Consumed

I don’t recognize her. Oh God, I don’t even recognize her anymore…

I stood numbly at the end of the hospital bed, staring at the sickly woman lying in it underneath a mass of tubes and wires. Her matted, tangled curls spread mold-like over the pristine white pillows; her dark complexion looked like curdled chocolate milk. Her thin lips trembled in her sleep and her sunken eyelids twitched feebly. There wasn’t anything to say, nothing I could say to make sense of anything my eyes saw. But I did know one thing.

This woman was not Andrea Zarkoff.

She was many things – a living corpse, a shell, a shadow of a woman she once was, a stranger… but she was not my Andrea. My Andrea didn’t look this weak, this hollow, this pained. My Andrea didn’t have horrific surgery scars on her chest where her breasts once were. My Andrea wasn’t suffering in her sleep from chemotherapy drugs and cellular respiration gone haywire. My Andrea was going to live. This woman… this woman was hanging by a thread, tangled in a web of tubes pumping poison into her bloodstream, and still the spider called cancer kept encroaching.

And all I could do was watch it happen.

Oh God, I’m sorry. Andrea, I’m so fucking sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m –

“Mr. Zarkoff?”

I looked up blankly as Dr. Schmidt walked in, clipboard in hand and stern eyes looking sadly from Andrea to myself. Pity. He pitied her. Pitied me.

I didn’t want his pity.

“Doctor…” I started, and then halted before I said a word. What words were there to say when the evidence of Andrea’s suffering was right there in front of me?

“I’m… sorry you had to see her like this, Mr. Zarkoff,” the doctor sympathized, looking up at me wearily. “She’s been fighting this very hard, and she seemed to be improving for a while, but as you can see, she…”

“Don’t, doctor, I know,” I responded, my eyes never leaving Andrea’s sunken face. “She’s… she’s not doing well. The treatment didn’t work, did it? She’s… she’s going to…”

The doctor’s strict face softened, and his hand settled on my shoulder.

“The cancer’s spread too far. We’ve found evidence of malignancy in her liver and the lymph nodes in her arms. It’s possible it’s even spread further than that. I’m so sorry, Michael… but there’s nothing more we can do to prevent the spread at this point. We’ll do our best to ensure she’s comfortable, but she has, at most, one more week.”

I nodded numbly, feeling time slow to a grinding halt. The doctor’s hand slid from my shoulder, but I barely noticed.

“So that’s it, then…” I murmured, eyes falling to the floor. The room was so quiet I could hear the beeping of the heart monitor and the sink dripping in the bathroom next door. Dripping. Dripping…

“I can’t imagine how it must feel,” the doctor responded before stepping towards the door. “But she’ll surely feel a bit better when she wakes up and sees you there…”

The door closed behind him, and with it, the dam burst. The tears came like a waterfall, slipping through my shaking fingers as my hands covered my face. I didn’t want her to see me like this when she woke up. I didn’t want her to know what I’d just been told. All I wanted was for her to live out the rest of her life believing she would pull through. She didn’t deserve to wake up and watch the light fade from her eyes when she saw me in pain. She didn’t deserve to have her faith in the doctors and in me crushed like that.

And more importantly, she didn’t deserve to share in the same demons that haunted me. The creatures, the barely human things I’d been seeing everywhere I went for the past week… Why, why were they after me? Why did they want to cause me more pain than I was already in? I had done nothing to deserve this, and Andrea did nothing to deserve this, and her body didn’t deserve to be consumed like this. Consumed by itself, by a disease that didn’t care what it was devouring, a disease that blindly ate everything in its path, gorging itself on misery and bodily tissue. Flooding every area of the body that it could. 

The sink continued to drip in the next room, slowly picking up pace. Drip by drip, pounding itself into my ears, meeting the pulse monitor’s beat and reinforcing it in a horrific crescendo. Flooding me with sound.

Stop…

But I couldn’t stop. I could never stop, that was the problem. She was drowning. She was drowning in her own skin, drowning in pain, and all I could do was sit here uselessly and let fear and grief consume me. As always. My mind never could let go of things, not even when it counted most, and it would snowball, piling up, consuming me, progressing like a tidal wave to crash down upon me again and again until I couldn’t bear it anymore, beating me into submission, beating me, beating me, beating me…

Stop!

My hands trembled as the tears leaked through my fingers, dripping to the floor in the same pattern as the dripping sink, heaving in waves with my sobbing frame. I couldn’t. I couldn’t…

I could. I could have fixed it. I could have helped her more. I’m selfish, I’m foolish, and this is all my damn fault. I could have done something. I should have done something. Anything other than let the doubt and pain scrape at my mind, carving deep furrows into which the anxiety could pool and overwhelm me, scratching against the inside of my skull, screeching for release…

 “Stop!”

My breath came raggedly, and my fist ached, bruising. I stared at the vague dent I’d left in the wall in despair.

The tap in the next room continued to drip slowly, innocently, unaware of the pain it was causing as I reached, shaking, for the bottle of Xanax in my jacket pocket. How many had I taken this week alone? How many had disappeared from the bottle, doing nothing to quell the rising fear inside of me? How many little oval, blue pills had found their way into my palm, into my mouth, into my system since all of this shit had started?

I sighed heavily, clenching and unclenching my aching fist. My free hand wiped at the tears on my face as I focused on controlling the one thing I could, my breathing. Inhale, exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale... Exhale…

“… M-Michael…?”

Stop breathing.

“Andrea…?” I whispered, looking up into her tired, sunken eyes. “Oh thank God, you’re awake… why are you crying…?”

Not a word as her lips trembled weakly, and fearful tears formed in her eyes. Her frail hands shook with exhaustion and the inability to hide her fear.

“Michael…” she softly whimpered, “I… I heard…”

My face fell as I approached her bedside. She hadn’t been asleep.

“How much did you hear…?” I asked gently, holding her shaking hand in mine.

“Enough,” she murmured, weakly wiping the tears from her eyes. “I heard… enough…”

I turned away to wipe at the tears forming behind my eyelids. God no. No. Please don’t make me explain to her. Don’t make me tell her that she’s going to die…

“Michael…?”

I looked up at her helplessly, heart crumbling.

“Please… don’t blame… yourself, honey… You have other… things to worry about…”

A weak smile from Andrea, and her hand slid from my grasp.

“I had… a nightmare,” she said, soulful eyes following me. “Before I… heard the doctor…”

“I’m sorry to hear that, love,” I murmured gently, brushing a stray tendril of hair from her face.

“It was… it was about… you,” she continued. “There was water… filling our room at home… water everywhere, and I couldn’t stop the flooding… And there was this horrible… horrible Man, staring in the window at me… watching it happen. But he… he didn’t have any eyes or… or a face… and I couldn’t wake up… It was…”

Her eyes shut slowly as she shakily breathed, and my stomach churned. Oh, God, please no. Not her too. Why her? Aren’t I enough? Why are they after her now? Why? What did she ever do to deserve that? What did she ever do…?

“Michael, honey… you look pale…” Andrea fretted, face marred with worry. “Are you feeling alright…?”

“Yes, sweetheart, I’m fine,” I lied, softening my face a bit. She didn’t need to worry about me. She had enough to worry about already. “It was probably just a nightmare… It’s nothing to be concerned about… and it’ll probably never happen again.”

Andrea nodded slowly, and her shaking arms curled around herself as she began to calm.

“You have… work tomorrow,” she stated as bluntly as a hospitalized woman could, and I smiled a bit. There was the woman I knew, the woman I loved, my beautiful, wonderful Andrea…

“I do,” I murmured gently. “But I can spend a little more time with you…”

“It’s almost… time for the visiting hours… to end,” she replied ruefully. “And besides… you need sleep. You look like you haven’t… gotten enough…”

I looked up at her once more, and for a second I saw a little spark of who she once was in her eyes, the determined, business-minded woman I knew so well. She always was good at seeing what I tried to keep hidden from her…

“I haven’t,” I admitted sheepishly, putting my hands into my pockets again. “And you’re right, I should try to get some sleep… It’s getting late.”

Andrea smiled weakly and turned towards me as I began to leave the room.

“Goodbye, Michael… I love you…”

“I love you too, honey… See you tomorrow.”

The door closed behind me with a soft click, muffling the sound of the heart monitor, and leaving me with only the sound of my footsteps clicking on the tiled floor as I slowly walked down the hallway.