Thorns on Wildflower Island

by Michelle Files

  Within an hour, every person that wanted to help search, were out doing so. Despite the fact that most people had their own things going on, and everyone was exhausted, quite a few people pitched in. The town of Sea Cove was searched from top to bottom, as were the outlying areas. Though the island wasn’t a huge one, it would be impossible to search the entire thing.

  Sheriff Rex was certain that Zachary did not leave the island by ferry. There were cameras all over the port and on the ferry itself and he spent numerous hours perusing the tapes for any sign of him. None was found. The boy could have been taken off the island by a private boat, as there were many of them around the island. Any boat in the marina would have been seen by the cameras. However, there were quite a few houses with their own private dock and no cameras around. That is the only way he could have been taken off the island, unseen. Because of this, Rex and his deputies went door to door with a photo of Zachary, but to no avail. Regardless, the search continued.

  Rex put out a multi-state bulletin to quite a few agencies, hoping someone would see the child somewhere and report it. Flyers were distributed and hung everywhere. He felt fairly certain that Zachary was no longer on the island. Someone would have seen him if he was still around. It is very difficult to hide a small child and have absolutely no one notice. Rex didn’t have high hopes of getting Zachary back though. Small children that were abducted by strangers were rarely recovered.

  It was standard procedure in cases such as this to automatically suspect the parents. It was an unfortunate fact of life, but sometimes the parents were involved. However, the sheriff was pretty sure that was not the case this time. He quickly ruled out the Porters in any wrong doing regarding the disappearance of their son.

  Marshall and Eliza were very young parents, only about 20 years old, both of them, and probably had no business with a baby. But lots of young couples had children and didn’t lose them. Regardless, Rex could see that they were both devastated by their son’s disappearance, which is why he ruled them out as suspects in short order.

  The worst the sheriff could come up with was that Eliza should have been watching him more closely. He admonished her for that, which made her cry even more than she already was.

  Precisely at 6:00 a.m., eight days after Zachary went missing, the Porters’ bedroom phone woke them from a dead sleep.

  “Hello.” A groggy Marshall answered the phone. He squinted his eyes against the horizontal sunlight peeking in through the metal shades in their bedroom.

  “Marshall, Sheriff Rex here. I apologize for calling so early, but this couldn’t wait. We found your boy.” Right to the point, as usual. Rex wasn’t much for small talk.

  Marshall was suddenly wide awake. Lifting himself into a sitting position, he reached one hand over to shake his wife out of her slumber. “What? Are you sure?” he asked the sheriff.

  “What is it?” Eliza asked him, crawling out of bed and picking up her pink robe from the floor. Her short blonde hair was sticking up in every direction.

  “Just a second, hun,” he said to Eliza, as he held up his left index finger toward her and listened intently to the voice on the other end of the phone.

  Eliza couldn’t read his face while he sat silently, looking her way. Marshall watched Eliza as he listened to the sheriff.

  “Okay, sure, thank you,” he said into the phone and hung up, turning to Eliza.

  “Rex said they found Zach.”

  Eliza gasped. With her robe only half on, Eliza stopped what she was doing and turned to face Marshall. “What exactly did he say?” She ran her fingers through her hair in an attempt at taming it. Her closely cropped hair followed the delicate shape of her head.

  “He just said Zach was found in another town, off the island, and a social worker is on her way to Sea Cove with him. They will be boarding the ferry shortly. We are to meet them at the sheriff’s office in an hour.”

  They both looked at each other, stunned into speechlessness.

  One hour later, the Porters arrived at the Sheriff’s Station. One look at their faces and Rex could see how anxious they were to get their son back. He thought of himself as an excellent judge of character.

  “Sorry folks, they haven’t arrived yet. Go over there and get some coffee.” He pointed at the far corner of the tiny office kitchen. “Then come on into my office so we can talk while we wait.”

  Once the three of them sat down, the sheriff explained to them what happened.

  “I talked to one of the deputies over in Big Oak on the mainland and he said they got a call about midnight. There was this drifter that was at one of them all night diners. His name is…” Rex put on his glasses and looked at a piece of paper on his desk. “Jeff Romack. Does that name sound familiar to you?” he asked, looking back up at the Porters.

  Both Marshall and Eliza shook their heads in response.

  “Okay, anyway, he had a small boy with him and the boy seemed upset. The whole thing seemed out of place to the waitress, I guess. She had never seen a drifter with such a young child before and it concerned her. She tried to talk to the boy, but this Romack character shut her down and the boy started crying for his mommy.”

  Rex looked over at Eliza then, who was digging for tissues in her purse. Marshall just sat there in stunned silence.

  “Anyway, the waitress just knew something wasn’t quite right and she called the local sheriff. When they questioned the man, he said the boy belonged to a lady friend of his and he was just watching him. The man gave them the woman’s name, but the sheriff couldn’t find any trace of anyone with that name. No evidence of her at all, and the man couldn’t give them her whereabouts. He told them he forgot where she lived. That’s when they arrested him for kidnapping. And that’s where we come in.”

  “Are they sure it’s him?” Eliza looked hopeful to Rex.

  “Well, they saw him on a poster. You know we have posters of your boy all over the state?” He waited for a response and they just nodded.

  “The cops saw the poster and said it sure looks like him to them. We just need you to identify him when they arrive.”

  “Of course,” Marshall replied.

  “Well, that’s the whole story, of what I know anyway,” Rex told them. “So I’m going to leave you two for a few minutes. I need to make some phone calls. You can stay here in my office until they arrive, if you like.”

  Rex got up and sat at one of the desks in the main office where the rest of the staff sat. He was the only one that had his own office. He was the sheriff after all. While he made his phone calls, he glanced over at Marshall and Eliza occasionally. It made his cranky heart feel good to give the two of them a happy ending to their story. He could see them talking in his office, but couldn’t hear anything.

  A few minutes later, the social worker walked in with the little boy and the Porters came out to greet them. The scared little boy reached for Eliza as she drew near. She took him and hugged him tight, her tears dribbling down the back of the boy’s blue t-shirt.

  “Well, it looks like my work is done here,” Rex told them. “Take your son home. And please watch him more carefully.” They both just nodded.

  Rex smiled as they walked out the door, happy that the boy had been found and was unharmed.

  Chapter 4

  Life went back to normal once little Zachary returned home. The Porters all settled back into their normal routines. Eliza became a bit of a nervous wreck, making a point to never take her eyes off of her son again. Zachary was just fine. He appeared to have not even noticed that he had been away from his parents for eight days.

  One evening Marshall and Eliza were watching television after dinner, while Zachary played on the floor with his toys. Without warning, the boy began heaving and threw up his dinner on the living room carpet. Then he laid down and started crying.

  Eliza leapt up and ran over to her son. “Oh Sweetie, are you okay?” she asked, as she picked him up and held him in her arms.

  Marshall paused the t
elevision show they had been watching while Eliza tended to their son. He made absolutely no move to help her though. She checked the baby by putting her hands on his cheeks, and his back, and finally on his forehead.

  “Marshall, he’s burning up,” she told him as she carried Zachary to the bathroom to clean him up.

  Within a few minutes, she had undressed the baby and cleaned him up. He was screaming the entire time, quite unhappy about being wiped down with the cold wash cloth. She had also given him some medication to hopefully bring his fever down.

  “Marshall, did you hear me say that he has a fever?” she called out to the living room. She could feel the heat emanating from her son’s little body.

  Marshall had not bothered to leave his spot on the couch. His wife could take care of it. He was comfortable. As soon as she had left the room with the baby, Marshall had resumed the television show. Engrossed in the thriller he was watching, Marshall never heard her call to him from the bathroom.

  “Marshall!”

  “What?!” he yelled back from his perch, still refusing to move.

  “Come in here!”

  “Ugh, fine,” he muttered to himself, as he paused the television and reluctantly removed his backside from its position on the comfortable sofa. He could hear the air rushing back into the cushion as he stood.

  “Nice of you to make an appearance,” Eliza snapped when he entered the bathroom. “Go get a fresh wash cloth and soak it in cold water,” she ordered.

  Without comment, Marshall did as he was told.

  Resentment crept into the deep recesses of his body. Resentment for being so young and having a wife to deal with. And resentment for having a baby to feed and clothe, and to worry over when he got sick. Marshall wanted nothing more at that moment than to run. Run far and fast. Visions raced through his mind of a nice beach in Maui, or even Mexico, where he just hung out all day renting jet skis to tourists. No real job, no wife, and certainly no kid to muck up his life.

  “Marshall…Marshall! Are you listening to me?”

  He was jolted from his daydream by the grating voice of his wife. “What?!” he snapped over the cacophony of his son’s screaming. Zachary was quite unhappy and didn’t care who knew it.

  Eliza gave him a look. She didn’t have to say anything, he got it. Eliza was holding Zachary in her arms, trying to cool down his fever. He was wearing nothing but a diaper.

  “Sorry. What do you need?” he asked much more calmly that time. Frequent fighting was their normal way of operating, but Marshall knew it was not the time. Their baby was sick and they needed to take care of him to the best of their abilities.

  “Marshall, the baby’s fever has not gone down. And he’s listless. Look at him.” She held Zachary up, who was beginning to calm down. He did seem a bit listless to Marshall.

  “We need to take him to the hospital. Go get his diaper bag,” she ordered. “And some fresh clothes from his room.” Eliza never took her eyes off of the baby as she spoke to her husband.

  “Are you sure? Did you give him that fever medication we have in the medicine cabinet?” Marshall reached over and opened the cabinet in search of the bottle of purple liquid. “I really don’t want to go to the hospital,” he told her.

  “Of course I did. We really need to go and find out what’s wrong with him.” Eliza was adamant. She knew enough to know that you don’t mess with a fever in a small child. She wanted a doctor to take a look at him right away.

  “Yep, okay.” He had no choice in the matter and he knew it.

  Marshall walked to Zachary’s room and fetched the items as instructed. He had to search through the baby’s closet and dresser drawers, because he had no idea where anything was. Eliza had always been in charge of that stuff. Guilt crept into his core as he realized that he actually did very little for their son and just left Eliza to deal with it all. He would have to make a concerted effort to change that. He was the kid’s father after all. He found what he had been sent for and met up with his wife and son in the living room. Eliza had already dressed Zachary and retrieved his cup and some snacks from the kitchen. She knew that hospitals were notorious for being mind numbingly slow. They could be there for hours.

  The three of them headed straight for the hospital, with Zachary screaming the entire way.

  “He sounds like he’s in pain. Don’t you think?” Eliza had turned around in her seat and was watching her son closely. She handed him his sippy cup with milk in it and he swatted it away.

  Eliza climbed in between the front two seats and reached down into the back floorboard to retrieve the cup. Once she sat back in her seat and reconnected her seatbelt, she wiped off the cup with a baby wipe towel. Eliza made another attempt to hand Zachary his cup, holding onto it tighter that time. He again tried to knock it out of her hand, his face growing redder as he screamed even louder. She gave up and sat back down in her seat with the cup.

  “Good god, can’t you shut that kid up?!” Marshall yelled over the squalling coming from the back seat.

  “I’m trying!” Eliza shot back. “He’s gotta be in pain. Just not feeling well wouldn’t cause all this ruckus.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” was all Marshall managed to mutter, while pulling their car into the lot with the big sign that read ‘Emergency Entrance.’

  When they arrived at their destination, Marshall and Eliza found the intake desk in the emergency room right away. There were several hospital employees walking around, completing their tasks, in their various uniform colors. Some had burgundy scrubs, some blue, some green, and some even had little characters or designs on them. Marshall looked around, unable to tell which scrubs signified which jobs. Or even if any of it mattered. Perhaps they just all wore whatever color they wanted, be damned the patient that couldn’t tell one from another.

  One of the nurses, as far as they could tell, was working at the desk in the emergency room, completing some of his paperwork. He looked up at them as they approached.

  “Hello, what can I do for you?” the nurse asked.

  “Hi. Our son has a fever,” Eliza explained. She did her best not to sound panicked.

  The nurse looked from Marshall to Eliza, then to the toddler in her arms. He noticed that the boy seemed in pain, though he was no longer crying.

  “Of course. Follow me. My name is Nathan, by the way. You can fill out the paperwork while you wait for the doctor.” Nathan grabbed a clipboard and walked around the desk toward one of the exam rooms. The Porters followed dutifully.

  Nathan was in his thirties. He had no steady girlfriend, and thought it was because he was what people would call ‘plump.’ His blue scrubs didn’t help. They were a bit snug and clung to all the wrong places. He dated a bit, but it never lasted long. He was very outgoing and friendly though, which was why people were drawn to him. Nathan had tons of friends, but couldn’t seem to land a woman. The Porters had seen him around town, but didn’t know him.

  As they all headed toward an exam room, Nathan started talking.

  “Today is your lucky day. It’s pretty slow around here. Normally you would have to wait at least an hour to be seen. And sometimes several hours.”

  “Yeah, lucky us,” Marshall replied with a smirk.

  Nathan ignored the comment. He had learned long ago to tune out the mutterings of impatient people. They were in a hospital, after all, where nothing ever happened in a timely manner. Though Nathan was impatient by nature, over the years he grew accustomed to it all.

  Everyone hated hospitals, and Marshall was no exception. He was more vocal about it than most people were though, and Nathan found himself wondering what kind of pain in the ass the father was going to be for him.

  “Ah, here we are,” Nathan exclaimed with the nicest voice he could muster, and opened the door. He stood in the hall while the Porters all filed in ahead of him.

  Once they entered the exam room, Nathan handed the clipboard of paperwork to Marshall and told Eliza to sit on the exam table and hold Zachary in he
r lap from behind. It would be easier that way. Nathan didn’t want a squirmy baby that he would have to try to wrangle. He took the child’s temperature and blood pressure, all the while Zachary complained. Then Nathan attempted to listen to his breathing, which was difficult with a screaming baby.

  “Hold his arm tight like this,” Nathan demonstrated. “So I can get a blood sample from him.”

  “Is that really necessary?” Eliza asked.

  Zachary was terribly unhappy about the whole thing and continued with his screaming.

  “I just don’t want to make this worse,” she explained over the wails of her child.

  “His temperature is high, but not terribly. Let me go talk to the doctor and see what tests he would like to do, but they always want blood. So, we’ll see. Be right back.” With that, he was gone.

  A few minutes later, Nathan and the doctor walked into the room.

  “Doctor, we’re really worried about him. He’s really hot and threw up earlier. Plus he’s been screaming almost non-stop,” Eliza explained.

  Marshall stayed in the corner and was perfectly happy to let everyone else tend to the child.

  “Do you know what it could be?” she continued, without waiting for him to respond.

  “Well, we…,” the doctor made an inclusive gesture, “need to find that out. Okay?”

  Eliza nodded in response. The doctor noticed Marshall standing off in the corner letting his wife take charge. It wasn’t uncommon. Mothers tended to be the fierce protectors of the little humans that came into his emergency room. He nodded toward Marshall without actually speaking with him.

  The doctor did a quick exam and proclaimed that Zachary had an ear infection. Nothing to worry about. He prescribed some antibiotics and something to make Zachary sleep easily. He told them to come back if his symptoms got worse.

  All in all, the doctor was there with them for about five minutes. Nathan remained in the room and took some blood from Zachary as soon as the doctor completed his examination. Then he took the completed paperwork from Marshall.