Three Gray Dots Read online

  Three Gray Dots

  K.L. Randis

  To my daughters.

  You have one heart and many choices to make.

  Let your heart guide you, but your choices define you.

  You are both my greatest loves.

  Copyright © 2019 K.L. Randis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  P.O. Box 938

  Kresgeville PA 18333

  klrandis.com

  Cover Design: Murphy Rae

  Due to graphic scenes and mature content,

  this book is recommended for readers 18+.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, organizations, and incidents are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author

  .

  Table Of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen (JACKSON)

  Chapter Twenty (JACKSON)

  Chapter Twenty-One (JACKSON)

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Special Thanks

  Contact K.L. Randis

  Other Books By K.L. Randis

  Spilled Milk

  PROLOGUE

  The second time I witnessed Jackson attempt to kill himself, he was standing at the ocean’s edge with a .22 in his right hand.

  The September breeze whipping off the clashing waters, mixed with the darkened skies as the sun began to set, told me that we would be alone for a while. I squinted down the coastline anyway, hoping someone would be flying a kite or walking a dog and would witness what was about to happen.

  There was no one.

  A softer, seaweed-colored haze surrounded his blank pupils. They were a lot like his personality, a mixture of steel and cotton that didn’t know how to coexist together.

  At that moment the structural frame that kept him together was unfolding.

  Jackson’s shoulders were hunched as if he was about to get sick—adrenaline stemming from my showing up to the beach moments before he off’ed himself seemed to shake his confidence in what he had been planning to do.

  “You told me this would get easier,” he whispered, his eyes locked with mine. He turned his head toward the water, a flicker of air pushing dark strands of hair across his forehead. For a moment I considered grabbing the gun and heaving it as far as I could into the depths of the ocean. I knew better. He would find another way, any way, to end the pounding in his head. He was barely thirty but had a chiseled physique and a fast mile. He’d be head first into the ocean within seconds to find the gun at that point. If he didn’t find it, he would simply choose not come up for air.

  Right then, I was his air.

  “I did say that,” I confessed. “This isn’t you.” I nodded toward the gun. “I know you.”

  “You don’t know anything!”

  I flinched as angst forced his trembling hands to rest on the top of his head, the .22 pointed inadvertently in my direction.

  In response, I lowered myself to the chilled sand. Patting a spot beside me, I lured him to do the same. His body language told me he would never let me in that easy, but if I could get sand into his hands, I could distract him enough from the agony his face was telling me he felt.

  “Do you know what today is?” he asked, wiping his nose on his sleeve and coughing to cover up the pitch in his voice.

  “I do.”

  “I don’t know who I am anymore,” he muttered, more to himself. The wind threatened to drown out anything else he said, so I patted the spot next to me with one hand while letting sand drift through my fingers like an hourglass in the other. He watched the crystallized strands flow to the ground, sighing deeply.

  That’s it, come back to me now.

  One knee bent behind him and the next one followed, bringing the gun to rest on his right thigh. Shoulders still hunched, he refused to look at me.

  I mistakenly reached out to touch his left thigh and he flinched, looking up and then back down at my hand.

  I turned my palm toward him. “Feel the sand with me,” I suggested. I was unsure if he could hear the thudding in my chest over the wind.

  He stared at me for a moment, then back down at my open hand. Nodding, he rubbed his beard before inching his fingers toward mine.

  When our hands interlocked, I put pressure around his fingers and started to bury our hands beneath the cold surface of the sand like a squirrel. Once our hands were mostly covered, we took turns squeezing the sand between each other’s fingers in a slow and rhythmic motion.

  “You know why I’m doing this?” I asked, knowing that he wouldn’t look at me when he answered.

  “To bring me back,” he replied.

  “Yes.” I shook my head and we sat in silence a few minutes longer, watching the waves stealthily inch closer.

  “Hey, why are you crying?” Jackson’s voice alerted me to the trickle of tears that were being supplied by the adrenaline.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I don’t know either,” I confessed.

  “Huh?”

  “You said earlier that you don’t know who you are anymore.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t either,” I whispered.

  With our hands interlocked beneath the sand, he had no choice but to let the gun slide down his thigh and fall in-between us so that he could cup my chin in his hand. “We’ve been here before, haven’t we?” he asked.

  The burn from trying to hold back tears was evident on my face, I was sure. “Yes, Jackson. We’ve been here before.”

  “So what happened? Why are we here again? What did we do wrong this time so that we’re right back to where we started?”

  “It’s not anyone’s fault. We didn’t do anything wrong, we just…”

  “We just what?” he asked, his breath lingering on my lips.

  I closed my eyes, trying to fight the urge to do what I knew I shouldn’t do. “We can’t do this.”

  “We can,” he coaxed.

  His leaned on his free hand so that our noses were almost touching. The sun had disappeared long ago and the only way we could make out the shapes of each other was courtesy of the stars peeking out from above. “We can do this, we can fix it.”

  “I don’t know if we can…” Shifting my weight, I used my shoulder to gently push against his chest so I could breathe, so I could give myself the space I needed to think clearly.

  “Pippa, I love you.”

  My knee-jerk response to him telling me he loved me for the first time flew out of my mouth. “There’s no way you can.”

  “You have no idea, Pip. I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you, you have to know that.”

  “You can’t love me,” I demanded.

  “Why not?” he asked, the desperation in his voice mimicking my own.

  “Because you have no idea who I really am,” I said. I clos
ed my eyes, not knowing if what I was about to say was going to help or hurt the situation. “I’ve been lying to you this whole time.”

  Chapter One

  “What is that distressing noise coming from room two-thirty-three?” I asked, craning my neck around the nurse’s station and down the hallway of Palmetto Hospital’s mental health unit.

  “New guy,” Lisa replied, not looking up from her phone as she scrolled through Facebook. “Well, not new. He’s spent twenty-four hours in the emergency room already but they transferred him to our lovely section of housing accommodations. Apparently he had a rough night.”

  “He didn’t have a rough night,” Moe chimed in. “He gave Victoria a rough night. He punched her right in the face when she went in around two a.m. to take his vitals.”

  “Noooooo,” I replied. “Is that why she’s not here today? I didn’t think she was the kind of intern to call it quits after day four but if she had a night like that…”

  “He’s a menace,” Lisa said. “Stay away unless you absolutely need to go in there.”

  “Speaking of that,” Moe said, “who’s going in next? They removed his restraints early this morning but I don’t know…”

  Eyes still glued to her phone Lisa smiled. “I’ll rock-paper-scissors you for it.”

  I rolled my eyes and made my way down the hall to start rounds as Moe pushed his chair across the floor to get closer to Lisa. As I flipped through my charts I could hear them slapping their fists together behind me, with Moe ultimately objecting. “Hey, best two out of three, Lisa. You cheated!”

  “I got it guys, don’t want you to work too hard,” I called over my shoulder.

  “Might want to put some scrubs on first,” Moe teased.

  “Might want to take a long walk off a short pier,” I replied.

  “He’s not your patient!” Lisa called after me.

  “I don’t see you jumping up to check on him,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “It’ll take me two minutes. You can thank me by buying me lunch later.”

  I exhaled slowly, regretting the second cup of coffee I had finished in the elevator moments before my shift started. My mission to make it to work with enough time to eat a decent meal from the cafeteria almost never happened, so a cup or three of coffee usually fueled me enough until I could sneak away for a salad or muffin at lunch time.

  Moe and Lisa usually managed to push through their mornings on energy drinks and clementines, so at least they would speak to their first patients smelling like orange juice instead of a stale coffee house.

  I managed to not eat anything that morning, and I was also still in my street clothes since a forgotten pen in one of my pockets anointed the only clean scrubs I had managed to transfer into my dryer after a grueling fifteen hour shift the day before. Lisa was kind enough to give me her locker combo so I could steal a pair of her scrubs for my shift, but I was late as it was and needed to at least make an appearance to one patient on the floor before I changed. The life of a psychiatric nurse was an immersive one with exiguous pauses.

  The halls of Palmetto’s mental health unit were often barren, even though we were a mere twenty-nine minute drive to the Marine Corps base Camp Lejeune. We were one of three hospitals in the area that had a dedicated inpatient facility for psychiatric holds that were funneled through the emergency room. We specialized in treating veterans, given our proximity to the Marine base. Patients were categorized—unofficially, and by the nurses who worked the unit—into one of three designated groups: Desperates, Fireworks, or Sads.

  We’d never admit it to our Charge Nurse, but before each shift we’d secretly update each other on the status of the newbies who had come in or on the ones being released. It made working the floor slightly more predictable, although the word ‘predictable’ was a unicorn word in our unit.

  Desperates were comprised of impulsive individuals who would hit rock bottom without warning. They were pill-swallowers, self-mutilators, and suicide-note-writers. They’d usually show up accompanied by a loved one, only to be discharged several hours to two days later and with a newfound appreciation for life outside of hospital food and one-on-one deep breathing lessons. Most times they were the ones that would never return. The ones that did ultimately show up again would wait until tensions built up so powerfully that no breathing techniques would slow their minds.

  Fireworks were a hit-or-miss bunch that either threw feces at us when we entered their rooms or blankly stared at the aging ceiling tiles for weeks. Carl was the first patient I had who fooled me into thinking I was any good at my job. When he was admitted he had been caught with his pants down at the grocery store, a full sized trout placed between his legs in the seafood aisle. Screaming to ‘Free Willy’ he ran, shrieking obscenities until the freshly waxed floor in aisle nine curtailed his fun by sending him slip-and-slide style into an end cap of Progresso soups.

  Two days after he woke up, appearing lucid enough, he told me he had not remembered the grocery store incident and that he probably forgot to take his medication. After several sessions together, only twenty-four hours before I intended to hand in paperwork to my supervisor for his release, he managed to steal an extra pair of scrubs and make his way into another patient’s room. Him and another Firework were happily cutting long incisions up their thighs, convincing each other that they were surgeons, and drawing pictographs of an imaginary patient’s tumor on the walls with their own blood.

  “Oh, Carl,” I muttered under my breath, stopping in front of room two-thirty-three. Sunlight flooded the hall from the one lone window at the end as I turned the chart over in my hand. I dragged my finger down the center as I read, absorbing the vital information it handed over on who was behind the door: name, admission date and reason, some history. Raising an eyebrow I realized we were the same age, and I exhaled slowly, noticing the light scent of coffee still lingering. “Please don’t punch me in the face,” I said, pushing the door open.

  My eyes couldn’t adjust to the darkness, and it took me a moment to realize the patient had hung bed sheets on the windows to block out any additional light that came through. Unsure if anyone had seen me enter, I gently cleared my throat to announce my arrival.

  “Anyone awake in here?” I asked, keeping my voice barely above a whisper.

  Nothing.

  I took three steps toward the bed, light from the hallway barely illuminating the brand new, white sneakers I purchased after a projectile vomit episode—courtesy of a Desperate—from a few days earlier. “I’m here to visit, is that okay?”

  The bed sheets rustled and I remained where I was until I had permission to move any closer. Sometimes giving the patient some control, even a small amount, was all it took to break down a barrier and gain trust.

  “Is she okay?” said a voice.

  “Ohhh…” I said, covering my mouth before I finished reacting. I had never heard words spoken with such remorse in my life. They were laden with the kind of gruff undertone that suggested someone had been crying. The word ‘okay’ was barely dragged from the depths of his throat, pitching and breaking at just the right moment that made hairs on the back of my neck stand on edge.

  A heap of sheets slowly rose from the bed into an upright position, shape-shifting into the outline of a man. “The nurse I punched in the face this morning, is she okay?”

  I inched closer to the bed, searching my memory for the update on Victoria that Lisa had given me. “Yeah,” I said. “I think she’s okay.”

  He cleared his throat, as if to offer an explanation, but remained silent.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  I watched a hand rise from the sheets, coming to rest on his face. Cradling his forehead in his palm, knees bent and chest forward, the balled-up version of the man I thought was going to punch me initially was no longer a worry. I could tell he was looking in my direction from the weak swallows of light coming from the ajar door behind me.

  “You know what I love about the dark?” he asked. The steadf
ast nature of his voice came out as a lullaby of words, strung together with so much pain that I hurt for him.

  I swallowed in response, giving him the silence he needed to continue.

  “It’s forgiving,” he said. “The dark consumes everything. If you can’t see anything, it forces you to feel everything. It gives you a reason to stop and really feel the things you would otherwise shut out.”

  “What are you feeling right now?” I asked, pointing to the sheets hanging from the window. I wanted to match the softness of his voice when I spoke. It was alluring, and the contradiction of who I thought he was when I had first entered the room versus the shell of a man I saw in front of me made my head woozy.

  “Everything,” he replied finally. “I don’t want to feel anything.”

  I closed my eyes at his response, thankful for the dim surroundings that hid my expression. “Seems to me you feel quite a bit,” I responded. “At least that’s how it looks from where I’m standing.”

  “Move closer.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s not true. If you come closer you’ll see.”

  The same hairs from before stood up on the back of my neck and I tried to assess whether or not he was threatening me or trying to prove a point.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he promised. “Just come closer so you can see for yourself.”

  Nodding, my sneakers shuffled over the floor toward the bed with reservation. When I was within an arm’s distance from him, he patted the bed next to him.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “Please? Please sit.”

  Sighing, I glanced over my shoulder at the ajar door as I lowered myself onto the bed. Crossing my hands in my lap, I forced a smile. “I don’t think—”

  My hands covered my mouth to stifle my scream as his right hand sprung from the bed. Convinced I was about to be hit I kept my eyes closed, but the crack never came.

  “Open your eyes,” he demanded.

  Adrenaline forced me to do as I was told, so I half-squinted before opening my eyes. Sunlight flooded the room, and I blushed when I realized his arm had outstretched to pull the sheets off of the window to let light in.