And he called a lot.
"Hello?" I said weakly into my cracked cellphone as the haziness of sleep was wearing off.
"Hey, where are you? I’ve been calling you all day yesterday. I was so close to calling the police,” Eric asked, concern in his voice.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I kind of passed out during volunteering and had to stay here in the hospital for a bit. Nothing big, but I didn’t have my charger and forgot my phone even existed, I’ve been so busy with tests and stuff,” I apologized, hoping Eric wouldn’t compartmentalize this for later.
Silence.
"Are you ok?" he asked, a flash of anger sparking in his tone.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Just passed out and bumped my head,” I replied, trying to brush off the incident and not worry Eric too much. He always worried about me. Whether it was worrying over how much oatmeal I had for breakfast or what the acne-riddled teenage boy was telling me at the grocery checkout line. He was always so protective of me.
“I’ll be home soon, promise you’ll be home when I get there?” I asked warily, not knowing if it would be a good idea having him see me like this.
“Depends, I have basketball practice, " Eric said, his sentences now cut short. I knew I needed to end this conversation before Eric got even angrier.
“Alright, I got to go, the nurse is coming to give me lunch.”
"Ok, bye."
I pressed end on the call and sighed, not knowing how Eric actually took it. I was just scared he would suspect I was lying and think that I was in fact somewhere else. It wasn’t like the Eric I always knew, but the Eric I knew now had become an overly paranoid mess. What's worse is that the current Eric was beginning to take out his frustrations physically. I rolled over on my uncomfortable but very adjustable hospital bed, stuffing my slightly throbbing head into one of the flattest pillows I had ever felt. I couldn't help but let out another groan. I heard the woman lying in the hospital bed next to me groan back in a weird sort of reply. I looked over and waved through the thin pink fabric separating our beds. I saw her dark black shadow wave back in return and give me a thumbs up.
"What are you in for?" I asked.
"Oh you don't want to know," the lady responded, her frail voice breaking up with small coughs.
"Well don't worry. I know you'll get better."
The lady took a moment to respond.
"How so?" she asked, curiosity overcoming her.
"Because I've heard you talk to your husband and I see that beautiful photo of you two on that horribly tacky wooden dresser. You have too much to live for."
I laid my head back on the cardboard pillow, wondering what it was like to share that kind of love. During my busy night of being poked and prodded, and not in the good way, I was able to catch an intimate display of love between the elderly couple. I was lying in bed, waiting for the nurse to come and draw some blood, when the older woman’s husband shuffled into the room. His walker made small thumping sounds as the green tennis balls attached to the legs met the ground underneath. I tried my hardest to give them some privacy but that’s pretty hard when you’re tied down to various machinery designed to sound like a bomb going off if your vitals began failing. So I sat there, trying to distract myself with an old Peoples magazine. As I was reading an article about Jennifer Lopez, I quickly peeked over at the couple and saw a scene straight out of The Notebook.
From a pulled back corner of the cloth barrier between us, I could see the two in bed, the older gentleman with his head resting on the woman’s chest. His eyes shutting in what seemed to be sleep at first, but I could see a shiny glean on his cheek and fresh tears falling from his closing eyes. The woman kissed the back of his head over and over again; her frail hands burdened with various IV needles, lifted up and ran through the thin strands of white hair left on the man’s head.
“I’ll love you until the moon stops shining.”
“I’ll love you until the earth stops spinning.”
The love in the room enveloped me, bringing tears to my own eyes. These two had something that I wanted to have so badly. Just pure, unadulterated love that has the power to last the test of time. A bond so incredible that only a global catastrophe could have them focus on something else, and even then I had a feeling their love would still outlast such a cataclysm. I tried getting back to my magazine, but couldn’t shake the thought of their adoration for the rest of the night. I watched as the man left, hobbling back out of the room, his hands braced himself up against the walker as the weight of the world pressed down on him, threatening to overwhelm him. I saw years of life and love leave the room that night. I didn’t know it would be the last night they would ever share an embrace again… Thankfully I didn’t know it would be the last night they would ever share an embrace again.
From the bed next to me, I heard tears trying their hardest to keep silent. I was just about to ask her what was wrong when I heard a voice I already knew all too well come from the entrance to our quaint little room.
"Emma, you're up!" Ryan said, walking over with his iPad clutched to his strong chest, ready to note down my vital signs and make sure I wasn't secretly dying or anything.
Then again, weren't all of us secretly dying in some sort of manner?
"Yep. My headache is almost gone too so that has to be a plus, right? I woke up, so that's one, and I lost my headache, that's two. How many do I need to get out of here?"
He reached behind my head to check for any swelling. I noticed how big his hand was as his fingers glided through my hair, sending small sparks of relaxing pleasure.
"You're going to need at least one more before we can let you go. The next one on the list is learning how to tightrope with a tutu-sporting poodle.” His smile was infectious.
“I’m allergic to dogs.” I responded, pushing myself back up on the scratchy white sheets.
“Well that’s unfortunate. Looks like we’ll have to keep you here for even longer.”
I feigned a look of distress as I reached over and picked up the tray of faux-gourmet hospital food. The jell-o tried shaking but its stiffness wouldn’t allow it, instead managing only a barely noticeable wiggle under the fluorescent white light.
“Sorry, doc, but even if I had multiple stab wounds along with five compound fractures and a crazy sized abdominal abscess, I still wouldn’t stay here longer than three days. Do you remember the food?”
I watched as Dr. Matthews chuckled. He looked up from his shiny black iPad and seemed to look through me somehow. It made a small shiver run down the back of my neck and memories of the night before came flooding back. My temperature started to rise as I admired the way his strong legs filled out the pastel green scrubs.
“That’s a lot of medical terminology, you studying to become a doctor?” he asked, clearly impressed by my use of big words. I guess that 7:15 class I took on medical terminology did end up paying off.
“Yeah well I was. But it just so happens that I now pass out at the sight of blood and the sound of unstoppable wailing, so I’m guessing I may have to reconsider.” I played with the hospital wristband which was slightly cutting off my circulation. I didn’t really want to think about having to reconsider my whole life plan. I had everything laid out pretty well, a timeline that I wasn’t too keen on adjusting.
I was supposed to graduate college with my bachelor’s at the age of 22, make my way through the rigorous medical curriculum and become a practicing surgeon by the age of 33. In the interim, I planned on figuring out the situation between Eric and me. We were growing farther apart as each day passed us by and his outbursts were becoming bigger and more frequent. So now I not only had to deal with Eric but I also needed to figure out where my other passion was and somehow break the news to my mother. That was probably the scariest part of this whole mess.
My mother was such a gentle, loving, and supportive woman that always wanted the best for me. I was six when my father was sent to jail for armed robbery, and that was when my mother promised me that a better life was just around the corner. She busted her ass working three jobs and sending me to the best schools, always instilling in me a passion for hard work and success. I saw her single-handedly turn our lives upside down in the best possible way. We went from living in a small one-bedroom and cockroach infested apartment to a much nicer two-bedroom apartment with working faucets and only small silverfish that scurried away under the bathroom rug whenever the lights came on. Much nicer than the mutated cockroaches that seemed to hold nightly support group meetings in our cluttered kitchen.
I’ll never forget the look on her face when she saw I had been accepted to UCLA. It wasn’t Harvard, but it was a close second. Tears of proud joy streamed down her features as she wrapped me up in one of the tightest hugs I had ever had. I was lucky all my ribs were still intact. Then when she found out I wanted to be a doctor, she immediately thought that I was going to be an incredible surgeon and would never miss a chance to talk about how her daughter was going to save so many lives.
Well, so much for that.
I knew she wouldn’t show obvious disappointment, but I was scared that deep down she would feel the pains of the broken dreams for her daughter. It hurt me a little, knowing that I was letting her down. I wanted to make her happy, I really did. It just wasn’t something that was even feasible for me at this point. I just did not like being in a surgical room, even if I didn’t pass out.
I knew my mother all too well. I knew she already imagined my posh Beverly Hills mansion, only a ten-minute drive away from the hospital I worked at where I was stitching away at hearts and piecing them back together. It was an image that was so starkly different from the one we were both used to growing up that I couldn’t deny her the escape of just dreaming it.
“You can go into radiology. They sit in a dark room all day and look at cool pictures,” Ryan said, leaning back on a bland wooden dresser that rested next to my small bed. The air-conditioning caught his cologne in just the right way and drifted it over my direction, filling my senses with his masculine scent.
I thought of the possibility of being a radiologist and quickly dismissed it. As much as I respected them for what they did, I knew I needed a career that gave me constant interaction with people. Growing up, I felt the most comfortable when I had someone with me. I always sheltered myself with the people I loved and cared for and felt the happiest when I wasn’t by myself. It was a problem that leaked into my sense of what a normal relationship should be. The thought of being alone terrified me, so I tended to stick with people that didn’t have my best intentions at heart just so that I could be around someone.
I was sort of clingy in that sense.
I was also a very dependent person, which was something I needed to desperately try to work on. It was getting worse too. Especially with Eric.
Oh Eric.
“What made you want to become a doctor?” I asked, now genuinely curious. I was positive this guy could have made a killing by being an international male model. His jaw was just so impeccably chiseled and his hair so perfectly tousled. It was like looking at a cover straight off of a GQ magazine, hottest men in the world edition.
“The easy access to drugs,” he quipped, smiling mischievously at me.
I nodded my head over to the bottle of painkillers on my side table.
“So if I were to, let’s say, become best friends with you… you can get me those on the reg?” I asked, joking back.
“Might need to be something more than just a friend before I risk losing my license to practice and decide to make new friends in a jail cell instead.”
Woh, did he just flirt with me?
I wasn’t even sure if I could call that subtle. I suddenly realized I didn’t really know how to flirt back, I was so rusty at the whole concept that I may as well have pulled out peacock feathers and strutted around, which wouldn’t even have worked, I would have just ended up attracting all the lesbian peacocks.
I guess that’s what happens if you’re in a six year relationship with your fifteen year old high-school love. You end up losing all the abilities of finding someone else. I mean it’s not like I planned on finding someone else. Eric was perfect in every sense of the word. He was always edgier than me, getting his first tattoo on our one year anniversary. It was a graffiti heart on a concrete wall, it’s bright red paint dripping down off the gray background and onto his defined, tan shoulder. I loved it and almost got one of my own but wimped out last minute, too scared of passing out from the pain.
So much for that, huh.
He was also always into basketball, earning a full ride to UCLA based on his skills alone. The sport was a way of escaping for him. And he needed that escape. If I thought I had a rough life, I couldn’t even begin to place myself in Eric’s shoes.
He once told me a story about how his mom had to sell a mountain bike he had won in a contest just so that she could take her next hit of heroin. It wasn’t too long before Eric was put up for adoption. His younger life consisted of bouncing from home to home, trying to find the perfect family. He would tell me that by the age of nine, he had already given up, accepting the harsh reality that he may never find a permanent family. It caused him to start lashing out. He became more and more rebellious, testing the limits of whomever his guardian happened to be at the time. Finally, a year later, Sandra Sanchez opened her heart and gave him a permanent place to call home. Sandra was everything to Eric, so when she unexpectedly passed away two years ago in a horrific car accident, it absolutely crushed him. The Eric I knew and loved had died with Sandra in that car. In his place was a broken shell of a man. It tore my heart to pieces seeing him so empty.
It also changed our relationship forever.
No longer were there random bouquet of tulips and sunflowers secretly hidden throughout the apartment. No longer were there goodnight kisses and good morning romps. No longer was there a love so strong I thought it was unbreakable. In its place was an immense amount of frustration and anger. An anger so intense that it boiled over, leaving me with the fear of physical abuse. I tried trusting him, but it was becoming harder to let myself go around him. I always felt on edge, as if the wrong word would trigger a tirade of abuse. He had already begun to strike out through emotions. When that couldn’t express his frustrations, he would punch at the wall, bloodying his knuckles and scaring me in the process.