Comatose

My mom has always been sick, for as long as I can remember. She used to be in and out of hospitals a lot, for various reasons: shingles, fibromyalgia, she was even in a clinic somewhere in southern Boston for a couple months because of her anorexia. She was always in pain, always suffering, and she blamed me and my younger brother for it. Even when somebody forgot to brush their teeth, she would snap, calling us disrespectful little shits and reminding us that we were the cause of her constant suffering. Then, she would be normal again in an instant, dancing and sweeping the kitchen floor. I liked it when she was like that.

In June of 2014, I got a text from my dad: I’m picking you up now. Meet me outside, it’s important.

I was 14 then, only a freshman. It was 2:30, and I was staying after school to work on a project for my drawing class. The class wasn’t really important to me, however, the attractive Teacher’s Assistant definitely was.

“Dad, you’re gonna blow it for me. Pick me up at 3:30,” I replied.

That hour went by quickly.

Dad and I sat in the car, both waiting for the other to say something. The silence was deafening. Then, he said those five familiar words, the words I was hoping I would never have to hear again, “Your mother’s in the hospital.”

To this day, I’ve never seen my mother as peaceful as she did on that hospital bed, tubes appearing to sprout from her wrists and nostrils. For a while, the only sound that filled the room was her life support. The thought of her life being in the hands of some machinery and some potentially unreliable doctors made my stomach turn over. Eventually, the steady beeping of her life support was joined by the soft, jagged sobbing of Dad. I’ve never seen him cry before.

“Dad?” I said softly.

“Yeah, buddy?”

“Do you love Mom?”

“I..” He seemed like he was unsure about what to say. “Of course I do. We’ve been

married for 21 years, why wouldn’t I love her?”

“Well,” I said, “why didn’t you ever show it?”

I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling fan. My short attention span had completely disappeared. Dad said that Mom’s new medicine didn’t react well to her usual medicine, putting her into a comatose state. Nobody knew when she’d be out of it, or if she would wake up at all. The house was quiet for more than thirty minutes at a time, and I grew to despise the silence. The halls of the house no longer echoed with her naturally loud voice. I could no longer hear the vibration of her blaring Willie Nelson upstairs. My ears began to ring from the incessant silence.

The ringing ceased when somebody knocked on my bedroom door. It was my older sister, Cassandra.

“Hey bud, you doing okay?” she asked. I said nothing.

“Well, we have to talk. You know why Mom is in the hospital, right?”

“Bad medicine reaction.” I replied, with a tone of voice more monotone than usual.

“You’re not a child anymore, Hunter. You need to know what’s really going on.” She

looked at me with her sad, brown eyes.

“What?”

“Dad found Mom unconscious in her car, parked near the bank on Charlestown Road at 3 in the morning. Her medicine didn’t react badly, Hunter, she overdosed.”

She woke up about three days later. However, she was still very drowsy from the anesthesia, so she was kind of out of control. Dad said this is how Mom was whenever she hadn’t had her medication for a few days. I found that hard to believe, considering she had to have her own personal police officer outside of her hospital room in case she threw a fit.

My younger brother, Nason, texted her. He told her how much we missed her, asking her if we could visit her any time soon.

She replied with: Fuck off, both of you killed me.

We did eventually visit her, but she was still a bit out of it. She screamed at the police officer, calling him words like “pussy” and “bitch”. I hated seeing her like this, because I knew this wasn’t Mom. She would never hit anybody or blatantly disrespect strangers, much less a police officer. This was some kind of husk, an empty shell of her that some hellish beast took residence in. I needed answers, and I obviously wasn’t going to get them from her at this point. I asked Dad if I could go home.

Eventually, Mom came home. She was on our porch, smoking a cigarette, playing Words With Friends on her phone as if nothing had happened. Dad had driven me home from staying after school. At first, I thought my eyes were deceiving me. I slowly ascended the stairs, not once breaking eye contact with her.

“Hi, baby.” she said, weakly. All I could do was stare at her, forcing myself to mask every trace of emotion. Her smile soon faded. I wanted to scream, “How could you do this to us? To me? You were going to fucking leave me alone to fend for myself! Are you fucking mental?”

Instead, with tears beginning to form in my eyes, I opened the door to the house and quickly walked to my bedroom. I heard her attempt to follow, but she was too weak to keep up. I lay down once again on my back and stared at the ceiling fan.

I never did get my answers. Mom insisted that she would never attempt taking her own life, but why would my family lie to me about that? Things became relatively normal soon after she returned, but something changed inside all of us. We became more bitter towards each other, as if we were only tolerating each other’s presence. Dad always asked, “How was school, buddy?” but I swore he only said it to mask something else. I’d always answer with, “Fine, I guess. How was work?” and we’d continue our facade until one of us cut it off. He never cared about my day, and I never cared about his. It was a pointless act. The illusion of a functional family.

After two years, I still catch myself staring at the ceiling fan.