The Invalid

Content Warning: Content below contains thoughts/actions of violence and abuse.

The words—I’m sorry—formed in Tom’s mind, only as he spoke them, they were marbles in his mouth, round and unmanageable, lacking coherent sound to accompany them. His three grown children with varied expressions of frustration and anger on their faces surrounded his bed where he’d returned to consciousness from the deep black of nothing. Ben stood at the foot of the bed, his brow collapsed like a building imploding, his mouth shaped with repulsion. Jason stood to Tom’s left, his second son’s expression somewhat neutral, but his body removed, standing at a distance as if to remain out of Tom’s reach. Then there was Amy, Tom’s youngest, to his right, her arms wrapped around her body, and her expression an amalgamation of hate, sorrow, and pity. 

He needed to say, “I’m sorry,” and tried once more.

“Don’t talk,” Ben said, his tenor a resonance of Tom’s own characteristic contempt. Tom was grateful his children took after their mother, though Ben—the oldest—perhaps favored Tom’s features a bit more than the twins with his lighter hair and hazel eyes. The twins’ hair was darker, their eyes darker.

He wasn’t sure where he was, why he was there, and he was shocked his kids were at his bedside. And while it was a cause for celebration that they were—an opportunity to tell them he was sorry—it necessitated the question: how bad was it? A latent hint of memory clouded his memories that he couldn’t access to know for sure, black ooze slipping around inside his mind, coating the happiness with something dire and sinister. 

Tom tried to say, “I’m sorry,” once more.

Ben huffed a frustrated sound through his nose. “Doesn’t this just beat it all?” His oldest son turned away and left Tom’s line of sight. He couldn’t turn his head to follow his son’s path to know where he’d gone, but heard Ben add, “I’m not fucking wiping his ass.”

“Is that necessary?” Amy asked, her head turned away from Tom, looking over her shoulder as she spoke. 

“Can you blame him?” Jason asked. 

Tom’s eyes jumped to his other son, wishing he could turn his head and confused as to why he couldn’t. 

“After what he put us through? What he did to Mom.” Jason didn’t step further away but he shifted away from the bedside.

“You know he can hear you?” a stranger’s voice interrupted.

Tom’s eyes snagged on the clear plastic of an IV bag hanging above the bed and the subsequent conduit of tubing winding down toward him, only he couldn’t feel it. He tried to lift his hand to see the IV insertion, but he couldn’t move. 

The hospital.

What was wrong with him?

Tom’s heart lurched the tremulous beat, fearing the unknown.

“In fact,” the stranger continued, “your father is lucky.” 

Using his eyes, he skimmed the space to locate the speaker, because he had a few things to say. He certainly wasn’t feeling very lucky. Then, startling him, the stranger’s face appeared over his. Too close. Tom pressed back into the bed, but his debilitated form refused to cooperate with his wants. 

The nurse with a name tag that read “Clara” pinned to her cartoon inspired scrubs leaned over him. “How are you doing, Thomas?” 

Her giant eyes looked like a fish’s, and he wanted to press away, unnerved by this stranger’s appearance. He wanted to tell her not to call him Thomas. Only his hateful mother had ever called him that. But he didn’t and opted to say “fine” though the word was thick between his lips and was no longer marbles but sludge.

“Fucking won the lottery,” Ben said from somewhere in the room. “Can’t get away from you ever now can we.”

“We could put him in a home–” Amy suggested.

The nurse straightened, looked somewhere over Tom’s body at what he assumed were Ben and Amy. “He can hear you–” the nurse said.

Perhaps it was a mercy on her part, but Tom knew he didn’t truly deserve mercy. Only, there was a look on her face—the hint of a smile at the edges of a mouth upturned at the corners—that seemed to suggest she was enjoying the exchange. 

“What? It’s what he deserves–” Ben spit the words like bullets. And suddenly his son’s red-mottled face appeared over Tom. “You’ve made sure we can’t get away. You’ve trapped us again, any way you can. Isn’t that right, Tom? You fucking prick. We’re stuck with you forever.” Ben disappeared once more.

“I’m sorry.” The marble words dropped out of his mouth as unintelligible sounds and tears filled his eyes. He closed them unwilling to face the truth of their anger. 

He deserved it. 

This was why he’d never reached out, and now Ben was right—everyone was stuck.

They were stuck with him as much as he knew he was stuck in his body. Grunting with sound he wished was accompanied with fury, Tom tried to lift his hand to reach for one of his children, but it remained immobile at his side. 

Clara spoke, “Stay calm, Thomas–”

And Tom opened his eyes once more, tears spilling trails from the corner of his eyes to his ears. He wanted to tell the nurse that his wife’s name had been Clara, too. How long had it been since she passed? Seven years? Eight? Her funeral had been the last time he’d seen his children and the realization pointed a skeletal finger of accusation at him. 

The nurse’s bulbous eyes—the same color cornflower blue as his late wife’s—appeared weighted with concern. “Your children are here. They’ll take care of you.” 

He tried to tell the nurse, “I need to tell them ‘I’m sorry,’” but the sentiment provided nothing coherent.

She patted his arm with her hand which she left there. It grew heavy and uncomfortable and squeezed. “It’s okay, Tom. Don’t talk. No one cares what you have to say.”

Tom’s eyes widened, and panic became needles poking at him. 

“You’ve had a stroke,” Jason said from the other side of Nurse Clara. His head peeked around the nurse’s large frame, even farther away than when Tom had first become aware of his middle child. 

A stroke. 

Tom tried to remember, but that blackness oozed in his mind like slime coating the surface of everything lingering there. There were the red numbers of his alarm clock: 3:27. Three. Twenty-seven. His wife had died on the twenty-seventh of March. 

He looked back at Nurse Clara, tried to beg her with his eyes, to grab hold of her with the limited movement in his hand, but couldn’t. He was trapped inside his own body. Trapped inside the torture of his own racing mind without any way to communicate his thoughts. Trapped. 

You’ve trapped us again, Ben had said. 

His heart tightened with the realization as his eyes jumped around to find solace in his children. Except he knew he wouldn’t find it there and tears of self-pity clouded his sight once more, following the trail the first ones made pooling in his ears. Tom was a selfish man. Always had been, and he knew it was too late now. He should have reached out to them. He should have said he was sorry years ago when the twelve-steps insisted he make amends. After Clara died, he’d gotten stuck in his own bitterness and fear.

He was stuck.

“We were all stuck, you fucking asshole,” Nurse Clara said in his late wife’s voice.

Tom’s eyes bounced to the nurse who tilted her head and smiled at him. “Clara?” he asked, but couldn’t speak, his mouth now unable to open at all, leaving him to mumble through closed lips.

Ben leaned over him. “I fucking hate you, old man. I think it’s time to give you some of your own medicine.”

“You aren’t staying calm–” the nurse—who was now his late wife—bent forward hovering over him with a smile that was much too wide now like her giant, globoid eyes— “We’ll have to keep you restrained so you don’t hurt yourself.” And she wrapped his wrists in restraints mounted on the bed.

“Remember when you used to throw me in the basement and lock the door?” Jason asked, even farther away. “I’d cry for you to let me out and when anyone tried to help, you hurt them–” his voice caught.

Tom closed his eyes. He had done that.

Clara, whose face was turned away, looked at Jason, her head tilted. “He did.”

“Remember when you’d beat the shit out of me? Remember the time you used my baseball bat because I’d struck out twice?” 

Ben.

Tom hated knowing this was who he was.

“And when Mom got sick the first time–” Amy said quietly. “What you did to me in the darkness of the night.

Tom squeezed his eyes shut because he knew what he’d done to Amy and loathed himself for it. He knew he could stop drinking, follow a twelve-step program, claim to know God and be forgiven, but it didn’t change the essence of who he was and what he’d done. He hadn’t made amends because it was a fruitless task. He didn’t deserve it. 

“I’m sorry,” he tried to say, his mouth stitched together. He opened his eyes, and each of their faces crowded around him, only they weren’t his kids or globular Clara, but instead versions of him. Angry, dark, menacing, monstrous. 

“Maybe we should kill him,” One of him said, only it was his late wife’s voice. When Tom looked at that horrible version of himself, his skin was rotted away, his eyes oozing green decay, and his exposed teeth clacking together as he spoke. 

Tom tried to scream as this monstrous undead version of himself climbed up and sat on his chest with that grotesque smile.

“Let’s bury him alive,” he clacked while the rest of the Toms laughed.

The hospital room changed into walls of earth and Tom looked up at the light above him as a shovelful of dirt rained down and filled his mouth, choking him. He struggled against the weight, against his inability to draw a breath but it was fruitless. He couldn’t move. He was trapped.

Monster-Tom, still sitting on his chest, snarled.

And Tom’s eyes flew open.

With his heart pounding in his ears, Tom realized he was in his bed, the red numbers of his alarm clock glowing eerily. He patted his chest, his cheeks, his closed eyes. A dream. A terrible dream. He heaved a relieved breath.

To slow the racing of his pulse, he turned his head to look at the alarm clock which read 3:25 AM. Then he sat up on the edge of his bed, took several more deep breaths, and swiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. Nausea pulsed through his gut he was so unnerved by the vivid dream. 

Unable to let the horrible dream go, Tom knew he needed to finish what he’d started. His sponsor tried to tell him that “It isn’t up to you whether your kids forgive you. But you need to forgive yourself,” only Tom knew he didn’t deserve forgiveness. But he figured his kids deserved to hear him acknowledge his wrongs. The nightmare, a wake-up call of sorts.

Tom hated that this was what he’d made of his life…

Hurt his wife… What was her name? 

He shook his head, his feeling strangely gooey. That wasn’t right. He knew his wife’s name. It was… 

And his kids. They were . . .

Tom lifted a hand to squeeze the back of his neck, only his muscles felt weak. Something wasn’t right. He glanced at the alarm clock which read 3:27. 

An intense pain ripped up the side of his face and raced across the left side of his body. Tom shouted and tried to stand, but his body locked, and he collapsed, pulling the end table down with him. The bedside lamp dropped like a hammer against his head, and he groaned. His phone was on the floor just an arm’s length away, but he couldn’t move his body to reach for it. So he stared, as if it would move for him. 

“Please,” he murmured, the letters were marbles inside of his mouth incapable of creating a comprehensible sound like his body was trapped. “No. No. No,” bounced from him like grunts, and the blackness started, the ooze of it thickening and spreading like oil inside his mind. His last thought before the thick darkness took and dragged him into its inescapable depths was, I needed to say I’m sorry.

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