Green Day's Angels, chapter 10
Mike's POV
Claudia went making herself some coffee. She got me a mug too with out asking. I guess she had a difficult night. She seemed so sleepy and didn't speak a word to me until she sat down across from me at the dinning table. She rubbed her hands across her face, kept pushing back her hair away. She was in a white tank top and some blue pajama pants. She seemed so tired, so miserable, so agitated. She was shaking. She hid her face in her arms for a few moments. I sat there and waited. Waited and waited and waited. It was 4 am before she lifted her head and through hazy eyes stared at me. She sniffled and pushed her hair back again out of her face. She whispered something to me, but I couldn't hear her.
"What?"
"She... she... " she opened her mouth but the words didn't come out. I leaned forward; she just looked at me through bloodshot eyes. "She is ill," she whispered to me.
"Who?" I asked with a sense of dread.
"Brittney," she whispered in a soft, knowing voice.
I just stared at her. She saw my blank expression and sat up. She rubbed her eyes and drank from her mug. She took a good look at me before she spoke again. "Mike..." she spoke directly at me, "She's ill." She spook to me clearly and loudly as if I didn't speak English.
I said nothing but kept staring at her, expecting her to say more. Claudia sighed.
"She's not well upstairs," she said tapping one of her temples with one finger. She smiled at me with weeping sadness. She shook her head. "She came by here today... She was... restless... " she stared at the grass green tablecloth and smoothed out its winkles as she spoke. "She was a mess."
She spoke as if she was reliving the memory. I knew something was not right. I knew something wrong happened. Adie had warned me of such things, before I came here. "What happened?"
She was silent as if she hadn't heard me. She slowly looked up. "Come."
She stood from her chair, grabbed my hand and let me through the kitchen, into the living room. As she flicked a switch, light lit up the room, revealing the living room in wreckage. Glass shattered, pillows torn with feathers everywhere, tables overthrown, frames cracked, a broken vase of flowers that seemed to have been thrown against a wall. It looked like a tornado ripped through the house. Half of the vast room had a decent attempt to be cleaned, but the disaster was evident. I was speechless for a few moments. All I did was stare. She had gone way out of control. But it wasn't the first time.
"She was at the front door one minute. She didn't last one second after she came in here. She was staring at a picture on the wall, right there." She pointed to a now empty spot on the wall across the room. "Then, she started yelling... screaming hysterically, crying and she started throwing things and... and... " she hide her face in her hands as she drew a breath, shaking her head. "It was horrible."
I watched her. I shiver thinking of what horrid nights I had spent in that situation. I had never told anyone she hit me and would nearly tear the house down because I was afraid. I never really knew what I was afraid of, besides her. I guess I wanted to protect her because I still loved her. But I couldn't get it through my head that she didn't love me anymore, but now I'm glad I didn't. She didn't hit me because she hated me. There was another reason dawning.
"She was screaming thing... like she hated her life... " she whispered.
"She said that?" I asked quietly. Claudia nodded.
"I don't know how, but some how I got her to calm down after she fell on her knees crying in the middle of the mess... I sang her the first thing that came to my mind."
"And what was that?"
She smiled and laughed a bit. She started singing. "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when, skies are-"
"Okay, you can stop now. Please." She laughed.
"I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault, Mike," she told me.
"I should have been here."
"How would you have known?"
I shook my head. "What's wrong with her? Really?" I pleaded her.
Claudia looked up at me, she sighed. "I don't know, Mike. Her doctor wouldn't tell me."
"Her doctor?"
"Yeah," she whispered.
She walked out of the room and back into the kitchen. I followed her. She pulled a bottle out of the top cabinet. She grabbed two shot glasses and filled them up. I sat at the counter. She stood on the other side. "After got her to calm down, I searched through her purse and found her doctor's card. I called him."
"What did he say?" She handed me one of the shot glasses.
"She has some type of psychotic illness." She walked to the fridge and gathered some stuff. She returned with some Mangos and some other fruit I didn't recognized. I looked at it weird. "What? Haven't you ever seen maracuya before?" she asked me surprised.
"Uh... " I turned my attention back to her, "What kind of psychotic illness?"
"Well... " She began cutting up the mangos with a large knife she retrieved from a drawer, "She can't control what she says or does... kind of like double face. She goes into raging fits she can't control and gets worked up over practically anything and nothing." She scooped up the chopped mangos and tossed them into the blender. I shuffled the shot glass in my hands.
"The only thing that keeps her sane is this medication, she told me." She began cutting the other strange fruit.
"She told you? What did she tell you?" I asked suddenly the excitement in my voice rising.
"She told me she's had this illness since she was little. And she said that she had taken medication all her life just to not go Mad." She looked up from cutting and looked at me straight in the eye. "But several times, the medication she would be taking eventually stopped working. She would panic, but the doctors always found some other drug to keep her sane." She through the last of the cut up fruit into the blender with the mangoes.
"But... did anyone know she was... sick?" I asked uncertain.
"Only her family... she never told anyone else because she was afraid of rejection. As a child, as a friend, employee, student, partner... " Trailed off and turned on the blender, sending the high pitch buzz through my ears. She stopped it after a few seconds and turned back to me.
That's why she never told you," she said softly. I hung my head and sighed. The guilt was building up on my shoulders.
"But she always seemed perfectly normal... until now... " I whispered a bit ashamed.
"About that... " she grabbed a glass from the cabinet.
"What?"
"I told you eventually one medication would stop working and they'd give her another one till they ran out, right? Well, when did the fights start happening?" she poured the juice out of the blender compartment.
"What fights?" I asked sorrowfully in a lousy attempt to avoid the subject.
"Don't lie to me Mike. You don't think Tre hasn't told me about the Brittney Truck, do you?" she said sweetly.
I grunted as I slowly meet eyes with her. "Couple months," I mumbled. She studied me for a moment.
"Hmm, that's when the medication she was taking must have stopped working on her." That's when the light bulb finally when off inside my head. It was all starting to make sense now.
"So, she panicked and didn't want to tell her doctor cause she was afraid they'd stick her in a nut house because there was probably nothing else they could do and-"
"She didn't tell me because she was afraid I would leave her and we would get into fights because she didn't have any more medication and that's why she would scream at me and hit me but she did love me all along and she didn't mean to and then we went away and she called me telling us that she kidnapped Adie, but it was fake just to get us to come home and now she's out there somewhere," I blurt it all out all in a single breath. I understood now. Everything made sense. Claudia just stared at me blankly. I couldn't read her expression.
"She hit you?" she asked in shock.
Ah, crap... I thought. I hesitated uncertainly. Her eyes searched through me. I felt like a child admitting to his mother some bully at school hit him. "Yeah." I admitted with a heavy heart.
"Did you tell anyone?"
"No," I muttered.
"Mike, why?" she had a worried tone in her voice.
"I was trying to protect her I guess... I love her... "
"What did she do to you?" she seemed horrified.
After witnessing what she could do to a room, she had every right to be terrified. I looked down. A sense of dread was dwelling inside of me. But I was in too deep; she had to know. Slowly, I unbuttoned my jacket and slipped it off. I lifted up the right sleeve of my t-shirt to reveal a painfully bruised shoulder. A large area big as the palm of my hand was purple, black, and dark red. Claudia's eyes nearly popped out of her head as stared at my shoulder. I laid back down the sleeve and pulled down the collar of my shirt, a large scrape ran across my chest, with another bruise. She winced. I pulled my shirt back up.
"Is there more?" she asked me. I hung my head. I glanced at her.
"You want to see more?"
"I need to see what she does to you, Mike. It's the only way if I can see."
"See what?"
"What has done to you?" I grunted. I lay my head on the counter.
"Alright... " I pulled off my shirt and lay it on the counter. I sat humble, ashamed. She observed me, my arms, my chest, my back. She sighed and closed her eyes. She shook her head.
"What did she do... hit you with a baseball bat?" she whispered almost inaudible, the pain cracking in her voice. I didn't dare look at her.
"Around there." There were moments of silence.
"It's either love or fear that drove you to this," she told me.
"I love her. I knew I was being abused, but I loved her... but I know now she didn't mean to. She didn't want to hurt me..."
Cluadia came around to my side and hugged me tight. "I know, I understand, Mike. She's murdered people she never meant to kill."
"Murdered?!" I nearly jumped out of my seat. I did a double take. My mind suddenly flashed back to my dream in Vegas. The names cut into her arm, dripping blood... drowning in blood...
"Mike?"
"What?" I snapped back to reality.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine... " I was taking deep breaths.
"You're not going to have a panic attack on me, are you?"
"No, I'm fine, really," I said calming down, "Do you know where she is?"
"Brittney?" she asked surprised.
"Yes, do you know where she is? Did she tell you where she was going?" I was desperate.
"How should I know? She just ran out of the house after I caught her making a phone call."
"A phone call?"
"Yeah, I just finished talking to her doctor, when I walked into the kitchen and there she was."
"Did you hear what she was saying? Do you know who she was calling?" my heart was pumping in my chest wildly.
"All I heard was something about Adie and 3 days. I think she said your name too."
"She called me!" I suddenly jumped off the stool I was sitting on and began putting my shirt back on.
"She did?"
"Yeah, she was saying that she had Adie hostage and that I had 3 days and she hung up. Wait... was she calling from a cell phone?"
"I think so. Why?"
Suddenly, everything was coming together in my mind. Britteny has a mental illness and she never told me because she was afraid I would reject her. Her medication stopped working and she panicked not wanting to be thrown in a nut house, so she didn't tell anyone. She would start loosing her mind and hit me and scream at me and tear the house down because the medication no longer worked and she could not control herself. So I broke up with her because we would fight all the time, but I didn't know of her illness and then she hated herself because she never meant to hit and scream at me. We went on the road trip and I had that dream in Vegas. She texted messaged me from her phone, trying to scare me. Then visited Adie this afternoon. She stole Adie's cell phone. She visited Tre's house, where she lost her mind and confessed herself to Claudia. Then, while Claudia was on the phone with her doctor, she called me using Adie's cell phone to make it look like she had actually taken Adie hostage, which was the bait to bring us back home. Now, god knows were she is.
"Are you going to find her?" Claudia asked me as I put my jacket back on.
"I have to."
"I couldn't sleep thinking she'd kill herself. She's really crazy Mike."
I felt my pulse grow faster at the thought. She could kill herself. She would kill herself. "I have to find her."
I was about to run out of the kitchen. "Wait!" Claudia grabbed me by the arm, "Here." She grabbed the shot glass I left on the counter and gave it to me. "Drink."
I looked down at the shiny transparent bronze liquid. I gulped it down and gave the glass back to her. "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For everything... " I gazed at her for a moment before I kissed her on the cheek and ran out of the house. I jumped into the convertible and started the engine. I was just about to pull out when I she yelled at me from the front door.
"Mike!"
"Yeah?"
"Remember!" she shouted out to me.
"What?"
"Never give up! On anything!"
I smiled back at her. I pulled out of the driveway and zoomed away. My heart was in my mouth as I though of where to look for her. Her house was my first thought. God, I have to find her, I just have to... I thought desperately. I was scared. Mortified. I saw Tre sitting up next to me, yawning.
"Dude... " he give a big yawn, "where are we?"
Claudia went making herself some coffee. She got me a mug too with out asking. I guess she had a difficult night. She seemed so sleepy and didn't speak a word to me until she sat down across from me at the dinning table. She rubbed her hands across her face, kept pushing back her hair away. She was in a white tank top and some blue pajama pants. She seemed so tired, so miserable, so agitated. She was shaking. She hid her face in her arms for a few moments. I sat there and waited. Waited and waited and waited. It was 4 am before she lifted her head and through hazy eyes stared at me. She sniffled and pushed her hair back again out of her face. She whispered something to me, but I couldn't hear her.
"What?"
"She... she... " she opened her mouth but the words didn't come out. I leaned forward; she just looked at me through bloodshot eyes. "She is ill," she whispered to me.
"Who?" I asked with a sense of dread.
"Brittney," she whispered in a soft, knowing voice.
I just stared at her. She saw my blank expression and sat up. She rubbed her eyes and drank from her mug. She took a good look at me before she spoke again. "Mike..." she spoke directly at me, "She's ill." She spook to me clearly and loudly as if I didn't speak English.
I said nothing but kept staring at her, expecting her to say more. Claudia sighed.
"She's not well upstairs," she said tapping one of her temples with one finger. She smiled at me with weeping sadness. She shook her head. "She came by here today... She was... restless... " she stared at the grass green tablecloth and smoothed out its winkles as she spoke. "She was a mess."
She spoke as if she was reliving the memory. I knew something was not right. I knew something wrong happened. Adie had warned me of such things, before I came here. "What happened?"
She was silent as if she hadn't heard me. She slowly looked up. "Come."
She stood from her chair, grabbed my hand and let me through the kitchen, into the living room. As she flicked a switch, light lit up the room, revealing the living room in wreckage. Glass shattered, pillows torn with feathers everywhere, tables overthrown, frames cracked, a broken vase of flowers that seemed to have been thrown against a wall. It looked like a tornado ripped through the house. Half of the vast room had a decent attempt to be cleaned, but the disaster was evident. I was speechless for a few moments. All I did was stare. She had gone way out of control. But it wasn't the first time.
"She was at the front door one minute. She didn't last one second after she came in here. She was staring at a picture on the wall, right there." She pointed to a now empty spot on the wall across the room. "Then, she started yelling... screaming hysterically, crying and she started throwing things and... and... " she hide her face in her hands as she drew a breath, shaking her head. "It was horrible."
I watched her. I shiver thinking of what horrid nights I had spent in that situation. I had never told anyone she hit me and would nearly tear the house down because I was afraid. I never really knew what I was afraid of, besides her. I guess I wanted to protect her because I still loved her. But I couldn't get it through my head that she didn't love me anymore, but now I'm glad I didn't. She didn't hit me because she hated me. There was another reason dawning.
"She was screaming thing... like she hated her life... " she whispered.
"She said that?" I asked quietly. Claudia nodded.
"I don't know how, but some how I got her to calm down after she fell on her knees crying in the middle of the mess... I sang her the first thing that came to my mind."
"And what was that?"
She smiled and laughed a bit. She started singing. "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when, skies are-"
"Okay, you can stop now. Please." She laughed.
"I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault, Mike," she told me.
"I should have been here."
"How would you have known?"
I shook my head. "What's wrong with her? Really?" I pleaded her.
Claudia looked up at me, she sighed. "I don't know, Mike. Her doctor wouldn't tell me."
"Her doctor?"
"Yeah," she whispered.
She walked out of the room and back into the kitchen. I followed her. She pulled a bottle out of the top cabinet. She grabbed two shot glasses and filled them up. I sat at the counter. She stood on the other side. "After got her to calm down, I searched through her purse and found her doctor's card. I called him."
"What did he say?" She handed me one of the shot glasses.
"She has some type of psychotic illness." She walked to the fridge and gathered some stuff. She returned with some Mangos and some other fruit I didn't recognized. I looked at it weird. "What? Haven't you ever seen maracuya before?" she asked me surprised.
"Uh... " I turned my attention back to her, "What kind of psychotic illness?"
"Well... " She began cutting up the mangos with a large knife she retrieved from a drawer, "She can't control what she says or does... kind of like double face. She goes into raging fits she can't control and gets worked up over practically anything and nothing." She scooped up the chopped mangos and tossed them into the blender. I shuffled the shot glass in my hands.
"The only thing that keeps her sane is this medication, she told me." She began cutting the other strange fruit.
"She told you? What did she tell you?" I asked suddenly the excitement in my voice rising.
"She told me she's had this illness since she was little. And she said that she had taken medication all her life just to not go Mad." She looked up from cutting and looked at me straight in the eye. "But several times, the medication she would be taking eventually stopped working. She would panic, but the doctors always found some other drug to keep her sane." She through the last of the cut up fruit into the blender with the mangoes.
"But... did anyone know she was... sick?" I asked uncertain.
"Only her family... she never told anyone else because she was afraid of rejection. As a child, as a friend, employee, student, partner... " Trailed off and turned on the blender, sending the high pitch buzz through my ears. She stopped it after a few seconds and turned back to me.
That's why she never told you," she said softly. I hung my head and sighed. The guilt was building up on my shoulders.
"But she always seemed perfectly normal... until now... " I whispered a bit ashamed.
"About that... " she grabbed a glass from the cabinet.
"What?"
"I told you eventually one medication would stop working and they'd give her another one till they ran out, right? Well, when did the fights start happening?" she poured the juice out of the blender compartment.
"What fights?" I asked sorrowfully in a lousy attempt to avoid the subject.
"Don't lie to me Mike. You don't think Tre hasn't told me about the Brittney Truck, do you?" she said sweetly.
I grunted as I slowly meet eyes with her. "Couple months," I mumbled. She studied me for a moment.
"Hmm, that's when the medication she was taking must have stopped working on her." That's when the light bulb finally when off inside my head. It was all starting to make sense now.
"So, she panicked and didn't want to tell her doctor cause she was afraid they'd stick her in a nut house because there was probably nothing else they could do and-"
"She didn't tell me because she was afraid I would leave her and we would get into fights because she didn't have any more medication and that's why she would scream at me and hit me but she did love me all along and she didn't mean to and then we went away and she called me telling us that she kidnapped Adie, but it was fake just to get us to come home and now she's out there somewhere," I blurt it all out all in a single breath. I understood now. Everything made sense. Claudia just stared at me blankly. I couldn't read her expression.
"She hit you?" she asked in shock.
Ah, crap... I thought. I hesitated uncertainly. Her eyes searched through me. I felt like a child admitting to his mother some bully at school hit him. "Yeah." I admitted with a heavy heart.
"Did you tell anyone?"
"No," I muttered.
"Mike, why?" she had a worried tone in her voice.
"I was trying to protect her I guess... I love her... "
"What did she do to you?" she seemed horrified.
After witnessing what she could do to a room, she had every right to be terrified. I looked down. A sense of dread was dwelling inside of me. But I was in too deep; she had to know. Slowly, I unbuttoned my jacket and slipped it off. I lifted up the right sleeve of my t-shirt to reveal a painfully bruised shoulder. A large area big as the palm of my hand was purple, black, and dark red. Claudia's eyes nearly popped out of her head as stared at my shoulder. I laid back down the sleeve and pulled down the collar of my shirt, a large scrape ran across my chest, with another bruise. She winced. I pulled my shirt back up.
"Is there more?" she asked me. I hung my head. I glanced at her.
"You want to see more?"
"I need to see what she does to you, Mike. It's the only way if I can see."
"See what?"
"What has done to you?" I grunted. I lay my head on the counter.
"Alright... " I pulled off my shirt and lay it on the counter. I sat humble, ashamed. She observed me, my arms, my chest, my back. She sighed and closed her eyes. She shook her head.
"What did she do... hit you with a baseball bat?" she whispered almost inaudible, the pain cracking in her voice. I didn't dare look at her.
"Around there." There were moments of silence.
"It's either love or fear that drove you to this," she told me.
"I love her. I knew I was being abused, but I loved her... but I know now she didn't mean to. She didn't want to hurt me..."
Cluadia came around to my side and hugged me tight. "I know, I understand, Mike. She's murdered people she never meant to kill."
"Murdered?!" I nearly jumped out of my seat. I did a double take. My mind suddenly flashed back to my dream in Vegas. The names cut into her arm, dripping blood... drowning in blood...
"Mike?"
"What?" I snapped back to reality.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine... " I was taking deep breaths.
"You're not going to have a panic attack on me, are you?"
"No, I'm fine, really," I said calming down, "Do you know where she is?"
"Brittney?" she asked surprised.
"Yes, do you know where she is? Did she tell you where she was going?" I was desperate.
"How should I know? She just ran out of the house after I caught her making a phone call."
"A phone call?"
"Yeah, I just finished talking to her doctor, when I walked into the kitchen and there she was."
"Did you hear what she was saying? Do you know who she was calling?" my heart was pumping in my chest wildly.
"All I heard was something about Adie and 3 days. I think she said your name too."
"She called me!" I suddenly jumped off the stool I was sitting on and began putting my shirt back on.
"She did?"
"Yeah, she was saying that she had Adie hostage and that I had 3 days and she hung up. Wait... was she calling from a cell phone?"
"I think so. Why?"
Suddenly, everything was coming together in my mind. Britteny has a mental illness and she never told me because she was afraid I would reject her. Her medication stopped working and she panicked not wanting to be thrown in a nut house, so she didn't tell anyone. She would start loosing her mind and hit me and scream at me and tear the house down because the medication no longer worked and she could not control herself. So I broke up with her because we would fight all the time, but I didn't know of her illness and then she hated herself because she never meant to hit and scream at me. We went on the road trip and I had that dream in Vegas. She texted messaged me from her phone, trying to scare me. Then visited Adie this afternoon. She stole Adie's cell phone. She visited Tre's house, where she lost her mind and confessed herself to Claudia. Then, while Claudia was on the phone with her doctor, she called me using Adie's cell phone to make it look like she had actually taken Adie hostage, which was the bait to bring us back home. Now, god knows were she is.
"Are you going to find her?" Claudia asked me as I put my jacket back on.
"I have to."
"I couldn't sleep thinking she'd kill herself. She's really crazy Mike."
I felt my pulse grow faster at the thought. She could kill herself. She would kill herself. "I have to find her."
I was about to run out of the kitchen. "Wait!" Claudia grabbed me by the arm, "Here." She grabbed the shot glass I left on the counter and gave it to me. "Drink."
I looked down at the shiny transparent bronze liquid. I gulped it down and gave the glass back to her. "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For everything... " I gazed at her for a moment before I kissed her on the cheek and ran out of the house. I jumped into the convertible and started the engine. I was just about to pull out when I she yelled at me from the front door.
"Mike!"
"Yeah?"
"Remember!" she shouted out to me.
"What?"
"Never give up! On anything!"
I smiled back at her. I pulled out of the driveway and zoomed away. My heart was in my mouth as I though of where to look for her. Her house was my first thought. God, I have to find her, I just have to... I thought desperately. I was scared. Mortified. I saw Tre sitting up next to me, yawning.
"Dude... " he give a big yawn, "where are we?"
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