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The hours passed and I could do nothing but stew in the rage. They’d told me that this might happen. During my rehab. They’d offered me drugs to control my moods. I took one once, and the eight hours of nothing I felt were the most terrifying of my life. I was already robbed of sight. The drugs robbed me of emotion, leaving me numb. I never took a mood med again. But that morning I probably would’ve needed about a hundred to quell the hatred that pumped through my veins instead of blood.
I jabbed my earbuds in and told my phone to playMinistry’s “Psalm 69.”Loud. Louder. As loud as I could stand. The music infiltrated my brain, and I hoped it would leave room for nothing else. Instead, it fueled my rage to greater heights until I was ready to explode.
And then I felt it. The first twinges at the back of my skull. The Monster, waking. And not a slow emergence from hibernation, either. The Monster was roaring to life with a speed I hadn’t thought it capable.
I told the music to stop and sat up quickly. I tore the earbuds out and reached for the little bottle of migraine medication. But I was already panicked, shocked at how fast the pain was growing. My hand brushed the lampshade; my elbow hit the medicine, knocking the bottle over. Dread took hold of my heart and squeezed along with the pain in my head. It wrapped a steel band around my skull, tighter and tighter. The hatred I’d been marinating in all morning quickly morphed to out-and-out terror.
I searched the floor, hoping desperately that my fingers would close around that goddamn bottle. My groping fingers found nothing but wood floor, bed post, side table. My breath turned to panting. My clothes became drenched in sweat. I crawled until I lost all sense of where I was and still felt nothing but hardwood. A cry tore out of my throat, faint under the pounding pain that was like a jackhammer in my skull.
I searched on hands and knees until I was back to the side table. I propped my elbows on it and hauled myself to standing, though I had no idea why. No plan. My thoughts were breaking apart under the pounding agony. Dizziness crashed over me, and I flailed for something to hold on to until my hand closed around the lamp.
With a mindless scream, I hurled it across the room. The base shattered as it struck the wall next to the closet, and I felt like I was shattering too. The pain was wracking me, tearing me apart. My throat issued a low, steady stream of moans while tears and sweat poured out of my eyes, my skin.
I fell to my hands and knees again, taking the side table with me. It tipped over, bruising my thigh. A little kiss of pain compared to the howling agony in my head. I crawled on the floor like the pathetic wretch I had become, still searching, still finding nothing.
My hands felt hardwood become cold tile. The bathroom. Delirious now, lost in an ugly, dull haze of agony, I gave up the search and thumped my forehead on that tile, over and over; a steady rhythm that kept time to the pounding in my head. How long would this last? This was the end. Had to be. My head would explode like some grisly scene in a horror movie. Or I’d bang it until my skull cracked open like an egg and the pain spilled out. I shuddered, my stomach clenching.
Make it stop… Oh God, please, someone make it stop…
“Noah? Oh my God!”
Charlotte.
And somewhere, behind the agony where I could still think, I thought it was possible I might come out of this maelstrom alive after all.
chapter fifteen
“Get the hell out and don’t come back today.”
Noah’s words that morning were like a bucket of cold water thrown over me, shocking and chilling me at the same time.
I thought he was getting better. I thought I was making a difference.
I shouldn’t have let it hurt as much as it did. Our walk, him taking his meals with me, when he’d touched my face…I thought something had changed, only to find out we weren’t any further along than we were the day he yelled at me for opening the drapes.
I descended the stairs to the first floor, telling myself that Noah had “bad days” and that his every emotion didn’t have to be about me. In fact, it was better that they weren’t. We were employer and employee, right? Nothing more.
So why were hot tears stinging my eyes? I swiped them away angrily and started to close the door to my room, close the door onhim, and let him have his bad day and his foul temper and his denial that was ruining his life.
I almost closed that door.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. And that’s why, some hours later, I heard the crash two floors above me.
My heart took off at a gallop and I sat up in bed, my book tumbling to the floor. Noah’s rule that I never help him no matter what echoed in my mind, sounding as impossible to comply with as it had when I first heard it.
I raced up both staircases, not sure what I’d find but knowing something was horribly wrong. As my foot hit the landing on the third floor, a second crash sounded, this one a heavy thud punctuated by a muffled cry.
Noah’s door was shut but I didn’t bother knocking. I threw it open, and in the perpetual dimness of his room, I saw the remains of the bedside lamp against the wall to my left, its ceramic base shattered into pieces, the shade dented, the plug mangled from having been torn out of the wall. On the other side of the room, next to the bed, the sturdy wooden side-table had been upended. Agonized cries were coming from the bathroom.
My heart in my throat, I hurried there to find Noah on his hands and knees, banging his forehead on the ceramic tile.
“Noah? Oh my God!” I raced to him and knelt by his side.
“Make it stop,” he cried. “Please, ah God, make it stop…”
“O-okay. Please, it’s okay, please don’t do that…”
I took hold of his shoulders and tried to pull him up, to stop him from that awful banging. But he was in so much pain. It was in every hunched muscle and sinew of his body. His T-shirt was drenched in sweat and a constant hum of agony issued from his throat. I finally got him to sit against the cabinets below the sinks and gasped at the horrifying ashen color of his face. His long legs writhed, fists clenched and let go, over and over, and then he began to strike his head against the cabinets behind him.
