Chapter Ten
I got dragged from the room and taken into a bathroom to wash my hands free of Caitlin's blood, which was all over my hands and arms. How can one person bleed that much?
All that ran through my head while pink water ran down the drain was everything she'd screamed.
I DIDN'T MEAN TO! I DIDN'T MEAN TO DO THIS TO YOU!
I shook my head, as if that would get the voice out of my head, and her eyes, screaming apologies at me.
I'M SORRY!
I left the bathroom and returned to the waiting room, and returned to staring at the hole I was trying to glare into the floor.
I was curled up in a little ball in the bathtub screaming, "SHUT UP!"
Rubbing my temples, I screwed my eyes shut tight and willed her voice to get out of my head; to leave me alone, just for now. I didn't need to hear it repeated.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because Dr. Smith woke me up with a grim expression on her face. Shit.
"What's wrong? What happened?" My mind flipped to the worst possible scenarios. They couldn't stop the bleeding. She made it even worse. She's been put in a locked up room.
Dr. Smith, once again, sat across from me. "We have her in stable condition yet again, but.." But? But? What but? "We've had to restrain her arms, so another episode like the last doesn't happen again." I blinked. Restrain her arms?
"I—I'm sorry," I said, not really knowing what I was apologizing for.
Dr. Smith smiled a sad smile at me. "Do you know why she broke down like she did?"
Her voice came rushing back into my mind.
I'M SORRY! I DIDN'T MEAN TO DO THIS TO YOU!
"She.. I don't know." I shook my head again, trying to rid my head of her voice.
Her pleading brown eyes infiltrated my mind, and I cringed.
"Something wrong?" I gave Dr. Smith a "What-the-Fuck-Do-You-Think?!" look, and she mumbled, "Sorry."
"H - how long do you think it'll take for the deep cuts to heal?" I asked quietly.
"Well, the deepest lacerations are nearly an inch deep —" cringe "— so up to a month-and-a-half, probably," Dr. Smith rattled off, her voice sounding staccato in the nearly empty waiting room.
"And where are the deep ones at?" I wasn't one hundred percent sure if I wanted to know, but I had a pretty good idea of where they were at.
"Well.. she has five running down her wrists, and those are about half an inch deep, but there is a single line going down each arm. Those are the deepest ones. The scars won't be pretty." I blinked while this settled in. I knew the "Cutter's Poem." Go across the stream, not down the flow, or up to heaven you'll surely go. She really had come close to.. No. Don't think about it.
A loud shriek pierced through the silence, and I recognized it as Caitlin's.
"AA-RON!"