The Girl Who Was Taken

by Charlie Donlea

  She fumbled through the findings of her external exam, covering the left-side lividity, the bruising, and the broken wrist. She went through the mostly unremarkable findings of the internal exam, noting the presumed time of death based on stomach content and suspected time of last meal. She moved to the neurological findings, covering with some confusion the midline shift she presented as the cause of death.

  “What did the QuickTox tell you?” Dr. Colt asked from the darkened gallery of the cage.

  Shit.

  A QuickTox was an abbreviated toxicology report that quickly identified chemicals in the bloodstream, and was a precursor to the full toxicology report that typically took days to return. Livia had sent samples to the lab, but hadn’t run a QuickTox.

  “I didn’t think to run one. I felt pretty certain in this case that the cause of death was midline shift.”

  The moment of silence that followed her statement was the most uncomfortable time Livia had spent in the cage. She knew what was coming.

  “Is that how we practice medicine, Dr. Cutty? By being ‘pretty certain’ about things?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why is there no QuickTox in your presentation?”

  “An oversight,” Livia said.

  “A startling one, Dr. Cutty. Can you please tell us which medications your patient was taking?”

  Livia stumbled with her words as she shifted through her notes. “I don’t have that information with me.”

  “You don’t have that information with you?” Dr. Colt repeated. He referred to his notes. “This patient was taking eight different medications. One of which was a new Rx for OxyContin, given for recent onset of neck pain and headache. So we have an eighty-nine-year-old woman with a new onset of headache symptoms, prescribed likely too high a dose of an opioid analgesic, who possibly fell as a result of a drug interaction. And you don’t have that information in front of you?” Dr. Colt went back to his notes for reference. “She was also taking the acid reducer cimetidine, which is not meant to be taken with OxyContin. Cimetidine increases the blood levels of OxyContin, which can cause dizziness, low blood pressure, and fainting. All quite relevant to a fall victim.”

  Dr. Colt continued as his voice elevated. “Or, we have a stroke victim who’s been having headaches for the past week and collapsed as a result of said stroke. However, the very examination performed to determine if any of these mechanisms played a role in her death didn’t actually cover any of these possibilities. So I ask you, Dr. Cutty: This morning, did you see someone’s mother on your table? Did you see someone’s wife? Or did you simply see an old woman who fell in her bathroom and hit her head?”

  He looked back at his notes. “Did you simply see one hour and fifty-four minutes out of your day lying on that table? Because with the reckless manner in which you handled this case, I’m betting on the latter.”

  The cage took on a heavy quiet when Dr. Colt finished his rant. He stood up and walked to the front of the room, taking a place next to Livia.

  “Let Dr. Cutty’s case be an example for all the fellows in this program. We want you to make progress during your training. And with progress comes respect. But when you rest on your laurels and put up shoddy work under the cover of that respect, you will be called out. Keep it up, and you might lose the respect you’ve worked so hard to earn over the past three months. Every single human body that comes through this place is someone’s wife, brother, son, uncle, sister. Treat them that way. That’s why we hired you, and that’s what you promised us.”

  Dr. Colt walked out of the cage and left each of its occupants quiet and uncomfortable as they slowly shuffled papers and headed into the weekend.

  * * *

  An hour later, Livia was sweating as she punished the Everlast bag. Randy leaned a shoulder into the leather to steady it as Livia went after it.

  “Because you’re in such a nasty mood,” Rand yelled over the pounding. “I won’t mention your crappy form.”

  “Good.” Livia grunted as she punched. She danced on her feet. “Tonight’s not about form, just anger.”

  She released a combination of punches and kicks for the next twenty minutes until her fists were sore and her shins raw.

  “Okay, Doc. That’s all my shoulder’s got in it.”

  Livia put her hands on top of her head, breathing heavily. “Thanks, Randy. I’m done anyway.”

  “Get it all out?”

  Livia grabbed her water bottle. “Probably never get it all out.”

  “Wanna tell me about it.”

  She sipped from the bottle. “What would that do to my membership fees?”

  Randy threw her a towel and waited.

  “You have regrets in life, Randy?”

  “Too many to list.”

  “Name your biggest.”

  “Let’s see . . . I’ve got an eighth-grade education ’cause I thought selling drugs on a Baltimore corner was a career path. I’ve got this”—he pulled down the collar of his shirt to reveal a shiny gray scar across his dark black skin—“because somebody shot me. And I gotta wake up each day knowing I’m alive ’cause I killed the guy who wanted me dead.”

  Livia stared at him a moment, then slowly nodded her head. “Okay, you trump me.”

  Randy laughed. “Impossible. Not with regret.”

  “No?”

  Randy shook his head. “Nope. Regret, it’s got no size. Mine can’t be bigger than yours. My daddy always said: ‘You either got it, or you don’t.’” He pointed at the bag. “And you’re not gonna get rid of it by punching a bag.”

  “Probably true.”

  “So what is it? What’s your regret?”

  Livia looked at the bag, then back to Randy. “Not answering my phone.”

  * * *

  That night Livia Cutty woke in her childhood bedroom under the same ceiling fan that kept her cool during the hot summers of her youth. After her trip to the gym, she decided to get out of Raleigh. With Casey Delevan’s picture in her purse she headed to her parents’ house in Emerson Bay. Her original plan was to ask them about Nicole in the months before she disappeared. To ask if her parents knew anything about the guy Nicole was dating. Livia had planned to show them Casey Delevan’s picture and tell them his body had been pulled from the bay and slapped on her autopsy table. That he was likely dead for more than a year, and if the timing added up he had been killed about the same time Nicole went missing. Livia’s original plan had been to confess her suspicions that the man in the picture was somehow connected to Nicole’s disappearance. She needed her parents’ help to figure out what Nicole was up to in the months before her death because, alone, Livia knew little about Nicole from that summer. The sad truth was that her sister had fallen into the shadowed corners of Livia’s life in the years before she was taken. Nicole’s rebellious attitude had driven Livia away. She blamed her absence from Nicole’s life on her residency and the looming decision to pursue a fellowship or move straight into the workforce. She claimed to have no time for her sister, even when Nicole had asked that summer to stay with Livia for a week.

  “I just need to get out of Emerson Bay for a while,” Nicole said.

  “And come here? Nic, there’s nothing to do here,” Livia said.

  “I don’t care. I’m okay doing nothing. As long as I’m not here.”

  “I spend twelve hours a day at the hospital.”

  “I don’t care. We can hang out when you get home at night.”

  “Nicole, I get home at eleven o’clock. Sometimes later. Then I get up early and start it all over again. It’s what you do in residency. I’m not going to be able to entertain you, or take you out.”

  “I don’t care, Liv. I just want to get away from everyone here.”

  “I know high school is hard, but you’re done with that now. You’ll be off to school in the fall and you’ll make new friends. Trust me. Coming here will depress you.”

  Silence.

  “Nic?”

  “What?”
>
  “It’s your last summer before college. Enjoy it, okay? Just give up on all the drama. It’s pointless.”

  “So I can’t come see you?”

  “In three weeks I’ll be home for a long weekend. We’ll talk then.”

  Nicole went missing from the beach party a week later. Livia had tucked that conversation into the dark recesses of her mind and covered it with a heavy dustcloth. It was a protective measure: compartmentalizing the times she had failed her sister.

  When Livia arrived home Friday night, her parents were thrilled to see her. They were anxious to hear about her first months of fellowship. Livia handled a battery of questions and apologized for how busy she had been, and for being out of touch lately. What she couldn’t tell them was that her forensics fellowship offered very manageable hours and was, in fact, one of the best lifestyle choices in medicine. The truth was that she had never been so busy that she couldn’t return home. But the excuse of a hectic schedule was an easy lie, and her parents never questioned her long absence. Either they were oblivious to the fact that Livia had trouble walking through the door of her childhood home because it reminded her so much of her younger sister, or they knew damn well the trouble she was having and gave her a pass. In this first year since losing Nicole, they all suffered from the same feelings of inadequacy and failure—stuck between needing to do something every minute of the day to prove they hadn’t given up, and allowing themselves to let go so they could move on.

  Whichever it was, ignorance or a free pass, Friday night’s impromptu visit was spent discussing her new life as a forensics fellow and never touched on her absence over the past year. None of Livia’s concerns or suspicions about Casey Delevan came to fruition Friday night. Having aged greatly in the last year, her parents shouldered the heavy burden of their missing daughter, and it would be unfair for Livia to present any of these developments before meaning could be assigned to them.

  Before bed, Livia had ducked her head into her parents’ room. They sat up in bed reading the way she always remembered them doing as a child. She wished them both good night and, backing out of the doorway, noticed Megan McDonald’s book on her mother’s nightstand.

  She sat now in the dark hours of night when sleep would not come, and watched that red ceiling fan spin and soothe her sweaty skin. Her parents had never believed in air-conditioning, and Livia carried memories of her and Nicole sleeping on damp sheets with windows yawning and box fans humming through the night. Warm Septembers saw her off to school with red cheeks and sweaty strands of stray hair plastered to her forehead. October now and unseasonably warm, Livia’s bedroom was the same as it had always been.

  As the grandfather clock in the downstairs foyer chimed to indicate two hours past midnight, Livia sat up in bed. The room had not changed since she left for college more than ten years ago. Pictures of her youth still stood on her dresser, and stuffed animals hung in a net in the corner. Her old beanbag chair where she used to do her homework sat deflated next to the bed. The room looked like that of a dead child her parents didn’t want to forget. Nicole’s room next door was the real thing, and Livia sensed why she hated coming home.

  At her old desk, Livia pulled out her MacBook and sat in the subtle glow of the screen. She typed Megan McDonald into the search engine and found thousands of hits. She pulled up articles from 2016 when Megan and Nicole went missing. The stories exhaustively covered Megan’s background. Her shining future was known to the world. The reporters loved that such an all-American girl had been kidnapped. It made for great reading, how such a smart young girl had outfoxed her abductor, escaped from the unsettling bunker the entire country got to know so well through pictures and tours on the morning talk shows, whose journalists had all converged onto the small town of Emerson Bay. Livia found a video of Dante Campbell clambering out of the bunker in a skirt and high heels and looking like a complete fool.

  The country fell in love with Megan McDonald. She was the girl who made it home. Megan became a star. She was the brightest of Emerson Bay High, and after the abduction she was the doll of the country. That Nicole Cutty was also a part of the story was only news initially. That Nicole’s abandoned car was found down the road from the beach party where both the girls had gone missing was only newsworthy until Megan McDonald resurfaced. Megan’s stunning return home and heroic escape overshadowed everything else. Eclipsed the fact that Nicole was still gone.

  As Livia sat in her childhood bedroom, she realized how much had changed in the last year, and how much had stayed the same. Her room. Her parents’ love of humid, stuffy homes. And Livia’s unwavering guilt that during her sister’s time of need, she had turned her back on Nicole.

  Livia typed the name Casey Delevan into the search engine and hoped for more luck than she had earlier in the day. Mr. Delevan was a twenty-five-year-old construction worker reported missing by his landlord in November of 2016. Estranged from his mother, and with an MIA father, he had no family looking for him and no one who ever knew he was gone. The article stated that Casey Delevan’s mother lived in a town outside of Atlanta called Burlington. Livia checked the map. I-95 to I-20, about eight hours.

  The drive looked easy. A straight shot and a good place to start.

  CHAPTER 10

  With her parents still sleeping, Livia snuck out of the house at six a.m. By noon, she entered Georgia. Bald cypress trees stretched into the afternoon sky, and river birch shadowed the road. The last two hours of the drive were easy, and Livia allowed the GPS to guide her through the town of Burlington.

  Casey Delevan’s mother lived in a dilapidated house with peeling paint and dirty windows. There was no garage, but a rusted-out Toyota Corolla was parked in the gravel driveway. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday. Three hours earlier Mrs. Delevan had answered the phone when Livia called and asked if she were interested in purchasing a magazine subscription. Now Livia parked in the street and walked to the house. The doorbell made no audible sound and after the second try Livia knocked instead. A moment later, a middle-aged woman answered the door.

  “Barbara Delevan?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, ma’am. My name is Dr. Livia Cutty. I’m here to talk to you about your son.”

  The woman regarded Livia through the screen door, then pushed it open and held it for Livia to enter. “C’mon in.”

  Livia walked through the door, which led directly to the living room. On a sunny autumn day, Mrs. Delevan’s home was dark and drab. A forced blackness brought by drawn shades that allowed only an outline of boxed light to enter. No lamps helped Livia’s vision, and the result was a dingy brown glow her eyes needed time adjusting to.

  “Can I get you something? Water or soda?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Beer, or something?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “C’mon in and have a seat.”

  Livia walked into the living room and took a seat in the recliner. The couch, Livia could tell, was Mrs. Delevan’s domain. It was split into three sections, and the middle cushion was well worn, trampled down and stained with various colors—food and coffee. Mrs. Delevan fell into the spot and brought her feet up onto the coffee table. There, too, was evidence of a sedentary life. The finish on the table was absent from where the woman’s feet constantly rested as she watched television—a giant monstrosity that stood in the corner and predated flat panels, it was the very definition of a “large screen” television. It was blaring an episode of Housewives from somewhere, and in the same movement that Mrs. Delevan sat down, she muted the television.

  The cushion to her right was stacked with papers—Livia guessed they were bills or financials of some sort, organized roughly in piles and by a slider where envelopes rested upright. Covering the cushion to her left was food and beverages. Cartons of takeout and plastic bottles of Coke, the current one wedged between the cushions. A bottle of vodka stood in the corner of the couch and a white Styrofoam coffee cup, the rim bitten and marred, r
ested on the table.

  Mrs. Delevan slopped some vodka into the coffee cup and topped it with Coke, then looked at Livia.

  “If you’re here to talk about Casey, I’m gonna need one of these. Sure you don’t want nothin’?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Livia looked around the small home. “You live here alone, Mrs. Delevan?”

  “Call me Barb. Yeah, it’s just me. Alan down at the store thinks he lives here sometimes, till I set him straight.” She smiled to reveal a set of rickety teeth and necrotic gums.

  Livia noticed a pack of Marlboros on the end table and had smelled the stale odor of nicotine as soon as she walked in the door. The last years of Livia’s life had been spent analyzing the lifeless human body, its tissue and cells, and witnessing the destructive nature of the world—the things the human race does to one another and to themselves, the substances that are ingested, the air that is breathed, and the manner in which our organs malfunction as a result of it all. The consequence of this education and the postmortems she’d conducted was that Dr. Livia Cutty saw death before it arrived.

  She watched Barb take a gulp of vodka and Coke and imagined the fatty liver that sat inside the woman’s body. Livia knew exactly what that organ would feel like in her hands, bloated and greasy with hardening vessels snaking along its surface, abused for so long by the toxins that washed through it. When Barb reached for the Marlboros and put one between her lips, pinching her lips together as she ignited the tobacco, Livia watched in her mind’s eye as the smoke traveled through the trachea and into the lungs. She imagined the epithelial cells and goblet cells lining the airway, streaked now with yellow soot and slowly dying. She saw the small bronchioles of Mrs. Delevan’s lungs already stenosed from years of abuse, and the tiny clusters of alveoli tight from necrosis and unable to expand and transfer oxygen into the bloodstream. Put this woman on a treadmill and Livia could see her heart working in overdrive to push oxygen into those dying lungs.