The Mother Who Cried Werewolf

Chapter Fifteen

Standstill

"Breathe in. Hold. Alright, that's great," Percy heard the old green-eyed healer say as Percy was huffing and puffing like a fish out of water whilst his healer had a listen to his chest with her flying stethoscope. Percy's cheeks were getting pink with the summer heat, and his hair was frizzier than ever. His hands were dry, and he might murder someone for a lemonade.

"Wonderful, you're doing wonderful," she said.

I'm not a child, Percy wanted to say. But to the ancient lady, he probably was.

The healer's office was a tiny cubicle painted in the most shocking lime green Percy had ever seen. His healer blended into the walls with her lime green robes and electric green glasses.

"That's wonderful," Arthur said with a click at the end of his sentence. His eyebrows were furrowed together, and he was tapping one of his feet so loudly that it was all that Percy could hear. "That everything is so wonderful."

"Yes indeed," the healer said. "Wonderful."

"Ecstatic."

"Lovely."

Percy was nervous. It was just a healer's visit, a regular one and not one in the middle of the night because he was short of breath or having chest pain. His feet were a bit more swollen despite having to go to the loo every three seconds because of all the potions he took. Arthur was sitting beside him, holding his hand even though Percy didn't like it. Arthur's hand was clammy and cold. Percy bit his lower lip as he watched his health records whizzing around the office. Bright purple papers were being arranged on the desk as she stared at him with her lip turned up as if she were thinking.

"Everything's fine then?" Arthur asked in a high-pitched, shrill voice. To Percy, he sounded like a schoolboy that had been caught at the headmaster's office for telling off a teacher behind her back. "Everything's just fine with Percy? I can take him now. We can go home, and …we can have our next appointment soon?"

"What's given you that idea?" the healer asked with a raised eyebrow, popping a hand to her hip.

Arthur rubbed his neck. "He's not been in the hospital for four months," he said.

"Four months ago, when he was brought in due to cardiac arrest? Is that correct?"

"Y-yes."

"Your son who needs a heart-lung transplant?"

"Lung transplant?" Arthur asked. His whole face went white. "What's he need a lung transplant for? He has a heart condition!"

Percy zoned out completely when he heard the healer explain the high blood pressure in his lungs and heart. He couldn't be any less interested if he tried. He didn't care about any heart-lung-kidney-bone-whatever transplant he needed. The thought of him getting a transplant never even came to his mind. He couldn't envision it ever happening.

Percy had gone the longest stint he'd ever had of his life of not being in the hospital. It had been four months since he'd last been in the hospital. Maybe that was why his father thought he was getting better, even if he'd almost died the last time he'd been here.

He tried to bite his lip so that he wouldn't laugh. It was funny when you took in the context. But if he laughed, his father would lose it.

Arthur didn't look like he was understanding either with the onslaught of medical terms that the healer used. His eyes were wide and glassy with tears. Now and then, he was breathing erratically. By the end of her explanation, his lips were pursed tightly together, and he was staring vacantly at the wall. The laughter in Percy's face had faded, and he was left fiddling with his fingers.

"Dad?" Percy asked, watching his father's lower lip wobble. He was so ashen that he thought that Arthur had a coronary.

"Percival, go outside when I talk to the healer," Arthur told him. His tone was so factual and nonsensical that Percy felt his heart stop in its track. He hadn't heard his father talk to him in so long that he'd forgotten what it sounded like.

"Why would I—"

"Just wait outside," he said to Percy. "Please, Percival."

Percy felt like he'd gotten a decade younger as he wheeled himself out of the healer's office. The healer's office was in the middle of a narrow corridor. Percy felt the air out of his lungs disappear, his vision dimmed, and his limbs became numb and heavy. People stared at him like he was in the way with his lumbering wheelchair as they squeezed past him. Percy's good mood soon vanished in seconds. He kept staring at each end of the hallway, expecting a woman with floral printed robes to appear suddenly. He was terrified that his mum would unceremoniously turn up and whisk him away.

Percy bit his nails, darting his eyes back and forth from the healer's office to both ends of the corridor.

No floral robes. No shocking red hair. No freckly noses and wonkily painted red nails. So why was he so terrified?

He clung to his wheelchair, burying his head into the leathery backrest and breathing in the scent of the leather. It was rubbery, and it felt dusty even though it was clean. Percy realised he was alone. He was embarrassed when he started to suck his thumb to soothe the thoughts swirling into his head.

When he heard the door open, Percy tucked his hand behind his back, his cheeks reddening.

By the time Arthur had come outside to bring him back in, Percy had expected that he'd apologise for throwing him out. Arthur barely looked at him and instead just wheeled him back into the healer's room for her to complete the examination.

Percy was laid back on the bed, where they took an ECG for him. When she saw it, the healer frowned and stared at him like he was a ticking bomb. With the look the healer was giving him, he bet there was something funny about the blood tests they took a week back. Percy didn't care to know about it. Meanwhile, his father was blank-faced and kept asking questions about his health. No matter what she said, it was like his father couldn't understand. It was like the woman was speaking to him in Elvish.

He turned his face away from them to stare at the wall. Nothing about the room was soothing him. He could feel an imaginary line separating him from his father and the healer. It felt like they were in two different worlds.

Percy thought about what he would do when he got home, but his mind was turning blanks. Everything felt consuming. The thought of picking up a book or a quill felt daunting. The idea of taking a shower, sleeping, and breathing felt cumbersome, unimportant and impossible. He wished someone could help him. It felt like he was drowning under a sea of lime green walls and hushed conversations, and nobody was pulling out his hand to help him. He could remember the sleepiness he felt with the potions his mum gave him; he longed for the absence, the blackout, until all those feelings disappeared, until he could finally breathe without the drowningdrowningdrowning.

His father's shoulders dropped, and the lines around his mouth disappeared when they left the clinic. There was even a laugh when they'd stopped by the canteen in the hospital, where they made sandwiches with yellow rubber in between and had doughnuts that tasted like raw flour. The rock-hard lemon muffin he got Percy was left untouched, and the sight of tea being poured into takeaway containers made Percy's stomach slosh.

After the hospital, he headed down to Audrey's flat, which was not an unusual recurrence. He and Arthur didn't talk, not that his father noticed. His father was somewhere else entirely, his eyes vacant and staring at nowhere. Percy could imagine his father trying to fix the Percy he had in his mind, the one that could be glued together with spello-tape and a bit of extra tender loving care. The one who didn't have a hard-wired jaw, said whatever was on his mind and fought with him because he was sick of going to hospital appointments. Throughout the way, Percy could feel the blood rushing into his ears; all he could see were shop signs glowing threateningly at him.

Percy wondered how it would be like if he just didn't come back home at all.

He and Audrey ate Chinese food as they played board games with Flo. Louise was content sitting at the side-lines, loudly announcing which colours she liked. It was a lovely, warm evening, and Percy felt a little lighter afterwards. More like himself. After a day of barely eating, he'd demolished a carton of cookie dough. By the end, he was picking up cookie dough from the vanilla, and Louise shrieked that Percy was doing 'a very bad thing'. He fell asleep on the sofa, with his head propped up against the armrest. He could barely breathe but was so sleepy it didn't matter.

When he woke up at night, he swore he could see his mum walking around in the darkness. He could practically hear her breathing close to him, her hand on his arm. Percy sat up straight, his chest aching.

He felt like his heart was pounding, racing for hours. His hands were shaking as they clung onto Flo's thin duvet, his sweat-soaked hairline. He could taste the saltiness of it on his lips. Then it came; the pain in his chest spread so far past it felt like he was being crushed. Panic attack, he thought. He'd had them before—many of them.

Percy waited for the feeling to disappear as he clung to the duvet.

He stayed awake enough to watch the sunrise from the window. The feeling didn't go away. While underwater, he tried his hardest to make peace with another hospital visit. Another admission. Another few days in the hospital. He could hear wheezing through his tracheostomy and gurgling, foaming, like bubbles on the water's surface.

Percy looked for his potions and opened the cupboard. He took a few sips of water after he'd downed one PRN potion after another, not sure what any of them did. Not sure if he cared. They were all so colourful and vibrant. He could feel his hand shaking as he drank. The sticky, syrupy taste of the potion as it went down. It was hot in the room. His pyjamas were wet from where he spilt water on them.

He'd dropped the cup from his hand, and the glass shattered. Before he knew it, Audrey was standing beside him, in her oversized pink t-shirt and the tiniest shorts that Percy had ever seen. It disappeared under her shirt.

Sunflower soon followed afterwards. They had him sit on a chair. When Audrey placed a saturation monitor on him, Sunflower ran around, looking for her wand. She was too unsettled for apparition, waving her wand into symbols that Percy had only seen on instructions manuals on what to do if your loved ones had collapsed. Blaring lights soon followed, and emergency service vehicles materialised out of thin air. A man apparated before him. Audrey's saturation monitor showed the same number no matter how much she fixed the pulse ox.

He could feel his cheeks flush even more whilst he was levitated towards a stretcher and whizzed into the ambulance. By the time that he'd gotten there, his hands were blue. It was freezing, but he was soaking through his white pyjama top.

They suctioned his tracheostomy tube, and Percy watched bloody pink gunk come out of the line. Audrey had come into the ambulance with him. Her hair was a bloody mess. Her lips had formed a small 'o', and her eyes were glossy like Bill's when he had a few drinks. She looked like she'd been through the wringer, and Percy couldn't help but laugh.

"What?" she asked.

"You look…" Percy's voice trailed off.

"Arsehole," she said. She laughed too, but then she burst into tears. "You can't die," she said. "You're my first boyfriend."

The ambulance people opened his pyjama top through his buttons, sticking ECG leads on him. They felt cold to his skin, soothing almost. Audrey had leaned so close to him that he could feel her breath on his chest. She grabbed his arm, holding it so tightly that he felt like he was witnessing the last few moments of his life.

"I didn't eat for a whole year because mum convinced everyone I needed a feeding tube," Percy told Audrey. He watched her eyes widen, her mouth hanging agape. His home life was seeping into everything else that he had. The good thing that he had. "And she'd drugged and beat me since I was little. I remember. And nobody cared enough to know."

Audrey stayed silent. There was all this space between them, but Percy didn't feel the weight on his chest as bad as it was moments before. He saw Audrey leaning down enough that he could smell the remnants of her perfume.

"I don't want to go to the hospital," he said. He bet he sounded like a child.

She squeezed his hand so tightly that he could see the blood drain from her knuckles.

"Percy," she said his name like there was a meaning behind it. It went through transitions of notes. It sounded needy; it sounded scared. It sounded firm. It sounded loving. Percy hadn't heard his name said quite like that before.

"Audrey," Percy said quietly.

Percy stared at the bubbles in the oxygen tank connected to his bed on the monitor side of the emergency department. They tried to take blood from him three times, but his veins were bulged and torturous, swollen from the numerous blood tests he'd taken over the past decade. It was five in the morning. Audrey was leaning against the bed. Sunflower had someone taking care of Louise at home, standing by the edge of his bed, staring at his monitor. He wondered how scared she used to be when Audrey was here too.

He kept flicking his eyes to the clock. He wondered how long it would take for his father to be there. He thought about how Charlie and Bill. They had recently returned to their jobs in countries that Percy had never been in. How they'd be receiving another owl that something was wrong with him again. How he had ruined their lives even more.

He saw Ginny's small face peeking through the curtains. Nobody to watch her at home. His father had to take her with him. Percy felt his breathing hitch, imagining what the tubes and wires looked like through her small eyes.

He imagined how it would feel for her if he died.

He wondered if she was scared that he was going to die. If she knew how selfish he was. He didn't care if he died as long as he didn't need to be in the hospital anymore. He didn't want to listen to his father talk anymore about his mother. He wondered how much of a coward he must seem like to everyone. He'd rather just die than face the trauma of everything he'd been through. He would rather face that than have hope. Then think about things being better because the thought of the disappointment was more terrifying than being buried six feet under where the world was finally still.

His father entered the room. He looked like he barely slept. For the first time in a long time, he felt bad for what his father was enduring. How hard it must be to have a bloody son like him that was always on the verge of collapse.

Everyone in that cubicle was paler than him. Their eyebrows were knitted, their lips pursed, their eyes darting, silent. Percy could feel the tension in the air.

"Come on, Percy," Arthur said. "We can go home."

"Really?" Audrey asked. She didn't look like she agreed with that. She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. "Are you okay?" she asked Percy.

Percy snapped his head in disbelief. He didn't think that he'd be allowed to go home. The dread he'd felt about another hospital admission suddenly vanished, and he felt like he could breathe more easily. He couldn't help but beam at his father, holding a bag. More potions for him, Percy reckoned.

"I'll send you an owl," Audrey said. "And a flower or something."

He smiled at her, making his eyes light up a little. She smiled back, but the smile didn't quite reach her eyes.

He didn't know what the healers had told his father about him. His face was the same as it was when he'd been to his appointment in the hospital. There were lines on his face that made him look decades older. His shoulders were tense.

Percy got off his bed by himself and felt okay walking, but his father insisted on taking him home in his wheelchair.

"There's a book club in a café next to Madam Malkin's that meets up every Tuesday around six," Percy said. He'd gotten the reading list from Oliver last week, who had claimed that he was the only one that Oliver knew was boring enough to want to go to something like that. He'd already read most of the books on the list, the bestseller books. He hated most of the ones he'd read and wanted to complain about them to someone. "It's not going to be long."

"No."

"It'll just be for an hour."

Arthur tightened his jaw. "You're not going," he said. As if Audrey and Sunflower had poisoned him on purpose when he'd been to their flat. Percy felt his day looking less bright, but he nodded. "You're not going anywhere anymore."

"That's not fair."

"You could've died."

I don't care, Percy thought, but he didn't say that. He felt like his father already knew.

"You can read books at our house and talk to Ginny about them," Arthur said, looking at Ginny for confirmation.

"Gross," she said. She looked less pale now that they were out of the emergency room, but she was still much quieter than usual. Her hair was growing again. She didn't ask for breakfast, even though she must be starving now. "Are you…okay now?"

Percy only gave her a toothy grin. His father pursed his lips together as he stopped walking.

"Why…" Arthur began asking, but he didn't continue that. He cleared his throat and fixed his work robes. For the second time in a few days, Percy could feel the kernel of excitement in his body fade away.

At the Burrow, Percy felt the crushing pain in his chest again. He didn't want to go up to his room.

"Not this again," Arthur said. "Percy, we've worked on this."

Percy didn't think that was true. Just because they painted it and bought nice things for him didn't mean anything. He kept trying to look for a place to escape. The living room. Kitchen. Linen closet. Garden. Upstairs. Arthur's room. Ron's room. The twins' room. His parents' room. Ginny's room. Bill's room. Charlie's room. Laundry room. Bathroom.

"You're a liar," Percy said. "You said that things would be different."

"Maybe if you were around long enough around the house instead of running away from it every chance you get," Arthur said, raising an eyebrow at him. "I tried, Percy, but you don't want anyone to know you."

He didn't dare look at his father because he would be furious if he did. He could about maintain his composure. His back was straight, his chest puffed.

"I've done everything for you," Arthur said.

Something inside of him snapped. Percy pushed his father away from him. Arthur, who had not expected it, was propelled backwards straight into the coffee table. The sound of the vase crashing and the groan from his father made his heart beat faster. Percy jumped up at the sound, feeling it echo in his mind.

"Percy!" Ginny said, and he'd forgotten that she was there.

Percy got up from his wheelchair and walked out of the house.