Love on Call

by Shirley Hailstock

  Mallory couldn’t believe the many facets to Brad. At every turn she discovered something new and different about him. Though he’d been raised by foster parents in a happy home, he’d grieved the loss of his biological mother all these years, and now he’d found her. Some might suspect that seeing Sharon Yarborough yesterday had been the reason his lovemaking was so intense, but Mallory didn’t. She’d never believed in the life-affirming theory that having sex after a trauma restored balance. Sex might help ground a person, it might relieve stress, but she and Brad hadn’t just had sex. They had made love.

  She smiled.

  Suddenly, she felt a hand touch her face and she snapped her eyes open. “Brad,” she sputtered, gazing up at his somber expression. “What’s wrong?”

  “Owen and I are going to the police station.”

  “Police? Why?”

  He bent down and kissed her forehead, then sat on the chair with her. She moved slightly to accommodate him. He was warm against her. “It’s nothing to worry about. Owen read the detective’s report last night, and we’re going to the police station to read the official report of what happened to…Sharon.”

  Mallory noticed the hesitation in his voice. He didn’t call her by her real name or by any of the terms most children call their mothers. She’d been estranged from him so long Mallory wondered if he thought of the woman as “Mom” or as “my mother who abandoned me.” “Sharon” was easier to say.

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “You’re not dressed.” He looked at her in the white robe. “We won’t be long.” He kissed her then, slowly and deeply. Mallory didn’t have far to go to reach the aroused state she’d been in shortly before. Brad’s kiss took her there. She leaned into him, the robe falling open at the top, and kissed him back.

  He smelled like soap from the shower, a distinct male scent.

  “No,” he moaned against her lips. “You have got to stop doing this to me.” The deep note in his voice told her the exact opposite.

  He stood up then and ran his hands down her jaw-line. “Owen is driving, so I’m leaving the car if you want to go out.” He kissed her gently, one last time. “I won’t be long.”

  Mallory heard the promise in his voice as surely as if he’d said he couldn’t wait to get her into bed again.

  When he disappeared through the door and left she felt alone and restless. She dressed quickly in shorts, a shirt and sandals. The weather was unseasonably warm for this time of year, but Mallory had no complaint. She would be back in Philadelphia soon, where fall was giving way to winter, with the prospect of snow for Thanksgiving. A few days in the sun were to be relished.

  Checking her watch, she decided Brad and Owen probably wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. She took the keys and left the room to go for a ride. Half an hour later, Mallory turned into the driveway of the Austin Rehabilitation Center. Dr. Diaz was on duty and spotted her as she walked through the door.

  “Dr. Russell, I didn’t think we’d see you so soon.”

  “I thought, if it’s all right, I’d like to visit with Mrs. Yarborough for a few minutes.”

  He smiled kindly. “I’m sure she’d like that.”

  They started toward the back of the building, heading for the hall that led to her room.

  “Did she show any reaction after we left yesterday?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he said with obvious disappointment in his voice. “I thought if anything was going to draw her out of the state she’s in, it would be her children. That is most times the case. But with Mrs. Yarborough it didn’t work.”

  They’d reached her door. It was blue like the walls, and like all the hallways, it needed to be repainted. Mallory stopped and turned to face Dr. Diaz. “Why do you call her Mrs. Yarborough?”

  “According to her file, when she was admitted to the hospital after the police discovered her, she weighed only eighty pounds. Her brain was damaged and she was unable to speak or write. When she was transferred to this facility she was very agitated and made many sounds, but nothing coherent. One of the nurses thought she said her name was Sharon, and so they began calling her that.”

  “And her last name? Yarborough?”

  “Same thing. ‘Yarborough’ sounded like what she was trying to say when she tried to speak.”

  “Actually, Sharon is her grandmother’s maiden name,” Mallory provided. “She might have been trying to say that for a different reason.”

  The doctor’s frown made her go on and explain how she knew that information. “Dr. Clayton hired a private investigator to find his mother. I’ve seen the report from the investigation. He discovered her here by going further back into her family tree and using combinations of names she might have used. He discovered the Jane Doe in the hospital and then the transfer here under the name of Sharon Yarborough.”

  Dr. Diaz nodded. “Since we know her real name now, we’ll change her records and begin calling her that.”

  Mallory smiled as he left her. She opened the door, hoping to find Brad’s mother in an alert state. But with her coma patients, she was often disappointed in discovering them exactly as she had left them.

  Brad’s mother sat in the same position, in the same chair, with the same blank expression on her face that had been there twenty-four hours ago.

  The moment Brad recognized the rental car he and Mallory had used since they arrived in Texas, his blood started pumping. He knew why she was here: to see his mother. She seemed to be in a comalike state, and Mallory was an expert on comas. Had she talked his mother into coming back from wherever she had hidden herself?

  When he and Owen opened the door, Mallory looked up. None of the surprise he expected her to display was in her eyes, only a reserve he’d seen time and time again, starting with the Wayne Mason incident in the emergency room.

  “Hello,” Owen said.

  Mallory shifted her attention to him and smiled. “Hello,” she replied.

  “We know what happened to her,” Brad murmured. Mallory came toward him. Together they walked back to the waiting room where Dr. Diaz had talked to them yesterday, and sat on the government-issued furniture.

  “The police report had the details listed under ‘Jane Doe.’ No one knew her name, and even when she got here her real name was never discovered.”

  “That’s why no one ever contacted you or your brother.”

  He nodded.

  “What about fingerprints? Wouldn’t they try to identify her using those?”

  “Her prints weren’t on file anywhere, but even if they were, with the state of government and the cost associated with what was essentially a closed case, I doubt it would have been done.”

  “Closed case?”

  “No. They’d found her raving in a house on the outskirts of Austin. It was little more a shack, apparently. She’d been held there for months, by a crazed man who’d repeatedly raped and beaten her. She was delirious for weeks after they found her, and when eventually she woke up, she could tell them little.”

  Mallory shuddered at what she must have gone through. Brad tried to keep his voice steady and sure, but there was a rage inside him that needed an outlet.

  “The man holding her was shot and killed trying to escape capture on an unrelated charge. He’d been running toward the house where my mother was.” Mallory took his hand and kissed his knuckles, then kept it close to her. “They took her to a hospital, but one day she just walked out. No one knows where she went. They assumed she lived on the streets for several months. Then she was involved in a traffic accident and was taken back to the same hospital. One of the nurses recognized her as the Jane Doe from the previous visit.”

  “The man was her first husband, Dawson Armstrong.”

  “How do you know that? Did she talk to you?”

  Mallory shook her head. “Mrs. Seleig told me the story. I had to keep her on track. She wanders a lot, but I got the details out of her.”

  “What else did she tell you?” Owen spoke
from the doorway. He came all the way into the room and took a seat in the chair across from Mallory.

  “The day she left for work he was waiting for her. She hadn’t seen him in years, but he apparently had been stalking her. He kidnapped her and took her to a house not far from here. He kept her there for months. She didn’t know how long it was, but it felt like years, and all the while she wondered what had happened to you two. She stayed alive for her sons.”

  Mallory swallowed. Brad saw the workings of her jaw. She was giving them a moment to let it sink it.

  He wanted to hit something. All the while he’d cried in the night, alone and wondering, his mother was being abused and thinking of him. All the times he’d hated her for never coming back, it wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t return. And when she did, they were gone.

  “The police found her and took her to the hospital. She ran away from there to try and find you. But she couldn’t talk. Her vocal chords were swollen from a rope that had been tied around her throat to keep her in the cabin when Dawson Armstrong wasn’t there. She couldn’t talk and she couldn’t write. So she went to find you.”

  “The state had already taken us away.”

  “Not quite.”

  Brad looked at Owen, then they both stared at Mallory.

  “She saw Brad.”

  “Me! When?”

  “You were running. She ran after you, trying to call your name, but she couldn’t speak. There was a cop chasing you and you went over a fence. She was too weak to keep up with you, but she tried. But when you ran across a street and she followed, she was hit by a car and woke up in a hospital. After that she was moved here.”

  “I thought she said she saw me at the airport.”

  “It was the Airport Road,” Mallory corrected.

  When Mallory finished, both brothers were quiet, astounded by the story and too stunned to move.

  “I can’t believe it,” Owen finally said. “All these years I’ve hated her, hated her memory, hated her for leaving us, and all the while she was trying to reach us, trying to return to us.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up over that, Owen,” Mallory said. “You were a child. It was a natural reaction. You felt alone and abandoned. But what matters most now is that you both know she loved you and would never have left you of her own accord.”

  “Why won’t she talk?”

  “I don’t know why she only talks to Mrs. Seleig. Her speech is very impaired. It’s hard to understand her, Mrs. Seleig says. One reason she remains silent might be fear.”

  “Fear?” Brad asked. “Why?”

  “She saw you being chased by the police. Owen wasn’t with you. She couldn’t protect you and she was afraid something might happen to you if she talked to the police, so she told no one.”

  “Except Mrs. Seleig.”

  “Mrs. Seleig is her voice in the dark.”

  Brad understood what that meant. He was sure Owen didn’t.

  “Dr. Russell spends a lot of her time with coma patients,” Brad explained. “She talks to them, usually in the dark.” He looked at Mallory and smiled. “She’s had a lot of success in getting them to wake up. Mrs. Seleig was there to talk to…Mom.” He’d said it. He cleared his throat. “Or to listen to her when she talked.”

  “So why won’t she talk to us?” Owen repeated.

  “If she didn’t react yesterday when you two went in the room…” Mallory trailed off.

  “She’s not likely to?” Owen finished.

  “Not likely to what?”

  Mallory immediately stood up. Mrs. Seleig stood inside the door. Next to her was Brad and Owen’s mother.

  “Mariette,” Mrs. Seleig said, and looked at the gray-haired woman. “I can call her that now?”

  Mallory nodded.

  Brad and Owen got to their feet. Each of them moved slowly, as if there was a heavy hand on their shoulder.

  Mrs. Seleig looked up at the two tall men who stood in front of her, straightening her stooped shoulders.

  “She wanted to see you,” she stated.

  Every eye in the room was trained on Mariette Joyce Randall.

  Chapter Eleven

  Cobblersville, Texas, was a pretty little town thirty miles east of Austin where two of Brad’s siblings lived. And they were all waiting to hear the news Owen and Brad had to tell them.

  “It’s about time.” Rosa greeted them without preamble. “Why didn’t you tell me the real reason you were coming here?”

  “Hello, Rosa,” Brad replied. He took Mallory’s hand and pulled her forward. “You remember Mallory?”

  Rosa smiled at her. “It’s good to see you again.” She threw a glance at her brother. “I’m not finished with you.”

  “Hi, Uncle Brad.” A small child of about six bounded over to them. Brad stooped down and scooped her into his arms.

  “Look at you,” he said, that wide smile reserved for children on his face. “You are so big.”

  “I am six years old,” she told him proudly.

  “Oh, that is really old. I guess you’ll be getting married soon.”

  She giggled. “I’m not old enough for that yet.”

  “Well, you be sure to tell me when you are. In the meantime, let me introduce you to Dr. Mallory Russell. Mallory, this is Samantha Yvette Pierce Clayton.”

  “Are you a children’s doctor, too?” she asked.

  “No, I’m training to be another kind of doctor.” She knew the word neurology would mean nothing to the child.

  By the time Brad set Samantha on the floor, several other people had joined them. He introduced her to his family. Digger and Erin were the child’s parents. His sister Luanne was a social worker, and her husband, Mark Rogers, was an oil geologist. Owen and Rosa she’d already met. Dean was a film student, away on location, so he was missing from the gathering.

  “Sit down,” Luanne urged them.

  “I’ll get the kids busy in the playroom,” Erin said. “Don’t wait for me. Digger will fill me in.”

  “All right,” Rosa insisted. “Tell us.”

  Mark and Luanne passed out glasses of iced tea as everyone settled around the large kitchen table. In the center was a dish of tortillas and a bowl of jalapeño dip.

  Owen told them the story of finding their birth mother, the detective Brad had hired, the report, the police department, everything right up to her walking into the waiting room and looking at them.

  Everyone sat silently while he talked. When he finished, they appeared spellbound.

  “Did she say anything?” Luanne asked.

  “She tried.” Brad picked up the story. “Her eyes focused on us and she tried to say something, but only a low sound came from her throat.”

  “Dr. Diaz examined her and said he could see nothing wrong in his preliminary examination, but he’d have to run some tests.”

  “But she knew who you were?” Rosa asked.

  Both brothers nodded.

  “How did you feel?” Luanne asked.

  “Numb, like an eleven-year-old,” Owen said. “I wanted to laugh and cry and shout all at the same time.”

  “Brad?” Luanne looked at him.

  “I wanted to apologize.”

  She placed her hand over his. “You have nothing to apologize for. And don’t go playing the ‘if only’ game. You did what you could. You were nine years old. And there was nothing you could do to stop what happened.”

  Mallory immediately liked her. She was the social worker, and Brad seemed to take her words seriously. He didn’t show it, but then he never did. Only when Mallory was in his arms did she know his true feelings.

  For several minutes more they talked about Brad and Owen’s mother, asking what the two planned to do now and when they were going to tell their foster mother about her. Mrs. Clayton lived in Dallas and rarely traveled anymore.

  Owen said he knew of several nursing homes near Dallas. He’d have Mariette moved as soon as possible and get her better care. With luck she’d recover and resume her li
fe. It seemed she had been waiting for her boys to find her, and now that they had, she could return to the living.

  Eventually the conversation moved on to other things. And finally it came around to Mallory. “They have these little powwows all the time,” Mark said to her. “I’m sure Brad has mentioned them.”

  “He said his family was very supportive.” And they were. From what Mallory had seen, they were concerned about each other, always ready to pitch in and help if needed. She wished she had the kind of support they shared. She and her sister had only each other, and while they would do anything for one another, it wasn’t like having a large network to fall back on.

  “You two work at the same hospital?” Luanne asked.

  “We do,” Brad answered for her. “She’s a first-year resident and she’s not planning to be a pediatrician.”

  “Well, you only need one in a family,” Rosa interjected.

  Mallory was uncomfortable. His family had assumed they were a couple. She was in love with Brad, but she had no indication he felt the same. Mallory had no idea what would happen when they returned to Philadelphia. This was a little like being on a ship, but they had to return to land soon and resume the lives they had there. They worked at the same hospital and she already had one secret to keep.

  Mallory left Brad in Texas. He took her to the airport and kissed her goodbye, but he stayed to take care of details regarding his mother’s new living arrangements. Mallory felt bereft without him, but knew she had to get used to the idea of being without Brad. His family was close and supportive, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he used this time to find employment in a Texas hospital.

  “Margaret, you should have seen his face.” Mallory told the coma patient everything that had happened at the conference—her discovery that she was in love with Brad, his birth mother’s recovery and his family’s welcoming support. Despite their closeness, Mallory thought she and Brad were as far apart as two people could get. “I’m really scared, Margaret. There’s nothing holding him here. He has family in Texas. He can go home anytime. And then what would I do?”