by Edie Claire
THE MUD SISTERS
Copyright © 2012 by Edie Claire
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Dedication
This novel is dedicated to all my crazy, big-hearted, fun-loving friends in the Mayfield High School classes of the early 1980s, in loving memory of John Edward Elder (December 15, 1962–July 5, 2012), who epitomized the best in all of us.
Chapter One
The atmosphere in the emergency department waiting room hung thick with a volatile mixture of anxiety, boredom, and aggravation. A dozen people huddled in plastic chairs with their coats still on, warding off the icy gust that struck them with each opening of the automatic doors to the parking lot. A small boy ran unchecked from one end of the room to the other, strewing orange cracker crumbs like a jet trail and chortling each time his leaps onto the doormat brought another blast of snow swirling inside. The sound of a television no one was watching droned on like a persistent mosquito, punctuated by the occasional hooting cheer of a studio audience.
From her position in the staff area behind the triage window, Teagan surveyed the crowd with sympathy. Everyone hurried to emergency rooms; yet for any whose condition fell short of dire, time slowed to a crawl once they arrived. She moved up to the window to speak to the little boy just as an elderly woman grasped him by the arm and sat him forcibly down beside her. Several wan faces looked up hopefully toward the new figure behind the glass, eager for any sign that their deliverance had come.
Teagan was sorry to disappoint. But she was not a doctor; she was not even a nurse. She was a social worker, and a rookie one at that. Lighting a fire under the ample rear end of Dr. Sam “Shoot-the-Bull” Sorenson, whose legendary sluggishness was responsible for this particular backlog, was not within her job description.
Which was a shame, because she would have enjoyed it.
“Teagan?”
The charge nurse who had summoned her appeared in the hallway outside the triage room, rolling a clanking piece of medical equipment across the tile floor. Teagan turned from the window and approached her. “Another Jane Doe,” the older woman said with exasperation, cocking her head in the direction of room number three.
Teagan’s eyebrows rose. In the four months she had worked at Northside General, this was the first unidentified female patient she had heard of, much less encountered personally.
“She just got back from radiology,” the nurse continued as she moved. “Severe head injury, hypothermia, probably a broken arm. Domestic violence, most likely. She’s been alert the last hour or so, but she doesn’t know who she is or what’s going on, and of course she’s got no ID.”
The woman’s face and voice were expressionless, but her unspoken message was clear: Some idiot woman got mixed up with some he-man nut job and nearly got herself killed. Now go figure out who she is so registration can get the paperwork moving!
Teagan knew better than to ascribe the nurse’s apparent lack of empathy to unkindness. She had seen the same woman cry bitter tears over an elderly assault victim just yesterday. Facing the continual stream of human tragedy an inner-city ER produced was tough on a caregiver; the tendency to judge, a common defense mechanism. If, by any convolution of logic, the suffering could be considered the patient’s own fault… Well, at least it wasn’t yours.
Teagan cast a glance at the room in question. “How was she brought in? Was there anyone with her?”
“Nope. She came alone, by ambulance,” the nurse answered, opening the door across the hall and whisking the wheeled contraption over its threshold. “Some passerby found her rolled in a blanket and dumped in Riverview Park, unconscious. She’s lucky she didn’t freeze to death. The police were here and left, but they’ll be back again now that she’s awake.”
“Do you think she’s up to talking with me?”
The nurse let out a snort. “Oh, she can talk, all right.”
Translation: Look out. She’s hell on wheels.
The nurse released the door. It clipped the trailing corner of the cart with a bang, then clicked shut.
Teagan clutched her clipboard with its empty patient intake form and let a shy smile escape her lips. She had been at work only half an hour this morning and had already been accosted with two supposed “emergencies,” both of which were, in her opinion, trivial administrative issues. The woman in room three, on the other hand, was exactly the kind of challenge for which she had left her job in corporate HR.
Why she found such work stimulating, God only knew. Her husband joked that her passion for the underdog was a compulsion. Pathological or not, one master's degree in social work and over $30,000 shelled out to the University of Pittsburgh later, here she was.
She reached for the handle, rapped her knuckles lightly on the door, and swung it open.
A woman about Teagan’s own age lay on the bed, her head and one arm wrapped in gauze, her face blotched and puffy. Her eyelids were closed, but not as if she were sleeping. The woman appeared to be squeezing her lids shut purposefully, like a small child attempting to disappear.
Teagan took a few steps inside the room. “Hello,” she began warmly. “My name is Teagan. I’m with hospital social services. I understand that you’ve had a head injury, and it’s left you a little disoriented. I’m sorry.”
The eyes remained closed; the reply, sarcastic. “A little disoriented? That’s rich. Try completely clueless. Try totally freaked out!”
Teagan’s breath caught in her throat. She moved closer.
That voice.
She knew it. She had heard it before. Husky, yet silky. Inarguably feminine. She took a fresh look at the unmade-up, swollen face on the pillow, and her heart skipped a beat.
Long buried images raced through her brain. Laughter. Sun. Water. Shining circles of gold…
She folded limply, dropping her weight onto the foot of the mattress, her gaze transfixed by the small face on the pillow.
The patient’s eyes flew open. “What are you staring at?” she asked irritably, grasping at her blankets. “What am I to you people, some kind of freak show?”
Teagan had seen eyes like that only once in her life. Irises of topaz. Uniformly golden, not nearly dark enough to call brown. The color was rare.
“What is your problem?” the patient demanded testily.
There could be no doubt. No matter how long it had been.
Teagan’s voice came out a croak.
“Jamie?”
Chapter Two
Summer, Indian Lake, Pennsylvania, 1997
Teagan couldn’t tell where she was. She knew she had made a mistake, that something bad had happened. She just wasn’t sure what.
She couldn’t see. Blackness surrounded her. A numbing cold crept into her lean, twelve-year-old body, seeping deeper and deeper toward her rapidly beating heart. Why couldn’t she move? Why couldn’t she think straight?
Something was missing. Something she needed, something she had to have. Its absence loomed larger and larger, growing until the need itself assaulted her—an insidious, clawing vacuum that sucked painfully deep inside her chest.
Air.
She was underwater.
She was drowning.
Panic seized her, but the rush of adrenaline proved no use. Where was the surface? She had no sense of direction, no sense, even, of her own body. She couldn’t feel her limbs. Her chest felt as though it would imp
lode, as if her ribs would at any second collapse inward and crush her thudding heart. The compulsion to act, to do something, was fierce—pushing her, driving her, begging her. Yet there was nothing she could do.
Nothing.
She would die.
A sharp pain tore at her scalp, and the contact jogged some dormant part of her brain. All at once she was aware of her arms and legs—they were being squeezed, pulled, tugged. Each sensation was painful, but none could distract from the agony that plagued her chest. Her lungs were flaming, bursting, boiling. A curtain of light accosted her still-closed eyes. Cool air prickled her skin.
She heard a voice.
“Teag! Wake up! If you don’t wake up and breathe right now, I swear to God, I’ll kill you! Do you hear me? Wake up!”
There was water inside her. Flooding her. In her chest, her throat. It rose within her like a tidal wave, and involuntarily she clenched her body into a ball and released the fluid onto the ground in a spasm of gagging and coughing.
The voice swore.
Teagan’s eyes opened.
Another girl leaned in close above her, her soft face pale with fright, her ordinarily light-blond hair dripping brown with lake water. “Are you all right?” Jamie asked, her voice cracking with emotion.
Teagan nodded. She coughed some more.
Jamie sat back on the muddy bank with a flop. She dropped her head between her knees, then turned back to Teagan with an accusatory look. “You scared the crap out of me! What was that? What were you trying to do?”
Teagan looked into her friend’s bizarre golden eyes. When combined with a smile, they could be strikingly beautiful. But when Jamie was angry, their color could be off-putting, almost creepy.
Teagan shivered, though not from fear. She was cold. “It was supposed to be a back flip,” she explained, teeth chattering.
“Back flip my ass,” Jamie retorted, pushing the drooping straps of her faded, too-large swimsuit back on top of her thin shoulders. She was breathing as heavily as Teagan was, and her voice was still unsteady. “All you did was twist around and slam your back against the edge of the dock. You fell into the water like a rock, and you didn’t come up again. Were you trying to give me a heart attack?”
Teagan didn’t answer. She wasn’t used to making mistakes, especially not dangerous ones. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Jamie’s eyes turned distant, and her voice dropped. “I couldn’t see anything in that water, Teagan. You were at the bottom, just lying there. If I hadn’t felt your hair with my feet, I might never have—” her voice broke off.
Teagan tensed. She didn’t want to think about it.
“You were limp when I pulled you out,” Jamie continued, her tone angry again. “I didn’t even know if you were breathing. I just started jerking you around and then you coughed… Like I know how to do mouth-to-mouth! I don’t know any of that stuff. You could have died just now! Do you know that?”
Teagan’s coughs were subsiding, but her lungs still burned. She was dizzy. “I just got the breath knocked out of me for a second,” she insisted. “I would have been all right.”
Jamie’s eyes widened, then narrowed to a glare. “Yeah, you’d have been fine!” She stood with a jerk, smacking ineffectually at the mud-smeared seat of her swimsuit. “Whatever. I’m out of here.”
Teagan’s heart began to race anew. “No!” she pleaded, squelching what was left of her ego. Despite her show of bravado, she was scared witless; she didn’t want to be alone. “Don’t go. My lungs are on fire and my shoulders are killing me—that really hurt.”
Jamie’s gaze met hers, and Teagan’s face begged silently for understanding. Yes, she had been bragging all summer about the lifesaving course she had aced last spring. Yes, she had probably been really obnoxious about it; and yes, Jamie had every right to be miffed now. But Teagan was supposed to be the one doing the saving—not nearly drowning herself trying to show off!
The whole thing was mortifying.
Jamie looked back at her friend’s humbled visage, and her expression softened.
Teagan’s shoulders slumped with relief. Jamie did understand.
They had known each other only since the beginning of the summer. But while most girls their age whiled away their vacation listening to music and giggling about boys, the two of them had quickly discovered a shared thirst for adventure—the desire to explore, to imagine. They had investigated every inch of Indian Lake in Teagan’s grandfather’s canoe, all the while dreaming up tall tales of jungles, cannibals, and love-struck Polynesian princes. They had other similarities, like being raised by single mothers, but they had spent precious little time dwelling on that.
They had simply been having fun.
Until now.
Jamie turned and knelt on the ground beside Teagan. “Sit up a second,” she commanded. “Let me look at your back.”
Teagan scooted around in the mud.
Jamie blew out a breath. “You scraped your shoulders up pretty bad. You need about half a box of bandages, and you’re filthy besides. You want to go to my house? It’s closer.”
“No,” Teagan said quickly. The Renicks were nice people, but a bit too attentive for her tastes. Jamie’s foster mother would probably coat half Teagan’s body in iodine and then the foster father would insist on driving her back to her grandparents’ house—which would only call more attention to the fact that she had done something monumentally stupid. She would much rather suck it up and slink back home unnoticed. “We can go to my house. I can paddle okay.”
“Of course you can,” Jamie retorted, rolling her eyes. Nevertheless, she crossed to the beached canoe, shoved it into the water, and held it for Teagan to step into. “You’d better not pass out on me once we get on the lake,” she warned. “Because I’m not saving your sorry butt again—once a day’s enough.”
Teagan settled into the front of the boat with a wince. She was still light headed. Paddling was going to hurt something fierce, but it was better than walking the long way around the shoreline.
“Your back looks awful,” Jamie commented shortly, pushing them off into the water.
Teagan didn’t answer. She picked up a paddle and started to push, then nearly dropped it. Her shoulders felt as though someone had tried to rip both arms out of their sockets. She pulled her elbow tightly back to her side.
The paddle came out of her hand as Jamie grabbed it and laid it down in the boat. “Just sit still,” she commanded, pushing her own paddle expertly into the water. “We’ll get there some year.”
Teagan stared straight ahead over the lake. It was a haul back to her house. Jamie would be exhausted, doing all the work herself.
She thought you were going to die.
The August sun reflected hot off the water, and the sticky air was devoid of any breeze. Still, Teagan shivered. She had forgotten how recently Jamie had lost her mother, the only family she knew. Had she been thinking of that when Teagan disappeared under the water? Had she been afraid that her new best friend, too, would never come back?
A chill swept down Teagan’s spine. The biting coldness cut deep.
“Jamie?” she asked quietly, not turning around.
“Yeah?” came the answer. Terse. Guarded. Still out of breath.
“Thanks.”
For several seconds, the only sound Teagan could hear was the lapping of the paddle and the far-off honks of some agitated water fowl. She stole a glance over her shoulder, just long enough to see Jamie’s jaws clenched tight, her face red, her eyes brimming with moisture.
Teagan looked straight ahead again.
“You’re welcome,” Jamie answered.
Chapter Three
The present
Northside General's latest "Jane Doe" stared down at her hands. They looked pale. Her left arm was swathed in gauze; for some reason she couldn’t lift it. She picked up the small pocket mirror that had appeared on the mattress next to her and gazed at her reflection. She saw a puffy, tired face wit
h funky yellow eyes and bandages for hair. She laid the mirror back down.
It was a bad dream. There was no other explanation. How else could she be magically transported to a place where she knew no one, not even herself? She was real, she was sure of that. It was everything else that was screwed up.
She didn’t know where she was supposed to be. She only knew it wasn’t here. She wanted to get up and leave, but her body was too weak to walk and she had no idea where to walk to.
Why not? What was wrong with her?
Her heart began to pound. She couldn’t defend herself here; she wasn’t in control. She was as vulnerable as a newborn kitten, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
Through the narrow window in the door of her room, she could see an endless stream of men and women in cotton uniforms meandering slowly past—talking, scribbling, rolling around various carts, wheelchairs, and poles—all acting as though she didn’t exist. What else were they doing that was so important? Why couldn’t anyone explain to her what the hell was going on?
The door latch clicked. Someone was coming in. But as the unlocked door began to swing slowly open, Jamie felt more alarm than relief. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What is it you want?”
The female visitor paused in the doorway. She looked as if she were in her mid twenties. Her dark blond hair was pulled into a pony tail, and her clothes were casual—not a uniform. She wasn’t magazine-cover pretty, but she had a charismatic, appealing face with high cheekbones, a perky, slightly upturned nose, and large dark eyes. Both her smile and her manner were guileless, and at the sight of her, Jamie relaxed a little.
“My name is Teagan,” the woman answered, her tone soothing. “And I don’t want anything. I’m just checking back to see if you have any more questions—if there’s anything else I can help you with.”
Jamie’s brow furrowed. The woman seemed to be suggesting they had talked before, which was ludicrous. “Any more questions? What are you talking about?”