Secrets She Left Behind (25 page)

Maggie

T
AFFY BROUGHT MADISON INTO THE PLAYROOM THURSDAY
afternoon. “I thought she could use a break from her room,” she said.

“Great!” I reached out, and Madison moved her hand easily from Taffy’s to mine, as if she was used to being transferred from one person to another.

“Thanks, Miss Maggie,” Taffy said. “I’ll see you later, Madison.”

I walked with Madison toward the table in the middle of the playroom. We had the whole room to ourselves for the moment.

“What would you like to do, Madison?” I asked. “We can paint or color or I can read to you or you can watch a movie?” She looked sort of lost, and I thought I’d given her too many choices. Her dazed expression reminded me of the way Andy looked when someone asked him too many questions at once. “Would you like to paint or use clay?” I tried.

“Paint,” she said so quietly I had to read her lips to understand her.

“Okay.”

I put her in a corner of the room with the easel, but quickly realized she didn’t have enough wind to stand and paint. I got her a chair and lowered the easel for her.

“How old are you?” I asked as I set up the paints for her.

“Almost seven.” She looked much younger than that.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

She stared at the blank paper in front of her, and I leaned close to hear her answer. “A brother,” she said.

“Me, too.” I said. “My brother’s name is Andy.”

“Mine’s Devon.”

“Younger?”

“Older.” She
almost
smiled. “He’s horrible.”

I laughed. “How is he horrible?”

“He tells gross jokes.”

“Wanna tell
me
one?”

She giggled, but shook her head.

“Well, okay,” I said, moving the paints closer to her. “Do you know what you’d like to paint?”

She shook her head again.

“Maybe these pictures can give you some ideas.” I pointed to the wall in front of her, where someone had hung photographs of animals. There were twelve of them, but we needed more. I’d find some stock images on the Internet and bring them in.

Madison began painting a lion, doing a not-bad job for a six-year-old. She wheezed a little when she breathed, but her arm with the tube taped to it didn’t seem to be bothering her today.

I’d seen Dr. Britten in the hallway outside Madison’s room that morning. I’d stared at him, separating which features were his and which were Ben’s. I had to stop that. I knew perfectly well that my attraction to him was screwed up. Plus, the man was married, married, married! Yet that didn’t prevent my insides from knotting up with longing when I looked at him. Sick.

But it was really
Madison
I was in danger of falling in love with. That had been one of Miss Helen’s warnings to me on my first day.
“You’ll want to love ’em up, honey,” she’d told me, “but you have to keep a little bit outside their world to be able to help.”

I thought of that now as I sat with Madison while she painted. She was pretty good at it, considering how sick she was and the goofy fat brushes we had for the kids to use. Maybe I could get some better ones. Madison painted the lion, an alligator and a bear. I got her to tell me a couple of her brother’s gross jokes in her quiet little voice, and we giggled together. I kept feeling my eyes tear up, and could practically hear Miss Helen warning me to get a grip. It was just that I felt so
healthy,
sitting there. I tried to beam my health into Madison’s tiny, weak body. For the first time in more than a year, I felt the
Empathy
tattoo on my hip burning.

“I’m tired,” Madison said after a while. She set down the paintbrush.

“Okay,” I said. “How ’bout I wheel you back to your room? Save you the walk?”

She nodded, and I pulled the kid-size wheelchair from the side of the room. Madison sat down in it, and I wheeled her out into the hallway.

I spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon reading to kids in their rooms, giving their mothers—and in a couple of cases, fathers—a break. I reached Madison’s room last and her mother, Joanna, seemed relieved to see me.

“I’m dying for a smoke,” she said. It bothered me that she used the word
dying
when that was exactly what her daughter was doing. She had Madison’s brown eyes and small pouty mouth. Her strawberry-blond hair was clipped to the back of her head so that the ends spiked straight up like a crest. I wondered if Madison’s hair was the same color.

“Go ahead,” I said to her. “I brought a book to read to Madison, if she’s up for it.”

“I’m up for it,” Madison said in her small voice.

Joanna leaned over and kissed her forehead. “I’ll be back soon, cutie,” she said.

Miss Helen had told me we weren’t supposed to sit on the patients’ beds, so I sat in the big recliner in the corner of her room, and Madison climbed willingly into my lap with a trust that made my heart ache. I could barely feel her weight on me, she was so thin. Her head rested against my chest while I read to her, and I could actually feel the air moving in and out of her lungs as she breathed.

Ten or fifteen minutes had passed when a man walked into the room.

“Hey, Madison!” he nearly shouted. He was around thirty, with a few days’ growth of beard on his cheeks and blond hair to his shoulders. And he was, like, totally drunk. The stench of him reached all the way to the recliner. “How’s my girl?”

Madison rolled her head against my chest to get a look at him. I thought I felt her stiffen beneath my arms.

“Can I help you?” I asked. I didn’t like the boom of his voice.

Neither did Madison. “Go ’way, Rudy,” she said.

He suddenly seemed to notice me. “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “Where’s Joanna?”

“She’s taking a break.” I could see old sweat stains in the armpits of his T-shirt. “She should be back any minute. Maybe you could wait in the hall for her.”

“Like hell!” He pointed at Madison. “
I
can read to her now,” he said. “You can turn her over to me.”

Madison shook her head, and I tightened my arms around her. “Sir…Could you wait in the hall until—”

“No,
damn it!
”

I cowered, sinking a little deeper into the chair.

“I’ll be damned if I’m waiting in the hall!” he said. “I’ve made arrangements at Children’s Hospital for her to go there. This here hospital’s for kids they give up on!”

I spotted the call button attached to Madison’s bed. Leaning forward, I grabbed it and pressed it hard, over and over again.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He snatched the button out of my hand.

“Nurse!” I yelled. Madison curled into a ball on my lap, hiding her face in her arms.

“Who are you anyway?” the man asked. “You’re nobody to her. Let me have her!”

What was I supposed to do? I knew the hospital had security guards, but I couldn’t reach the phone from the recliner.

“Sir,” I said as calmly as I could, which wasn’t very. “Please go out in the hallway and see the nur—”

“Do you know who I am?” He leaned toward Madison, who turned her head against my neck and grabbed my arm.

“It’s okay, Madison,” I said. But it didn’t feel okay at all. I slid even farther down in the recliner, trying to get away from the man’s rank breath.

“Look at me!” he shouted at Madison. “Do you know who I
am,
little girl?”

“Rudy,” she whispered.

He let out this half growl, half moan. “It’s time you put an end to that Rudy shit. I’m your
daddy!
And I’m gettin’ you outta here.”

Madison cried quietly against my neck. “He’s not my daddy,” she whimpered.

The man folded his arms sloppily across his chest. “The hell I’m not!” he said.

Taffy suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Did you buzz…” She looked from me to the man and back again. “What’s going on?”

“Call security.” My voice shook, though I was practically whispering.

“We don’t need no security!” The man flung his arms out at his sides, and even though he was still a few feet away from Madison and me, I ducked. I saw Taffy take off at a run down the hallway.

“You!” He shouted at me now. “Let go of her or I’ll yank her outta your arms. I’m not joking.”

I was totally confused as well as frightened. “Are you her father?” I asked. If he
was
her father, didn’t I have to do what he said?

“Hell, yes, I’m her father! Now give her to me!” He reached for Madison, but I batted his hand away before I could think. He could probably sue me if he was really her father, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t turning her over to him until I knew for sure.

Instead, I stood up, still holding Madison, who had to be the world’s lightest six-year-old, and turned my back on him.

“Rudy!”

I looked over my shoulder to see Joanna run into the room.

The man grabbed her shoulder. “You left Madison here with some stranger!” he shouted. He tried to hit her, but he was so drunk that he missed totally and fell to the floor. I climbed over him before he had a chance to get up, ran past Joanna and into the hallway, still clutching the little girl in my arms. Two security guards practically crashed into us.

“In there!” I nodded toward Madison’s room. Then I carried her to the playroom, which was empty. Thank God. I sank with her into one of the rockers, shaking all over and totally winded from carrying her.

“Are you all right, Madison?” I asked as I started to rock the chair.

Her head was still pressed against my chest. “He’s not my daddy,” she said.

“Your mom and the security men will figure it all out,” I said as I rocked her. “You’re safe here.” I hoped that was true. I hoped the security guards could arrest that guy or something. Mostly, I hoped he wasn’t her father. What an asshole.

Madison slipped her thumb into her mouth. She sniffled, and I felt her heart beating hard against my ribs.

Or maybe it was my own heart I was feeling.

That night, after Andy went to his room to do his homework, I walked out to the porch where Mom and Uncle Marcus were sitting all lovey-dovey under an afghan on the glider.

“I need to talk to you two.” I flopped into a wicker chair. I’d been waiting for the chance to talk to them ever since getting home from the hospital.

“What’s wrong?” Mom asked. It was dark on the porch and I couldn’t see her face, but I heard the worry in her voice.

“I’m fine,” I said. “But…an incident happened at the hospital today, and it made me realize we need to talk about something.” Damn, I’d been scared! That drunk Rudy guy bursting into the room, coming at me. It had reminded me of when Lizard would come after me in the prison yard. Only with Lizard, I just had myself to protect, not some helpless little kid.

“What happened?” Mom asked.

“This little six-year-old girl who has cancer…I was reading to her in her room and this guy came in, falling-down drunk and screaming that he was her father and I should hand her over to him.”

“How frightening!” Mom said.

“What did you do?” Uncle Marcus asked.

I told them the whole story about how the cops eventually showed up and how I sat with Madison in the playroom while everything got sorted out.

“The thing is,” I said, “he really
was
her father. Her biological father. Though Madison—the little girl—didn’t know that. She thought he was some…I don’t know…annoying family friend, I guess. He found out she was sick and wanted some other treatment for her.” I wasn’t sure of the facts. Once the nurse told me that the guy really was Madison’s father, that’s all I heard. “But I started thinking, what if Keith tells Andy that Daddy was…that he—Keith—is our half brother. You know Keith. He could blow at any minute. I’m amazed he hasn’t already. I think Andy really needs to know the truth.”

Mom and Uncle Marcus looked at each other. It was dark, but I knew they could see each other’s eyes and they were communicating in a language I didn’t know.

“What?” I asked. “I think it’s important.”

“You’re right,” Uncle Marcus said. “He should know.”

Mom let out this long breath. “Maggie, there’s more to it, though. There’s something neither you or Andy—or Keith—knows. Marcus and I have been trying to figure out how to tell you and there’s just no easy way.”

Oh, crap. What more could there possibly be?

“Do you want me to leave?” Uncle Marcus asked Mom.

“Oh, you chicken.” She actually laughed. It couldn’t be too horribly serious. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Mom stopped laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to make light of it, because it’s not funny at all.”

“
What’s
not funny?”