Shrink

21

Eddie Hess ruined my life, but somehow it never dawned on me how badly until I was swept away in the aftermath.
We'd met in high school initially, but really started dating freshman year of university, him being in a different sort of league at the time. All I could think when I met him, was damn, Eddie was nothing if not convincing. He managed to cajole me into going to the bonfire at a farmer's field one night, where everyone got too drunk to run from the cops. Of course, we managed to drive away, him staying sober to be able to drive me home.
The rest came so easily, and meanwhile, everyone told me we were going too fast, but by the seventh month of our relationship, it was only logical we moved in together. Eddie was perfectly good and pretty and polite.
He liked to go climbing a lot with his friends, doing parcours throughout our very tall city surrounded by mountains. My whole life lay in that city.
It was a warm summer afternoon when I realized in my flurry during my exams, I had missed my period by two weeks. I went to buy a test, and lo and behold, I was pregnant. I lost my mind. I deliberated on getting an abortion, as neither Eddie nor I could afford a baby, barely skating by as we were. I sat on Mount Royal that whole day in the sun, thinking, when I realized Eddie was the perfect guy, and we loved each other. We would get through this together. I came home before dark, and decided to tell him over supper the next day.
I fell into bed with him that night, giddy with nervous energy. He had grown out his red hair and beard, and was beginning to look more and more daddish. Must have been the mommy hormones.
As I was shopping for wine the next day, holding a red in one hand and a white in the other, deciding I'd tell him I had to quit drinking for nine months, I got the call of my life.
Correction, the call of the end of my life.
Eddie was in the hospital. He was undergoing emergency surgery to relieve the pressure on his brain. He'd fallen, his friend Tim said. A floor in an old building they liked to climb had collapsed.
The wine crashed as I took off for the hospital. I got there in time to see them wheeling him broken into another room. His red hair was matted with blood, his green eyes shut and bruised bulbous. His whole face was nearly unrecognizable. His leg was in a cast, and his crushed arm was in a sling.
He woke up days later, in a foreign place, surrounded by people he loved.
He wanted to go home, so I took him home. He didn't want his meds, so I didn't force him to take them.
When he got his casts off, the first thing he did was leave the house and come back at dusk. I didn't ask where he went. I finally told him about the baby during my second trimester, when it was unavoidable.
He blinked, and walked out.
The doctors said he'd suffered some brain damage that might change him.
At that point, I started to tell everyone that he was a druggie in jail, which wasn't far from the truth, but it was just easier than saying my traumatized baby-daddy left me.
All that mattered was that my Eddie was gone. And so was his Pap.

~A/N~
i'm so sorry about my recent hiatus, been going through some unexpected not great stuff.
much love,
e