With Every Breath

by Beverly Bird

  Maddie looked after the Pathfinder, bemused. For the first time in a long while, she realized that she was itching for her camera. She’d love to photograph his eyes. Just his eyes, she thought, fading out the rest of his features. The image that brought to mind made her shiver slightly.

  She finally went back to the phone booth and actually found a psychologist right on the island. She punched in the number, and the phone was picked up on the second ring.

  "Leslie Mendehlson," a smooth voice answered. If she had thought about it, Maddie realized that she should have guessed a psychologist wouldn’t be So busy on Candle that she’d either need or could afford a receptionist.

  "Hi," she began. "My name is Madeline Brogan and I—"

  "Maddie!"

  Instantly, without warning, her heart thundered.

  She knew her, Maddie realized, from before. Leslie Mendehlson? The name didn’t ring any bells. She could understand not remembering an acquaintance. She wouldn’t have expected to. But this woman’s tone was friendly, warm, closer than that.

  "I’m so glad you got in touch," the woman went on.

  "Actually I ... I’m c-calling for professional reasons." Then she realized how that must sound, given her past. "I wanted to talk to you about my little boy."

  The woman’s laugh was musical. "I didn’t think it was about you. You seem to be talking just fine now."

  Sort of, Maddie thought. Not quite.

  She felt as though the sidewalk shifted beneath her feet. She definitely knew this woman—or she should have.

  "I am," she managed. "I’m fine."

  "And probably wondering how good I am if I’m still working on Candle Island, right?" Leslie Mendehlson laughed without rancor. "Actually, I’m in Jonesport three days a week now, then I come back here on Thursday and Friday and the weekends. Not, mind you, that there aren’t several people on the island who could

  use psychological help." She laughed again. "It’s just that very few of them are willing to admit it."

  Maddie recovered a little. The woman’s candor made it easier. "I think I’ve met a few of those," she admitted.

  "Cassie Diehl comes to mind, and you even ran into her mother at the market, or so I hear. Now there’s a real Welcome Wagon."

  Maddie remembered the dour woman in the grocery store and managed to laugh outright. She wasn’t at all surprised to find out that she was Cassie Diehl’s mother.

  "Angus, too," Maddie supplied. "And Gina Gallen. She stopped by my rental house this morning."

  "Ah, yes. Gina should definitely still be seeing me. Unfortunately, she’s given me a pretty wide berth since the court let her off the hook."

  The court? Maddie was both curious and appalled. Apparently, even the island psychologist wasn’t very reticent.

  Leslie Mendehlson seemed to realize her breach of ethics. She changed the subject quickly. "Why don’t you come in now? Bring your little boy and we’ll get reacquainted. I’ve nothing on my schedule until two-thirty. I’m still in the same place, right behind the diner."

  "That would be fine."

  Maddie hung up. She remembered seeing the diner yesterday. She was reasonably sure she could find Leslie Mendehlson’s office. There would probably be a sign or some such thing. But just to be on the safe side, she checked the address in the phone book.

  The office turned out to be a thrusting appendage stuck to the back of a square, gray, two-story building. An alley ran between it and the diner. When the woman opened the door, Maddie realized with a shimmy of gratified surprise that she did remember her.

  Nothing was abnormal about her memory. Nothing at all.

  Leslie Mendehlson was a rangy woman of indiscriminate age, tall enough that Maddie had to look up at her, and she wasn’t short. She wore tight, close-cropped curls and wire-rimmed glasses that seemed too small for her big face. Her smile was sincere, and Maddie sighed unconsciously, letting herself be hugged.

  "It really is good to see you again," Dr. Mendehlson said.

  Maddie nodded and eased away from her. "Thanks. This is Josh."

  Leslie Mendehlson looked down at him. "Hello, young man. It’s good to meet you as well."

  To the woman’s credit, Maddie thought, she showed no outward reaction when Josh failed to answer.

  Dr. Mendehlson ushered them inside. There was a toy box in the waiting room, and she set about finding something that Josh might consider interesting. She bypassed some dolls, then a few busy-toddler contraptions, before she settled on a battery-powered robot.

  "Have a go at it, Josh," she said. "Your mom and I will be right in that room over there."

  Maddie followed the doctor into the inner office. "Thank you," she said quietly. "I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing, but I always try to converse with him as though he’ll answer me. I remember being so frustrated when people ignored me."

  The woman sat at her desk and waved Maddie into a chair. "Just out of curiosity, what finally brought you around? Did your aunt continue your therapy in Florida?"

  Maddie smiled fleetingly. "No. She gave me an old camera."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  Maddie lifted her hands and mimed snapping pictures. "I was able to communicate through the pictures, to say things. Then one day the words just sort of fell into place again, too."

  Dr. Mendehlson nodded and smiled. "You kept at it, obviously. From all accounts, you’re very talented." Maddie was surprised, flattered, then uncomfortable talking about herself. "Unfortunately, Josh doesn’t seem to share my fascination with photography," she answered. Then she blurted, "Is the silence hereditary?" That, she thought, was the biggest source of her gnawing guilt. Not only had she allowed Rick to nearly take Josh, but she’d passed on her own instinctive response to trauma. She watched Dr. Mendehlson tilt her head to the side.

  "I would have to say so," she agreed after a thoughtful moment, "if only in the respect that intelligence is largely hereditary. I’ve done a good bit of reading on the subject over the years. I admit your problem fascinated me. And it seems to occur predominantly in intelligent, creative children. Maddie, you’d be amazed at how truly little modem science knows about the physiology of the human brain. The function and responsibility of better than half of our gray matter is still a mystery to us. What does this portion do? What happens if we cut out that lump there? For obvious reasons, it’s difficult to learn that sort of thing from a cadaver."

  Maddie nodded, surprised. "Of course. I hadn’t thought of that."

  "We can remove all sorts of things from an inert body, and get no reaction at all. At least, we devoutly hope we don’t."

  Maddie smiled weakly.

  "Largely we’re left with instances like you and Josh, and we try to learn what we can from them. I have to

  tell you, I find this extremely interesting, that your son has developed the same self-protective reflex. What started it for him?"

  Maddie looked out the office’s glass window into the waiting room. Josh was playing intently with the robot. "His father."

  She glanced back in time to think that Dr. Mendehlson looked almost unduly intrigued. "And where is your husband now?" she asked.

  "Ex-husband," Maddie said shortly. "And your guess is as good as mine."

  This time Dr. Mendehlson’s brows very definitely went up. "I think you’d better start at the beginning." Maddie ran a hand through her hair in a gesture almost as nerve-ridden as her unruly tongue. "Rick was ... a control freak," she began. "He’d been in the service at one point, and everything around our house had to be square, tight, perfect. He’d scream at Josh if the poor kid bumped into a table and set it slightly askew. He’d spit-shine everything, and when he was done, he literally didn’t want us to move for fear of messing things up." Maddie ran her tongue along her lower lip, thinking. "It got to the point where I knew Josh and I had to leave. It got to the point where Rick’s behavior was more detrimental to him than our separation might be.

  "There were other things, of cou
rse, but the cleaning is the best example. He wanted me to stop working, too. Well, actually, he wanted me to work, to take my pictures, but only right there around the house. He didn’t want to give up my income, of course."

  "That’s unrealistic," Dr. Mendehlson murmured.

  "A bit," Maddie agreed, sarcastically. "Anyway, I finally left and filed for divorce. And then he started . . . following me. But I could never actually prove that he was stalking me."

  "Florida is one of the states with a law against that," Leslie Mendehlson said.

  Maddie nodded. "But Rick and I sort of fell into a gray area. Everywhere he’d turn up was a place he had every right or reason to be. It was just frequent enough to be eerie, not frequent enough that the authorities would take me seriously. And until that point, he’d never physically harmed us, so I had no grounds for a restraining order."

  "Did he hurt Josh eventually?"

  Maddie winced and forced herself to breathe when the air wanted to get caught in her tightening throat again. "No. To my knowledge, he never actually laid a hand on Josh. It was ... a stranger."

  "He hurt a stranger?" Leslie Mendehlson clarified. Maddie dragged breath in. "He killed a stranger. Rick killed a police officer. Josh was with him. And he hasn’t said a blessed w-word since."

  And that was very interesting, Leslie Mendehlson thought. She sorted through it, making comparisons. A beloved authority figure fatally molesting another authority figure; it was the same premise as one’s father killing one’s mother.

  "Go on," she urged. "Please."

  "When I filed for divorce, I fought Rick for custody with everything I had," Maddie explained. "But he still got some visitation. It ended up that he got to take Josh every Saturday, and every other week he kept him overnight and returned him to me on Sunday afternoon. But then one week he called and said he wanted to see him on Friday and Saturday. He said that he wanted to take him to a Marlins game on Friday night." Maddie took a deep breath. "By some fluke, I noticed in the paper that the Marlins were playing in Atlanta that night. I read it just about five minutes after Rick picked Josh up. It wasn’t a home game."

  Something cold slid down her spine all over again at the breath-robbing horror that had hit her in that moment of understanding. Josh was in danger. She had known it instinctively. It had been a miracle, an absolute miracle, that there had been anything she could do, or that she had even realized that something was wrong in the first place. She wasn’t a sports fan. Rick had gambled on that. She had just sat down with the newspaper and a cup of coffee because . . . well, because. And there it was, Marlins coverage on the first page of the sports section, with a little window giving the details of the game that night.

  If Rick hadn’t chosen that particular lie, if he had kept his visitation to its usual routine, she never would have known that anything was amiss until it was too late. But at least a cop would still be alive.

  "The police wouldn’t help at first," she went on, her voice becoming vaguely strangled again. "They said I must have misunderstood. I knew I hadn’t. So ... I lied. I told them Rick had taken Josh against my wishes and against the custody order. I had to do something, had to make them move fast. I told them that he’d struck me and forced Josh into his car. I didn’t know ... it was spooky, a coincidence, that he really did have a gun on him. Or maybe not. He was so ... so gung-ho military.

  "The authorities put an APB out on his car, and two of their officers pulled him over. Rick was going to run with Josh. They found suitcases in the car, and there were two plane tickets to Nassau in one of them." Her hand went up again. Her fingers tunneled through her hair. "Anyway, when the first cop ordered him to get out of the car, Rick did. But then he fired, and the cop went down. By some miracle—" Another miracle, she thought. So many of them. "—it was the police car that Rick took off in. He was closer to it. He panicked

  and jumped in and raced off. He left Josh in his own car."

  "So he’s being sought."

  Maddie made a bitter sound. "Even the FBI’s after him now. Finally." Too late, she thought. The damage to Josh was already done. "They ended up finding the police car several days later in a convenience-store parking lot up in Volusia County, near Daytona Beach. No sign of Rick, though. They think he might have gone to Nassau anyway, but I’m not sure why. That’s certainly not what a sane man would do after leaving those tickets behind."

  "If a sane man would kill a cop at all," Leslie pointed out. "And you don’t think he’ll look for you here?" Maddie gave a tight smile. "It’s highly unlikely. I never mentioned Candle Island to him." A shadow passed over her eyes. "When Josh stopped talking. Aunt Susan said that he reminded her of me back then, when she drove up here to pick me up after my parents disappeared, and it gave me the idea."

  Disappeared? A red flag popped up in Leslie Mendehlson’s head and waved urgently. That was certainly a curious way of putting it.

  "It’s perfect, really," Maddie went on, "with only the ferry for access, and nearly a continent away from Florida and the Bahamas."

  "If your ex-husband shows up, I doubt if Joe Gallen will agree with you," Dr. Mendehlson answered wryly. "Joe likes to keep things quiet here. I doubt if he’d be overjoyed to greet a cop-killer on his turf."

  Maddie felt an odd jolt. "Joe Gallen?"

  "Our esteemed chief of police. I’d thought you'd met him. Maybe our rumor mill is slipping its cogs."

  "No, I did. I just.. She hesitated. "He’s married to Gina?" She was moderately surprised at the way everything

  slid and settled down inside her, as though she was disappointed.

  Leslie Mendehlson’s expression flattened. "Not anymore." She stood up, glancing at her watch. "I’d really like to see Josh if you’ll agree to it."

  Maddie nodded. "I was hoping you would. You know, he seems to like Angus. I thought maybe that would help, in conjunction with therapy, of course."

  Dr. Mendehlson smiled. "Old Angus. He certainly isn’t inclined to put any pressure on anyone, is he?" "That’s what I thought."

  She flipped over a page of her calendar. "How about tomorrow afternoon? Three-thirty?"

  Maddie scowled. "I thought I’d give him some time to get settled in here first."

  Dr. Mendehlson nodded thoughtfully. "There’s a valid point. Next Thursday then, when I come back to the island, same time? In the meantime, be careful not to coddle him too much. I know the temptation is strong, but it’s not in his best interest, Maddie. Don’t make too many allowances for his silence. Do things as you’ve always done them. You don’t want to enable him, to make it easy for him to remain mute."

  Maddie grimaced. "Like not giving him lemon cheesecake for breakfast when I’ve always insisted upon oatmeal?"

  Leslie Mendehlson nodded. "That’s exactly the sort of thing I mean. In his mind, it’s like you’re rewarding him. His father did a terrible thing, and Josh’s silence is his way of dealing with it. He’s retreating to the safety inside himself, a safety he can trust, maybe the only thing he can really trust at this point in time."

  "He can trust me."

  Leslie Mendehlson looked at her levelly. "No. Not really. You’ve got to remember that he loved and

  trusted your ex-husband, too, and look where that got him. He’s probably even afraid that you’re going to turn into a monster at any given time as well."

  "But we’ve always been close!" Maddie protested. "Much closer than he and Rick were."

  "All the more reason why the possibility of your changing terrifies him."

  "I see," Maddie said quietly. She did, but she didn’t like it.

  "In any event, if Josh feels too safe and comfortable inside himself, he’ll never come out. If you start giving him lemon cheesecake, you’re effectively making his hiding place a good place."

  Maddie nodded reluctantly. It made sense.

  "Keep to your old routine as much as possible, given this change of scenery," Leslie Mendehlson went on. "If you’ve always worked in the mornings, then keep
working in the mornings. Don’t alter your schedule to stick close to him. Except..." The psychologist trailed off, thinking. "I’m considering you and that first camera. Does Josh like animals?"

  Maddie thought about it. "As much as any child does, I guess. He’s never really had a pet. Aunt Susan gave us a kitten once, but Rick said it was dirty. It disappeared. To tell you the truth, I guess even then I suspected that I didn’t want to know where it might have gone."

  And there, Leslie Mendehlson reflected, was just another way of hiding. She was encouraged that given Maddie Brogan’s tendency toward such behavior, she was still forthright and determined enough to seek help for her son.

  This was one tough lady, she thought, a true survivor. And there was the double-edged sword. A survivor would do anything to keep on going without pain . . . even hide, albeit in a more subtle way than Josh had chosen.

  Leslie thought about the rumors she’d picked up on, and wondered just how much Maddie Brogan did remember.

  "Then why not another kitten?" she suggested. "Assuming you’ve no real objection to having a pet in the house, that might be a tremendous help in reaching Josh. You’d be amazed at the effect taking care of an animal can have."

  "I’d try anything," Maddie said fervently.

  Dr. Mendehlson’s smile softened. "I believe your old friend Dolores Carlson has a litter. You could try giving her a call." She watched Maddie’s face closely. "Otherwise, there’s an SPCA over in Jonesport."

  "I’ll try Dolores first." My old friend? Well, Maddie thought, the way things were panning out, she’d recognize her, too, once she saw her.

  She went back to the waiting room and collected Josh. Dr. Mendehlson hugged her again briefly. "I’ll see you next week."

  As they were getting back in the car, Maddie glanced over her shoulder at the diner. The Pathfinder was there.