so hard she could barely catch her breath. I found Jimmy b-back in the kids’ bedroom with Noah, who was screaming, screaming…” She squeezed her eyes shut, but she could feel her heartbeat in her temples. “The belt was still in Jimmy’s hand.”
When she opened them, she found the doctor’s eyes riveted to hers, his face rigid with fury. But he didn’t say a word. So she looked at the baby instead, which only tangled up her emotions even more. “How I managed not to lose the baby, I do not know, because I started yelling at Jimmy like a crazy woman, telling him to get out of my house and to never come back, that our marriage was over, that if he ever hurt one of my babies again, I would kill him. I had no idea….”
She shook her head, still disbelieving after all this time. “He took the car, eventually landing in some bar he’d never been to before, where he got stinking drunk and picked a fight with somebody he shouldn’t’ve. Guy hit him back, Jimmy’s head caught the edge of a table when he fell. By all accounts, it shouldn’t’ve been enough to kill him….” Her stomach was shaking up a storm; she willed it to settle down.
After a moment, Dr. Logan stood and approached the bed. He didn’t say anything at first, like maybe he was afraid to, but his set mouth and wrinkled brow told Maddie probably more than she wanted to know. He simply stood beside her, his hands crammed in his back pockets, watching the baby for several seconds, until his breath suddenly left him in a great rush. “And now I suppose you blame yourself for his death?”
She thought on that for a bit, then said, “Not as much as I did at first. I mean, yes, I was the one who told him to get out, but it wasn’t me who told him to drive way the heck out to some bar he’d never been in before, pick a fight with a local twice his size. And it wasn’t me who’d made a mess of my life, or took out my frustrations on a five-year-old child.”
The side door buzzer went off, making both of them jump.
“That’ll be my first victim,” he said, finally looking at her. “The office is right next door, so all you have to do is thump on the wall if you need anything—”
“I’ll be fine,” she reassured him with a shaky smile. “You just go on now.”
He touched the baby’s head with two fingers, then left the room.
“Well, hey, Alden,” Ryan said, coming up with a grin for the elderly man sitting in the waiting room, a grin which he then shared with Alden’s Lancaster’s pinchy-faced daughter Ruthanne sitting beside him, her black patent leather purse clutched tightly on top of even more tightly clutched together knees. The old man was just in for a checkup after a bout with pneumonia he’d gone through a few weeks ago. “Come on in, come on in… How’re you feeling?”
But then it was as if something just shut right down inside of him, because Ryan barely heard his patient’s “Not too bad, considerin’,” as the pair followed him into the office, barely said two words to the old man as he checked his vitals, listened to his lungs and heart. Wasn’t until he caught the odd looks the two of them were giving him that he realized he wasn’t acting like his normal self.
Which might have something to do with the fact that he sure as hell wasn’t feeling like his normal self.
Ryan fixed a smile to his face, dragged his bedside manner back out on display, and got through the appointment as best he could. But after they left, rather than calling in the next patient—Sadie Metcalf and her chronic psoriasis—he decided maybe he’d better take a minute to collect his thoughts.
The fifty-year-old rolling chair behind Dr. Patterson’s oak desk creaked mightily when Ryan slumped down into it, his palm cradling his cheek. It wasn’t as if he’d never heard stories like Maddie’s before. Or borne witness to the effects of neglect, ignorance, abuse on mind and body. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been fully aware he was wading into treacherous waters, encouraging her to talk. Still, it wasn’t the tale itself that had left him so shaken—she hadn’t said anything he hadn’t expected to hear in any case—it was the telling of it.
The way she kept that soft, raspy voice of hers steady, even though her hands trembled with the emotion brought on by freshly remembered wounds. The way she’d looked at him—the few times she did—as if daring him to judge her. Not that she was asking for absolution for the decisions she’d made, not even those he imagined she’d be the first to admit hadn’t been any too smart.
Why he should be feeling something like admiration for a woman who made no apologies for loving a man who had left her with nothing but a pile of debts and three children, he didn’t know. Yet he did. She’d given that love freely, unselfishly—the illogical, irrepressible, irresistible love of youth, Ryan mused sourly. And now, even though that love had left her in a fix and a half, her pride still balked at having to ask strangers for help.
Like a stubborn child, Ryan thought, snapping upright and rubbing his eyes. A stubborn, courageous child with the soul of a woman, a woman who deserved far more than life had given her thus far.
A woman who deserved the kind of man who would put her first.
Who could offer her more than dreams.
A rap on the office door disrupted Ryan’s brooding. He got up, opened the door to look down into Sadie Metcalf’s puzzled smile. “Don’t mean to rush you, Dr. Ryan, but Alden left some time ago…?”
“Yes, yes…sorry,” Ryan said, standing aside to let Sadie in, at the same time pushing a whole bunch of thoughts he shouldn’t even be having out.
A tiny window over the tub let in enough light for Maddie to see her reflection in the medicine cabinet over the pedestal sink, upon which she now leaned heavily, frowning at herself. The tile floor chilled the bottoms of her bare feet; she barely noticed. The shakiness from having told Dr. Logan her story had already begun to ease some, mainly because there seemed little point in dwelling on things she couldn’t change. She would grieve for what she’d lost every day of her life, but her heart told her that her marriage would’ve died anyway, even if Jimmy hadn’t. Her love for him sure had, although she’d resisted admitting that to herself for some time after the fact.
Oh, Lord, it was all too much to think about right now. She finally got around to brushing her teeth, which is why she’d come into the bathroom to begin with. When she finished, though, she squinted at her reflection, her mind wandering off in a different direction entirely.
Why on earth would anybody call her “pretty”? All she saw was a redhead complexion without the benefit of having red hair, a mouth that was no more than a slit in her face, a nose that was too long, eyes that were too wide apart. And a figure? She wouldn’t know a curve if it bit her.
And, no, she was not feeling sorry for herself. Those were just the facts of the matter.
Maddie let out a sigh, then shuffled back to bed. Oh, well…if nothing else, she supposed it was still a nice ego boost to know that some man, somewhere, found her worth looking at. And since ego boosts came few and far between in her life, she figured she might as well make the most of this one. Even if it had come secondhand, like her clothes, through a source who didn’t see her as a woman at all.
Which, she thought on a yawn as she felt herself drift off, she supposed was just as well, all things considered.
Ryan’s last appointment of the day—removing a dozen stitches from Roy Farver’s forehead where renovating his hen-house had led to a run-in with a wily two-by-four—had been gone for a half-hour or so before he heard the thumps and thuds and animated conversation
