Aug
24th
Push - Chapter Four - By Lauren & Hattie
By GreenyDoodle
Chapter 4
My dad woke up soon after that in a small hospital bed. He looked at me and sputtered a bunch of nonsense, his spit flying with his words. I pursed my lips and waited for him to say something that made sense. When he did, it was, "Did you throw that vase on my head?" I nodded, because there was no point in lying to him. He was injured, and I did have a heart.
"Why?"
"You were hurting Mom." I tugged a ponytail holder off my wrist and tied my long auburn hair up into a high ponytail off of my neck which was, at this point bathed in sweat.
"No, I wasn't."
"Yeah, you were. You were holding her way too tight to just be a friendly hug. She couldn't breathe, and that was the only way I could think of to get you to stop." A cold finger touched the back of my neck, and I spun around. No one was there.
"What," Dad asked me, raising his eyebrows.
"Nothing." I say, and I turn back to face him.
"Anyway...Where am I?" He took a long look around the crisp white room. The only color besides white was the door, which was brown and the silver footrest and headrest on the hospital bed.
"You're in the hospital." I mumbled, looking down at my feet.
"And just why is that?" He raised his eyebrows even further, face seeming to grow in color. I didn't answer right away. "Cadence...hmm?"
"Your head got cut with that vase." I say, words darting out of my mouth and into the room faster than I thought them.
His face turned bright red as he ran his hand over the bandages on his head. I saw that the blood soaked through the gauze that enveloped his face and wrapped around his head in a thick headband.
The cold finger from earlier touched the top of my ear and ran itself down to make a swirl on the back of my neck, making me shiver. An icy breath reached my neck. I shrugged my shoulders up till they touched my earlobes, trying to cover my neck from the breath while trying to ignore it. "You...go....oo.....ay..." My eyes widened as I recognized these words from earlier this morning, the cause of all this. If I hadn't heard this on my radio, I wouldn't have yelled, Dad wouldn't have hit me, and so on, all leading down to this.
I shut the voice out of my mind, then focused back on Dad. "I'm sorry I hurt you, though... I really am this time, too. I just didn't want you to hurt Mom," I lied convincingly.
"Whatever. Go get me a goddamn beer, and maybe I'll forgive you."
I stood up, exasperated. "Okay, sure, fine." I walked right out the door and stop a doctor.
"Yeah? Need help with the patient in there?" She pointed at the door to my dad's room.
"He wants a beer."
"No alcohol for the patients." Her voice was sickly sweet and familiar, making me want to gag.
"Can you give him some drugs or something then? He's driving me nuts about how much he wants a beer." Okay - not really the truth.
"...Sure." Her sweet, girly voice echoed in my ears, making the room spin. Slowly, without noticing it, I sank to the floor, the icy voice right by my ear. "Are you okay?" The doctor asked me.
"...ay...."
"Shut up." I mumbled to the voice.
"You're going...." The voice was cut off by the doctor grabbing my shoulders.
"Hey! Hey. You wanna lay down for a while?" I shook my head, face burning with rage and sprinted without direction through what seemed like a million doors, down a flight of stairs and pushed past people in the waiting room. Past the strangers who waited on their loved ones who had even more life-threatening attacks than my dad, and past my mother, who I watched out of the corner of my eye as she saw me hustle out of the hospital, a shocked look on her face. I rushed through the hospital, trying to find my mom's gray Ford Escape in the large parking lot that was dotted excessively with cars and trucks of the staff and the loved ones of the patients. I found mom's car and shut myself in it, remembering my mom leaving the doors unlocked when we went inside because she was too worried about Dad to be distressing about her car being stolen. I didn't have my license to drive or even my permit yet -society doesn't want kids under 16 to have any freedom- so I was forced to wait inside the car for my mother to finish her visit with Dad, which, with my luck, would be a few hours.
The voice must've followed me to the car because I heard it just as I had settled in with a blanket I found in the trunk.
"You cannot hide." It had said, clearly for once. I ignored it, the hairs on my neck prickling. I suddenly grew cold even with the thick woolen blanket over me. A few minutes later: "I know you can hear me." I ignored it again, and after a few seconds of silence, something pulled my ponytail right out of my hair, ripping a few strands out with it.
"Ouch!" A cackle followed my yell, then nothing. I became warm again. I played little mini-games on my cell phone for a little more than an hour before my mom appeared on the pavement heading toward the car, keys in hand. I threw my phone into a little black cup holder, it's battery depleted considerably.
"Sorry for the wait, hon." She said after she opened the car door. "Did I really leave the baby unlocked?" She often referred to her Escape as "the baby" even though I told her it was lame for her to do it. Actually, I probably only feel that way because I've never been called anything like that in my entire life. I've always just been "Cadence," never "Pumpkin," or "Baby Girl," but when I think about that, I usually just shrug it off. I mean, how bad would I look if I were jealous of a car?
"Yeah. I guess it was because you were worried about Dad." I said, buckling my seat belt under the heavy blanket as she stuck the key in the ignition and started the car.
"I guess," She sighed. "We'd better be nice to him for awhile. When I walked in, he asked me where you were with his beer, why some doctor had come in to give him feel-happy drugs, and why the doctor was a girl. That sexist man...I should leave him." She said that quite often, but she never did. She claimed it was because she "loved" him too much. Really, I knew it was only because she was scared of what he might do when she told him he didn't have his slaves anymore.
"Aren't we usually nice? We do his bidding all the time."
"...Well, yes, but what you did will require doing a lot more than chores to make up for." She paused. "Unless he dies in there." I couldn't help but notice a hopeful note in her voice as she said that.
"Hopefully he will." I replied casually as she finally backed out of the parking lot.
She looked over at me for a second, then faced the road again, a smile on her face. She chuckled to herself for a second, then sighed. "We shouldn't think like that."
"Why not?"
"I can't explain it. It just isn't right." She pushed the air conditioning button, then looked at me with a surprised and scared expression on her face. "What?"
"The air conditioning just turned on,"
"And? You pressed the button. Did you expect hot air?"
"No. I thought I was turning the A/C off. It was cold in here...I thought maybe you'd turned it on." Mom said.
The voice. I hadn't noticed because I was busy imagining the perfect life without my drunk of a father. "Uhh...is the window open?"
Mom ran her finger across the top of her window, then shook her head, never taking her eyes off the road. "No. You?"
I did the same, then shook my head. "Negative." I stretched to the back of the car and touched part of the back windows with my finger, then came back to the front. "Neither are the back windows. Weird."
"Oh well. It's warmer now. Anyway, it's Saturday. Do you wanna just hang out at the house or go to the mall or...?"
"Um. The house is fine..."
"Okay. I'm going to find something to do with Cindy." Cindy was Mom's best friend.
"Okay? You don't need to tell me everything you're gonna do, you know." Mom always told me things I didn't really care about.
"Well, if I'm out with Cindy then you can't call me, remember?"
"I know that. You tell me that every time you go somewhere with her. I promise you my mind won't make an exception this time and forget not to call you." I looked out my window at the trees that blurred together, then at the clock that glowed green. 9:30 AM. I would not have chosen to spend 6 hours at a hospital, especially for my dad.
My thoughts wandered to Griffin in the silence. I wondered what he was doing right at that moment, and if he was thinking about me. No, no, you don't even know him. Get that kid off of your mind.
Once at home, I went to the freezer and got out a little cup of sherbet. Dad would kill me if he knew I'd taken one without his permission, but since he wasn't there, what the heck? I could do whatever I wanted, and he'd never know.
I sank into the cushions on my dad's chair, then turned on his special flat screen TV. I surfed through the channels until I found Food Network. It was time to watch some Rachel Ray, 30 Minute Meals. I like getting ideas from this channel so I can make my dad happy with dinner, especially since if I burn even just a corner of his steak he'll go off on me and lock me in my room...After he pretty much kills me, of course.
Eventually I fell into a fitful sleep, full of monsters with chilling voices and vases falling and at the very end, just before I woke up, Griffin's face, but it was quickly replaced the second I opened my eyes by my mom's concerned face.
"Are you alright? You were thrashing around and yelling at something to stop... I couldn't even wake you up. You don't usually sleep that deeply..." She glanced at the empty sherbet carton on the table beside my dad's squishy chair and grinned. "No more sherbet before sleeping, eh?"
I sit up, heart pounding. "What time is it?"
"Past three. When did you fall asleep?" Mom asked me, raising her eyebrows.
"Around ten."
"Dang. You completely conked out." She walked over to the couch and grabbed the remote, then proceeded to throw it at me. I caught it in a fit of panic, not wanting to be brained by a TV remote. "I assume you want that back, right?"
I shrug in reply. "There's nothing on at 3 PM. You know that." I twirl the remote around in my hand in a fit of boredom.
"Bored?" I nod. "Go for a walk or something. Don't sit around here being a bum." I look up at her. Her behavior is weird.
"Mom? You okay?"
"Yeah. Why wouldn't I be?"
"You're acting a little strange."
"I'm just being me. I might be a little peppier though, with your father gone. The doctors say he has to be in the hospital for a month at least." She laughed. "He was so mad when he heard that. Madder than he gets when he can't get a beer. He kept calling his room a sanitary prison cell."
My dad knows what a prison cell is like, too. He was in one for several months for abusing a random woman on the street because she wouldn't tell him her name. The laws against men hurting women these days. . . .Too bad my dad doesn't give a crap about them when it comes to his own family. "So," Mom said, changing the subject. "What d'you feel like doing, hon?" "What? I mean, I dunno. Nothing."
"Why don't you call up one of your friends? Lesley? Kaylee? Lianne? One of them?" Mom seemed like she was pleading for me to call one of them.
I debated pros and cons, and though there were more cons than pros, making Mom happy was in the pros, winning over all the cons. "Alright...I'll call...Kaylee." Kaylee was the one that was least involved with Galena and whatnot, so I decided she'd be best. Then Lesley. If Lesley couldn't do anything, I'd sit and watch TV. No way would I call Lianne.
I grabbed the home phone out of it's charger on the little wooden table next to my dad's chair. I nimbly dialed her number, and slowly brought the phone to my ear. Mom watched me eagerly.
"Hello?" Kaylee's soft but somehow strong voice answered.
"Uhh... Hi, Kaylee. It's Cadence." Surprise showed in her voice. "Cadence? No way. Lesley and Lianne will not believe this." Kaylee's excitement grew as she spoke.
"No, I'm not going to be friends with them again. I only called you because you're the one that wasn't really involved with--" I stopped myself, and looked at my mom, whose curiosity showed in her eyes.
"With what, C?" I turned her voice through my head, trying to come up with something else to say.
“You know what, Kay? My mom's calling me, I'll call you back." My thumb pressed the END button on the phone shakily, preparing for a list of questions from my mother.
"Involved with what, Cadence?" Mom immediately asked when I closed the phone and bit my lip.
"Oh, uh, a project at school...?" I tried out. I flinched at the way my words curled up at the end of the sentence involuntarily.
"A project? For what class?" "Um." I desperately tried to find a class that I recently had a project in, but when I hesitated, Mom nodded.
"That's what I thought." She shook her head. "Tell the truth, Cadence." She stared me down, and I couldn't help it, I spilled.
"I pretty much killed a girl at my school, okay?"
Mom's eyebrows raised, clearly surprised. "What?"
"This girl, her name was Galena." When I said Galena, a cool breeze whipped around my ankles and worked its way up to my face, making my hair dance around my head and cover my eyes for a spit second, which wasn't natural. Not inside a house with all the windows and doors closed due to cold weather outside. "My friends, Lianne, Lesley, and sometimes Kaylee would mess with her. They told me that if I didn't too, then they wouldn't be my friend anymore." I felt my eyes stinging, but I refrained from letting any tears fall. "I broke her glasses, she got contacts, some guys touched her, and she committed suicide that night. I pretty much killed her!"
Mom blinked, seeming like she was unsure whether to get mad or not. "How have you been hiding this for so long, C?"
"That's what you have to say? Really?" I turned away from her and walked out the front door. She didn't follow me, she didn't call me back, and I was glad.
I wasn't sure where I was going. I pressed on through the cold January air down several roads that I didn't know the name of, but I didn't care. I just needed to get away from the rest of the world around me and escape into my own thoughts which continuously flooded through me.
I ended up at the neighborhood park, and I stumbled over to a bench where I sat down next to some inconspicuous guy. I glance over at the sketchbook that was open in his lap without realizing it and take time to admire the detailed tree he'd started sketching. My eyes worked their way up to the guy's face, and with a sudden pang I realized who it was.
My dad woke up soon after that in a small hospital bed. He looked at me and sputtered a bunch of nonsense, his spit flying with his words. I pursed my lips and waited for him to say something that made sense. When he did, it was, "Did you throw that vase on my head?" I nodded, because there was no point in lying to him. He was injured, and I did have a heart.
"Why?"
"You were hurting Mom." I tugged a ponytail holder off my wrist and tied my long auburn hair up into a high ponytail off of my neck which was, at this point bathed in sweat.
"No, I wasn't."
"Yeah, you were. You were holding her way too tight to just be a friendly hug. She couldn't breathe, and that was the only way I could think of to get you to stop." A cold finger touched the back of my neck, and I spun around. No one was there.
"What," Dad asked me, raising his eyebrows.
"Nothing." I say, and I turn back to face him.
"Anyway...Where am I?" He took a long look around the crisp white room. The only color besides white was the door, which was brown and the silver footrest and headrest on the hospital bed.
"You're in the hospital." I mumbled, looking down at my feet.
"And just why is that?" He raised his eyebrows even further, face seeming to grow in color. I didn't answer right away. "Cadence...hmm?"
"Your head got cut with that vase." I say, words darting out of my mouth and into the room faster than I thought them.
His face turned bright red as he ran his hand over the bandages on his head. I saw that the blood soaked through the gauze that enveloped his face and wrapped around his head in a thick headband.
The cold finger from earlier touched the top of my ear and ran itself down to make a swirl on the back of my neck, making me shiver. An icy breath reached my neck. I shrugged my shoulders up till they touched my earlobes, trying to cover my neck from the breath while trying to ignore it. "You...go....oo.....ay..." My eyes widened as I recognized these words from earlier this morning, the cause of all this. If I hadn't heard this on my radio, I wouldn't have yelled, Dad wouldn't have hit me, and so on, all leading down to this.
I shut the voice out of my mind, then focused back on Dad. "I'm sorry I hurt you, though... I really am this time, too. I just didn't want you to hurt Mom," I lied convincingly.
"Whatever. Go get me a goddamn beer, and maybe I'll forgive you."
I stood up, exasperated. "Okay, sure, fine." I walked right out the door and stop a doctor.
"Yeah? Need help with the patient in there?" She pointed at the door to my dad's room.
"He wants a beer."
"No alcohol for the patients." Her voice was sickly sweet and familiar, making me want to gag.
"Can you give him some drugs or something then? He's driving me nuts about how much he wants a beer." Okay - not really the truth.
"...Sure." Her sweet, girly voice echoed in my ears, making the room spin. Slowly, without noticing it, I sank to the floor, the icy voice right by my ear. "Are you okay?" The doctor asked me.
"...ay...."
"Shut up." I mumbled to the voice.
"You're going...." The voice was cut off by the doctor grabbing my shoulders.
"Hey! Hey. You wanna lay down for a while?" I shook my head, face burning with rage and sprinted without direction through what seemed like a million doors, down a flight of stairs and pushed past people in the waiting room. Past the strangers who waited on their loved ones who had even more life-threatening attacks than my dad, and past my mother, who I watched out of the corner of my eye as she saw me hustle out of the hospital, a shocked look on her face. I rushed through the hospital, trying to find my mom's gray Ford Escape in the large parking lot that was dotted excessively with cars and trucks of the staff and the loved ones of the patients. I found mom's car and shut myself in it, remembering my mom leaving the doors unlocked when we went inside because she was too worried about Dad to be distressing about her car being stolen. I didn't have my license to drive or even my permit yet -society doesn't want kids under 16 to have any freedom- so I was forced to wait inside the car for my mother to finish her visit with Dad, which, with my luck, would be a few hours.
The voice must've followed me to the car because I heard it just as I had settled in with a blanket I found in the trunk.
"You cannot hide." It had said, clearly for once. I ignored it, the hairs on my neck prickling. I suddenly grew cold even with the thick woolen blanket over me. A few minutes later: "I know you can hear me." I ignored it again, and after a few seconds of silence, something pulled my ponytail right out of my hair, ripping a few strands out with it.
"Ouch!" A cackle followed my yell, then nothing. I became warm again. I played little mini-games on my cell phone for a little more than an hour before my mom appeared on the pavement heading toward the car, keys in hand. I threw my phone into a little black cup holder, it's battery depleted considerably.
"Sorry for the wait, hon." She said after she opened the car door. "Did I really leave the baby unlocked?" She often referred to her Escape as "the baby" even though I told her it was lame for her to do it. Actually, I probably only feel that way because I've never been called anything like that in my entire life. I've always just been "Cadence," never "Pumpkin," or "Baby Girl," but when I think about that, I usually just shrug it off. I mean, how bad would I look if I were jealous of a car?
"Yeah. I guess it was because you were worried about Dad." I said, buckling my seat belt under the heavy blanket as she stuck the key in the ignition and started the car.
"I guess," She sighed. "We'd better be nice to him for awhile. When I walked in, he asked me where you were with his beer, why some doctor had come in to give him feel-happy drugs, and why the doctor was a girl. That sexist man...I should leave him." She said that quite often, but she never did. She claimed it was because she "loved" him too much. Really, I knew it was only because she was scared of what he might do when she told him he didn't have his slaves anymore.
"Aren't we usually nice? We do his bidding all the time."
"...Well, yes, but what you did will require doing a lot more than chores to make up for." She paused. "Unless he dies in there." I couldn't help but notice a hopeful note in her voice as she said that.
"Hopefully he will." I replied casually as she finally backed out of the parking lot.
She looked over at me for a second, then faced the road again, a smile on her face. She chuckled to herself for a second, then sighed. "We shouldn't think like that."
"Why not?"
"I can't explain it. It just isn't right." She pushed the air conditioning button, then looked at me with a surprised and scared expression on her face. "What?"
"The air conditioning just turned on,"
"And? You pressed the button. Did you expect hot air?"
"No. I thought I was turning the A/C off. It was cold in here...I thought maybe you'd turned it on." Mom said.
The voice. I hadn't noticed because I was busy imagining the perfect life without my drunk of a father. "Uhh...is the window open?"
Mom ran her finger across the top of her window, then shook her head, never taking her eyes off the road. "No. You?"
I did the same, then shook my head. "Negative." I stretched to the back of the car and touched part of the back windows with my finger, then came back to the front. "Neither are the back windows. Weird."
"Oh well. It's warmer now. Anyway, it's Saturday. Do you wanna just hang out at the house or go to the mall or...?"
"Um. The house is fine..."
"Okay. I'm going to find something to do with Cindy." Cindy was Mom's best friend.
"Okay? You don't need to tell me everything you're gonna do, you know." Mom always told me things I didn't really care about.
"Well, if I'm out with Cindy then you can't call me, remember?"
"I know that. You tell me that every time you go somewhere with her. I promise you my mind won't make an exception this time and forget not to call you." I looked out my window at the trees that blurred together, then at the clock that glowed green. 9:30 AM. I would not have chosen to spend 6 hours at a hospital, especially for my dad.
My thoughts wandered to Griffin in the silence. I wondered what he was doing right at that moment, and if he was thinking about me. No, no, you don't even know him. Get that kid off of your mind.
Once at home, I went to the freezer and got out a little cup of sherbet. Dad would kill me if he knew I'd taken one without his permission, but since he wasn't there, what the heck? I could do whatever I wanted, and he'd never know.
I sank into the cushions on my dad's chair, then turned on his special flat screen TV. I surfed through the channels until I found Food Network. It was time to watch some Rachel Ray, 30 Minute Meals. I like getting ideas from this channel so I can make my dad happy with dinner, especially since if I burn even just a corner of his steak he'll go off on me and lock me in my room...After he pretty much kills me, of course.
Eventually I fell into a fitful sleep, full of monsters with chilling voices and vases falling and at the very end, just before I woke up, Griffin's face, but it was quickly replaced the second I opened my eyes by my mom's concerned face.
"Are you alright? You were thrashing around and yelling at something to stop... I couldn't even wake you up. You don't usually sleep that deeply..." She glanced at the empty sherbet carton on the table beside my dad's squishy chair and grinned. "No more sherbet before sleeping, eh?"
I sit up, heart pounding. "What time is it?"
"Past three. When did you fall asleep?" Mom asked me, raising her eyebrows.
"Around ten."
"Dang. You completely conked out." She walked over to the couch and grabbed the remote, then proceeded to throw it at me. I caught it in a fit of panic, not wanting to be brained by a TV remote. "I assume you want that back, right?"
I shrug in reply. "There's nothing on at 3 PM. You know that." I twirl the remote around in my hand in a fit of boredom.
"Bored?" I nod. "Go for a walk or something. Don't sit around here being a bum." I look up at her. Her behavior is weird.
"Mom? You okay?"
"Yeah. Why wouldn't I be?"
"You're acting a little strange."
"I'm just being me. I might be a little peppier though, with your father gone. The doctors say he has to be in the hospital for a month at least." She laughed. "He was so mad when he heard that. Madder than he gets when he can't get a beer. He kept calling his room a sanitary prison cell."
My dad knows what a prison cell is like, too. He was in one for several months for abusing a random woman on the street because she wouldn't tell him her name. The laws against men hurting women these days. . . .Too bad my dad doesn't give a crap about them when it comes to his own family. "So," Mom said, changing the subject. "What d'you feel like doing, hon?" "What? I mean, I dunno. Nothing."
"Why don't you call up one of your friends? Lesley? Kaylee? Lianne? One of them?" Mom seemed like she was pleading for me to call one of them.
I debated pros and cons, and though there were more cons than pros, making Mom happy was in the pros, winning over all the cons. "Alright...I'll call...Kaylee." Kaylee was the one that was least involved with Galena and whatnot, so I decided she'd be best. Then Lesley. If Lesley couldn't do anything, I'd sit and watch TV. No way would I call Lianne.
I grabbed the home phone out of it's charger on the little wooden table next to my dad's chair. I nimbly dialed her number, and slowly brought the phone to my ear. Mom watched me eagerly.
"Hello?" Kaylee's soft but somehow strong voice answered.
"Uhh... Hi, Kaylee. It's Cadence." Surprise showed in her voice. "Cadence? No way. Lesley and Lianne will not believe this." Kaylee's excitement grew as she spoke.
"No, I'm not going to be friends with them again. I only called you because you're the one that wasn't really involved with--" I stopped myself, and looked at my mom, whose curiosity showed in her eyes.
"With what, C?" I turned her voice through my head, trying to come up with something else to say.
“You know what, Kay? My mom's calling me, I'll call you back." My thumb pressed the END button on the phone shakily, preparing for a list of questions from my mother.
"Involved with what, Cadence?" Mom immediately asked when I closed the phone and bit my lip.
"Oh, uh, a project at school...?" I tried out. I flinched at the way my words curled up at the end of the sentence involuntarily.
"A project? For what class?" "Um." I desperately tried to find a class that I recently had a project in, but when I hesitated, Mom nodded.
"That's what I thought." She shook her head. "Tell the truth, Cadence." She stared me down, and I couldn't help it, I spilled.
"I pretty much killed a girl at my school, okay?"
Mom's eyebrows raised, clearly surprised. "What?"
"This girl, her name was Galena." When I said Galena, a cool breeze whipped around my ankles and worked its way up to my face, making my hair dance around my head and cover my eyes for a spit second, which wasn't natural. Not inside a house with all the windows and doors closed due to cold weather outside. "My friends, Lianne, Lesley, and sometimes Kaylee would mess with her. They told me that if I didn't too, then they wouldn't be my friend anymore." I felt my eyes stinging, but I refrained from letting any tears fall. "I broke her glasses, she got contacts, some guys touched her, and she committed suicide that night. I pretty much killed her!"
Mom blinked, seeming like she was unsure whether to get mad or not. "How have you been hiding this for so long, C?"
"That's what you have to say? Really?" I turned away from her and walked out the front door. She didn't follow me, she didn't call me back, and I was glad.
I wasn't sure where I was going. I pressed on through the cold January air down several roads that I didn't know the name of, but I didn't care. I just needed to get away from the rest of the world around me and escape into my own thoughts which continuously flooded through me.
I ended up at the neighborhood park, and I stumbled over to a bench where I sat down next to some inconspicuous guy. I glance over at the sketchbook that was open in his lap without realizing it and take time to admire the detailed tree he'd started sketching. My eyes worked their way up to the guy's face, and with a sudden pang I realized who it was.
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