Lisa Gardner - Live to Tell

Immediately, Michael’s face shudders. He climbs out of the chair, wearing the same khaki shorts and Brooks Brothers shirt he wore to my house. This confuses me more. What day is it? What’s happened to me?

“How do you feel?” he asks, crossing to the bed, glancing at the monitors, as if they mean something to him.

I swallow once, twice, three times. “Th-thirsty.”

“I’ll ring for a nurse.”

I nod. He pushes a button. “Evan?” I try again.

“He’s okay.”

“Chelsea?”

“She’s at home. With Melinda. What do you remember?”

I shake my head. I don’t remember. But then it comes back to me. Sitting down on the couch next to my sun-drunk child. Feeling a little sleepy. The sudden pain in my side…

My hand drops down to my ribs. Sure enough, my left side is covered in a swathe of gauze. I don’t have to touch it to feel the pain, the red, swollen mess of it. My son stabbed me.

“The knife penetrated your liver,” Michael tells me, as if reading my thoughts. “If the EMTs hadn’t gotten you here in time for emergency surgery, you would’ve died.”

“Evan?” I ask for the third time.

“Do you understand me, Victoria? You would’ve died.”

A nurse appears. She bustles in, picking up my wrist, checking my pulse even though some cumbersome plastic object attached to my fingertip must be telling her the same thing. “How do you feel?” she asks, studying the monitors.

“Thirsty.”

“I can bring you ice chips. If you hold those down, next we can attempt water. Sound like a plan?”

I nod. She exits, returning quickly with half a cup of ice chips. I take them sparingly, realizing the increasing discomfort in my abdomen. I’ve never been good with anesthesia. Ice chips probably are the best I can do.

“Doctor will be in to talk to you shortly,” she says. Then the nurse is gone and Michael and I are staring at each other again.

“Thank you for coming,” I manage. I don’t know what else to say.

He shrugs. “Someone had to come. It was either me or your mother.”

We both know what he means. My mother would’ve pulled the plug. I’m not a daughter to her. More like the competition. At least I used to be. It’s been so long since she’s visited me or her grandkids, she has no idea how far I’ve fallen.

“Evan?” I try yet again.

“Evan’s okay.”

“He didn’t mean to-” I start.

Michael holds up a hand. His face is the angriest I’ve ever seen. “You know why I left?” he said abruptly. “You know why I took Chelsea and got the hell out of our home?”

I shake my head. His anger frightens me.

“Because I figured it was only a matter of time before I had to kill my son in order to protect my wife and daughter. And call me crazy, but I didn’t want to kill Evan. Dammit, I love him, too, Victoria. I’ve always loved him, too.”

I don’t know what to say.

“Do you know what you’ve done to him?” he continues, the force of his emotions causing his voice to tremble. “He’s eight, and he now has to deal with the knowledge that he stabbed his own mother. That he nearly killed you. He’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake. How’s he supposed to handle that? With everything else going on in his fucked-up head, how the hell is he ever supposed to deal with that?”

I don’t know what to say.

“I thought you’d died. I got the call, and the way the emergency room nurse was talking… I raced all the way here thinking you were dead. That Evan had murdered you. Then I run into the emergency room, and the police have a million questions and the doctors have a million questions. I can’t even see you; you’ve already been whisked away to the operating room. And Evan’s shackled to a hospital bed. They’ve got him cuffed and everything. My son. My little boy…”

Michael’s voice breaks. He turns away from me, walks toward the wall, and stares at it for a bit.

“I had to call Darren,” he says at last, referring to an old college friend who’d become an attorney. “I had to get legal advice for Evan. That’s where we are with things, Victoria.”

“He didn’t mean-” I try again.

Michael whirls around. “Shut up. Just shut up. I don’t care that you’re hurt. I don’t care that you almost died. I want to hurt you worse, Victoria. I want to slap you until you realize once and for all that your denial is destroying our son. Evan did mean to hurt you. He intentionally stole that goddamn knife out of the drying rack. He cleverly slipped it inside the fabric on the underside of the sofa, where you wouldn’t find it. And he carefully retrieved it during an opportune moment, just so he could drive it through your ribs.”

“How do you know all that? How can you possibly know?”

“Because he told me.”

I stare at him, slack-jawed, disbelieving.

“He’s broken. He answered my questions by rote. There’s no light in his eyes. He stabbed you, but he broke himself. And I don’t know if we’ll get him back. Sure this was better than an institution, Vic?”

The bitterness of his words hurts, just as he intends. I feel the full force of his helplessness. The buried rage from all the times I overrode him, shut him out of the parenting process because I didn’t agree with his solutions, couldn’t let go of my own notions of what was best for my child. I’m the nurturer. Michael, the fixer. We were doomed from the start.

“Did… did they arrest Evan?” I ask, shifting a little in the bed, trying to get comfortable. I feel queasy, but that might be from the conversation as much as the aftereffects of the anesthesia.

“I’m sure an arrest warrant is only a matter of time. At the moment, however, given his fragile mental state, he’s been hospitalized.”

I stare at him in confusion. “Where?”

“Upstairs. Turns out this medical center has a locked-down pediatric psych ward on the eighth floor. Evan’s now a patient.”

My eyes widen. Once again Michael holds up a hand. “I don’t want to hear it. I had Darren pull our divorce decree. I still have custodial rights to Evan and, given your current physical and emotional state, I’ll take you to court and demand full custody if I have to. Our son’s experienced a psychotic break. He’s upstairs and he’s gonna stay there.”

“He’s just a child-”

“Which is why it’s a pediatric ward. And, since you asked so nicely, it’s an excellent acute-care program. Highly recommended, considered very progressive in its approach to mentally ill kids. You can visit anytime you want, assuming you get yourself healed enough to get out of bed.”

“Bastard.”

“I wish I’d become one sooner,” he says flatly. “Maybe then we could’ve avoided this.”

“I’m not a bad mom,” I whisper after a moment. It seems a stupid thing to say, given that I’ve just been stabbed by my own child.

But Michael seems to understand. His face smooths, some of the tension seeps from his shoulders. He sighs, rubs his forehead. Sighs again. “No, you’re not a bad mom, Vic. And I’m not a bad dad, and Evan, when he’s Evan, is not a bad kid. And yet, here we are.”

“What will happen next?”

“I don’t know.”

“I won’t press charges,” I state defiantly. “They can’t arrest him without me, right?” My stomach rolls. I am going to vomit.

Michael, however, shakes his head. “Not that simple, Vic. He stabbed you, then confessed to the police. Those officers will prepare affidavits. Those affidavits can be used by the prosecutor to demand an arrest warrant. According to Darren, the court will probably be willing to accept Evan being held in a mental institution versus a juvenile center for the time being. So that’s step one. Next, we let the legal process grind along while focusing on improving Evan’s state of mind. If we can show he’s more stable, the court may be more forgiving. Maybe. But it’s going to take time, Vic. Time for him, time for you, time for the legal system. We’re in it for a bit.”