Chapter Thirty-Eight
Harley - Present Day
Bring Me Back To Life – Evanescence
Quinn stops talking for a few moments. She opens her eyes, blinking a few times, expelling the tears that have formed.
She quietly sobs, her shoulders heave, but she doesn’t utter a word.
She sits there, stroking Ted. He sits up on her lap and licks at her tears, comforting her in the best way he knows how.
“Do you want to stop, Magpie?” She shakes her head. “I need you to verbalise this for me, Quinn. I need to be sure you want to carry on.”
“I–I-I,” she says, trying to catch her breath enough to form a sentence. She breathes out deeply before continuing. “I want to carry on. This hurts. But it feels good. Cathartic almost. I want to keep going, Bones.”
“Okay. But first you need a drink. The crying and excess emotions will dehydrate you, and we don't want you to suffer from any headaches or anything later on. I’ve added some electrolytes to the water next to you so that we can try and keep on top of that.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She picks up the glass and downs half of it, gasping for breath as she puts it back down.
“Tell me what you’re feeling.” He sits opposite me with a pen and paper. Close enough to be a comforting presence, but far enough not to overstimulate my mind. God knows, when he’s too close, my brain can’t cope, and I want to jump his bones like my life depends on it.
“Honestly? Grief. Soul-destroying grief. I blocked out this entire memory. Obviously I always knew it had happened, but the details. The emotion. All of that I had hidden from. Yet, behind the grief is this tidal wave of anger.” She wipes her under eyes, flings her head forward, pulls her hair from her face and ties it up on top of her head in a messy bun.
Little curls fall, framing her face, and despite the circumstances, she looks utterly adorable.
“Okay.” She breathes. I’m ready.”
Quinn - Present Day
I feel like I have a ball stuck in my throat.
The hairs on my arms are standing on edge, and I won’t lie, I’m fucking terrified.
I could stop. I could. But that’s what the old Quinn would do.
The old Quinn would lie down like prey that had lost the fight to a predator and let them tear her to pieces.
But that’s not the Quinn I want to be anymore.
The Quinn I want to be is fierce. Strong.
A woman that refuses to be taken lying down.
“Okay,” I repeat, almost like I just need to hear my voice out loud one more time. Like I need to make sure I’m actually alive and this isn’t a living nightmare. And, yes, I’m aware that’s ironic because my entire life so far has been just that.
Quinn - Age 11 - 17 years ago, cont…
Commotion erupts around me. Shouts, bangs, hands caressing my arms, someone shouting to check Eric is still breathing.
My eyes burn from the unspent tears, my cheeks ache from the prolonged screaming.
But all I can focus on is the bathroom door handle, watching and waiting for Scott to get it open.
All of a sudden, the sound of wood splintering echoes around me, and before they know what’s happening, I’m ducking under Scott’s arms and pushing through the door without a second glance.
I don’t think about the trauma I’ll live with forever from the sight of my mother bleeding out in the bath.
Or the fact that she’ll never forgive me for saving her life.
And I definitely don’t think about the fact that this image will never leave my brain. Why would I?
Scott and Manda are shouting at me, trying to grab hold of my arms and pull me from the room, but it’s to no avail.
The bathroom is laid out so that the bath is behind the door, but before my feet have even touched the bathroom lino, I spot the blood pooling on the floor and sprayed on the door.
It almost looks like watered-down blackcurrant juice, darker in some spots, lighter in others.
Clusters of droplets differing in size decorate the bath panel and the tiles surrounding it.
I brace myself, take a deep breath like my teacher at school taught me when I was bordering on a panic attack, and step further inside.
The first thing I see is my mother’s feet, wrinkled and pruned from the prolonged water exposure.
Words cannot ever describe the feelings rattling around my stomach.
I’m nauseous, terrified, panic-stricken, but none of them seems to even come close to the level of emotion building inside me.
I’ve spent the first eleven years of my life never understanding why she didn’t love me.
But in this moment, I know I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering why I was never enough for her to stay and why he was enough for her to leave and want to take him with her.
They say your firstborn is your first ever experience of unconditional love.
But on this day, at the age of eleven, the realisation sinks in that unconditional love was never something my mum wanted with me.
Her love for me was conditional, and I didn’t stand a chance because I couldn’t hold a candle to him.
I move in slow motion. I can sense Scott standing over my shoulder, itching to push past me.
Manda is still on the phone with the emergency services, and I could swear it’s been hours.
Sirens wail in the distance, and I take another step in.
Far enough to be able to see past the door and have a full view of my mother's naked body and grey skin, but not quite far enough that the bloody puddles are soaking into my socks. Who gets naked to kill themselves?
My breath shudders, and I crumple to the floor.
Scott seizes the moment to grab hold of her and pull her from the bath.
The bloody water splashes over my school clothes, my white shirt staining red, puddles gush over the floor, and I don’t even register the fact that I’m quite literally bathing in my mother’s blood.
I see the cuts on my mother's arms, not in the horizontal way that I’ve become accustomed to doing mine, but vertical, and my curiosity is piqued.
Maybe that’s what I’m doing wrong…for a moment I take stock of what I’m seeing, the details I can use, and the lessons I can learn from my mother’s technique.
For a moment in time, I can forget my mother is lifeless in front of me, and focus on what’s next for me.
Almost instantly I float back down to reality, my eyes wide at the realisation that blood has congealed around the edges of the cuts, the rest of her skin has become mottled, and I’m convinced she’s dead.
We’ve gone from a family of four to a family of two in a matter of minutes, and my dad is none the wiser.
“She’s got a pulse!” Scott yells. My heart drops into my stomach at the possibility of my mother surviving and me being able to tell her I love her and promise to be a good girl from now on.
Footsteps thunder up the steps with voices shouting, “Call out! Paramedics! Call out!” Before I know it, Manda is next to me, Millie behind her, trying to coax me out of the bathroom.
“Come on, my girl, let’s give them space to work on your mum. She’s going to be okay. You saved her.” Manda pulls me away from the chaos and down the stairs.
“But all the b-bblood.” My words stammer like I’m full of vibrations. I stand firmly in place. “She can’t be okay! Look at the blood.”
“Let’s get you back to ours, and you can watch a movie with Millie. We’ll get you cleaned up in some of my cosy clothes, and you’ll feel better,” Manda soothes.
“My dad! Someone needs to call my dad!”
“Don’t worry, babe, I’ve spoken to him. He’s on his way to the hospital now.”
“But what about me? Why doesn’t he want to be with me, too?” I cry harder than I did when I saw Eric lying lifeless on my mother’s bed. She’s rejected me. He’s rejected me. WHY AM I NEVER ENOUGH?
Think you need to take a lesson from your mother.
Swipe a knife at those arms, fuckface.
I follow Manda; my body and mind numb. I hear nothing.
It's silent. Serene. I feel nothing. For the first time in my life, I feel absolutely nothing, and it's invigorating. This is the feeling I've been chasing for the last eleven years, and I never want to lose it. Just like always, I’m relegated to the bottom of the priority pile. Unless I’m ill or have some kind of drama going on—and even then it’s selective—I’m never a priority.
They never want to love me or be with me.
So maybe this is the way forward… Maybe the only way to win over the people who are supposed to love me the most is to hurt myself.
To pretend the monsters inside me are louder than they are.
Or at the very least follow in my mother's footsteps.
It felt like days until my dad came to get me. And the funny thing is, it was. I had crashed out on the sofa at Millie’s that night after a movie marathon of Dirty Dancing and Grease; she was acting out the dances and trying to make me laugh, and I was rejecting every attempt she made.
Calloused hands running across my cheeks woke me, my dad, I thought, whispering in my ear.
“Come on, Quinn, you need to wake up. It’s time to go to bed.
” I jolted upright, panic setting in. “Are they dead?” I mean, if they weren’t, surely someone would have told me by now.
In my sleepy state, I realised it was Scott waking me, and not Dad, and disappointment flooded my body.
I didn’t know why I was surprised; there was nothing left inside me, but a hollow emptiness where I supposed the love of a parent should be. “Come on, Millie is already in bed.”
We walked towards their stairs, the layout of their house identical to mine, but opposite, and we shared a wall. “They’re alive, love. The worst is over. But you’ll need to stay here for a few days and give your dad time to clean the house. You don’t need to go back there and see that.”