Chapter Thirty-Six
Emma felt so groggy. Her entire body felt heavy; weighted, as if held down by a thick sheet of cement. Her mouth was dry, her throat was parched, her eyelids felt like someone had pulled a blanket over her eyes. Her brain was also muddy, as if trying to emerge from a pit of quicksand. It was very clear that there were people around her, but it was hard for her to hang on to a thought that was longer than what is going on?
She passed in and out of consciousness, without her knowledge. She was aware that she was waking up and falling back into deep rounds of sleep, but every time she woke up, she was so tired that she had to fall back asleep again.
She wasn’t sure how many times she’d gone through the cycle but eventually, she found herself staring at the steel bedframe of the hospital bed she was in, and the ECG monitor beeping from behind it. She stared at it for a while, her mind silent. It was the most calm she had felt in a while.
“Good morning, sleepyhead.”
She craned her neck to the sound of the voice and found herself staring at Sarah, “what happened?”
“Oh, it’s so good to hear your voice,” she leaned over the bed and hugged her tightly, “you’ve given everybody such a scare.”
Her joints felt stiff. In fact, everything felt stiff down to her skin. “I need some moisturizer.”
“Ok, I can arrange that.”
“Why do I feel like something bad happened?” Emma asked, slowly looking around the entire room. The hospital room essentially looked like a greenhouse; that’s how stock full it was of flowers and plants, and roses. She looked down at her arms, which were still hooked to IV drips. “Fuck. Shit went down, didn’t it?”
“I guess you can say that.”
She groaned lightly “Did I survive?”
“Just barely.”
“Shit.”
“You broke your arm, though,” Sarah said, and Emma looked down to see that her right arm was wrapped in a cast. “It’s been healing for a while, though. So you should be able to use it soon.”
“How long?” Emma swallowed spit in an attempt to moisten her dry throat, “how long have I been in here?” The assortment of gifts around the room looked like they had been piling up for a while…
“Just a little over two months.”
“Shit,” Emma sighed, “Fuck. That’s bad.”
Sarah laughed at her reaction, “I know.”
“So is it like, spring now?”
“Yeah, it’s April. The snow is almost gone.”
Emma found herself giggling, and the giggle slowly turned into a laugh. She didn’t know why she was laughing, but she found that whatever emotion was tightly wrapped up in her chest was suddenly unraveling like a spring, snapping undone like a whiplash. It might have been exhaustion, or relief, panic, or just pure unadulterated emotion at having survived whatever it was that she’d survived, but the laugh slowly turned to a sob and she found tears strolling down her cheeks.
“I’m such a mess,” Emma said in between tears, her words barely intelligible. “I’m sorry for being such a mess of a friend. Only I would find a way to get a serial stalker kidnap me and try to murder me.”
“Oh Emma,” Sarah scooted into the bed with her and pulled her into a hug, “all of our lives are a mess. Some are just better at hiding it than others. Stop being so hard on yourself.”
x.x
It took a few hours, but as time passed, the more Emma began to feel like herself. Sarah filled her in on everything that had happened, how Hunter had put two and two together to realise that you were missing and that you hadn’t skipped town as the note had implied you would. She told Emma how she’d gone up to the lighthouse with a pair of binoculars that she’d found in the house, and that was how she’d spotted Emma a few kilometers away, running naked through the woods with nothing but what looked like a red cape wrapped around her shoulders.
And she told Emma how the search and rescue party had immediately beelined to get her, and how three people – one of which was Hunter – had jumped into the ocean after her to save her.
“I don’t remember any of it,” Emma said to Sarah after she was done. She was in the hospital room but was sitting up now. The doctor had cleared her for light liquids (anything more would be too hard on her stomach) and she was sipping on chicken broth. Sarah had stayed with her for the past few hours, helping her with basic tasks since her body was so stiff from having been on bed rest for the past two months. She would need physio to get her limbs back in shape, a nutritionist to help her ease back into eating solid foods, and constant check-ups with both a court-ordered psychologist to help her wade through the trauma of it all, and a doctor to help her with her arm. Despite all of that, she asked the question that was most pressing on her mind. “Has Hunter been around?”
Sarah rolled her eyes, “don’t even try to act coy with me.”
“What?” Emma blinked innocently, “how am I acting coy?”
“Has Hunter been around?” Sarah mimicked, “he’s been here every day checking up on your injured ass. I have never seen someone so in love with someone else.”
The words sounded strange to her ears, and almost filled her with panic. “He’s not in love with me.”
“He jumped into the Labrador Sea to save you.”
“He’s a cop. He would’ve done that for anyone. He’s sworn to protect, remember?”
“Ugh!” Sarah looked like she wanted to shake Emma, and probably would have if she wasn’t already in such a sensitive state. “Why are you being so thick-headed? I can see when someone truly cares about someone, and when someone is doing their job. He looked like he was ready to kill. That’s not just a man doing his job.”
“You don’t know Hunter the way I do,” Emma didn’t want to talk more on the subject, “if he cared, he’d be here.”
Sarah didn’t have a response to that. Hunter had left after Emma had awoken and hadn’t returned since. “Men are strange. Men in their thirties are stranger. Don’t read into it.”
Emma took a long sip of her broth. “I think you are reading into it. If he cared, he would be here. It’s as simple as that.”
She didn’t know why she felt upset. It was mixed in with a slew of everything else she was feeling right now: exhausted, vulnerable, shaken, weak, scared.
“Where are they?” she finally acknowledged the elephant in the room. She hadn’t wanted to think about it. It was like opening a pandoras box. “Jackson and Clayton.”
Sarah sighed and sat down on her bed, “They’re in custody. I’ve already given my statement to the police and charges have been pressed against them. You’re going to need to tell them everything that happened obviously. They’re pleading not guilty, which is ridiculous of course, so it looks like it’ll go to trial. It’s everywhere on the news. Dirty cop, and backstabbing friend. One murder and one attempted murder in a remote village in Canada. It makes for perfect headlines.”
The thought of it made her nauseous and she closed her eyes to stop the images from flashing before her eyes. She had felt nothing when they’d thrown her off the cliff – she’d been paralyzed by fear. People always said your life flashed before your eyes, or that you realized some universal truth moments before your death. She had seen, felt, and heard nothing. The only thing she remembered was the chill of the wind slicing through her skin before darkness engulfed her. The only recollection she had of the past two months were the strange dreams that she had waded throughout. They too, were beginning to slip away from her memory like water from open fingers.
“We should leave this place, Em.” Sarah said after a long silence. “There are too many bad memories here.”
Emma didn’t say anything in response. She simply closed her eyes and tried to drown out the memories of her screams chortling through the air as she fell towards the water.
x.x
She stayed in the hospital for four days longer, even though she was beginning to feel fine after the second day. Apparently, there was a lot of hoopla about making sure she was reasonably mobile after her coma, before they were legally allowed to let her go. The swarm of visitors she received was overwhelming. Nick from the bar, Kat, police officers, random townsmen, and Sarah who came every day. She felt silly for ever feeling lonely. There was a swarm of people who cared about her for some reason.
Kat cried at the sight of Emma, pleading that Emma believe her when she said she had no idea Clayton was behind any of this, or that Jackson was the one orchestrating everything from behind the scenes. Everyone said the same thing when they came in the room, that they had no idea, that they were sorry – that they would have stopped it had they known.
People appeared ashamed, embarrassed – as if they were somehow culpable by not welcoming her when she’d first arrived. It was as if the town had been slapped with a wakeup call, and those who had turned their back on her were liable in some way for what happened.
Emma said to Kat what she said to everyone: that there was no way she could have known, and it was all over now. That’s what mattered.
She gave her statement to the police on day three. It was an arduous, lengthy and painful process. They thankfully sent Officer Diane, so it was easier relaying the sexual assault since she didn’t have to say it to a man. Regardless, reliving the 48 hours were painful, and she found herself crying and shaking uncontrollably at unexpected times.
By day four, she was finally discharged from the hospital and she left feeling relieved, and upset.
He hadn’t shown up. Hadn’t even called. Nobody had mentioned his name, and even Sarah had stopped pressing her about it eventually. She tried to refocus her energy on more immediate matters such as physiotherapy, and eating normally again.
The degree of how long she’d been under settled in the moment she actually stepped outside the hospital doors. Sarah hadn’t been lying when she said the snow was gone. Well, most of it was gone. There were still patches of hard ice covering various parts of the ground, but the frail tips of early spring grass were beginning to push through the fertile dirt. The biting cold was gone, replaced by an earthy wind which felt wet and warm at the same time. Harbordale had transformed completely. To Emma, it felt like it had transformed overnight. There was actually sun peeking out from behind the clouds, and the glow warmed the trees and roads around her. It felt like a different place entirely.
Sarah pushed her wheelchair to her jeep, which had been parked in the lot outside of the hospital. “Let’s go home and put this shit behind us.”
“Amen,” she breathed out, using Sarah’s help to get into the passenger side. The last time she had been in this car was the night she had driven into Harbordale. It felt like a century had passed since then. “Time to go home.”
Emma stared out of the window dully as Sarah started the car. Why did it feel like she had no idea where home was?