In Our Darkness - 18. Chapter 18: Coming Clean

Andy woke up feeling like trash. His bones in pain, his throat burning, his stomach in knots and the nausea spreading like wildfire through his body. Yet this terrible feeling was not foreign to him. His suspicions about where he was were confirmed when he weakly looked around and recognized the hospital setting, yet again.

He felt bad for the doctors and the nurses who had to work on him and save his life, time and time again. He wouldn’t hold it against them if they had just given up. If they took one look at him and decided he wasn’t worthy of life, of their hard work, and of their precious lifesaving medicine. He would agree with them. He wasn’t worth it. It would all be wasted on him. There was no point. He was a screw up, and he deserved everything that happened to him. He wondered how he even made it to the hospital. He doubted anyone at the house called the paramedics. Someone clearly must have come for him, but who? He didn’t have any family that cared about him, and he had lost most of his friends to drugs.

He tried to unhook himself from the IV, but he was too weak. All of a sudden he felt annoyed by the doctors who saved him. The do-gooders. Couldn’t they see there was no point? That they were doing more harm than good. Why couldn’t have they just let him go, let him fade away into the nothingness, where he wasn’t homeless, where he didn’t carry burdensome secrets, where nothing would hurt anymore. Where he could just sleep in peace. He was so close to it, but now they brought him back again. And now he was in more pain than ever before.

How did he end up in this sad predicament? He knew exactly how. Secrets; they come with a very heavy price tag. You never feel clean, or all the way honest, even when you’re telling the truth about something else. You never feel like someone can get truly close to you, because you’re carrying this… this something heavy, something dirty and unwashed in your very core. It trails behind you. It sits inside you. It peeks out from under the covers when you forget about it for a while and reminds you with a swift kick to your insides that it’s still there, taking permanent residence. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. In the morning, it’s there waking up alongside you. At night, it’s there viciously keeping you awake. Sometimes it goes quiet for a while, perhaps just to torture you even more when it comes back. But it’s always there. And you can’t escape it. It’s your very own house of horrors.

Andy’s mind felt foreign to him. Untamed. A wild animal scraping at the floor out of fear, tearing its own flesh in the process. Bleeding and bruised, self-harming. Sometimes viciously lashing out, and sometimes calm for a brief moment, but always tense. He existed in a state of paralyzing fear. His mind wasn’t his own. His pain was so profound that sometimes it would bend him backwards, almost breaking his spine. But it was a silent pain, completely invisible to anyone else.

Andy couldn’t cry anymore. He was a prisoner in his body. With a current of emotion bubbling up underneath that he was unable to express.

For some reason, his high school girlfriend came to mind. The one who tried to fix him. Megan. Megan was a fixer. Megan was a doer. She was good at making detailed plans. She was excellent at typing up lists, and organizing anything from books to pantry items neatly stored in translucent canisters from The Container Store, and worthy of being on one of those Instagram pages for perfectionists with a capital P. She could plan a car trip down to the minute, traffic accounted for, and show up to an event at precisely the right time. She was good at figuring out how things worked. But for the life of her, Megan couldn’t understand why Andy was sad.

Andy was unfixable. Permanently broken. He now knew that with certainty. He had suspected for a long time. Probably since he could remember. He wasn’t sure what to do with his newfound certainty. He could continue to patch himself up everyday. Put on a new makeshift bandage and stop the air leak for the time being. But it would be a never-ending task. He couldn’t fully succeed. He’d have to try hard, day after day, just to keep his head above water while others would easily swim laps around him.

Or, he could end it. He’d had brief thoughts of ending it before, but never serious. Nothing that would ever scare him. But his thoughts now were calm and collected, and that in itself was scary. The idea would cross his mind more often. To the point where he acclimated himself with it. It was no longer foreign or shocking. It was just there. A part of him now. And it grew and spread. He wondered how Megan couldn’t see it, the dark growth all over him.

Sometimes he would find himself outside of his ex-girlfriend’s apartment at random hours. He tried to remember why she broke up with him but couldn’t. She probably sensed the sadness one day and knew she had to go in case it would envelop her too. She was smart.

Andy felt so tired of his goddamn secret. So very tired.

Then he saw David walk into his room. David, the tall, silent guy from AA. Andy had always felt drawn to him. He didn’t seem like someone who belonged in AA. He held an aura of authority, of elegance, and self-assurance. Andy couldn’t understand why a man like that would need to drink. What secrets did he have?

Andy could see that under the scruff and the tired eyes, there was a very handsome man. He looked up to David and enjoyed sitting next to the quiet man all the way in the back. It gave him a sense of calm.

“How are you holding up buddy?” David asked, taking a seat next to Andy’s bed.

“Livin’ the dream,” Andy replied in a croak, and half smiled. It was something his biological dad used to say before he passed away from cancer and before his mother became an alcoholic and a drug addict herself. Andy was too young to remember him, as he passed away when he was just 2 years old, but he watched the VHS tapes of his dad. And every time someone would turn the camera on him and ask how he was doing he’d say he was living the dream. Maybe if Andy said it enough times, he would believe it.

David smiled.

“How did you find me?”

“Your sponsor told me about the house.”

“Ahh, good old Reg. Listen, you didn’t have to go in there. You didn’t have to bother.”

“I know, but then who the fuck am I going to sit next to and eat donuts with at those boring meetings?” David asked and Andy chuckled.

“Good point.”

“Listen, I’m sure you’ve heard it all before, but I gotta say it again. You’re so young, whatever demons you’re living with, they aren’t worth you doing this to yourself. You’re bright, energetic, you could achieve so many things. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

“It’s not so much demons, more like atoning for a whole lotta sins,” Andy replied, surprising even himself.

“So you think flagellating yourself is the answer? What sins could you have at 19-years-old?”

“How long have you got?” Andy asked sarcastically. Then he wondered how someone so young could feel so old. He felt like a frail old man.

David looked at him, and for a second Andy felt seen. Like a human. Like somebody worth saving.

“I had my son at this hospital you know.”

“I didn’t know you have a son,” Andy replied surprised.

“He was stillborn.”

“Oh,” Andy wasn’t good at these types of conversations, they made him uncomfortable. But he was glad because David didn’t look like he was waiting for him to say anything more.

“Some people don’t want to spend any time with a stillborn. They find it macabre. They find it easier to move on without seeing their child. But I just couldn’t not see him. Not hold him,” David spoke slowly and tenderly, as if he was coddling his words.

“He was so perfect. He was born weighing 8 lbs and 10 ounces. And he looked just like he was sleeping. Except for the lips, you know. They’re bright red…something to do with no blood circulation. But he was perfect. Every feature. All the nurses said he had my lips,” David recalled with a chuckle.

“And I just held him and held him. You have to be really careful because their skin tears easily, like paper. So I just kept him in the blanket, and just looked and looked at him for hours. My wife was in and out of sleep, she was heavily medicated. But I couldn’t stop looking at him.” Andy felt something wet roll down his cheek. He was surprised, he hadn’t cried in years. “Other men enjoy their first hours of fatherhood among loud cries and noise. I became a father in stillness and silence.”

“I’m sorry,” Andy said quietly.

“In that moment my life started to stand still as well. People expect you to just move on, get on with it. Since he never even took a breath. Never even really lived. A couple months pass, and everyone forgets, everything returns to normal. But I don’t know who I was before I became his father, Andy. And to be honest, I don’t want to go back to being him. Because even though that man didn’t carry this pain with him, he also didn’t know the greatest love and the purest joy that I know. So really Andy, I want to thank you for bringing me back here, because this is the place where I have the most painful and yet the greatest memory of my life. This is the place where I met my son.”

Andy’s vision was blurry.

“Thanks for coming to get me,” he blurted out. And now he suddenly just knew what he had to do. The thing he had been putting off from doing all this time. The thing he was terrified of doing. He had to let go of the secret. He had to tell the truth.

Once the idea entered his brain, he felt a new type of determination he hadn’t experienced before. He could do this, he could free himself. It would just take a little bit of bravery.

He had been holding onto the secret for years. At first, because he didn’t have a choice. He was a child, a scared child, and Paul told him if he told anyone else he would go to prison for the rest of his life. He was an “accomplice” after all. He had watched movies with prisons in them and if there’s one thing he knew it was that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison.

As he grew up, there were many occasions he wanted to say something, but Paul’s threats changed from prison to death, and Andy kept on keeping quiet. Then, at fifteen, he finally got the courage and wrote the letter. He found their address and sent it. He waited and waited and waited. And then came an answer. They had moved on, they didn’t want his confession, he had caused them pain by writing to them, they wanted him to leave them alone or they would contact the police. Andy was shattered. He didn’t know what to do. He still wanted to confess, but now it felt like it would be hurting a family he already put through hell. He was conflicted and continued sitting on the secret for four more years.

But now he’d had enough. Something in David’s humanity towards him caused a part of him to wake up. A part he thought was long dead, a part he believed was killed by Paul who was supposed to be his father figure, who was supposed to protect him. Andy had a tough time trusting any adult male. But David was different. He was consistent. And now he had saved Andy’s life, and he showed no judgement towards him, only care. And right away Andy remembered what he wanted to do, what he should have done all along.

He needed to confess, he needed to unload the burden forever. And suddenly the solution seemed as clear as ever. He was going to share his story at a meeting, and then he’d turn himself to the police.