Her dad left the day after her mom went home. He wanted to stay, but was forced to fly back only a few days after Emma woke up. The band was three weeks behind schedule, and their label was pressuring them to get their latest album recorded. I promised to keep him informed on how Emma was doing.
Her dad had called the school and informed them of the situation before he flew back to California. She was pulled from all of her classes for the semester, and I went to her dorm room to pack the rest of her things. Only a few things were left there since she’d slowly started bringing her stuff to my house before everything had gone to hell. I packed what was left and brought all of it back to my house. I hoped that having the rest of her stuff with her would help her feel safer once she was back home.
We spent another week in the hospital before Emma was released with strict orders to rest. The doctor gave me a list of psychiatrists in case she needed to talk to someone about what had happened. She’d refused to speak with any of the doctors or nurses about what she’d gone through while she was with Ally.
The day I took her home, Andy helped me get her into my car, and he followed us back to my house. Emma was still sore and extremely weak after three weeks in a hospital bed. We had to help her inside and sit her on the couch. The doctor had prescribed her painkillers to help while she healed.
I had Andy stop by my house to change the locks the day before Emma came home. I didn’t want to take a chance that Ally would come back to hurt Emma again. We would never have closure until Ally’s body was found, and there was no certainty that it would be. I hated that Emma would always be looking over her shoulder. I knew deep down that Ally was gone, but it would be a long time before I stopped looking for her everywhere. I refused to let her or anyone else hurt Emma ever again.
Andy or I stayed with Emma constantly the first few days. Andy was sleeping in Ally’s old room, so he could help out. He would leave for work, but that was it. The guilt that tortured me was also eating him alive. We both felt responsible for what had happened.
Emma and I had never had a chance to talk about the events of that night while she had been in the hospital. Someone had always been around. After she came home, it seemed like Andy would appear anytime I tried to talk to her about it.
She was quiet for the first few days after she had been released from the hospital. She would spend hours on the couch, staring at the wall. I knew she needed to talk about what had happened, but I wasn’t sure how to get her to open up.
I slept on the couch while she stayed in my bed. I missed sleeping beside her, but I was afraid that she didn’t want me there. I didn’t want to push her when she was so fragile. I wouldn’t be the one to break her.
She had nightmares almost every night. She would wake up screaming, and I’d rush to her side. I could never get her to talk about them. Instead, I’d hold her as she cried.
Weeks passed by in slow motion as Emma’s body slowly healed. Once she was fully healed, Andy moved back into his apartment. I wasn’t sure if he had done it to give us space or for the simple fact that he couldn’t stand to look at her blank face anymore. She only spoke when we would ask her a question. The rest of the time, she was silent.
I finally reached my breaking point one afternoon when I came home to see her sitting in the exact same spot she’d been in when I left hours before. She hadn’t moved a muscle. I couldn’t take this any longer. Either she opened up to me, or I would call her dad. Maybe he could get her to talk or at least set her up with a therapist. She needed to talk to someone even if it wasn’t me. She couldn’t keep living inside of herself.
I slammed my books down on the bedside table harder than I’d meant to. She jumped and looked up at me. I didn’t think she’d even noticed that I’d come home until then.
“Emma, this has to stop.” I sat down next to her on the bed.
“What?”
“You can’t keep living like this. It isn’t working for either of us.”
“You’re right,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry that I came here. I never meant to bring you into this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You want me to leave. I understand why.”
“Emma, I don’t want you to leave. I want you to talk to me.”
“I don’t understand. You’ve been sleeping on the couch, and you barely talk to me.”
“I’m on the couch because I thought it was what you wanted. I thought you needed space. And I’ve tried to talk to you, but it’s kind of hard when you only give me one-word answers. You’ve been living in your own head for weeks, and I have no idea what you’re thinking. You have to help me understand what’s going on in there. I want to help you in any way I can.”
“I don’t want to lose you, but I feel like you’re slipping away, and there’s nothing I can do to change that,” she said.
“I’m not going anywhere unless you want me to. I’ve been trying to give you space, so you can figure things out.”
“I’m so scared of everything. I keep reliving everything that she did to me,” she said as tears filled her eyes.
“She’s gone, Emma. She can’t hurt you anymore.”
“Part of me knows that, but the other part wants to hide under the bed. I keep waiting for her to show up again.”
“You’re safe. She will never touch you again.”
“I kept picturing you every time she would hurt me, you know. I willed myself to be strong enough to overcome it, so I could see you again.” She took a deep breath. “I tried to fight back when she showed up here. I wasn’t strong enough though. She won without even trying. Then, I tried to get away at the house where she was keeping me. I pushed her down a flight of stairs, Jesse. What kind of person does that make me to do something like that to another human being?”
“You were trying to protect yourself. No one thinks badly of you for it.”
I hated how much this was hurting her. Anyone else in her position would have done the exact same thing. Emma was one of the few people in this world who would feel guilt from causing pain to her would-be killer.
“She made me pay for that. That’s why she cut me. She said she wanted to hurt me because I’d hurt her. The pain was horrible, Jesse. I wanted to die when she sliced through my skin.”
I could barely stand to sit here and listen to her talk about what Ally had done, but I knew I had to. Emma had to talk to someone. She had to get it all out. That didn’t make it any less painful for me though.
“I’ve never felt anything like that. She did it slowly, so I felt every centimeter.”
“I’m so sorry that you had to go through that, Emma,” I choked out.
“It’s not your fault.”
“But it is. If it weren’t for me, you never would have had to go through that. I’m so sorry.”
“None of us realized just how sick she was. She loved you so much that it drove her crazy—literally. She kept telling me that once I was gone, you’d finally let me go and realize that you loved her back. She thought that you loved her but didn’t know it. She blamed me for the fact that you refused to love her back.”
“Maybe if I hadn’t been so cruel to her, then she would have reacted differently.”
Emma shook her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think there was anything you or I could have done to help her. She was too far gone, lost in her own mind. It didn’t matter what I told her. She refused to listen. Whatever you said to her that night on the phone saved my life. She’d planned to keep me for a while, but then she said she didn’t have time for all the stuff she had planned because she had to meet with you. If you hadn’t talked with her, she would have tortured me and killed me slowly.”