Hell looked eerily like a hospital room.
Piyumi groaned as her eyes took their sweet time adjusting to the harsh light burning into her retinas. White walls, bare and stark, bore down on her from all four sides and there was a steady, rhythmic beeping sounding from something nearby. She supposed that that would be enough to make anyone go nuts if they were subjected to it for a long time, so that at least was a point in favour of the possibility that she had successfully made the pilgrimage to the underworld. Still, Piyumi mused as she looked down at the gauze wrapped around her abdomen, she didn’t think that bandaging up people’s wounds was part of the package. How oddly hospitable.
“Piyumi!”
Before she could register what was happening, Piyumi was suddenly buried beneath a pair of bodies, a flurry of arms flinging themselves around her neck. “Ack!” she wheezed. “Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe!”
The participants of the pile untangled themselves from Piyumi with hasty and hurried apologies. When the redhead saw who the culprits were though, she realised that she was the one who should've been grovelling for forgiveness.
“What are you two doing here?”
Hunter and Waliyha exchanged a look before they sat down on the edge of her bed.
“Piyumi,” Hunter gently curled his fingers over Piyumi’s knuckles to ease the tight grip she had of the bed sheets. “It’s okay.”
“We had a sneaking suspicion about your, uh, activities,” Waliyha smiled. “I mean, that intimidating motorbike lady constantly picking you up after school was kind of a dead giveaway.”
Piyumi’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “What?! Then why would you…?”
“Be your friend?” A teasing smile strung out Waliyha’s lips. “Well, despite the things I say, Piyumi, you’re not half bad.”
“That’s right! That’s right!” Hunter nodded furiously. “You saved me from that bully before we even knew each other! You’re a good person.”
Piyumi choked back a cry. “How can you say that?” she managed to warble. “I tried to rob you blind. You were almost stabbed, just like your…your…”
“I know,” Piyumi saw a shudder run through Hunter as he took in a breath. “When I think back to that moment and how wrong it could have all gone, I…I mean, I completely froze. I was done for.”
If this truly was Hell, then it was even crueller than she had imagined. “Exactly,” Piyumi could barely muster a whisper. “So please, I-”
“But don’t you see, Piyumi? I wasn’t. Because of you.”
“He’s right,” Waliyha piped up when she saw Piyumi's shock. “Think about it. If you hadn’t intervened, Damien would have stabbed Hunter. So really, in some weird, strange way, I think you were meant to be there, you know?”
“That’s…” Piyumi found herself at a loss for words. What on earth were her friends saying? “That’s not…Look, there’s no way of knowing that-”
“Well, that’s how I want to see it anyway,” Waliyha shrugged rather dismissively, but then a warm smile lit her face. “I am rather relentless when it comes to what I want. But you already know that, don't you?”
The tears were flowing freely now. Hunter reached out to gently push away the strands of hair that had fallen onto Piyumi's face, before he rested his forehead against hers. “You saved me,” he murmured, his eyes fluttering shut as his own tears started to fall. “Thankyou.”
Piyumi felt a weight fall against her shoulder, and then heard a content sigh as Waliyha snuggled in closer. What little hold she had on her emotions slipped away. She leaked from her eyes and nose and mouth, loud and disgusting and ugly. The sobs seizing her body pulled her stitches taut, needled at the bruises that made patchwork of her face. A broken mess of a human being, if she could be called human at all. She sure didn’t feel like one. Like she had failed to meet a set of very imperative and essential requirements needed to qualify her as such. Her lungs couldn’t get enough air, her heart felt like it was on fire. So what right, then, did she have to call herself human?
But somehow, despite it all, Hunter and Waliyha were undeterred. They said nothing else as Piyumi continued to cry. Their hold remained, steadfast and unwavering.
And for the first time in her life, Piyumi felt lucky.
Over the next couple of weeks, Piyumi was able to piece together a timeline of the events that'd occurred after she'd passed out. Damien had apparently fled the scene soon after the stabbing, and Mylene had done so after telling her friends to call an ambulance to avoid the cops Waliyha had contacted. Hunter and Waliyha had told the police that there were only two assailants involved and that Piyumi had been with them the entire night. Piyumi had maintained that story when the police came to the hospital to question her about the incident as well. One officer even went as far as to call her a ‘hero’ for defending her friends.
Piyumi wasn’t so sure about that, but if it meant that she would get off scot free, they could call her whatever they wanted.
She refused to lie to her friends, though. She had finally told them everything. How she had ended up working with Mylene, the crimes she had committed over the last year, her strained relationship with her father. It all came out in a big, jumbled mess she hoped was at least halfway coherent. There was one thing she did keep quiet about however, but she figured it hardly mattered. Palaedia was a non-issue, a fairytale. Why bother with something that would have no bearing on her life whatsoever?
Piyumi sighed, her eyes falling on the bouquet of flowers resting innocuously in a vase at her bedside, a bizarre but beautiful mix of hyacinths, roses, orchids and lotuses. She had yet to see her father, but the flowers were a telltale sign of his visits. They never seemed to wilt, so someone had to be replacing them while she was asleep. It was maddening. Even now, Miyuru was avoiding her. She couldn’t blame him after she had all but renounced him as her father, but still.
On the morning of her fourteenth day at the hospital, however, Piyumi finally saw Miyuru walk into her room. He evidently hadn’t expected her to be awake because as soon as their eyes met, he turned on his heel to walk back out.
“Thatha! Wait!”
Miyuru froze at the sound of her voice. A beat passed before his shoulders slumped defeatedly and he turned around to shuffle back into the room and plonk himself down into the seat closest to her bed. Miyuru hadn’t always been in the best shape, but it suddenly struck Piyumi how well beyond his thirty-four years her father looked in that moment.
“Duwa, I…” Miyuru started to say before his voice broke off with a crack. He took in a deep breath and tried again. “I am so incredibly sorry. I…I have failed you. I’m sorry”
Piyumi sighed, her eyes falling shut. She suddenly didn’t have the strength to hold them open anymore. “I don’t need you to be sorry, Thatha. I need you to be better.”
Piyumi felt a hand hover above her head before it descended to stroke her hair — tentatively at first, and then firmer when she didn’t pull away. “I’m so sorry, my darling girl,” her father said. “I…I have made you suffer for far too long.”
Tears streamed down Piyumi’s cheeks. It seemed like she did nothing but cry these days. “I’m just so tired, Thatha,” she whispered. “I try, and I try, and I’m so tired. The kid shouldn’t have to be the grown-up, you know?”
Miyuru didn’t say anything for a moment, but he kept carding his fingers through her hair. “I’ve let my love for your mother get the best of me,” he finally murmured. “I think I just missed the idea of family. My parents scraped together everything they had to give me the chance to study in this country and make something of myself. But then when I dropped out of school and had a child at twenty, unmarried and single, they cut me off. I haven’t spoken to them since.”
Piyumi pulled back from Miyuru, surprise flaring through her. Her father rarely talked about his family back in Sri Lanka, so she had just assumed that her grandparents were dead or something.
Miyuru gave her a knowing but sad smile. “But it was okay, I thought. I had my love, your mother. Piyumi was definitely coming back. She’d come back and take us away and we could all be a real family.”
“Do you still believe she will?”
“Yes,” Miyuru said fiercely. “Yes, of course. I love her and she loves me, and when the time is right, she will return. I am certain of it.”
Piyumi turned away. Her heart sank but the hand on her shoulder brought her gaze back to the man beside her.
“But I’m done waiting around for her to start being a real family,” Miyuru said with just as much fire. He let out a self-derisive snort. “It’s funny, I didn’t tell you about my family disowning me because I didn’t want you to feel like you were a burden, but I went ahead and did that anyway.”
'Funny' wouldn’t be the word she would use, but hope tugged at her heart nonetheless. “Yeah, well, what I’m about to tell you may make you rethink where you stand on that,” she wrung her lower lip nervously. “Thatha, I think…I think I’m in trouble. The money I’ve been getting…I don’t think it’s from, um, very good people, and they may retaliate because of what happened a few days ago, and I-”
“That’s not for you to worry about,” Miyuru smiled. “I’ve got it covered. This is not your mess. It’s mine. I never should have put you in that situation in the first place.”
“But, Thatha-”
“But nothing,” Miyuru’s voice had a tone of finality that brooked no room for argument. “The kid shouldn’t have to be the grown up, right? And you will never have to be again, not with me, I swear.”
The hope pulling at Piyumi’s chest swelled even further, but she stifled it. While her father’s promises seemed to be genuine this time around, she had been burned way too many times not to be cautious.
“I want you to go to AA meetings.”
“Okay.”
“And see a therapist at least once a week.”
“Okay.”
“And for the love of God, get a job.”
“Of course,” Miyuru grabbed her hands. His eyes flashed with a determined resolve. “You don’t have to find it in your heart to forgive me, Duwa, but I will say this — I will spend every day of the rest of my life trying to become the father you deserve. I promise.”
For a moment, Piyumi just stared at her father. She didn’t know if she could ever forgive him, and, to be honest, there probably wasn’t enough time in the universe for him to make it up to her completely. He had destroyed years she would never get back. But still, in that small hospital room, where it was just the two of them and the rest of the world seemed so far away, she opened up to the idea that maybe, just maybe, they could repair their relationship. Get back a semblance of what they had when things were good.
So, she nodded. She figured it wasn’t her father’s fault anyway.
She knew who was truly to blame.
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