Leave a Trail

by Fanetti, Susan

  Isaac took a deep breath. “Lookin’ that way. We got law on the town now. Seaver might have turned his back, but he eventually sent deputies in. Which is okay, because we’re gonna need the insurance to rebuild. But we gotta lay low and make sure we know what we’re doing before we look to collect a debt if it’s owed. Let’s make sure this isn’t just some fucked-up coincidence first.”

  “You believe in coincidence like that, boss?”

  “No, Badge. I do not.”

  “You think Seaver has a part in it?” Though the thought had been there since they’d been pulled over and he couldn’t shake it, Badger couldn’t make it straight in his head, either.

  Show answered him. “That’s a lot risk for a careful man like our Sheriff. He only fucks us with the lights out.”

  His eyes tracking as if he were reading signs in midair, Isaac nodded. “Agreed. I don’t see him doin’ it, unless we’re missing something. More likely somebody else. But who’d have the balls and the skill?”

  No one had an answer, or even a guess. Isaac leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “If it’s not Seaver…I don’t see it being Santaveria—we’re behaving ourselves, far as he knows. Things have been looking up a little in town—and anyway, why would one of ours destroy the B&B? The town built it. And kill Beth? Hurt Adrienne? It doesn’t add up. We’re missing something.” He sighed. “I’ll go to Marie’s in a few hours, when it opens. See what people have to say. You two take care of yours here. I’ll keep you in the loop—you do the same.”

  Before Show or Badger could respond, the doors to the surgical wing opened, and Adrienne’s surgeon came out. They stood and waited to hear his news.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The first thing Adrienne knew was pain. Dense and heavy, like powerful fingers digging deeply into her muscles, and at the same time spreading all along the surface like oily fire.

  Her body felt completely invaded by pain—inside and outside, top and bottom, down her throat and over her skin. She tried to burrow back into the dark from which she’d risen, but the bright agony closed off that path, and the rest of her senses revived. She realized that she could hear, smell, taste, as well as feel.

  She opened her eyes then, and she could see.

  Badger was the first thing she saw. His face, close to hers, his exquisite eyes gleaming with love and worry. She blinked and focused. The lower half of his face was obscured by a mask.

  “Babe. Hi.” His voice was muffled.

  She tried to talk, but there was something down her throat, gagging her. She tried to lift her arms, but they would not come, and the pain charged up as she made the attempt.

  “Easy, easy. I called the nurse. They’re helping you breathe. It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t okay, though. As her brain reassembled itself into some kind of working order, Adrienne knew that she was the very essence of not-okay.

  She couldn’t speak, so she shook her head.

  Badger leaned even closer and pulled the mask down to kiss her forehead. “I love you, Adrienne. We’re gonna be okay.”

  She shook her head again.

  ~oOo~

  It was two full days before they took her off the ventilator. Adrienne wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to describe the feeling of being conscious and invaded by that thing, a machine doing the most basic work of her body, robbing her of the power of breath. And speech. She’d felt curiously invisible and hyper-present at the same time. She was the focus of everything everybody who came into the room said or did, but very little of it was addressed to her. She lay in a bed while people talked around her, to her, reduced to slight nods and head-shakes, unable even to write, because her arms were not available for the exercise.

  Her left hand, her dominant hand, was useless because her arm was trapped in an elaborate contraption, like a hybrid cast/brace. Her collarbone was broken. Her right hand was no more available, because it was splinted straight and wrapped in bandages—as was most of her right side. Second- and third-degree burns over almost twenty percent of her body. Everyone who came into the room with her was masked and swathed in papery yellow gowns.

  They told her the third-degree burns were painless, because the nerves had been destroyed. But they didn’t tell that to her body, which felt exactly like it was still on fire. She didn’t even remember what it felt like to be on fire, but it must have felt like this.

  They had her on some kind of heavy-duty opiate, and she thought she understood Badger’s trouble a lot more now. Because the only time she didn’t think she’d go completely, out-of-her-head insane was for about two hours after the nurse came in and injected the drug into her IV. But it was weird—it didn’t take the pain away at all. Instead, it made her think about it differently. Her brain went to an alien place, where she didn’t care how much it hurt. She became clinically interested in her own pain.

  And it also turned everything swirly and purple, like she was in a Dr. Seuss book. She went far away, to Whoville, and looked down at her ravaged body. That part was pretty cool.

  Two hours after a dose, though, she cared again, and Horton took his Whos and went home. The remaining hours until the next dose were a slow slog toward hysteria. Internal hysteria, at least. Her response to pain was to be quiet—she got quieter, not louder, as her pain increased. She always had, even as a small child. The quieter she got, the more reason there was to worry about her. It was as if pain erased her capacity to communicate. She’d broken her ankle on a hike in Jamaica when she was eight, and, walking behind her parents and Aunt Hanna, she’d trudged on for almost half a mile before her silence was noted and they’d turned around and seen her distress.

  Her father would have known now. If he’d been here. If he were still her Papa.

  But no one here had reason to know it.

  Robbed of speech from the moment she’d regained consciousness, and trampled with pain that defied expression, Adrienne was almost entirely silent. When the ventilator was in her, she didn’t have a choice, and when it was finally out, her throat was raw and sore, so she couldn’t have spoken, anyway. Thus it was days before anyone realized that her continuing stillness and stoic silence wasn’t an indication that her pain wasn’t as bad as they expected, or that she was even bearing up well under it. The truth was that the pain was so bad she had lost the ability to speak.

  Badger was the first to understand that her tight little nods when they asked if she was feeling okay were vile lies her mind compelled her to tell.

  Just having somebody understand gave her some relief. She felt less trapped in her cage of pain and silence.

  ~oOo~

  Badger was with her all day, every day, though they wouldn’t let him sleep there, and her nights were long because of it. He could hardly touch her, though, and she hated that. It made her feel lonely even when he was with her. He’d rest his hand on her left hip while he sat with her, and he often ran his fingers through her hair and over her face, but it wasn’t enough.

  She needed to be held, and it was impossible.

  ~oOo~

  One morning, or maybe it was afternoon, Adrienne woke to see not Badger but Show sitting next to her. He came every day, but Shannon and their babies were in the hospital, too, so he only stayed a while before he went to be with them.

  Shannon had delivered the twins the day after the fire, while Adrienne had still been unconscious. More than six weeks early and both of them under four pounds, they’d been in the NICU. Shannon had had a caesarean, and she was still in the hospital, too.

  When Adrienne stirred and looked around the room for Badger, Show brushed his fingers over her face. “He’s not far, little one. Just gettin’ something to eat.” He pulled his chair up close to the bed. “I want to talk to you. Can we do that, you and me, straight up?”

  She nodded.

  “See, that’s the thing. You’re not talking. Badge says everybody should leave you alone about it, but I don’t know. Maybe he’s goin’ too easy on you. The docs are getting
twitchy about you. You know that, right? You’re paying attention?”

  A few times, somebody had looked down her throat and asked if it was hurting too much to talk. She’d only shrugged, in the stilted, one-sided way that she could, and no one had pushed harder about it.

  She didn’t even know why she had lost her words. She didn’t even know if she could physically talk, because she could not make herself try. The pain that had first driven her to silent isolation had improved somewhat, but words had not returned.

  To answer Show’s question now, she shrugged. She didn’t know anyone had been getting ‘twitchy’ about it.

  “Adrienne. They say you’re almost strong enough for surgery to make your leg better. You remember them talking about that?” She did—more surgery in a couple of days. Skin grafts to close the open wounds on her calf, thigh, and arm. More surgery, more pain. One whole side of her body melted and scarred. Scars and pain that they would make fresh, taking skin from her other leg and hip. She remembered that conversation vividly. She nodded.

  “No more of that, little one. You need to talk to me. They’re starting to talk about ‘selective muteness’ or some bullshit like that, and psych consults. I know you don’t want that. So show ‘em you’re strong. You gotta come all the way back. I know you can do it—you talk when you’re high on the dope they’re givin’ you. So talk to me now.”

  She stared at him, and he at her, until her eyes filled with tears and his face swam before her. When she blinked, wet trails slid down her face, and he reached out and wiped his thumb through each one. At his touch, she began to sob, silently.

  He cupped his palm over her cheek, and she turned into it. “What’s in your way, sweetheart?”

  She didn’t know. She was so alone, so lonely. It didn’t make sense; Show was there, right there. Badger was with her all day long every day, but it was like there was some kind of invisible barrier between her and them. The pain that was just hers, impossible to share or express or even explain. The fear. The loss. The confusion, like she’d been yanked out of her life and dropped into another dimension, one different in ways both subtle and extreme.

  Her last memory before the hospital was of sitting on the loveseat in the manager’s suite, watching television. Some sitcom she didn’t even know the name of. She’d been killing time, waiting for Badger to get home from his run. The day had been average in every way, except that Badger had been away from her, and she had been lonely for him and eager for him to come home.

  The last thing she could remember thinking was that she wanted to have sex with him again when he put her up on the kitchen counter.

  And then she’d woken here, and her life was totally different. Or it felt totally different. It felt tiny—trapped in this bed, either wracked with pain or dopey, surrounded by people in masks and gowns, everybody looking alike, nobody looking entirely human.

  And nobody could touch her. Except these barely touches of her face or her—so far—unhurt hip and leg. Or to hurt her. People touched her to hurt her every day.

  What she wanted more than anything else in the world was for Badger to hold her in his lap and wrap her up in his arms. She wanted to tuck her head under his chin and feel his beard on her face. She had no idea when or if she’d ever have that again.

  Somewhere in the jumble, she’d lost words. She didn’t know what was in her way. It was too big to see.

  Show pulled his mask down, and she saw his face for the first time in days. “Adrienne, please. Try for me.”

  But she was trying. She’d been trying.

  ~oOo~

  She woke up one morning, about a week or so after her hopefully last surgery, and could talk.

  There was nothing different about the morning—she’d woken to find Badger in his usual place. He was without a mask or gown, but that had been the case for a couple of days. There had been nothing different about the night she’d just passed, as far as she knew. Everything was the same. Her pain was less, but that, too, had been improving gradually every day since the surgery—it was still a lot of pain, but she was finding her tolerance for it.

  Still, on that morning, as on every morning, Badger stood when he saw her open eyes. He came over and kissed her, on the lips, gently, then more deeply when she opened her mouth. Then he’d pulled back a little and smiled. “Morning, babe.”

  And she’d answered. Without thinking about it, without trying, she’d said, “Morning.”

  She hadn’t even realized she’d done something remarkable until he flinched back, his smile spreading.

  “Hey! Are you back? Can you do that again?”

  Now that attention had been drawn, she could feel the weird stiffening of her throat that she’d felt every time she’d tried over the past however long she’d been fighting this—but before it could overtake her, she forced out two more words: “Think so.”

  Badger laughed and slid his hand behind her head, holding her against his shoulder—the closest thing to a hug she’d gotten in weeks. Since the skin graft surgery there’d been almost nowhere but her head that was both safe to touch and accessible.

  “I missed you, babe. I love you,” he murmured. She could feel his words moving his throat.

  “I love you.” She pushed her face against the side of his neck, feeling the soft brush of his beard against her temple and cheek, and wept.

  ~oOo~

  “The mysteries of the human psyche, Adrienne. Even those of us who are supposed to be experts are just making smart guesses.”

  Dr. Ambrose had come in to talk to her for the first time the day before her skin graft. He’d asked her a bunch of questions—all of them easily answered with a nod or shake. He hadn’t tried to cajole or force her to speak. He’d accepted that she couldn’t, not that she wouldn’t, and had worked around it. Badger was the only other person who hadn’t pressured her at all.

  It had been a long first talk, every question he asked built on the last so that she could answer in the only way she had available. Without her hands, she couldn’t write out longer answers or explanations. But by the time he left, she’d managed to tell him things she would never have thought she would be willing to tell him. He knew about her father. He knew about her pain. He knew how lonely she felt, even though she was hardly ever without company. He even knew about her hard time at Columbia—and almost nobody knew about that.

  When he’d left that day, promising to come back when she was up to visitors after her surgery, he’d said, “The last thing you need to worry about right now is whether you’re holding up your end of a conversation. I’m going to see what I can do to get everybody to leave you alone about that. And then, when you’re up to it, I’ll come and talk to you some more.”

  He had. He’d come every day for several days after. Sometimes he’d just dropped by and checked in; other days he’d sat for a long time and asked her lots of yes/no questions. Today, with her voice suddenly back, he was trying to answer a question she’d asked him. With actual words.

  He crossed one leg over the other. “Here’s my guess. Selective mutism is classified as an anxiety disorder, and I’d say that you have some things to be anxious about. Sometimes, when the signposts in our life start to shift unpredictably, and things we knew to be true suddenly aren’t, our mind tells us that we can’t trust anything we perceive. We pull in and regroup. By nature, you aren’t one to seek help when you’re hurting. You pull inward. This time, without control over your body, not even control over where it is or how it moves or feels, your mind pulled you inward in the only way it had left.”

  “But I wanted so much to talk. Everybody wanted me to talk. Not talking hurt worse.”

  “The mind isn’t always very smart. If it were, I wouldn’t have a job.” He stood up and stepped up to her bed. She was sitting all the way up for the first time, and she was finally able to move her burned arm—though it hurt to do so. When Dr. Ambrose put his hand on her bedrail, she bore the pain and lifted her hand to lay it on his.

&
nbsp; ~oOo~

  The day before they were sending her home, she finally looked at her body. All the time she’d been in the hospital, through all the dressing changes and surgeries and anything else, she’d refused to look. She knew eventually she’d have to deal with what had happened on the outside, like she’d had to deal with the inside.

  But she didn’t want to. She hadn’t known she was vain until she no longer had a cause for vanity.

  Badger stood next to her bed, on her left side. That arm was still bound in a brace, but he put his hand very lightly on her shoulder, his fingers and thumb hooked soothingly around the base of her neck.

  She hadn’t voiced her fears, even after regaining the ability to do so, but she knew she didn’t need to. Badger had a special insight into what she was going through—he’d understood her pain and her anxiety, her loneliness and fear, better than anyone else. And he’d just stayed with her, without pressure. He’d held her as he could and had done what he could to help her know he was there.

  When her father had forced her to make a choice, she’d made the right one.

  While the doctor and nurse unwrapped her right arm and leg, Adrienne kept her head turned away. She stared up at Badger, drawing strength from within his beautiful eyes.

  “You know it doesn’t matter, right? You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. Inside and out. I love you. The way I love you—it saved me. You saved me. A scar doesn’t mean anything other than you’re strong.”

  She believed him, because she thought the same thing about his scars. They made him more beautiful to her.

  She felt the tail of the last bandage leave her leg, and Badger nodded toward her right side. “You ready?”

  After a deep breath and another tour through the depths of Badger’s eyes, Adrienne turned and looked at the side of her body that had been on fire not so long ago.