Guilt and Remorse

Every day a young man came into the hospital to sit with his sister. He knew the nurses by name, the doctors sat with him and explained that she will never wake up and he should go about his life and live it instead of keeping watch over a girl that may as well be dead. He knew what every beep of every machine meant, he could read the wavelengths of her brain activity, which was plentiful.

From a physical perspective, she was very much alive. She was not intubated or on any sort of breathing assistance, she was simply asleep in a bed with wires and IVs monitoring and sustaining her. A feeding tube had been in her stomach since she was five and he didn’t even notice it anymore. It used to scare him because he wondered what would happen if she woke up and sat up without warning. What kept it inside of her? Would everything in her stomach seep out around the device if she weren’t flat on her back?

The doctors explained that to him as well. A small balloon inflated with water keeps it anchored inside of her stomach and pressed to her skin so, no, nothing will leak from her stomach if she sits up.

As much as they tried to get him to live his life, he centered it around her, he owed her after all. This was his fault. She wouldn’t be lying in that cold hospital room with weak muscles that he moved for her every day if not for his own stupidity at trying to walk a five-year-old down the street to the library when he was only six himself. Their parents blamed him for it. Even if they never said so, he saw it when they looked at him, and he saw it when they looked at her.

He was studying to be a nurse himself and the nurses on the ward helped him with his studies. He watched procedures with great care and mimicked their techniques in his clinicals. He had an upper hand on most students with this having been his life since he was a young boy. His ultimate goal was to bring his sister home where he could monitor her and be her full-time caregiver.

None of the workers in the hospital were sure if the young man even had a home anymore. They knew he worked and he went to school, but he came to the hospital every night, did his homework then lay in the chair beside her bed and fell asleep holding her hand, and had done so since he was a teenager.

What no one in the waking world knew, was that this was when their story truly began. She was fifteen and he was sixteen the first time it happened and it startled them both as he opened his eyes to see his sister running and jumping on the bed with all of the tubes and wires removed.

“Jessi!” he yelled, causing her to fall off the bed and smash into the floor with a loud thwack and thud.

“Oww,” came a weak sound muffled by the floor.

He jumped up and ran over to her to help her, “Oh my god, you’re awake! I have to get a nurse, hang on, I’ll explain everything!” he rambled as he looked from her to the door.

She grabbed his hand, “I’m not awake, Bo, you’re asleep. What the hell took you so long to get here! Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked.

Bo’s brow furrowed as he looked at his sister, “Where did you hear language like that? I’ve been very careful about what I say around you…”

She laughed and it was such a good laugh that it made a pit in his stomach as it rang through the air. He hadn’t heard her laugh since the day… He didn’t know he could miss such a simple sound that so many take for granted until he heard it again and he only wished their parents could hear it as well.

“The television, the nurses, the doctors, the other patients on the floor, family members that aren’t having good days. Everyone thinks I’m as good as dead so they don’t watch what they say when they stand near my door.”

“Why haven’t you woken up?” he asked as he helped her to her feet.

Jessi shrugged, “I can’t. I’ve tried. I even pinched myself. That used to work, but it doesn’t anymore. I feel everything here and I can watch some things, but only when people are touching me.”

She took a deep breath and looked around, “It used to be so dark here, but the nurses started sitting down and describing the room to me and they held my hand and looked around and I could see it, so now I have this room and a bed and the darkness stays away.”

“The darkness? What is that?” Bo asked.

“I don’t know. It’s cold and quiet. It’s scary and smells like those rotten Easter eggs we found at Halloween,” she held her foot up and he could see old stippled scars along the soles of her feet, “and it hurts if you stay too long.”

She looked to the door of the room and then back to her brother, “You have to go,” she said, a sudden chill hung in the air and the door to her room swung open

Bo heard a soft, “Hello, Jessica,” then found himself sucking in a deep breath as he sat up in the chair next to his sister’s bed. Her finger twitched as he let go of her hand and a woman stood on the other side of the bed, looking at Jessica with a smile that unnerved him.

She held a syringe in her hand and a deep purple liquid shimmered within, he’d never seen this given to his sister before, “What’s that?” he asked.

The woman jumped and dropped the syringe, shattering it on the floor. Her eyes were wide and she took a step back, “Visiting hours are over, young man,” she snapped as she tried to regain her composure.

He stood up and looked to the floor as he looked the woman over. She wasn’t dressed like the nurses. None of the nurses ever used glass syringes either; they were always disposable plastic.

“What was that?” he asked again.

“Blood,” she said, “I was drawing a sample and taking it for testing.”
She scoffed as he moved closer. “Stay over there so I can clean this up,” she snapped.

She held the swept-up shards of syringe and shimmering liquid in the dustpan. She never took another blood draw, instead, she looked at him as tears trailed down her cheeks, then she turned around and huffed, “You need to stick with visiting hours, she needs her rest,” before leaving with the contents still in her dustpan.

“All she does is rest,” he retorted.

Two weeks later Jessica was home, receiving care day in and day out from nurses qualified to do the things they had to do so her body didn’t waste away or become infected.

Bo and Jessica worked every night to figure out what was keeping her asleep. When he pricked her toes with a pin, she felt it but her body didn’t react. When he opened her eyes she could see but couldn’t control where she looked. She breathed on her own and her heart beat in a steady rhythm but everything else seemed out of her control.

The door to the room where she hid from the darkness hadn’t opened since that first night he entered her world. At least, it didn’t for a very long time after that.
Jessi wasn’t thriving at home. Her blood work wasn’t staying regular and the doctors became concerned that the different environment wasn’t good for her. Bo blamed the constant fighting of their parents and their avoidance of her. The last time their parents saw her she was being removed from their home and they were glad.
She was home long enough for Bo to give her new rooms to go to, however. Her old bedroom, his bedroom, and their living room and kitchen from home became awkward appendages to her original hospital room.

Bo was fast approaching twenty-one before they came up with a theory: The woman in the hospital wasn’t a nurse. She wasn’t death. She wasn’t anything but the darkness personified. If he and Jessica could figure out who she was, perhaps the hold she had on Jessica would lessen enough for her to wake. An evil nurse from the early days of the hospital perhaps?

Their theory wasn’t quite right, however, as the woman was not the darkness personified. She was the first person the darkness had taken in that hospital, which they learned in time.

Delany Marks was a sister at the hospital’s first incarnation as a care center for the poor. After a hit to the head during a botched robbery, she lived with no long-term damage under the care of her fellow sisters. She never woke and died six months later, believed to be a result of multiple organ shutdown due to malnutrition according to the paperwork.

Bo brought that information to Jessica and she looked at her brother with tears in her eyes, “Does this mean I’m never going to wake up?” she asked.

“No,” came a voice from the doorway as the room chilled. Sister Marks stood there, purple-filled syringe in hand.

“How are you here?” Bo asked.

She shook her head, “I’ve always been here,” she said as she looked at Jessica, “I can’t force you to take this, but you should know it took me ages to find you the first time I came to you and I’m grateful it didn’t take as long the second. If you allow me to give you this, I believe you will wake up.”

“What is it?” Bo and Jessica asked in unison.

“Does it matter if it wakes you up? And, I did not become comatose during a botched robbery. I didn’t die from malnutrition either. I can neither stay nor leave this with you so I need to know your answer before I’m pulled back,” the woman said.

“How did you die?” Bo asked

“How did you know we knew about you dying?” Jessica asked.

She looked to Jessica, “I heard you. I’ve been following your voices since I left you last time, it made finding you again so much easier.”

Her attention turned to Bo, “I swore to remain pure for my God, married to him and of divine order to remain faithful to him first and foremost. Mother Superior learned of rumors that I and another sister became favored by a young priest named Father Grisham for performing for him in a sexual manner. We did not, but before we could convey that to our Superior, she stripped us and lashed us in front of our sisters. When I begged her to listen and understand that it was a vicious rumor with no truth to it, she picked up a heavy candle holder and hit me over the head.”

“And your death?” Bo asked.

The woman sighed, “Father Grisham visited my bedside daily. After the first few visits, he had me moved to a private room and insisted he pray over me alone for an hour every day in an effort to wake me. While my mind sat in the dark and my feet bled from the cold biting at them, he took liberties with my body that were not his to take. I felt it. And I felt the lives growing inside of me and the hold the darkness had on me weakened as they grew. Then I heard Mother Superior’s voice in my ear and felt nothing ever again. I’ve since learned that the darkness is Father Grisham’s creation, though it wasn’t intentional and he didn’t know of it until his passing in more recent years.”

“By then this curse existed and his death strengthened it as it imprisoned him within its core. I didn’t… It has taken me many decades to work out the truth of it and I’m confident that his shame will end it just as his desires created it,” she said.

“Now, quickly, I need to know before it notices I’m not tucked into my prison and pulls me from here, do you accept this, Jessica, yes or no?”

“Yes,” she responded before Bo could interject and the woman plunged the syringe into his sister just below her navel. Jessica screamed, Sister Marks began to sob and faded before their eyes.

Bo snapped awake with a start. Jessica’s fingers clenched his and a tear rolled from the corner of her eye, but her eyes were not yet open.

His vigil continued but she still didn’t wake up. With a little more time, they understood why.

“I can feel it, Bo,” she said as she looked at her brother one night. “Her daughter. There had been two, but now there’s only one, so it’s going to take longer than she thought because one isn’t as strong as two. I can feel the grip of darkness loosening as she feeds me? Helps me? It’s like I’m pulling myself out of tar and it’s exhausting to both of us,” she said.

It wasn’t instantaneous, it was another six months before Bo walked into the hospital room to find his little sister in bed, her eyes open and a weak smile on her face. He screamed and the nurses rushed in as they rushed him out of the room. Jessi was awake and, though she needed physical therapy to learn how to talk, walk, and eat again, he was certain she was his sister, and she would get to live a life beyond the tubes and wires she’d grown up with.

Physical therapy was a years-long process. During one of her last sessions, she looked up at her brother and smiled, “It was never your fault, you know?” she said.

He looked at her and tilted his head, “What?”

“The accident. You didn’t let go of me. You were close enough for mom to grab and pull away, I wasn’t. You didn’t let go of me when she pulled you. I would have died if you hadn’t held on.”

Bo forced a smile, “I shouldn’t have tried to walk to the library with you, but thank-you.”

She laughed, “You didn’t. You refused to take me so I was going to go on my own. You tried to stop me, Bo.”

He saw the beauty in her new life as she took her first unassisted step since she was five, then she laughed with glee and he felt the weight of guilt shed from his shoulders.