Dead Beginnings (Vol. 2)

by Alex Apostol

  Dead Beginnings

  Volume 2

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  ISBN: 978-1537555713

  Text Copyright © 2016 by Alex Apostol

  Cover Design Copyright © 2016 Quivering Quill Press

  http://authoralexapostol.com

  Cover Image Copyright © 2015 IStock by Getty Images www.istockphoto.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means- electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other- except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of Alex Apostol.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

  For Charlotte

  One day your screaming will wake the dead

  I.

  Lee Hickey dropped off the patient file at the nurse’s station. As soon as the folder hit the emergency room desk, he started to walk away but stopped. The conversation he had with Olivia Darling, the struggling high-schooler with the hurt wrist, penetrated his thoughts. Her parents laid into her about her horrible choice of boyfriend, a conversation Lee wasn’t unfamiliar with, though the last time he heard it was through the open window as he walked up the front porch of his in-laws’ house.

  Olivia’s parents believed her “thug boyfriend”, as they called him, was the reason she was at Porter Memorial Hospital in the first place. She tried to tell them she had just done something stupid with a group of friends and that her boyfriend had been the one to try to talk her out of sledding down the enormous sand dune nicknamed “The Devil’s Slide”, a fact her parents dismissed when they heard it. Nothing she said would ever change their minds about the blue-haired boy, just as nothing would change Lee’s in-laws’ minds about him. To them, he was just another immigrant looking for a Green Card.

  He picked up the phone and called his wife.

  It rang.

  He wondered what she was doing.

  It rang again.

  He hoped she wasn’t with her parents, an awful thought he’d had on many occasions. He inwardly scolded himself for thinking it.

  It rang a third time.

  What were they telling his sweet Anna now? That she was better off without him? That she should leave him? That—

  “Hello, handsome hubby,” his wife’s melodic voice sang out through the speaker.

  A wide smile spread across his face as he exhaled a sigh. “Hello my sweet and perfect wife.” His once-thick Irish accent faded and melded into an almost American one.

  “Are you coming home soon?”

  “Probably not,” Lee said with a snort. “The E.R. is flooded.” He leaned against the desk and watched patients, nurses, and doctors walk by.

  “No problem. No rush. I’m still at my parents’ anyway.”

  Lee looked at his watch, a birthday present from Anna four years ago. “It’s half past eleven.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice dropping an octave and softening. “They asked me to stay the night. They said if you weren’t coming home till late there was no reason for me to sit in an empty house all alone.”

  “They do realize your almos’ forty, righ’?” Lee asked sharply, whirling around to hide his flushed face from anyone passing by. “Did they plan another intervention for ya? Hoping to finally convince ya to leave me once and for all?” His accent grew thicker the angrier he got.

  “They’re old and senile,” she interjected with a hushed laugh.

  “No excuse.”

  “You’re right. It’s not.”

  There was a moment of silence between them.

  Lee brushed his hand over his thick head of hair to smooth his unruly curls away from his heart-shaped face. It’d been fifteen years since he met Anna, a young nurse who worked in the delivery ward. They were twenty-five, both new to the field of medicine, and him to the US. His work visa was good for three years, but neither needed that long to figure out they were meant for each other.

  Six months after they met, Anna and Lee married in the Porter Superior Courthouse. Anna’s best friend was the only other person to attend, acting as witness and maid of honor. She always thought Lee was a sexy Irish catch. Anna’s parents, however, never trusted him, quietly accusing him of marrying their beloved daughter to gain citizenship. Over a decade of marriage had done nothing to win them over.

  “So,” Anna broke the silence meekly. “I’m probably just going to stay here, then…if you think you’re going to be late.”

  Lee’s face fell, but his voice was upbeat. “Yeah, that’s fine. I’ll see ya in the mornin’.”

  His wife knew him well. She sensed the hurt he tried to hide. “Please don’t worry. You know I love you, and I have some good news to tell you when I see you,” she said.

  He smiled a wary smile. “Can’t wait and I love ya, too.”

  He hung up the corded phone and let his hand remain there as he stared, lost in thought. It was ridiculous he still had these obsessive thoughts of sabotage. At the same time, he thought it was equally ridiculous they hadn’t come around to him yet. He had to face facts. They never would and this would be a life long struggle for him. The only thing that got him through it all was knowing deep within his heart that his beautiful wife was worth it.

  “In-law trouble again, hon?” the receptionist at the desk said.

  His thoughts faded away as he was brought back to the bustling reality around him.

  “Yeah. I just don’ bleedin’ get it,” he said, letting his broad shoulders fall. “I’ve done everything I can to get these people to like me.”

  The young girl looked down at her lap and smiled, blood rushing to her pale, white cheeks. She looked back up at Lee through her thick lashes, wisps of golden hair tickling her neck.

  “She’d be a fool to ever leave you,” she said, her blue eyes smoldering.

  It wasn’t the first time the young receptionist named Kelly had tried to flatter Lee. Each time, it sent a warm wave to the Irishman’s heart, followed by a second wave of embarrassment. She was only twenty-four years old, and looked five years younger than that. What she had was an schoolgirl crush that Lee wasn’t discouraging by being vulnerable in her presence.

  “Thanks, love,” he replied with a generic grin.

  He walked away, picking up another chart as he entered the room with his next patient.

  II.

  “Rowan Brady,” he read with indifference. He looked up when he recognized the name.

  “Yeah. Hey, Lee!” Rowan said, hopping off the gurney. His perfectly styled chestnut hair was sticking up on its ends.

  If it wasn’t for the blueish-purple bruises on his long, chiseled face, Lee would have thought Rowan had just finished up a wild night with a young lady. He knew better, though. He’d seen Rowan in the emergency room for similar injuries on several occasions in the six months.

  “Rowan, did you try an’ pick up another man’s girl again?” Lee chuckled as he walked over and inspected the bruises.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I didn’t know she had a boyfriend. And I definitely didn’t know her boyfriend was six-foot-five and a professional wrestler. He could have been your brother.”

  They both laughed, pushing Lee’s mind away from his troubles, if only for a second. “Well, I’d say you got off lucky then, huh?”

  “You ain’t kiddin’,” Rowan huffed, shaking his head and sitting back down on the gurney. He clutched his arm close to his chest.

  L
ee sat down on the roller chair and reached out for Rowan’s hand. “Let’s take a look an’ see if we can patch ya up.”

  “Thanks, man,” the defeated brunette said through doe eyes. “Sorry you have to see me in here all the time.”

  The nurse laughed quietly through parted lips. “I’m sure there’ll come a day when I see ya outside the hospital.”

  Rowan smiled. “Maybe we can grab a beer sometime and—”

  “The doctor will be in shortly to see ya,” Lee cut the young man off as he stood up.

  Rowan looked down at his boots, disappointment overtaking his normally bright eyes. “Oh, yeah. Sure. No problem. Thanks again.”

  It wasn’t that Lee didn’t like Rowan. He was sure if they had met in another setting at another time, the two could have gotten along well. But Lee wasn’t what one would call a “people-person”. Most of his family was back in Ireland. After his parents cursed him for going to America, he rarely picked up the phone to call them. All he had was Anna and her handful of close-knit gal-pals, and that was all he needed.

  Lee was a man who trusted his gut feelings. Right now, his gut was telling him not to engage with patients outside of work. He was a practical man who lived by the rules of the hospital and his own moral code. Of course, Anna was the only exception to his rule of keeping business and pleasure separate. When he met her, he knew immediately that she was someone he wanted in his life forever. By the look in her eyes, he knew she had felt the same way.

  It had been his first time working the night shift at Porter Memorial. He was finally done with training and on his own, something that both elated and terrified him. At two-thirty in the morning, a young man was rushed in from the ambulance. A car had hit him while he was riding his motorcycle down one of the back roads. Blood covered his face, neck, and leather jacket, which they had to cut off him.

  The site of blood never bothered Lee. If it had, he never would have gone into nursing. But it was the fear in that man’s eyes as they wheeled him in that made the nurse’s stomach churn and his heart race. He wanted to comfort the man and tell him everything was going to be okay. The collision hadn’t been that bad. A couple dozen stitches in his head and the man would be good to go, but the words got caught in Lee’s throat as he stared into the whites of the man’s eyes. He followed the doctor’s orders meticulously, and when they were done, Lee excused himself for a moment.

  The primal fear of death he saw had jarred him. The reason that man wasn’t ready to die didn’t stem from selfishness or vanity. It was love and family the man was so terrified of losing. Lee figured that out when the E.M.T. gave him a ratty brown leather wallet. Inside was a couple dollar bills, an Indiana driver’s license, and a picture of the man with his wife and two daughters, all smiling genuinely as if life couldn’t be any better than it was in that moment.

  What did Lee have in his life that was precious to him, aside from his medical knowledge? He had no family he was close with, no girlfriend to hold at night, no friends to crack open a beer with. All he had was his work and his sad little apartment several minutes down the road.

  The man was asleep in his room, his adoring family by his side, holding his hands and telling him how much they loved him. Lee decided to wander the stark white halls as he pondered his life. When he heard the squeal of newborns, he stopped.

  In the nursery, at least a dozen babies thrashed their arms and cried as nurses in pink and blue scrubs tested their vitals. Lee took a step forward so his face was only inches from the window, his fingertips resting gently on the glass. When would he start a family of his own? Now that he’d accomplished his goal of becoming a nurse, he wanted someone to share it with.

  “Are you gonna stay there like that all night?” someone asked, yanking him away from images of the family he wanted so desperately.

  “What?” He blinked and took a step back.

  The young woman was wearing seafoam green scrubs that seemed to match her deep eyes perfectly. Once Lee settled on them, he found he couldn’t look away.

  “You can come in and hold one if you like.”

  Lee finally removed his fingers from the glass separating him from the babies. “I can?”

  She smiled, a perfect, white, broad smile that formed two little dimples in her cheeks. “You do work here, don’t you? Or are you some crazy person posing as a nurse so you can come in and steal babies?”

  An older nurse passed by as the young woman said this, her nose wrinkled in disapproval at the joke.

  “Hey, Barb,” she said.

  The nurse passed by and turned her nose up. She kept walking without saying anything in return.

  The young woman shoved her hands into her pockets and turned back to the towering man standing in front of her. Her eyes widened as she cocked her head, her eyebrows lifted up as if pointing to the room beside them.

  Several sensations ran through Lee Hickey’s body in that moment. He swears he felt warmth radiate from his chest. His stomach danced endlessly, doing intricate backflips the longer the young nurse stared into his eyes. And his heart quickened its pace until he was sure she could see it pounding against his ribcage.

  She brushed a stray strand of chestnut hair back behind her ear, waiting for him to say something.

  “My name is Lee. I’m a nurse,” was all he could muster. His ears, hidden beneath long waves and curls, burned.

  The young woman laughed, her head tilted upward to look at the ceiling. “Well, that’s a relief. I’m Anna. You can follow me if you like.”

  And so he did.

  That was fifteen years ago, a day he always thought back on with a smile. They fell in love fast, married within the year, and actively started trying for their own baby immediately after the ceremony.

  But life doesn’t care what you want, a lesson Lee learned over and over again throughout his life.

  After several years of trying to conceive without any success, he took Anna to a specialist. That’s when they received the heartbreaking news that her chances of getting pregnant were slim-to-none. The percentage was in the single digits. He looked to Anna with tears in his eyes that day. Defeat washed over her face. She gave up right then and there on any hope of having a child of her own.

  III.

  Lee finally arrived home at a few minutes past four a.m. He walked into the empty, darkened house and locked the door behind him. For a moment, he stood in the entryway in silence.

  What are her parents telling her about me now? he couldn’t help wondering again. Did they tell her to give up on me, that I was the reason we were childless after fifteen years of trying? He knew it wasn’t true, but was sure they blamed him all along.

  He kicked off his white tennis-shoes and headed slowly down the hallway to the kitchen. A part of him hoped that when he went upstairs he would find Anna lying in bed fast asleep. Over the years, she seemed to pull away from him and gravitate back to her family for support. No matter what he did, or how much he tried to comfort her and reassure her that they would have a family of their own soon, she never seemed to believe him. He couldn’t blame her. He barely believed it himself.

  His stomach gave a growl as he opened the refrigerator. It was full of juice, milk, beer, vegetables, fruit, lunch meat, leftovers, everything for the makings of a four a.m. snack. But nothing his eyes scanned over appealed to him. He reached out for a beer, but then pulled back again.

  “Fuck it,” he said softly to break the silence.

  He trudged up the stairs to his empty bedroom and collapsed on top of the comforter. His body ached with exhaustion. The urge to take off his sweaty scrubs and shower drifted further away until he was fast asleep.

  Lee Hickey opened his eyes and looked around. The house was still dark, despite the feeling of having slept for half a day. He brushed his hair away from his face and sat up slowly. A sharp pain shot through his neck and up into his head. He rubbed at it as he stood up.

  “Anna?” he called out once he reached the door. “Are ya home?�
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  A strange sound echoed up the stairs. Lee rubbed at his tired eyes before heading down. With each step, the noise grew louder. It reminded him of an infant’s muffled cry, but he knew that couldn’t be it. His wife had to be watching TV.

  “Anna?”

  Still no answer.

  He wandered into the kitchen first. There were no signs that his wife had been home. Everything was exactly as he’d left it before he fell asleep. He pushed the swinging door to the living room open and stopped on the other side.

  The living room was no longer his. Lee squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, but the scene didn’t change. The couch was gone. The television was gone. Everything that had made his house a home was no longer there. Instead, there was a single wooden rocking chair in the center of the darkened room. A woman sat with her back to Lee, slowly moving back and forth.

  He wanted to call out to Anna—it was undoubtedly her. The thick waves in her brown hair were unlike anyone else’s—but he found his mouth stubbornly sealed. The only sound in the room was the creaking of old wood as the chair rocked endlessly.

  And then he heard it again—the squeal of a newborn. There was no mistaking it this time. Lee’s eyes grew wide as he stared ahead.

  Though his lips would not part to speak, his legs moved him forward without him telling them to. The hairs on his arms stood on end as an unbearable feeling of dread sank into the pit of his stomach like a rock.

  He found himself standing beside the woman.

  “Anna?” His voice was raspy. “Sweetheart, are ya OK?”

  The chair stopped instantly. Lee’s exhaled quick, shallow breaths as he waited. She didn’t turn to look at him, and didn’t say a single word. The cries from whatever she held in her arms grew louder until he couldn’t take it anymore.