. We have noticed that the connections with loved ones help patients to overcome this state and heal faster, which is why I am coming to you.”
Connection with loved ones.
Addy doesn’t love me.
My body becomes rigid.
And I withdraw into my inner world.
One I never look at unless there is nowhere else to go.
And right now, there is nothing left.
No car I can speed.
No roof I can retract to.
Nowhere to escape to.
“I can take you to her,” says the doctor.
“No,” I say and avert my eyes to a point in the corner of the dull room. “I’m not the one she needs.”
“What makes you so sure?” asks the doctor.
I scoff. The question is so obscene to me after everything Addy and I went through.
“Tell me,” says the doctor. “Because you seem awfully confident in your decision.”
I look at her. The doctor with the perfect hair, looking at me with her innocent eyes, probably coming from a family of doctors, where the biggest problem is which hospital for a residency she’d pick.
I scoff again.
She touches my arm.
Smiles weakly.
“Think about it,” she says. “It matters.”
“Nothing matters,” I say. “Nothing matters if you have been broken so many times that love is a word that causes the only pain you can feel.”
With that, I lay back into the bed with a desire to disappear.
“I’m sorry,” says the doctor. “I’m sorry for everything you had to go through.”
I scoff in disbelief. “As if you understand.”
And suddenly there is all this anger in me.
Anger about the world.
Anger about myself.
Anger about being helpless.
Anger about losing everything once again.
And then, I cry.
Cry like she usually does.
My fists clench with the nails painfully digging into my palms because I can’t get out of my own skin, cannot outrace the sensation, cannot escape this hell.
I am not an emotional person.
I don’t cry.
I don’t feel.
Least of all in front of others.
But even that doesn’t matter right now.
The doctor puts her hand on mine and sits with me. She sits with me for God knows how long, and the more she sits the more I have to cry.
“Go,” I tell her at some point. “I’m sure you have other things to do.”
“No,” she says. “Not right now.”
And I cry more.
Until I can’t stand myself anymore.
I can’t stand being in this bed.
Being in my own body.
I need to get up. She tries to stop me, but I am too powerful.
Everything is too much.
“She means much to you, doesn’t she?” she asks me.
“Don’t,” I say. The word Addy said countless times to me.
“It’s okay to feel that pain,” the doctor says.
“Nothing is okay!” I shout, and suddenly words come out of my mouth like a waterfall. “It’s all my fucking fault! I am too fucked up. She—she—I should’ve—she did it for me. Because she cared more about me than herself. And now—now—”
“Now she might not make it, and you are all alone.”
I stare at the doctor.
“We were supposed to die together.”
I swallow hard the moment the words came out of my mouth. Words I said about Elise. And now about her sister. How fucked up is that?
“And now you might live together,” says the doctor softly.
“She’s fucking dying!” I shout. “She was already dead! Even if she comes back, she will hate me forever.”
A weak smile on the doctor’s face.
A squeeze on my arm.
“And what if she’s not making it?” she asks. “What if she dies and you weren’t there?”
I want to give in for one second. Want to run to Addy, tell her she is not alone, tell her it was all my fault, tell her about all the things I feel, about the feeling she causes in me.
But then she might die.
She might be dead already and never come back.
Suddenly, a beeping rips me from my spiraling.
The doctor stares at her pager.
Looks up into my eyes.
One look and I know what it is, who it is.
She runs out of the room.
I stare after her, knowing that hope is the biggest bitch in life.
Because hope made me fall in love again, even though I knew better.
Because hope made me dare believe I deserve someone like her.
Because hope made me forget the pain loss causes.
And I'm done hoping.
I’m done with everything.
I’m so done that there is only one way out.
The way out that should have happened a long time ago.
And now, it’ll be final.
Fuck this world.
I don’t even know how I got some clothes and made it to the garage, but when I grab the key to the Porsche, nothing else matters.
Elise’s Porsche.
The one I finished with Addy.
I turn the key.
The flat-6 gurgles in its unique sound, turning into that aggressive sound from the custom exhaust.
Just like it did when Addy turned the key after putting the motor back together.
I was so impressed. By her knowledge. By her skill. By her love for cars.
There was this smile when the motor gurgled properly for the first time. She looked at me from the driver’s seat, the one I’m sitting in now. It was probably the moment I first fell for her.
I fell for her.
“Damnit!” I shout and punch the steering wheel.
The smile she had, the light-up eyes I see in my mind—a rare view between all the fuck up.
That moment in this garage was her, the real Addy with a love for cars, for speed and those ten seconds where nothing else matters—all compressed into one smile.
And then the doctor’s words come back into my mind.
“What if she dies and you weren’t there?”