The Monster Within

Chapter 15

Emma is left in utter shock as she stares down the hall at where her beloved son had vanished, claiming he no longer wanted to live with her. It is then that her entire body breaks down and she sobs. Her heart feels like it's been stomped on and shattered into a million pieces. Her shoulders shake uncontrollably and her lungs seem to struggle to breathe. She's at the point of hyperventilating.

She pulls her legs up to her chest and curls into a ball. It felt like the only safe position for her at this moment. She'd done it while in captivity and during her panic attacks, curling up to protect herself and the life inside of her. It was the physical manifestation of those walls that she built, meant to shield her from pain and suffering. However, it seemed that those walls had crumbled completely now that her son no longer wanted to be in her life or his baby sister's life. She could understand that this was hard for him, he always hated change but shouting that he wanted to live with his father, who had left the two of them for three years and had only recently resurfaced, made her wish that she was dead.

It felt like he didn't love her any longer. If Henry didn't love her, what was the point of living?

Emma cries and cries until she's at the risk of being dehydrated. She listens for any sounds from her son's room, but all she hears is silence. She takes the cups of hot chocolate, which were meant as a method of comfort and dumps them down the sink. She leans on the counter and just stares downwards as if the answer to her dilemma will suddenly materialize in the sink.

...

Henry lays on his bed, curled up into a ball as well. He too has been crying, but he's also angry. His mom drops this bomb on him, after all, that had happened to them, she wants to leave? He just wanted everything to be back to normal, with no boyfriend, no abduction, no search, no baby, no therapy and no moving. He hadn't felt this awful since the night his dad left town. He felt abandoned then and felt abandoned now. No one seemed to understand what he was feeling and if he is honest with himself, neither does he... His body is a hurricane of emotions and there seems to be no eye of calm in sight.

He buries his face in the pillow. His mind fills with the happy memories that had taken place in this home. He remembers spending hours in the living room making pillow forts with his dad or playing with his toys on the bedroom floor. He remembers when he used to jump into his parent's bed in the mornings to wake them up so they could watch cartoons together and snuggle up with them at night to read his favourite stories. He remembers his mother drawing bubble baths for him, putting the suds on his head and making different styles with his wet hair to make him laugh. All his birthdays had been celebrated here, all the Christmases, Easters, Fourth of Julys and so on. There were too many memories here to just leave them all behind. Most were very happy and meant the world to him.

Then he thinks about the bad ones, most of them were recent. The times when he was afraid of the dark as a child, the time he broke his arm while jumping on the bed, the many nights spent tossing and turning, thinking about, and praying that his dad would come home. The last four months, he can barely recall sleeping at all from all the activity going on around him. The phone call that was his mother's plea for help and the few times when he was alone in a big empty apartment. He felt like he was in the belly of some hollow beast that had taken his mother from him. And for the past few weeks, waking up in the night from his mother's tortured screams, sounding like she was in pain. He always pretended to be asleep when she came to check on him, but his stomach twisted, wondering what horrors she must be reliving.

While the happy far outweighed the bad, he still couldn't understand why she wanted to move. Why couldn't the baby sleep in his Mom's room? It wasn't that big. Killian was already living here, which wasn't much to his liking either, but at least the docks man tried to be friends with him and did not try to replace his father.