Chapter 2 #2
His words hit harder than any fist ever could. She was gone one day. One day, without her safety net, I nearly killed myself. One day without her voice reminding me to eat, to sleep, to choose life over the bottle, and I ended up broken and bleeding in an alley five hours from home.
The nurse who enters breaks up our confrontation, her presence a reminder that I'm in a place where my name and my money can't buy me the kind of help I really need.
"Is everything okay in here?"
I force a smile. "Everything's fine, ma'am. Can I get something for pain? My ribs are killing me."
"You can have ibuprofen." The nurse places a hand on her hip as if she’s challenging me to protest.
The dismissal in her voice grates against my nerves. I'm Gray Garrison. I've sold millions of albums, filled stadiums, and had presidents request private concerts. And yet none of that matters now. None of it can bring her back. "Since when?"
Her brow lifts in defiance. "Since you came in half dead with a blood alcohol content of .34 and a multitude of narcotics in your system."
The number should shock me, but it doesn't. What surprises me is that I'm still here, breathing, and hurting. Part of me has to think about whether I wanted to join my mother, if somewhere in my blackout brain I thought death might be easier than living without Rhea.
"I'd like to speak to your supervisor." The words come out automatically, my celebrity armor clicking into place even as it's cracking around the edges.
Her sardonic smile tells me she's dealt with rich, entitled, broken men who think their money can fix everything before. “Sure, let me get right on that.”
I throw the remote at her because it's the only weapon I have left, because I'm angry at the world that let Rhea walk away, and because I'm angry at myself for not being worth staying for. "Pain relief! Isn't that what I just fucking asked for?"
"Mr. Garrison, if you have another volatile outburst, I'll be forced to restrain you."
I flip her off because I'm five years old and thirty-six at the same time, because I'm too broken to care about consequences anymore.
"Go fuck yourself. Do you know who I am?” But even as I ask the question, I realize I don't know who I am either.
Without Rhea, without the band, without the anchor she provided, I'm just another addict in a hospital bed, raging at the world for not caring that my heart is bleeding out onto sterile sheets.
Andrew shakes his head with disappointment so heavily I can feel it pressing down on my chest. "I'm here to issue an ultimatum.
Get sober and get your affairs in order.
Not only is Case in Point without our lead singer, but we're also without our personal assistant, whom we count on far more than we should.
If you fail to get clean, you don't have a place in Case in Point anymore. You don't have a place with me either."
Each word is a door slamming shut, cutting off another escape route.
"Rhea is long gone, man. This is the end of the line for you, little brother. This is rock bottom. Blacking out for days and ending up almost dead isn't funny, Gray. It's fucking pathetic."
Pathetic. The word lodges in my chest like shrapnel.
"I get that bad shit happened to us when we were kids.
No child should ever lose their mother, especially not the way she went right in front of us.
It wasn't your responsibility to save Mom, Gray.
We were too little to help. Drowning it in a bottle isn't helping you, and it's not the answer to your problems. It's keeping you in the past."
The mention of our mother opens wounds that never properly healed.
I can still see her face, still hear the gurgling sound she made as the water filled her lungs while I stood frozen, seven years old and helpless.
Rhea knew about that night. She was the only person I ever talked to about finding Mom in the bathtub, about the way her eyes looked when she saw me, about how I couldn't move, couldn't scream, couldn't save her.
"It's not your fault, baby. You were just a little boy. You couldn't have saved her," Rhea used to whisper when the dreams came.
But Rhea isn't here to whisper comfort anymore. She's not here to hold me when the memories get too sharp, when the guilt gets too heavy, when the bottle seems like the only way to make it stop.
"It's time for you to make a decision. You have two choices, live or die, but the decision is yours and yours alone." Andrew picks up the remote I threw and places it back on the bed. "Call me when you're ready. We'll get you set up in a nice rehab somewhere you can heal."
He turns to leave, and I can't let him walk away, either.
I can't be alone with the weight of everything I've lost. In one last desperate attempt to have the last word, I yank my pillow from behind my own head and chunk it across the room.
It hits him in the back—a pathetic gesture from a pathetic man who's lost everything that mattered.
"Mr. Garrison!" The nurse returns with reinforcements, and suddenly, the room is full of people in scrubs reaching for me with restraints.
"I don't even know who you are anymore," Andrew says as he walks away, and the words cut deeper than any physical pain could.
I don't know who I am either. I was Rhea's boyfriend, the band's frontman, and Andrew's little brother. But strip all that away, and what's left? Just a broken man in a hospital bed, fighting against restraints like an animal in a cage.
"Let me go! Fuck you! Stop! Do you know who I am?!"
But as the sedatives flow through my IV and my muscles begin to fail, I realize a terrible truth.
I don't know who I am anymore. I'm nobody without her.
I'm nothing without the band. I'm just another cautionary tale about what happens when you love the bottle more than you love the people trying to save you.
As consciousness fades, my last thought is of Rhea, not as she was when she left, tired and defeated. I go back to her in the beginning, when she still believed I was worth saving. When she still believed in us.
The darkness that claims me is merciful, because in it I can pretend she's still here and haven't lost everything that ever mattered.
I can pretend I'm not alone.