Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [143]
“We called your mother and told her you were okay.” Chuck rubbed his palms together, a gesture he made when he was uncomfortable or embarrassed. His nails were pink and manicured. Lee imagined Susan sending Chuck to a manicurist, when he would rather be playing golf or doing yard work. Susan liked everything just so—ironed shirts, starched collars, perfectly organized closets, manicured nails. He imagined Chuck submitting meekly to her prodding.
Thinking of Susan made him think of Kathy, and that made his stomach go hollow inside. He sank back into the stretcher and watched the rotating lights of the ambulance spin around and around, cutting through the darkness like a red blade.
Chapter Sixty-six
Two weeks later, Lee Campbell stood in his apartment looking out the window at the first buds of spring struggling to open in the March frost. The sidewalks were damp from a recent rain, and the late-afternoon sun bounced off the wet pavement, turning the concrete into a mirror, reflecting the street scene on East Seventh Street. The return of the sun had finally lost its terror for him, and he felt the swelling of the earth in his own breast, a gradual awakening as the warmer weather opened the pores of the maple trees, the sap flowing freely again. All the earth’s transitions struck him as blessed. All four seasons had their unique charms, and they were all irreplaceable. Like people. No one would ever take his sister’s place. He knew that, but now he felt closer to accepting the irretrievable loss.
He turned to the small, dark-haired woman beside him.
“How are you feeling?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Kathy said, leaning her body against his. “How about you?”
“Fine.”
“You sound like your mother,” she said, frowning.
“Not exactly, I hope.”
“Pretty close.”
“Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said it is every woman’s tragedy that they become their mothers—and every man’s tragedy that they don’t.”
“That sounds like him. Wonder what kind of mother he had?”
“A hellion, no doubt.”
“That’s a word you don’t hear everyday.”
“What?”
“Hellion.”
They stood looking out the window together for a while. Below them, the middle-aged couple from the back building strolled along Seventh Street, hand in hand, the woman resting her head on the man’s shoulder. Her curly gray hair was abundant and shaggy. With the sun behind her, her head was framed in a silver halo.
Kathy and Lee were doing a delicate dance around the topic on both of their minds—her abduction and its aftermath, his betrayal by a man he loved like a father.
He turned to her. “Did you have nightmares last night? I don’t remember you waking up in the middle of the night.”
She continued to gaze out the window. “The sleeping pills help.”
“Be careful—they can be addictive. I wish you’d reconsider seeing someone.”
“Your therapist?”
“No, someone else. A specialist in post-traumatic stress.”
“Maybe I will…soon.”
She had been unable to talk about it for several days, and then, slowly, in the course of the past couple of weeks, the story had come out, of how Nelson had ambushed her on her way to her father’s house—right in front of the church, just as darkness was falling—and dragged her inside. How she’d called out for Lee until she lost consciousness, and awakened to see him on the cross. The nightmares that came now were surreal, but no more so than the experience itself. The cuts on her chest were healing, but the scars—both internal and external—would remain. Fortunately, Nelson hadn’t gotten very far—only a capital T, which was presumably the beginning of the phrase “Thine is the kingdom and glory forever and ever.”
Amen, Lee thought, looking down at Kathy, her catching the early spring sunlight as it crept through the French lace curtains.
The hardest thing for her now was remembering—reliving, really—the feeling of being slowly strangled to death, and she would wake up in the night, trembling, unable to breathe. Lee would wrap his arms around her in the darkness and murmur soft, unconvincing words to her about