I slept most of the way home. I came to as Tam pulled into my parking lot. The ground was glossy from the rain, the sky a beautiful purple grey. I loved rain. Did I mention that? But it had stopped raining. Slowly, I opened my eyes to the world once again rushing past me. I could hear the splash of water as the tires ploughed through a puddle. It was a weird rain. Usually rain brings green trees and fields, the smell of fresh earth and the memories of happy summers of the past. This rain only melted our cover, exposing the black dirtiness of traffic, the muddy mess of melted ground mixed with brown, dead grass. It was a monochrome of blah everywhere. Without snow, there was no activity outside, no life; no snowshoeing, no ice-skating, no skiing, no snowmen, no laughter from the children who made them and then started snowball fights. Even the roar of snowmobiles and snow-plows would be a welcome sound. The trees look naked and dead, a sad reminder of Persephone’s decent into the underworld. There is no life in winter without snow. I loved the rain, don’t get me wrong, however, I would rather have snow in winter: a constant fresh layer of snow to bring a clean, crisp, sparkly look to the sleeping earth. But I was not the one who controlled the weather.
“Good Morning,” I said to tam as I stretched.
“You might want to check your phone- it rang a couple of times.”
“Really? And I didn’t hear it?” I asked myself, but Tam heard it anyway.
“You were really out. I was even singing to the radio and not a stir...”
“You, singing? I can’t believe I missed it.” He blushed a little but I knew he was joking. Or maybe he wasn’t. His face was too innocent to really tell. We walked up to my apartment, and I took a quick glance at who had called: my mom, my sister, Melissa and Colleen. I started dialing Colleen as I walked through the door.
“Hi, there.”
“What’s up?”
“I have in my hands a fax from Tom. Guess what?”
“What?” I played along.
“The blood found on Will’s chest...” she paused.
“Yes?” I sounded a bit impatient.
“Tell me first, what you thought of it.”
“Oh, god, Colleen, just tell me.”
I could hear her huff over the phone. “It’s not his,” she relinquished.
“Really.”
“You’re not surprised?”
“Kind of. But not really.”
“Are you ok? Usually you jump up and down at news like this.”
“I just woke up.”
“Well... what do you want to do with this?”
“Is he running a DNA?”
“Yes, there’s a note at the bottom of the page.”
“Ok.”
“Is that it?” Colleen sounded disappointed and I felt bad that she did so.
“I’ll call you back in a few minutes. We just got home.”
We said goodbyes and I continued my slow, labored climb up the stairs. I was still so tired, all I wanted to do was curl up on the couch with the cats and sleep, but Tam already started to make dinner. With what, I don’t know. There was no food in the house that I would consider edible, but he was a genius in the kitchen. He had his head in the freezer, digging through blocks of mystery meat and leftovers.
“Hungry?” he called to me.
“Eh,” was all I could squeak out. I found the couch and Kali sitting on it, waiting for me. She immediately curled up to my chest as I slowly closed my eyes and drifted off into dreamland. “Don’t go outside; the armadillos will cut you to pieces,” said my mother to me right before I woke up. The apartment was dark except for the flicker of the television. Tam was sitting in the recliner, passed out as well. Kali still lay with me, Bala sat on my hip and Herman was on my feet. No wonder I felt warm and cozy. Kali must have been sleeping. I moved slightly to pet her ear and she jumped up, but when she saw that I was awake, she settled down again and allowed me to pet her. She purred loudly. I read somewhere that a cat purrs to relax themselves. I agreed; her purring was definitely calming me. I didn’t want time to pass. I just wanted to stay there, at that moment for the rest of my life. I couldn’t imagine a better place to be.
**************
A long pounding woke me up. I was the last to rise. Tam was already at the door followed by all three cats but they scattered as soon as he opened the door. I heard his voice greet someone he knew, couldn’t make out what he was saying though. I tried to move but my body was still asleep. I wanted to move it, but it just laughed at me. “Another ten minutes, Molly,” it said to me. Tam’s heavy footsteps creaked the floor indicating that he was coming back towards me. I pretended to all asleep. I heard him stop, and then turn around head back to the door. I couldn’t be sure if he was checking to see if I was awake or not, but he left the apartment, shutting the door quietly behind him. I could hear the silence in the room.
Kali jumped on my side, which in turn woke the rest of me. Her smiling face seemed to say hello, good morning, feed me. “I love you, too, Kal.” I scratched her sweet little face as I slowly sat up. My vision tilted a bit at the horizon line, but at least that’s all it did. I suppose I shouldn’t have taken both oxycodone at once. I steadied my feet to get up and arose without problem. Tam was talking with someone at the bottom of the stairs outside. I could barely see them through the dirty window glass. I couldn’t make out the other guy, but they were just standing there, talking, gesturing. It looked like they were making small talk but then I could see Tam shaking his head low, back and forth, nonstop. Whatever it was he denying, he wanted to make it clear to the guy that his answer was in fact “no.” I shuffled my feet closer to the window, but by the time I could get a clear view, Tam’s ‘friend’ had turned his back and was walking away. Tam stood there watching after him. He waited until the guy got into his car and started the engine. When he finally backed out of the parking lot, Tam turned to walk back up the stairs to the apartment. I panicked. I didn’t want him to know I was spying on him, so I turned to make a quick dive onto the couch but instead of diving to safety, I took a nose-dive onto the floor. I landed on my face. My hand revealed a gusher of blood pumping forth from my nose. My lip stung too, so I can only imagine how many sources this blood had. I slowly crept up onto all fours when Tam came in. He didn’t say anything that I heard, just the loud clomping noise of his boots. I felt his strong hands on my arms helping me up, awkwardly, of course, because my right arm throbbed under his touch. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t tell where my eyes where. My face pulsated with pain. Tam set me on the couch and within seconds has paper towels, ice in a baggie, and an assortment of bathroom items that he gathered in his arms in spilled on to the couch in disarray. He started to dab my face lightly with the paper towels and instructed me to hold one every now and then on various parts of my face. It seemed like forever so to pass the time I passed out.
When I woke up again, I could feel an intense cold all over my face. My fingers revealed that Tam had found a gel-eye mask Kat had given me for Christmas a few years ago. She had graciously said that it was a free gift from a purchase and so thoughtfully gave it to me for a present. I gave her an ipod that year.
“I told you it would come in handy,” said Kat. “It looks good on you, too.”
“Shut up,” I managed to mumble.
Kat just laughed.
“Where’s Tam?”
“He slid out of the door when I came in.”
“And?”
“’And’ what?”
“Where is he?”
“How the hell should I know.”
I huffed. “Is he outside or did he leave?” Silence. “Kat?”
“What?”
“Well?”
“I shrugged ‘no.’”
“You shrugged, great. Kat, look at m; I can’t see a damn thing. My EYE is swollen shut,” I shouted through clenched teeth and immobile lips.
“Yeah, the one eye. The other eye is fine.”
“It doesn’t help if you are not in the vision sight of that eye...” I hissed at her. We both sighed. My tongue checked to see if any teeth were missing. I think they were ok. My entire mouth was numb.
“Smile at me.”
I couldn’t. My lips were swollen to barely let a word escape.
“Do I look really bad?”
“Oh god, yes. You look horrible. You would frighten small children.”
I tried to touch my face but she stopped me. “Leave it alone. Tam put stuff on it to help with the swelling.” She came over to my good eye and demonstrated on her own face where my wounds were. “Here, above the eyebrow is split. Your right cheek has a big purple bump. Your lip is all cut up and your nose is purple.”
I nodded.
“It’s a good thing you have hardwood floors. Would those crime-scene clean-up guys freak out if they had to come over here to clean up your blood.”
I wanted to smile. I knew what she was trying to do. She was always good at trying to cheer me up.
“Bummer you won’t be able to sniff any crime scenes for a while...”
The thought of the morgue quickly filled my mind and I snorted out of my nose, accidentally blowing out a blood soaked tissue wad shoved up there to stop the bleeding. I could feel my face burn with embarrassment under all of the ice strapped to my face, but Kat just laughed. She slipped her arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. “Don’t worry, kid. You’ll be back in action in no time.”
We both turned our heads toward the door as loud bumps and crashes came from outside.
“Molly!” Tam yelled again. “There’s a lead. Quick, we need to run.” Tam burst through the door and grabbed my coat from the chair. He wrapped it around my shoulders and he pulled me to a stand.
“What’s going on?”
“Colleen just phoned. We have a lead to where Kylie might be.”
“Where is she?”
“At the monument.”
“Teller’s Cross?”
“Yes.”
“Who would know that?”
“Molly, we’re the closest. We need to go get her.”
“What if she’s not there?”
Tam paused a second to look at me as if I had suddenly transformed into an elephant. “Do you really want to take that chance?” He asked.
“No.” Where the hell did that question come from? Maybe I had turned into an elephant. I certainly felt like one.
“Come on!” He grabbed my keys to the Jeep.
I followed him out of the apartment, gritting my teeth with every painful bouncy step I took toward the Jeep.
“Good luck!” Kat yelled at us as we ran down the stairs.
Run, I said to myself. I had to stop wallowing in this funk I have been and jump-start my brain. I had to focus; I had to concentrate. I had to start to live again. I had to run.
“Tam, tell me what she said.”
“Kelly was canvassing out on Miller’s Road and he came across a set of small footprints. There was also some blood found on the trail. He followed it for about a mile when he called for backup.”
“Did he find the end to the trail?”
“At this point I don’t know.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and found that it wasn’t working. “Well, now I know why they didn’t call me,” I mumbled to myself. I tossed it into the back seat. Tam gave me a pained look.
“Hey! I just cleaned in here.”
I gave him a sideways glance. “Give me your phone. Please.” (I had such a lisp!) He reached into his breast pocket and handed me his phone. I called Colleen. There was no answer. I called Kelly, and again, there was no answer. “Where the hell is everyone?” We would be there soon, but not being able to contact anyone made me very nervous. Tam was driving as fast as he could with the police sirens. There was no one on the road to slow us down.
We pulled up onto the long dirt drive to Teller’s Cross. I sat up straight. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Before Tam could come to a complete stop, I opened the door and ran to her. She was sitting under the large Celtic cross replica at the top of the small hill. She had her knees to her chest and she shivered. There was about a foot and a half of snow with a nice sold ice crust from the rain. Finally, I reached her, flung my coat around her and held her. She put her tiny arms around me and I lifted her off of the snow with my left hand. Her skin was so cold. She whispered in my ear, “Miss Molly.” I smiled. I forgot that I looked hideous, but she still knew me.
“You’re going to be ok, pumpkin. I’ve got you. I’ve got you. I’m not going to let you go.” I started to step back into the first set of footprints to make my way back to Tam. His out-stretched arms met us both. She weighed nothing, like a feather pillow. Tam was standing near, ready to help. “I’ve got her,” I told him. He nodded and guided me down, breaking the rest of the snow to make it easier for me to walk.
It wasn’t until the sound of the sirens echoed off of the valley did I finally pull Kylie away from me a little. I just wanted to see her eyes. I told her softly that we were going to go to the hospital now, that her mom will be there and that everything was going to be all right. She had small tears in her big eyes, but she nodded her head and buried her face again into me. She felt a little warmer now. The ambulance pulled up behind the car, followed by the media. The circus was about to begin.
As I handed Kylie over to the paramedic, microphones were being pushed into my face. Voices swirled around my head, and not really understanding any of the words being shouted at me, I made a general statement that went something like this: Kylie White has been found. She is being taken to the hospital where she can be evaluated and treated. There is no word yet as to who took her or how she ended up out here. And that was all, because that was all I knew. I wasn’t holding anything back or exaggerating the truth. I heard voices comment on my face. Then I heard sentences strung that claimed I had tackled the kidnapper and wrestled Kylie away from them. I left them wondering and climbed into the Jeep with Tam.
The ambulance was getting ready to go. We were to follow them to the hospital. I was glad for this, not just to make sure Kylie got there all right, but for other, more personal reasons that weren’t as easily hidden as my arm had been. As I slid into the front seat, I caught movement in the corner of my good eye. I tried to steal a moment to look- purely an instinctive reaction. If I had a half of a second to really think about it, I would have wanted to know who or what it may have been, but to not let on that they knew that I was aware of their presence. Of course, I first had to convince myself that I might have, indeed, seen something to really worry about. It was just a deer, I thought. Trees have deer, and there are a lot of deer around here because there are a lot of trees, which gives the deer a lot of places to hide. A place to hide- he was hiding in the trees.
The motor brigade was on the move and I opted to stay in the Jeep instead of checking out my hunch. A bad move on my part, but my concern for Kylie and for my arm and face outweighed anything else at that moment. Tam also noticed me favoring my arm. He asked several times if I was “Ok” and I kept replying with a weak “Yes.” I took a quick mental inventory: two dead bodies, a recovered missing girl, a maniac on the loose, and a busted face and arm. My heart beat a little less difficult now that Kylie had been found. Of course, I had nothing to do with the fact that she wasn’t with her captor. I just picked her up out of the snow. Not to down play the extreme and horrific series of events, but that seemed a bit too easy.
“Tam?”
“How did you know she would be there?”
“By the direction Kelly described the footprints.”
“Yeah?”
“I know that area. She was on Parker’s trail which leads right to the Cross.”
“Why didn’t Kelly go to the other end instead of follow her on the trail?”
“He didn’t know where it came out. He didn’t grow up in those woods. He grew up on the farm and on the lake. I grew up with those trees, with that hill, with that whole landscape. It was my back yard, so to speak.” I nodded. He was always out there. More than I was, and my grandparent’s cottage wasn’t too far from there. Like Kelly, I grew up mainly on the Lake. I loved the woods, but the coyotes’ howling scared us too much to spend any time in there.
“How do you suppose she got away?” I asked after a few minutes of silence.
“No clue. We will just have to ask her about it when she is feeling better.”
“Hum.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Weird circumstances.”
“There have certainly been many of those lately.”
“At the diner yesterday, there was a news story on the radio. Did you hear it?”
“No, I wasn’t listening to it. What was it about?”
“Good news.”
“Really?”
“Shocking, isn’t it? The story was actually about something someone did to save the lives of a hundred people. And it turned out to have worked. No one was killed. Can you imagine? A happy ending...”
“Doesn’t happen too often, does it?”
“Not lately.”
I had a sudden and overwhelming urge to call my mom.
“Tam?”
“Yeah, Boss?”
“Do you think that maybe, whoever had Kylie might have let her go?”
“What makes you say that?”
“As we were leaving, I thought I saw something in the forest.”
“What kind of something?”
“Movement.”
“Animal?”
“Maybe, but maybe not. I’m leaning towards the maybe not.”
“When were you planning on telling me this?”
“In the car ride to the hospital.” I could feel his glare burn into the side of the face. I tried to not react. “Watch the road,” I said. He gave a heavy sigh. My ex-husband used to do that when I had done something wrong; wrong according to him, that is.
“Is there anything else you would like to tell me?”
I was silent. There were many things I would have liked to tell him, but when it came to him, words were hard to find for some reason.
“You have to start letting me in.”
When it came to work, I didn’t have to say anything- it seemed as though he could read my mind. I suppose I expected him to read my mind in every other instance as well. I also suppose, that maybe he can’t. He is good at his job; he knows what needs to be done at all of the right times. As for our relationship, I will be the first to admit that I am an enigma.
“Molly?”
“I hurt my arm,” I blurted out. I felt like crying, like this was some deep dark secret that I didn’t want anyone to know about. I looked at him with my good eye. He looked at me once then reached over for my good hand.
“We’ll be there in a few minutes,” he said to me. He didn’t let go of my hand until we pulled up by the emergency doors. “I’ll be right back. Stay here.” Tam left me to help the others escort Kylie into the emergency room. In the rearview mirror I saw Kelly pull up with Betsy White. He parked illegally and they both ran inside after the little girl. Following them were several news reporters in their huge top-heavy vans. I got out of the Jeep and gathered the remaining police and security force with strict orders not to let any of those vultures in. I made my way into the chaos. I tried to flag down someone to help me with my arm, but everyone seemed to be preoccupied. My lips were throbbing from talking too much. The pain in my arm had suddenly become very intense and it was clear to me that I really needed help. My breath came heavily.
“I heard you were on your way over here. I thought maybe you had come to your senses.” Melissa’s sweet voice came from behind me.
“What senses?” I asked her.
She just smiled, smirked, and giggled. “You’re welcome. Come one, you’re going into shock.”
“Shock? Nothing can shock me anymore. I’ve seen it all.” I was getting dizzy.
Melissa led me to one of the examining rooms. She sat me down just at the right time. Even though she worked as a morgue technician, she was still a licensed doctor. She took the x-rays that she made of my arm earlier that day and put them to the light. “I don’t know how you did it, but you managed to break your arm in three different places, with smaller fractures around the impact site.” She pointed out the small hairline fractures that seemed to weave themselves throughout my bones. “Two up here, and one down here. There are a few within this space, and a couple more down here. You’re going to need a full cast to stabilize the bones. What did you do? Jump out of an airplane without a parachute?” She turned to me and came up to me face to face, placing another ice bag on my throbbing arm. “Have you told Tam?” she whispered to me. Of all the people I encountered throughout the day, Melissa, whom I see on average two times a month, was the only one who knew about our relationship. We weren’t the best of friends, but friends nonetheless.
“Yes, I told Tam,” I said with as much ‘snotty-ness’ as I could muster.
She over-exaggerated her nod. “I’ll be right back.” She left the room chuckling.
I was sure she was on her way to get him. For some reason, I didn’t think she believed me.
I was alone in the semi-dark room with only the glow of the x-ray board for light. She had left the x-ray up so I decided to take a look at what went on inside of me. “Several fractures,” she had said. “Several” was an understatement. My bones looked like a road map of downtown Milwaukee at the Marquette Interchange. I let my fingers flow over the fissures, followed them along the lines that went everywhere, yet nowhere. The pattern looked so familiar. I’ve stared at so many road maps in my life, they seem the same after a while, especially when you’ve driven all of those roads. I couldn’t understand why I was thinking so hard about this. These were cracks on my bones, not a road map. There was no ethereal entity trying to give me clues by causing my bones to break. I was done with this shit. I needed to sleep. Maybe the vision, the hallucinations would go away with some simple sleep. None of this was real. None of this was real. I sighed and sat back down on the examining table. In a way, I was a bit disappointed. I suppose I could fool myself into thinking otherwise, but I had to stop lying to myself. The truth was in front of me. It was time I got back to reality.
Tam came into the room. He walked straight over to me and kissed me.
“You ok?”
“You say that so often.” I sighed, “I will be.” I looked up at him, his bright brown eyes shone in the dim light. His smile was like soft daisy petals. I was beginning to think I loved him. He brushed the hair from the side of my face. I wanted to melt into his hand. He felt so real. Melissa walked back into the room with Dr. Davis, breaking the spell. I had forgotten about the pain in my arm for just a moment.
“You did quite a number on yourself, Sheriff.” He wasn’t old, maybe in his early forties, but the way he talked reminded me of my grandfather. “Let’s see if we can’t get you patched up and back to work.”
“Does it have to be a full arm cast?”
“Do you want your arm to heal?”
“I’m in the middle of a murder investigation.”
“You are going to need stabilization.”
“If I need to draw my gun, I need to be able to shoot it.”
He looked at me, debating whether or not to play his hand. “I do have the authority to take you out the field completely if you prefer.”
My jaw dropped (painfully I may add), “You wouldn’t.”
“I can. So if you don’t mind, I will do what I can for you, but you need to meet me half way.”
My swollen lip quivered. I decided to keep my mouth shut and go along with the nice doctor. He looked at the x-rays with Melissa. Tam still stood by me, but he was sporting a smirk. I gave him a frown, but I got over it.
“How’s Kylie doing?” I finally asked him.
“She’s ok. She’s very dehydrated and may have some frostbite on her toes. Betsy, however, was given a sedative. She wouldn’t calm down, even after the doctors told her that Kylie was going to be ok.”
“I don’t blame her. Kylie is all that she has.” Tam grunted in agreement. Betsy’s parents died while she was still in high school, her brother was killed some years later by unidentified means and her sister died of cancer just a few years ago. Her husband was killed while in the military just several months after Kylie was born. She has had nothing but heartache over the years, losing one loved one after another. Kylie was her whole life.
Tam put his arm around the shoulder of my good arm. I still had my older sister and brother somewhere in the world. My parents moved away from here a year after I had graduated from high school. I immediately left for bigger and better cities, whereas my parents bought a house near my brother Brian and his wife to help out with their kids. Tina had had triplets. My sister Abby also had kids, but seemed to be a little more capable of raising them with her husband Lou. All of these kids were born so long ago. Abby herself just became a grandma to the sweetest angel in the sky and of course, our mom is there constantly, helping Lucy with the new baby. My mom says it helps to have him around, now that her youngest is gone. I will never learn how painful it is to have one of my children die before me. I feel that I am doing them a favor and keeping them from being born in the first place. They’ll thank me in the end.
“Ok, Molly. Are you ready for some plaster?” asked Dr. Davis.
“There is no way of getting out of this, huh?”
“Nope. In fact, you let this go for far too long already.”
“It just happened yesterday,” I said flatly. I knew I would get yelled at for that, but honestly, I didn’t think anything was really that wrong. I truly thought that it was just a severe bruise. I had no idea I had broken anything.
“Yesterday?”
“Yeah,” I said sheepishly, “and a little knock around from a couple of days ago.”
“What did you do?”
“Well...there was the fall on the file cabinet, and I fell the other day in my office, and then yesterday this girl banged the bathroom door into my arm. That’s it.”
“Molly, you have multiple fractures. Are you sure that’s all you did?”
“Yes, positive. Why?”
“As I said, you have several fractures. It just seems a little odd that a few bumps should result in this kind of injury.”
“See! That’s what I thought! So don’t go yelling at me...” the expression on everyone’s face went suddenly grim.
Dr. Davis walked over to the x-ray again and pointed to several cracks on the humerus bone. “Do see these simple cracks here? When a fracture occurs, these fibrous tissues form and grow around it, acting like an internal suture so that the fracture can heal. These fractures here have several days of fibrous growth. These here are only starting to grow. This information leads me to believe that over the course of the last few weeks, you fractured your arm several times in several different places. Being already damaged, and not getting it checked, may have allowed for further damage to occur.” I just realized that my mouth was open all the while he was talking. ‘Over the course of the last few weeks?’ rang loosely in my mind. Just three days ago I was with my family for the holidays. Oh yeah, and the funeral.
“I swear I did nothing!”
“I knew I should have gone with you,” scowled Tam.
“I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself, thank you,” I sneered back at him.
“The proof is here, Molly. Something happened. But for now I suggest that we get your arm immobilized and stable so that it can heal and you can get back to your crime fighting.”
I am surrounded by lunatics. “Just get it over with, please.”
“Ok. Let me give this to you now for the pain. It should take affect in a few minutes. And then, we’ll stitch up your face.”
“Stitches?”
“Oh yeah. That one above your eye is very deep. And this one here (he pointed to my pip with his pen) will heal crooked if we don’t get it straight.”
I could have sworn I heard a little giggle from him. Payback was a bitch, and this bitch was getting stitches on her face. He gave me the shot of the miracle pain reliever, collected the x-rays and other paperwork, and shot me again with a sideways glance that left me with goose bumps. Meanwhile, no one said a word.
“All right, let’s go.”
Tam started to follow me. “Can you check on Kylie? See if she is ready to talk about the guy who took her?” His face showed no emotion. I think he’s mad at me.
“There’s a sketch artist from Tom’s office with her now.”
“Oh. Ok.” I had nothing more to say. I shut off my ‘give a damn’ mode for a minute and decided to concentrate on me until I was out of the presence of Dr. ‘Dull’ Davis. Melissa seemed to be enjoying my pain, however. She had a constant smirk on her face since the first time she saw me here. “We are totally even,” I hissed at her. “Go home!” That just fueled her smile. I’m glad someone was enjoying my misery.
Dr. Davis gave me a compromise- I had to wear a thin fiberglass cast from my shoulder to my fingers. He said I could still work, but I was not allowed to use my firearm, being that I am right handed and under heavy sedation.
“How does that feel?”
“Oh, fine.” I tried, but I was no longer capable of sarcasm.
“I meant the cast.”
“That’s what I thought I meant.” As Dr. Davis cleaned up his area, I took inventory of my senses: nothing. And it felt so good. No anxiety, no fear, no pain, no sorrow. No cares or worries. I wondered how long I could keep this up, legally.
I heard mumbles around me. The faces in the room all turned their attention to the hallway, so I did too. Tam ran out of the door, followed by Dr. Davis. Melissa took a hold of my arm. “Molly,” she whispered to me. “I’m going to take you to one of the rooms so you can lie down, ok?”
“Yeah, whatever.” S’all cool, I thought, until we walked out into the hallway. Melissa tried to divert my attention, but I could see what was going on. There was a commotion down in Kylie’s room. At first I thought maybe there was a security breach and one of the television reporters snuck in, but I didn’t see any police rushing, just doctors and nurses. And in Tam’s arms struggled a distraught Betsy. My heart sank when Betsy screamed.
“Mel?” I managed to squeek out.
“Nothing you can do anything about it, Molly. Come on, let’s get you into a bed...” I don’t remember how I got out of Melissa’s grasp but I slowly became aware that I was moving towards Kylie’s room. It felt like I was moving in slow motion, but I arrived there fairly quickly because Melissa had to run to keep up with me. I moved past Tam who didn’t see me at first, but I could see the look on his face as he fought to keep a hold of Betsy. I stepped though the door to Kylie’s ER room just in time to hear the flat-line. Betsy matched the pitch. Every emotion that I had tried to suppress came flooding through my veins. The vortex was back, swirling and spinning around me: twirling, whirling, rushing around me. It crated a tornado around me, sucking me in and twisting me in place, spinning my head 360 degrees around and around. The room stood still, I knew it; my feet were still connected to the floor. It was me that was caught inside; around, around, and around I spun. It was then that I stopped, bent over and vomited. Fortunately for me, I missed puddle of sick when I landed on the floor and passed out...
