The Choice: Part 10

The Choice
Part 10

I look up at Jenn and wipe the tears from my cheek. She's been crying herself, and she looks at me expectantly.
“What happened after that?” she asks.
I sigh. “What happened is a string of disappointments and unanswered questions, to be honest. I haven't thought about any of this in years, but it still...it hurts so much.”
She speaks with more caution. “What happened?”
I took a deep breath.
“I got back to the hospital a couple hours later, and the nurses there said that visiting hours were over for anyone other than direct family. I wanted to express that I was related to her more than her parents were, but I held my tongue. I waited in the lobby for hours, falling asleep and waking up from nightmares I can only describe as...utter blackness. When I awoke, I felt a terrible surge in my chest, and I bolted upright. I ran to her room, and was stopped by the nurses outside. I asked them to let me see Caroline, but they said there was a problem. They told me to wait. One of them went back inside. He came back out several minutes later with a mask over his mouth.
“He pulled it down and he looked at me. “Are you related to her?” he asked.
“I said, “No, I'm her boyfriend.”
“He nodded and shook his head. “I'm sorry,” he said. “She's gone.”
“I just looked at him, rolling the words over in my mind. “Gone?” I asked. Because, I mean, it didn't make sense. The night before, she'd been in pain but she was okay. So, how did that make any sense?
“He took me by the arm and led me away from the room, and I shook him off. “I need to see her,” I said. “You're lying to me.”
“He said, “Sir, please. Until the family comes, I can't-”
“I shouted, “You have no idea how strong she is! You're lying to me, you have to be!”
“He looked at me and he looked at his partner. He said, “Alright.”
“He led me into her room, where a line of curtains surrounded her bed.
“And a pool of blood ran away from its wheels.
“He asked me if I could handle seeing her, and I said that I had to. He nodded, and opened the curtain a bit to let me next to her. He closed it behind me and said, “If you need anything, I'll be right here.”
“So, there she was. The only love of my life, cold and pale in a hospital bed. Her lips were already going white. Her skin had lost much of its color. Her mouth was slightly open, and her eyes stared without purpose to the side.
“The arm below the hand she'd used to turn me with was slashed through dozens of times, most of them deep enough to see scratches in the bone. She held a scalpel in her hand, and a trail of blood led away from a series of drawers at the side, many of which had been busted open.
“I could practically see it in my head. She argues with herself for a while after I gone, feeling betrayed that I left. She's already in a high state of emotion, because of the moon, because of the drugs she's on, because of what I've said to her. Suddenly she just wants to end it all, because her life has been nothing but a string of pointless miseries.
“Why love, when you only ever lose it?
“So she'd gone from drawer to drawer, breaking the locks until she'd found something in them sharp enough to cut her wrists. And she'd done that, hadn't she? She was a master of whatever she put her mind to. Never one to fail for trying.
“There wasn't a note. No message scrawled in blood. Everything she wanted to say to me was written on her face.
“I don't hate you. I don't love you. I don't care. I don't care about you, about the moon, and werewolves, about nature, about school, about my parents, about life, about love. I don't care about anything anymore.
“I almost wanted to tell myself that one of the wolves had snuck in and finished the job, but as skilled as I was at self-deception, I couldn't fool myself into that. It made too much sense. I still gave audience to the suspicions of course, but I can tell you right now that I never saw any of those wolves again. Whatever message they wanted to push on me, well... it stuck, and they knew it.
“So, as you can imagine, the next couple of years were not very pleasant ones for me. I spent most of that time alternatively hating myself and hating Caroline. In an irony that only made me feel worse, these shifts in opinion changed in tune with the phases of the moon. I spent a lot of my time trying to remember what happened the day she got shot, trying to find some flaw in my remembrance and hoping that it somehow triggered a flashback. Of course, that never happened.
“I finished out high school and I left. By that point, I hated the town with every fiber of my being. I went to college in another state, and that's when I started talking to people again. I got friends, and I came out of my shell, bit by bit. But I never told anyone about Caroline, and I kept my secret from all but a very select few.
“So, she died. And even without the guilt trip and the pity party... it was my fault. If I had have stayed with her, heard her out, even just been in the room, she never would have done what she did. I still find it hard to comprehend it. She knew I would have come back, she must have! What could possibly have possessed her to do something so brash without even considering the consequences?
“But then that's the question, really, isn't it? What if she did consider the consequences? What if she knew exactly what she was doing the whole time? That would be the worst part, knowing that she had done it simply out of spite. I wish I could go back and tell her how much I loved her, help her get through her issues about Christa and Micheal, and her life in general. If only I could have truly understood the weakness that I'd seen in her eyes that day on the train tracks, I might not have been such a fool. But acts of emotion are often unfounded and foolish, and one can't help but be how they are.
“But I've gone through the epilogue without giving you an ending. She died a week or so before the full moon, and you're wondering what I did?
“Well, her parents had the funeral on the day of the full moon, and because of that, I couldn't go. Much like when I'd first heard the call, I was racked with pains, but these were truly crippling. I found my hands shaking, my body convulsing, and I could think only of Caroline, and that simply made the pains worse. I reached a fever state where I thought I could see her next to me, saying comforting things, holding me. But I kept coming into a state of wakefulness, and she would be gone, and I'd find myself screaming for her.
“Darkness fell, and I ran as far as I could. With a terrible sickness realized that I was at the clearing in the forest where we had made love. I looked down at the pains of my past and wished it had never happened at all. I wished I had listened to her and never forced her to turn me, if only because being a wolf without her was worse than any horror a hell might be able to conceive. I was scared and confused, questions ran through my mind that could not be answered.
“And I looked up at the moon and felt in her complete and forgiving stare, and it made me want to die. I didn't deserve to be connected to such a strength, after having wronged myself and the only one I loved to such an extreme.
“And then I felt it in my body. A crack here, a crack there. Then, there came a snap from solar plexus, and suddenly waves and waves of energy poured out from it and covered my entire body. I felt weightless, and I looked up at the moon and begged her not to let me go through with it. I begged Luna to make all of it a dream.
“And then the pain started. What I later found is that the first transformation is the worst because your body, while capable now of undergoing such a shift, is not prepared to fight off the pains with the correct chemical reactions. Similarly, your muscles have never stretched into these positions, and your entire skeleton has to reshape itself.
“Your thought process begins to simplify, and as this happened with me, my grief only intensified. In my wolf form, I knew only that once I had, and now I had lost. I howled to the moon as I had yet been unable to do in my normal form.
“I felt vaguely that there should be someone at my side, but there was not. This sent me into fits of rage and fear. The forest was torn to shreds by the next morning, and I awoke in a pile of leaves. I opened my eyes and regarded the sky as something I never wanted to see again.
“My entire body hurt. My brain felt like it had been run over by a tractor. I hated myself, I hated the world, and everything seemed to be entirely wrong. I wanted nothing more than to go to sleep and never wake up again.
“But, I got up. I went to school. I went through my classes day by day and did the work and got through. I graduated, said goodbye to my parents, and I went to college. Every once in a while I would drive back, not see my family or visit the old haunts as much as visit her grave. It comforted me to talk to her. I knew she wasn't really there... the stuff that made Caroline the woman I loved went with her when she died. But it was nice to feel her presence, tenuous as it was, in a world where she was dead. And talking to her, I expressed my mixed feelings about everything, but I found that I could never bring myself to really, truly hating her. The thoughts that I had about us, the doubts and the fears...all they did was make my life more miserable. The only choice I could make was to move on.
“And even now, I don't regret the choice to become a werewolf. It hurts, sometimes, but I can't imagine life any other way. It's just the world I live in, you know?
“Everyone goes through life, and as they do they're presented with a series of choices. There's a myth that says that one choice is right, and one choice is wrong, but really that's just a morality play to make people feel pressured. The truth is that a choice is a choice, and a consequence is a consequence. There are some people who are so terrified of the consequences that they don't make any choices at all, and they spend their lives living in fear, in doubt... I made a choice. I don't know if it was right, morally or spiritually, but I know that it was the only option. My choice had been made from the beginning. It was in my blood, so to speak.”
I sigh and look up at Jennifer. She's staring at the table, a troubled look on her face.
“Penny for your thoughts?” I say.
She looks up and says, “You went through all of that... and you're still willing to turn me?”
I shrugged. “It comes with the territory. And like I said, what would be the point of living in fear of the past repeating itself? I've learned from my mistakes. I've told you the story, and now you can weigh the options better even than I could. You know what could happen, just as well as I do. But before you make your decision, let me draw your attention to something.”
I stand up and walk over to the counter, picking up the packet of razorblades.
“We tend to think only of the way things end, don't we? A movie, a story. But the ending...that's hardly a thing at all, is it? Life isn't like in the movies. We grow, we learn, we live... we try to form a narrative from the scattered pieces of our lives. Sometimes it comes together, sometimes it doesn't. In the end, we all die. But what about the journey? What about the path we took to reach the end?
“Despite everything that happened between Caroline and myself, I hold my memories of her in the highest regard. She showed me a world of happiness and love, and I only wish I had been mature enough to return that feeling in kind.”
I take a breath, then look back at Jennifer. “But, the past is past. I've made my choice, and I have to live with it. Now the decision is in your hands.”
I hold out the pack of razors.
“What's your choice?”