“Yes,” I say with force. “Damien Allen. I told the last nurse to phone him. He should be here.” My emotions are twisted. I’m restless. Part of me wants to get out of this bed and go looking for him.
“No dear,” the nurse says. “There’s no one here by that name.”
The nurse backs away from me and I lie back down. “Well can you try to phone him again? I know he’ll want to know that I’m okay.”
She walks to the door and pries it open the slightest bit. “I’ll leave word, dear. You just get some rest, okay.”
I nod, but know that resting is probably the last thing on my mind.
Thoughts and memories keep bouncing around inside of my head. I keep trying to remember the last time I saw Damien.
I can’t remember where.
I can’t remember when.
I keep getting this vision of him throwing back my pale yellow curtains and standing by my bedroom window with a smirk and a gleam in his blue blue eyes, but other than that nothing else.
In my mind I hear a bang and another bang.
I want to turn off my mind so I can focus, but I can’t.
I hear another bang, bang, bang!
Then yelling.
Followed by crying and screaming.
I hear voices outside my door.
They are a blend of male and female voices and I’m struggling to figure out which voice belongs to each person. I know the nurse with salt and pepper hair is speaking. Her voice is the only one I recognize.
We have to send her somewhere, she says.
Somewhere where she can get the help that she needs, she says.
This isn’t the right place for her.
I know of a place not too far.
She’ll receive all the help she needs.
I slide down into my bed and my heart sinks into the pit of my stomach. I feel like I don’t belong anywhere.
I feel like I am a lost cause and that no one can help me.
I huff in frustration and I decide that the best and only way for me to figure everything out is by resting, clearing my head, and praying to God that my memory returns by the morning.
Chapter Twenty Three
20 Years Later
Sometimes I can feel the quiet.
I mean really feel it.
Sometimes I can feel it expand inside of me and send miniscule tremors throughout my body before they wind up quaking in my bones.
The feeling is an overwhelming mixture of calm and ease and over the last fifteen years, I’ve learned to love it. I’ve learned to adore simplicity because sometimes, the little things in life are all a person has.