The Redemption of Callie & Kayden

stomach is empty, I fall back on my heels and sit down in the wet dirt.
    There’s no way Kayden could have done that to himself. But deep down in the center of my heart, I keep thinking about all the scars on his body and I can’t help but wonder: What if he did?
Kayden
    I open my eyes and the first thing I see is light. It burns my eyes and makes my surroundings distorted. I don’t know where I am.
What happened?
Then I hear the deep voices, clanking, chaos. There’s a machine beeping and it seems to match the beat of my heart as it hits my chest, but it sounds too slow and uneven. My body is cold—numb, like the inside of me.
    “Kayden, can you hear me?” I hear my mom’s voice but I can’t see her through the bright light.
    “Kayden Owens, open your eyes,” she repeats until her voice becomes a gnawing hum inside my head.
    I open and close my eyelids repeatedly and then roll my eyes back into my head. I blink again and the light turns into spots and eventually into faces of people I don’t know, each of their expressions filled with fear. I search through them, looking for only one person, but I don’t see her anywhere.
    I unhitch my jaw and force my lips to move. “Callie.”
    My mom appears above me. Her eyes are colder than I expected and her lips are pursed. “Do you have any idea what you put this family through? What is wrong with you? Don’t you value your life?”
    I glance at the doctors and nurses around my bed and realize it’s not fear I’m seeing, but pity and annoyance. “What…” My throat is dry like sand and I force my neck muscles to move as I swallow several times. “What happened?” I start to remember: blood, violence pain… wanting it to all end.
    My mom puts her hands next to my head and leans over me. “I thought we were over this problem. I thought you stopped.”
    I tip my head to the side and glance down at my arm. My wrist is bandaged up and my skin is white and mapped with blue veins. There’s an IV attached to the back of my hand and a clip on the end of my finger. I remember.
Everything
. I meet her eyes. “Where’s dad?”
    Her eyes narrow and her voice lowers as she leans in even closer. “Gone on a business trip.”
    I gape at her unfathomably. She’d never done anything about the violence when I was growing up, but I guess I was kind of hoping that maybe this would have pushed her to the end of her secrecy and her need to always defend him. “He’s on a business trip?” I say slowly.
    A man in a white coat with a pen in his pocket, glasses, and salt-and-pepper hair says something to my mom and then he exits the room carrying a clipboard. A nurse walks over to a beeping machine beside my bed and starts writing down stuff in my chart.
    My mother leans in closer, casting a shadow over me, and whispers in a low tone that conveys a lot of warning, “Your father’s not going to have any part of this. The doctors know you cut your own wrists and the town knows you beat up Caleb. You’re not in a good place right now and you’re going to be in a worse place if you try to bring your father into this.” She leans back a little and for the first time I realize how large her pupils are. There’s barely any color left except for a small ring around the edge. She looks possessed, by the devil maybe, or my father—but they’re kind of one and the same.
    “You’re going to be all right,” she says. “All the injuries missed anything major. You lost a lot of blood, but they gave you a blood transfusion.”
    I press my hands to the bed, trying to sit up, but my body is heavy and my limbs weak. “How long have I been out?”
    “You’ve been in and out for a couple of days now. But the doctors say that’s normal.” She starts tucking the blanket in around me, like I’m suddenly her child. “What they’re more worried about is why you cut yourself.”
    I could have yelled it—screamed to the world that it wasn’t all me. That it was my dad, that he and I had both done the damage. But as I glance around the room, I realize there’s no one here who really cares. I’m alone. I did cut myself. And for a second I kind of hoped it would be my end. That all the pain and hate and feelings of being worthless would
finally
, after nineteen years, be gone.
    She pats my leg. “All right, I’ll be back tomorrow.”
    I don’t say anything. I just roll over and seal my eyes and mouth and let myself go back into the comfort of the darkness I’d just woken