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It’s hard for her to get used to hearing sounds again. Inside the void everything had felt like it was covered over with a thick pane of glass; it blurred her vision, muffled her hearing, drowned out her terrified screams.
The moments of clarity were few and far between, but she thinks maybe she’d trade them all for a moment of actual quiet - because the room across the hall is never quiet.
She knows it’s where the man - the fiancé - lays, staring out the window. He doesn’t speak, but his friends, his family do enough to make up for it. She can almost picture his bright eyes and soft smile as he gazes over at them with adoration from beneath the crisp cotton covers of his hospital bed. When there’s not laughter during his waking hours, there’s snoring (and occasional muffled shouts) during his sleeping ones.
She’s never believed in karma, but the cold emptiness of her own room is hard to ignore.
It’d been Emily who’d come back for her. Begged and pleaded and forced. She’d tried to destroy them, and Emily had come back for her.
She’d popped her head into the room a handful of times but Debbie always pretended to be asleep. How was she supposed to face somebody whose life she’d help destroy so thoroughly? It hadn’t been the plan, she’d been used. It didn’t stop the guilt from consuming her. (Especially when she could hear the laughter.)
The flowers Emily left on her windowsill every three days felt a little like forgiveness. She hoped one day she’d be deserving of it.
She’d been walking six days to the bathroom and back before she got her first real visitor. Somebody who wasn’t just hospital staff forced to interact with her, or somebody inclined to out of a weird kind of obligation.
They’d spoken about her leaving soon, but really, she had nowhere to go to.
She could hear laughter and crashes and music from the room across the hall. Some kind of party, probably. She wished desperately she’d received an invitation, but squashed down the thought before it properly materialised. They belonged to a different world than her and she'd have to get used to that. (What would she even say to them?)
Despite the noise she’d somehow drifted off, before a nervous cough startled her awake. She’d jolted upright, staring straight into the face of a man she definitely didn’t know. He was wearing what looked like a soft blue sweater, forest green pants and a deer-in-headlights expression on his pale face.
Before she could say anything, he nervously stuttered out a “hello.”
She must’ve given him a quizzical look, because the man sighed, and bit his lip. “Do you mind if I sit down?” he asked gesturing to the unused chair she’d never even noticed.
She licked her perpetually-dry lips and nodded, trying to remember how words worked. He took a seat, his hands twisting in his lap as he peered at her nervously with eyes blinking in a manner that seemed almost mechanical.
“Who are you?” she finally managed after a moment of tense silence, and he laughed somewhat bitterly.
“I forgot, you wouldn’t know.” She scrunched up her face at that, before he added “it’s probably better that way.”
“I don’t understand,” she said softly, and part of him seemed to visibly tense (a thing a moment ago she wouldn’t have thought him capable of.)
He seemed to be considering his words very carefully. “My daughter came to visit the Wright boy.” He paused for a moment before adding “well. His daughter.”
Debbie had no idea what that was supposed to mean, and the man seemed to realise before continuing. “She said you’d had no visitors. She thought maybe you’d like one.” Every word he spoke felt deliberate and the ones he chose seemed to drop out of his mouth with a strange lack of precision. Like there was some sort of block on his ability to say what he wanted to without the utmost concentration.
She considered him again before he sighed. “I thought maybe you’d like one too.”
“Who are you?” was all she could manage again, and he smiled softly at her.
“I don’t really know anymore.”
“What can I call you,” she tried instead, and he seemed suddenly taken aback.
“You can.” She could practically see him thinking before he seemingly made a decision. “You can call me Jensen.”
It was a strange friendship. Not the strangest she’d ever had by any means, but strange by the ease with which it formed.
Jensen would visit her every two or so days, bringing stories of King Falls and his friends and his children - nieces? Cousins? She wasn’t sure really, but they sounded like good kids. They’d drawn her pictures and sent her boxes of their favourite candy - but they’d never come to see her themselves. Which was probably fine by her at that point; more than a few words at a time were hard for her still, and she didn’t know how she’d manage around potentially excitable pre-teens.
Debbie hadn’t spent much time in actual King Falls really, but she loved hearing the stories that Jensen would tell her about the place. About the people. About the mysteries and the diners and the community. It was a few weeks before she was taken aback by the realisation that he wasn’t universally beloved by everyone in town.
“Are you not from here?” She’d reluctantly queried, and his sullen answer of “It’s complicated” left her with more questions she couldn’t make herself ask.
It was maybe then that she realised why he kept coming back. Realised that the nurses and doctors looked at Jensen with the same sour expression as when they looked at her. She thoughts long and hard about how to breach the subject with him, but it wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it might be.
“You’re like me,” she’ finally said quietly one afternoon as they devoured a tub of strawberry yoghurt between them. “You’re not from here, and they don’t like outsiders.”
He’d laughed quietly at that, a smile softening his gentle features and reassured her once again that it was more complicated than that. “When you do bad things, even when those things are outside of your control, people aren’t always quite so ready to forgive.”
That, Debbie definitely could understand.
“I don’t know what you did,” she’d said to him as he was leaving, “but you’re more than the mistakes you’ve made.” Her eyes travelled to the light reflected off the delicate flowers on her windowsill and she thought of Emily and the laughter across the hall and the small girl who hadn't known anything about her beyond her darkness but had believed she was still worthy of visitors and kindness. "If it matters, I don't see monster when I look at you," she said almost inaudibly, "and in time maybe they won't either."
She was startled at the force with which Jensen launched himself over the chair and pulled her into a practically bone-crushing hug. His body shook with quiet sobs as he whispered his thanks into her tangled mess of unwashed hair.
There were things both of them had done out of their control. Debbie and Jensen could apparently both acknowledge that. But there were things they could control now. Kindness, friendship. Unspoken empathy and understanding. If given the chance, Debbie would probably choose to take back all the things she’d been forced to do at the hands of somebody else, somebody cruel and uncaring. But if taking it all back meant being alone, meant not having Jensen in her life, as her friend? As the person holding her as they both pretended not to weep together?
She probably wouldn’t trade that for all the quiet in the world.