Chapter 216: The truth isn't "nice"

My tears gave up at roughly the same time the nebulizer did. Leaving me somewhere in the middle of nothing. Physically at least I felt better and the oxygen saturation in my blood was happily plodding along between the numbers 98 and 99  but in some way through everything was admittedly less foggy, inside - were the feelings really mattered, I was raw.

 Without talking to me Esmee leant over me and pressed the end of her statoscope to my back and listened intently while I took the deep breaths that she would need to listen if there were any crackles or squeaks left in there. She wouldn’t find anything there now. My lungs felt fine and as I expected after a few minutes she put the statoscope back away and turned her attention to me. She had dealt with the outside now but as always the inside remained a problem and she was willing to have a crack at that too if she could squeeze through the barriers that I would subconsciously block her way with. Most people turned around when they saw a dead end street. Esmee and Emmet were the kind of people that would spend hours looking for a hole in the fence to crawl though.

 “So, there is a problem with nebulizers then. A problem that goes beyond the normal I don’t deserve the air problem I would think by your reaction, a problem that maybe causes flashbacks and some rather frightening ones at that. Am I getting close?”

 “I just don’t like them OK!” I snapped the anger rising in a blown to take over the empty bit that had been inside of me. “Not everything needs a story or a flash back. Sometime people just don’t like something and you shouldn’t force them to have it strapped to their face! In fact I think I might complain about you both!” I had no idea what I was saying or why I was saying it really. It felt like the words came out before I could actually think them. Anger made me different altogether, anger made me wish for death.

 "If you believe that we have done wrong by you in some way you have a perfect right to complain. If you would like I can also show you the piece of paper that allows us to do exactly what we have just done too. You have the perfect right to be angry with us if that is the way that you feel Mi and as I would with everyone I would encourage you to work with those feelings. “

 I couldn’t stay angry with her.  Even if I hated her I just couldn’t she tamed the anger and turned it into something a little different. It wasn’t sadness as such but it wasn’t happy either. Fear was there but it was a spate bubbling sensation.  It was mostly something raw that was brought on by understanding. No one else ever had and there was no reason why she should care.

 "I’m not angry at you, I’m angry at this, I’m angry at everything. Some things just won’t ever go away and they eat at the corners of my head.

 “You can tell us Mi, whatever it is you are safe now, no one is going to hurt you here.”  Emmet spoke this time his voice solid and steady as he changed his position on the bench and once again took my pulse with is two fingers. I noticed that Emmet and Esmee did it a lot like the hammering of my pulsing blood against their fingers in some way comforted them. It reminded them that I wasn’t dead. It reminded me that I was still alive and that the man who I had come to trust could be my most frightening threat in the entire world.

 “I was eleven the last time I used a nebulizer. I tried the rescue inhaler but it just didn’t work and I was scared so I tried to do what I thought I should have done and call an ambulance. I didn’t want to waste their time as I know they were busy and of course now I never would but I was eleven. Young and stupid.”

 “Sounds more like young and cleaver if you ask me. If you can’t breathe you call an ambulance it’s a logic that most of us follow in life even if it is a little sad that an eleven year old would have to do this for herself. You did the right thing back there and there is absolutely no one in the medical profession that would dispute that.” Emmet said firmly moving his self so he could get into my line of vision. It was sad, he had thought that it was the whole story and a bit of me told me to stop there. People generally preferred the lies then a painful truth and he had already bore the brunt of what happened in the park.

 “If that’s where you want the story to end it can.”  It could for them at least there didn’t have to be a brain in their lives, for them I could make him go away with no trouble at all. “The rest of the story isn’t nice.”

 ”You can tell us anything you need to or anything you want to Mi regardless if it is “nice” or not and I thing that if it is going to help you or it is something we can start to help you with you should tell us. We want to help you Mi and the more facts we have the better, Esmee said.”

 “I didn’t get to call for the ambulance. Someone found me instead and instead of helping he stole my mobile phone, pushed me to my knees, pulled down his trousers shoving his penis in my face and demanded oral sex of me if I wanted the luxury of breathing. Being eleven I was scared of dying of course so I sucked him off while he rang for an ambulance. I lived but I wished I had died and every day from then on I had wished that I had died and right now I wish I was dead too."

Panic took me at this point the words had been calm up to then like I had been explaining about another person’s nightmare and not my own but now I could feel his hands on me again and the walls closing in around me and I had to escape from them and everything else before I suffocated  or screamed.

 “Can I go now?” I asked almost desperately as I got to my wobbling legs. “My chest is fine and you know to much so I am going ok. I said stumbling towards the clinic door.

 “Mi are you safe?”

 I didn’t answer, they already knew.