Descent, part 5

Just like he had done when she was at St Augustine's, Eric visited Sam every day unfailingly. For five months he made the two hour journey that required him to take two buses and walk thirty minutes to the hospital. Nothing had changed during Sam's five months at White Oaks. She had continued refusing to eat and had become frighteningly emaciated. If ever he went to visit Sam and she was wearing a long sleeve it was because she had bruises on her arms from fighting the feeding tube.

Eric's hope had mostly faded. Sam wasn't going to get better at White Oaks, and her psychiatrist, Dr Morton, wouldn't let Eric take her home with him. He couldn't give up on her, his love for her had not diminished, and she was all he had. At home he received a stream of verbal abuse from his mother every day about him leaving the house for hours every day without telling them where he was going and for not doing anything with his life having graduated from high school. There was only one thing that Eric cared about, and that was Sam. A moment didn't go by when he wasn't thinking about her and what he could do to stop her from leaving herself to waste away. Every time he visited her he played her favorite songs for her on the piano in the communal room and they spent most of their time talking about her favorite books, all of which Eric had read in a matter of weeks. He thought that by showing her that he had become the person that she had always wanted him to be it would prove to her how much he loved her and that she had no need to fear him ever leaving her like her parents had, but all Sam thought about was how she was holding him back from getting on with his life and the trouble that was causing for him with his parents. For months she had been asking herself if Eric wouldn't be better off without her, and the more of his intelligence that was revealed by his reading the more guilty she felt about being so much of a burden on him. Her guilt grew over time and the tension within her kept growing until one day it became too much. Since she had arrived at White Oaks, Sam had never felt as if there was going to be a moment in the near future when she was going to return to normal. She wished that he would stop coming to see her and get on with his life, but every day at one o'clock in the afternoon she sat at her window and watched the entrance hoping to see him, and every day at two o'clock he would arrive.

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The day that it all became too much for Sam it was cloudy and windy. Eric entered the gates of White Oaks at two o'clock like clockwork, wearing jeans and a black hooded jacket. Sam, wearing a green jersey, ran down from her room to meet him at the entrance to the hospital like she did every time he came to visit. The sight of Sam's emaciated body perturbed Eric every time he saw her, which he concealed, and when he hugged her he did so with care. They walked through the communal room and out into the treed courtyard, which felt more private. Once outside, Eric removed his jacket and gave it to Sam, who was shivering in her jersey. They sat down on one of the wooden benches, and after a few moments of silence Sam started their conversation by asking him if anything new had happened at home and Eric told her that yesterday his father had extricated himself from his depression and was waiting for him in the living room when he returned home to talk about his future.

"What did you do?"

"I left, I walked around until midnight."

"Eric, why don't you just leave? You have the money, you were supposed to do it as soon as you were done with school."

"I can't, not without you."

Hearing him say that, Sam got up off the bench and walked a few paces away from him. Because of her his life had become nothing but suffering, and for as long as she was like this he would go on enduring it, because he loved her.

“Sam what is it?” Eric got out of his seat on the bench and asked, alarmed by the suddenness of the breakdown that she was having.

“I don’t understand,” Sam choked out, battling to maintain control of herself.

“What don’t you understand?”

“I don’t understand why you don’t hate me. My father cared about my mother and I so little that he went off and got himself killed with another woman, my mother cared about me so little that she spent eight years drinking herself to death, and now here I am stopping you from getting on with your life; why don’t you hate me for that?”

Eric could think of nothing to say in response to Sam asking him why he didn't hate her. He stood and looked at her crying and felt for the first time since she had attempted suicide six months ago that Sam was in a place where he couldn't reach her, that no amount of time and effort would change that. He walked over to her, put his hand on her shoulder, turned her toward him and held her. He couldn't accept that she was lost to him. It didn't matter to him what he had to endure at home or how much it hurt to see Sam in the condition that she was in, he would wait.