Silent Scream (4 page)

“I will.” 

As Yolanda left, Maddie turned her gaze back to the window, where moisture glazed the entirety of its surface, obscuring the blackness.  Maddie looked at her broken arm as tears pricked her eyes and she wished she could disappear.

* * *

Ashen clouds tumbled across the heavens, blotting out the setting sun as Gabriel strode up his front walkway and unlocked his door.  His breath funneled into the cold air.  There was a feathery white dusting the yard, the shrubs, and the roof.  Although the clouds had been spitting sleet earlier, now only lazy flakes fell here and there.  The storm had graced the city with four inches of snow in addition to the sleet, and, if the weatherman was correct, another two inches would be  added to the blanket already covering everything, even lightly dusting bare tree branches that reached toward the sky as though asking for mercy from the harsh cold spell.

Gabriel opened the mailbox and plucked out the contents while stamping his feet on the doormat, then stepped into the house where Gatsby, his Manx, stood sentry on the table next to the door and mewed indignantly.

“You knew I’d be home today,” he told the brown cat, and ran his hand along its fluffy back.  “And here I am.”

Another mew.

Gabriel lifted the cat to his chest and rubbed his chin against the cat’s head.  “You knew I had a job when you adopted me, so I don’t want another word.”

He stroked the cat a moment more, then set him back on the table.  Flipping on the lights as he went through the house, he groaned, remembering the tornado he’d left before his shift at the firehouse.  “Looks like tomorrow’s going to be a good day to reorganize.”  He set the mail on the counter and walked into the kitchen to the fridge, but even as he moved through the house, he thought of the doctor lying in that hospital bed.  He pulled out a beer, twisted the cap, and took a swig.

Nobody deserved what she had suffered.  Not her.

Not Jessie.  His jaw tightened as that thought came at him, stealing his breath.  He closed the fridge and leaned against it, taking another drink.  Cold beer kissed the back of his throat, and he knew it would take another four before he didn’t think about Jessie—or  Maddie.  And that was exactly what he planned to do: get drunk.

Gabriel spread the mail across the counter and counted four bills and one purple envelope, which he quickly plucked from the others and ripped open.  A birthday card from his older brother Sam, a cop in Owens, a neighboring town where the biggest thing that happened was a skunk infestation at City Hall.

Gabriel smiled and took another swig.  Personally, he was rooting for the skunks.  At least they didn’t try to hide the fact they had odors.  The mayor and council members were another matter, and Gabriel didn’t envy his brother’s role in serving and protecting, but he understood it.

Jessie.
  It always came back to her for both of them as they worked in careers to save those who could not save themselves.  Still, Gabriel winced; no amount of heroics could resurrect the dead.  Lord knows they’d both tried.  Peering around the kitchen, he quickly decided he could organize later and carried his beer into the living room, where he plopped into a forgivingly soft recliner.  He grabbed the remote and flipped channels—a football game, a music video, an old western, and the countryside where he’d found Maddie.

“The woman was taken to Comanche County Memorial Hospital ,” a female newscaster reported as the camera flashed back to her face, revealing a thirtyish woman in a navy suit.  “The police have not listed any suspects at this time.”

Gabriel punched the power button, and the room fell silent again, but the image yet lingered, and he remembered finding her in the yard.  He remembered her god-awful screams.  He remembered the cold that went far deeper than winter.

He would never forget.

The telephone rang. Gabriel jumped from the recliner and sauntered into the kitchen, where he grabbed the receiver.  “Hello.”

“Did you just catch the news?”  Ramsey crowed.

“Yeah, I caught it,” Gabriel replied flatly.

“You went to the hospital to see her, didn’t you?  How is she?”

Gabriel shook his head, and his back stiffened into a rigid line not even the recliner could soften as he sank back into it.  “She doesn’t remember much.”

“Lucky her.”

“Yeah,” Gabriel replied, knowing luck had nothing to do with it. 

Chapter Four

At one time, hospital sounds like laughing nurses, meal carts wheeling down the halls, and beeping IV machines would have been so commonplace to Maddie she wouldn’t have thought much about them.  Now, she heard everything and did the only thing she could to shut it out—drew the covers more tightly around her.  Every sound coupled itself with images Maddie didn’t want to think about.  The squeak of cart wheels as the dietary workers pushed dinner trays reminded her of the squeal of her tires before she’d hit the pickup.  The beep of the IV machine jolted her back to that truck and the sound of his watch beeping the hour as he hit her.  Laughter triggered his laughter.

All it took were sounds to transport her back to hell.  It was a one- way ticket, and she didn’t have the fare for the return trip.  Sweat beaded her forehead and ran down her temples, but still she clung to the blanket, lamenting it not being a cloak of invisibility.  Still, it was a blanket, and it covered the body she’d grown ashamed of wearing.

Her door slowly swung open, and a vaguely familiar blonde  stepped into the room carrying a clipboard.  She looked at the paper on the board and then back at Maddie’s face.  “Maddie?” she asked and smiled softly.

Discomforted by the woman’s apparent recognition, Maddie squinted, trying to classify her features into someone recognizable. No go, especially not in the half-darkness filling the room.

She sat in the chair beside the bed.  “Do you remember me?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

Maddie brushed the hair from her face.  “No, I’m sorry.  I really don’t.”

“Fair enough,” she replied evenly and offered her hand.  “Tammy Ballard.  I roomed next to you at the University of Oklahoma.”

 I don’t want you to see me like this.
  Maddie swallowed the lump in the back of her throat and thought back to college days from fourteen years ago.  Now she could see the slight blonde girl she’d befriended her sophomore year—a  quiet girl who liked track and psychology.  “You broke a track record our junior year,” she said finally.

Tammy smiled softly.  “Yeah, I did—and  sprained my ankle on the very next race.”  She shook her head.  “I was so clumsy.”

She looked at the chart in front of her.

Maddie frowned.  “What brings you here?”

“I’m a crisis counselor, Maddie.”

Maddie stiffened and looked away.   Images of the rapist filled her head, and she tried to blacken the memory, but it remained.  “I don’t need a counselor,” she said, staring at the sleet pecking the window.  “It’s not like I remember much, anyhow.”  She trembled, and tears threatened to spill down her face.  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“You’re right,” Tammy agreed, setting the chart on the counter next to the chair.  “There isn’t anything wrong with you.  There’s something very wrong with what happened to you.”  She leaned toward Maddie.  “Sending a counselor to help a woman who’s been raped is a standard procedure.   It doesn’t mean there’s something about you that’s defective.  Most women find it beneficial.”

I’m not most women
, Maddie thought, gritting her teeth.  With her good hand she rubbed her other shoulder, trying to ease the taut muscles.  “I’ve already told you I don’t remember much.  Why bother someone who has such poor memory skills?  I don’t remember much about our college days, either.”  She looked out the window and wished to be elsewhere as a sudden chill caressed her flesh.  She shivered.  “Why counsel someone who doesn’t even remember the attack?  I must be just fine.”  She brushed a fingernail across the sheet, wishing everyone would leave her alone.

“I know you don’t want to talk about this, but it’s not going to go away. No matter how hard you try to pretend nothing happened, someone still hurt you.”

A pocket of ice filled Maddie’s stomach, and a chill started there and radiated outward.  “I know you’re only here to help,” she said, wrapping her arms around her body.  “But I don’t want your help.  I just want to be left alone.  Is that too much to ask?”

“No, it’s not.”  Tammy stood and set a business card on the table next to Maddie.  “We each have our own ways of dealing with things.  How you choose to do it is your decision.”  She stepped away from the table.  “I just want you to know you aren’t alone.”  She picked up the clipboard and hugged it to her chest.  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Maddie brushed a strand of hair from her face.  “Just give me time and space.  If I need something, I’ll let you know.”

“As you wish.”  Tammy headed toward the door.  She gave Maddie one last look, as though she expected Maddie might change her mind, then stepped out into the corridor, letting the door slowly close behind her.

Maddie closed her eyes and pushed her head deeper in the pillow, wishing she could disappear.  It was one thing to be the doctor trying to heal people and quite another to be the one everybody was trying so damned hard to fix.  She felt like a lab rat.

The door to Maddie’s room didn’t stay closed for long, much to Maddie’s dismay, as Becca stepped into the room to take her vitals.  As the nurse pulled out a thermometer, Maddie folded her arms across her abdomen.  “I’m willing to bet my vitals haven’t changed since the last time you came in here.  I’m still alive.”

Shrugging, Becca covered the oral end of the thermometer with a disposable sheath.  “Maybe your vitals haven’t changed, but being a doctor, you know as well as I do that I still have to take them.  Dr. Gordon would have my hide otherwise.  Is that what you want?”  She prodded Maddie with the thermometer.  “Now let’s get your temp.”

“What I want is to get out of here,” she said and allowed the thermometer under her tongue, effectively silencing her.

“Your doctor said you might actually get to leave tomorrow.”

Studying her fingernails, Maddie frowned.  Maybe she didn’t want to go home.  Granted, she wanted more privacy than this hospital afforded her, considering she was one of the doctors who served patients here, but as Maddie thought back to that country drive, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be ready to try driving home.  She’d once loved that solitude, but from now on, she knew she would never feel the same about silence and darkness.  Her palms started sweating just thinking about trying to drive past where she’d hit that pickup.

But she had to.  Where else was she going to go?

 The thermometer beeped softly, but Becca ignored it as she wrapped the blood pressure cuff around her arm and started pumping.  The cuff squeezed Maddie’s arm for a moment,  then slowly loosened.  Frowning, Becca pulled off  the cuff.  “Your blood pressure is up, Doc, 148/91.”  The nurse then pulled the thermometer from Maddie’s mouth and took a quick peek at the temperature.  “At least you don’t have a fever.”

“Yes, lucky me,” Maddie replied, closing her eyes and trying not to think about anything as she rested.

Becca picked up Maddie’s chart, doubled-checked the fluid in the IV pouch, and scribbled a few note on a half-filled sheet.  “I know this doesn’t mean much to you, considering all that’s happened, but I can’t tell you how glad we all are you’re okay—and just how much we hope they catch the guy who did this.  We all know it hasn’t been easy for you to get used to being the patient instead of the doctor.  We’re all trying to help.”  She shoved the sheet back into the chart.  “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that.”  As she spoke, a light flush reddened her cheeks.

“Thank you,” Maddie whispered, knowing she didn’t always have a reputation for being as patient with the nursing staff as she should.   The fact that Becca had been kind enough to say such things meant a great deal to her. 

“Looks like I can leave you alone for an hour or so,” Becca said and glanced back at the IV bag.  “Or at least until the IV fluid gets low.”

Before Becca could scoot out the door, a dietary worker entered, carrying a single tray she set on the table before Maddie.  Becca situated the table closer to the doctor and uncovered the tray as the worker slipped outside.  “Looks like you have dinner.”

Glancing from the Salisbury steak to the baked potato, dinner roll, and green beans, Maddie turned from the food as a low ache throbbed in her broken arm.  “I’m not hungry.”

Stepping back, Brecca frowned.  “You’ve been eating less than a bird, Maddie.”

“How would you know?  Do you watch birds to see how much they eat?”  Maddie pushed the tray away, and lightly ran her fingers across the cast on her arm.

“Are you in pain?”  Becca asked.

Maddie winced.  “Yes, my arm.”

Becca pointed at Maddie’s tray.  “Why don’t you try eating while I get you something for that pain?”  She stepped toward the door.  “Dr. Gordon ain’t exactly going to want to send you home unless you’re eating, Maddie.”

“Whatever,” Maddie replied, and picked up what appeared to be the most innocuous part of the meal–the dinner roll.  Breaking small bites off of it, she slowly ate it and waited as Becca finally returned with two pills in a small paper cup.

“Thanks,” Maddie said and took the pills, swallowing them with a long swig of water that tasted like minerals.  Although Brecca was scribbling notes in her chart, Maddie knew she was trying to see how much she ate so she could make a note of that, too.  How much she peed, how much she ate, how emotionally disturbed she was--all fodder for taking her apart.  More for show than the appetite she didn’t have, Maddie took a few bites of the meat and baked potato.  With each bite, she tried to ignore what might as well have been cardboard for all it mattered.

Once Becca was convinced Maddie was eating, she closed the chart and headed out of the room.  “If you need something, just hit the  button.”