Water from Stone - a Novel (20 page)

Another step, and then another. Her eyes open, just a little. It is enough. The scream begins deep in her stomach, builds up as it works its way through her chest, becomes trapped in her throat as her eyes open wide in horror. There. Right outside her window, the hammerheads are casually tearing at something, ripping at someone, taking a bite and then casually dropping the body so that another can take a torturous, bloody strike at it.

And as she watches Joaquin’s body being torn to shreds, she becomes aware again that the cat is back, is screaming, in fact, screaming in terror at the swirling menace that begins to rush into the room. She tears her eyes away from her husband, away from the ragged strips that are all that is left of him, from the hand with the wedding band still gleaming dully on it as it disappears into a mouth, away from the terrified eyes that burst from their sockets as his head is crushed between monstrous jaws and looks around for the cat. Too late, if she is going to save herself, she cannot go back for it. She gets her legs under her and propels herself up and into the darkness, hears the cat scream, hears the cat howl, hears the scream turn to MOOOOOOOMMMMYYY! as the hammerheads rush in for her.

Forty-One

Jack.

The Pediatric ICU is quiet but for the low hum of the machines that are keeping people alive. Jack stands outside ICU #6 and closes his eyes, trying desperately to calm his nerves, still his heart.  He’d asked Caroline and Shaheen to wait down the hall for him, not wanting company at this point. Not wanting anything but for the little girl inside to be his little girl. And for her to be alright.

Jack takes a deep breath and enters the unit. His first look at the tiny form doubles him over like a sledgehammer to the gut. Most of the child’s body is covered in casts, the rest either bandaged or bruised. Just as Shaheen said, she looks as if she’s been crushed.

Jack stands over the child, his own breathing ragged. Most of her face is free of bandages, if you ignore the breathing tube that snakes down her throat, into her lungs. Her face looks beautiful, peaceful. The oxygen-enriched blood coursing through her has left her rosy-cheeked rather than wan and she looks almost as if she is sleeping peacefully, her golden eyelashes curled softly on downy cheeks.

He searches for signs that this is Mia, a resemblance to Lindsey or to himself. A wisp of blond hair that pokes out from the bandage around her head could be the color of Lindsey’s. He touches it gently and closes his eyes, overwhelmed.

Jack pulls up the guest chair and snakes his hand through the bed’s railing, his fingers seeking out the tiny hand that lays atop the sheets. As his fingertips brush the fingers that will never curl around his, he begins to weep.

Forty-Two

Mar.

Mar wakes with a start and reflexively clutches at her head. The pounding is relentless, leaving her nauseous and weak. Lifting her head, she sees that her right arm is encased in plaster, which accounts for the fact that it weighs a ton. As she stares at it dumbly, unsure how or when the cast got there, she feels a growing sense of dread. Slowly, as her numbed brain begins to take note of her surroundings, she lifts her eyes to the room before her and lets out a shriek.

“Mar, Mar, honey, it’s OK,” Shirley is immediately beside her and tries to wrestle her gently back into the chair.
“Shhhhh
, honey,
shhhhh
. Dylan, baby, can you help me out here, please?”

Mar feels Dylan’s strong arms encircle her waist and physically lift her off the railing she is trying to climb over. “Come on, Mar, you’ve got to relax. There, honey, let go of the railing, I’ve got you. Shit, Shirley, hit the call button, please, she needs more meds.”

Shirley captures Mar’s face between her hands. “Mar, stop it! Calm down right now or they’ll make you leave. I mean it. Mar, can you hear me? Honey, nod, please, or say something. Do you hear me? Are you with me here?”

As Shirley’s face swims into focus, Mar deflates, all the fight gone out of her. Dylan lowers her back into the bedside chair and tucks a blanket around her.

“Jesus, girl, you scared the hell out of me. Are you here? Are you OK?”

The concern in Shirley’s voice finally makes its way through the fog in Mar’s brain. “Shirley?” she asks.

“Yeah, honey, I’m here. Christ, you scared me.”

“I couldn’t get to her,” Mar’s voice is full of sorrow. “She was calling me and I couldn’t get to her.”

“I know, baby, I know. But she’s alright. She’s going to be alright. You’ve got to concentrate on you getting better, let the doctors take care of Lizzie.”

“She was getting me a star, from the studio,” Mar’s eyes begin to overflow, “for painting her room. She had the gold stars in her hand when I found her.”

Mar collapses back into tears and Shirley, unusually unhinged, looks at Dylan for help. “I’ll go find the nurse,” he says.

“Baby, child,
shhhhhhhh
. It’s OK, honey, kids climb, it happens. What’s important is she’s gonna be alright.”

***

The next time Mar wakes, she has a hard time opening her crusted, swollen eyes. Without thinking, she lifts her arm up to feel her face and screams in pain when something hard comes crashing down on her forehead.

“Hey, hey, don’t do that. Here, just a minute, Mar, let me help you.”

“Daddy?” she manages past parched lips and a mouth that tastes like a public toilet bowl.

“Hi, there, honey. Now,
shhhh
, don’t wiggle. I’m going to wipe your eyes. You’ve got that sleep stuff caking them together.”

Mar shoots straight up, knocking her father away, as the memories come flooding back. “Lizzie!” she cries.

Don Bloom steadies his daughter as the fight returns to her. “No, Mar, she’s OK. Your little girl’s fine.”

“I’ve got to find her.” She struggles to free herself of the binding sheets. “Where is she?”

“Maryann Carla Bloom!”

Mar freezes. She hasn’t heard that intimidating voice since the last prank she’d pulled as a child. “Yes, Daddy?”

Don chuckles and pats her hand. “Mar, you’re going to hurt yourself again if you keep struggling like that. Now, if you’ll just give me a minute, I’m going to help you get ready and I’ll take you to her.”

“I’m ready now, Daddy.”

“Uh, honey, trust me on this one, OK? If you go looking like that to see her, you’ll end up scaring Lizzie more than helping her.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Well, you’ve got a mighty impressive shiner and your hair’s sticking up all around the bandages there.”

“And my breath stinks.”

“I wasn’t going to mention it.”

***

Twenty minutes later, Don Bloom rolls his daughter up to Lizzie’s floor. She’s brushed her teeth, straightened her hair and wrapped herself in the bathrobe Diane had thought to bring. While she would prefer to walk, she’d quickly found out that she’d sprained her ankle. The last time she had awoken, Don told her, she’d jumped out of the bed to find Lizzie and hadn’t realized she was still attached to an IV. Which also accounts for the bandaged left hand. In all, her father told her, she probably has more hospital-induced injuries than the ones she’d suffered in the accident at home.

“Are you sure you’re feeling OK?” he asks as he rolls her down the hallway toward Lizzie’s room.

Mar nods tersely. “I’m fine.”

“Because that Demerol’s still in your system.”

“I’m OK.” Apparently, she’d forgotten to tell the admitting nurses about her sensitivity to Demerol and had spent the first hours of her hospital stay fighting hallucinations. No wonder she is exhausted.

Much to Mar’s frustration, Don parks the wheelchair several feet from the door to Lizzie’s room.  He says he wants to peek inside first. As soon as he steps out of sight, she tries to roll the wheels forward, but her damaged hands aren’t up to the task. She finds, though, that if she jerks her body back and forth in the chair, she can cause it to roll forward a little bit at a time.

“Mar? What in god’s name are you doing?” Diane asks from the doorway.

Mar looks up, startled. “Diane. Hello,” she manages. And then, inexplicably, her eyes begin to overflow with tears.

“Oh, Mar, honey,” Diane reaches down and wraps Mar in an awkward hug. “You do get yourself into the worst kind of fixes.”

“It’s a talent I have.”

Diane looks into Mar’s eyes.“How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine, tired. Scared, angry, upset. Is she OK?”

“Honey, she’s fine. She’s banged up some, understandably so, and she’s got a broken leg. Well, frankly, she looks a mess, but the doctors say she’ll be fine. She’s a strong little girl.”

“But she lost so much blood…” the memory of the spreading pool of blood sends icy slivers of fear tearing through her body.

“Blood?”

“I stepped in it, it was everywhere, and when I got the shelf off her, it was all over her. I thought she was dead,” Mar’s voice is ragged with emotion.

“Honey, Mar, look at me. That was paint.”

“Paint?”

“For the heart.”

“Heart?”

“That Lizzie was painting for you. When you didn’t come back to the phone, your dad called 911 and then called me. I found the poster Lizzie was painting.”

“But, how did she…?”

Diane shakes her head and sighs deeply. “I don’t know. All I can tell you is she takes after her mama. That little girl is you inside and out. That being said, I’m afraid this is only the beginning. Now, do you want to go see her?”

Diane rolls Mar’s chair right up to the bed. Mar has to bite her lip to keep from crying out. Her little girl is bruised, badly bruised, from the heavy shelf filled with paints falling on top of her. Her tiny leg is encased in plaster and her skin is a tired green. Mar reaches her bandaged hand through the rails of the bed and brushes Lizzie’s tiny fingers.

“Mama?” Lizzie whispers hoarsely, her eyes flickering but not opening.

“I’m here, baby.”

“Hokay,” Lizzie sighs and, as Mar watches, her tense body relaxes into sleep.

Mar lays her forehead on the side of the bed and begins to pray.

Forty-Three

Jack.

The funeral is a circus, with the curious and the media jostling for best viewing positions. Jack’s family and Lindsey’s had flown in earlier in the week when there had still been a chance the child was Mia. They’d stayed on afterwards, like Jack unable to say goodbye to the little girl they’d never known. When the time came, they accompanied the small casket out to the cemetery where hired guards kept the press at bay.

The little girl’s name had been Cassidy Renfro. At least, that is what her “adoptive parents” had called her. She’d been raised by a wealthy family. After all, who else could have paid her hefty purchase price? The girl’s parents were in custody, the father in jail for beating her black and blue, and eventually to death, the mother locked away in a psychiatric hospital, having suffered a psychotic break when she’d walked in on her husband punishing the little girl with his massive fists.

The story, pieced together over the past week, is sad and stupid, a testament to the evils and idiocies of the human heart and ego. The father, sterile, had been unable to father a child, but had refused to allow his wife to be artificially inseminated. The mother, somewhat fragile to begin with, had wanted nothing more than a child of her own. Finally, giving in to his wife’s pressure, he had one day shown up with a perfect little girl. The baby, who the couple had told everyone they’d adopted from Russia, seemed at first to fulfill the mother’s needs. In fact, by all accounts, they had been a very happy family. For awhile.

Over time, the stress of maintaining the charade began to eat at the woman. She’d started to see spies everywhere, began to imagine the police breaking into their house in the middle of the night to take the little girl back to her real parents. As her paranoia progressed, she’d cloistered herself and the child in the house, refusing to go out in public where they might be seen and found out. The husband, frustrated, angry and eventually violent, began to hate going home.

It had been a small thing that had set him off the day he beat Cassidy. A downward trend in the stock market, something that reversed itself the next day, too late for the little girl. Added to his financial frustration, Renfro had tripped over one of Cassidy’s toys when he’d come home from work. What had started out as a spanking had erupted into a violent bludgeoning of the worst kind the police had ever witnessed.

Even when the preliminary tests came back that Cassidy was not his biological daughter, Jack had refused to leave her side. Shaheen, as the agent in charge, had arranged for him to stay with the little girl. After all, there was no one else there for her. Her biological parents had not been found, and it was a long shot they ever would be. Shaheen was beginning to think she was one of the ones whose mother had sold her as an infant. When the time came, Jack had made all the funeral arrangements, everything from selecting the casket to choosing the prayers and hymns for the service.

By the time the actual funeral took place, word had leaked out about Jack’s involvement and all the old stories of Lindsey’s death and Mia’s kidnapping were once again dragged out and turned into grist for the voracious mill of human consumption.

“Jack?” Caroline breaks through his reverie. They are the only two left graveside. His mother and Amanda, both worn out by the emotional week, have returned with their husbands to the hotel. The press, kept back from the hillside grave, had long ago become bored and were sitting around, drinking coffee and joking among themselves as they wait to see if Jack does anything else noteworthy.

“Yes?” he asks quietly, his gaze on the small casket that lies at the bottom of the deep hole.

“They need to finish up,” she says, indicating the Bobcat that is waiting off to the side.

“I don’t feel her anymore,” he says, not indicating whether he means Mia or Cassidy. Over the past week, the girls have become one in Jack’s mind and he truly feels he is burying his own hopes for his little girl, if not the child herself.

“I know,” Caroline leans her head on his shoulder and waves at the bulldoze driver to continue, then stands by his side while the machine finishes the job.