I wish to personally thank the following people for their contributions and knowledge and other help in creating this book:
Beta readers, Hazel Grusendorf, Cindy McGrath, and Lisa Lamoureux.
Jim Grusendorf for editing.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
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Your symptoms may be invisible.
But you are not.
Chapter One
IT WASN’T THE FIRST time in his life that Gabriel had woken up in hospital. He’d been in and out of hospitals as long as he could remember. But his head was thick and sluggish, and he couldn’t remember what had happened. He looked around for his mother. Keisha would tell him what had happened and why he was there again.
She wasn’t there. There was a visitor chair pushed against the wall beside his bed. That seemed like an odd place for it to be. Keisha would pull it out and push it as close as she could to his bed so that she could hold Gabriel’s hand and look into his face. That’s what she always did. She might leave his side to go to the restroom, or get coffee, or talk to a doctor, but it wouldn’t be for long, and she would sit beside him again when she got back. Why wasn’t her chair close to the bed?
A nurse came in. She had a flowered smock, and her stethoscope was pink. She had blond, curly hair, and a broad red face.
“Oh, you shouldn’t be awake,” she commented, seeing Gabriel’s eyes open. She flipped through his chart for a moment; then she prepared a syringe to inject into his IV.
Gabriel tried to clear his throat and talk to her before she could finish the injection. She pushed the plunger slowly and glanced aside at him as he grunted.
“There, now. This will put you back to sleep,” she told him. “You’re going to be just fine, Gabriel.”
He wasn’t able to raise his voice before the whirling darkness swallowed him up.
When Gabriel awoke again, he was dizzy and nauseated. He tried to sit up a little, hoping that it would help him to regain his equilibrium. He listened to the hospital noises. A patient yelling down her hall. A young female voice, tones strident, very angry. The tired voices making announcements over the PA system. Footsteps and wheels up and down the corridor. It was all familiar, but that didn’t reassure him. The chair beside him was still empty.
A nurse came in. The same one as before. For an instant, Gabriel thought maybe he should play possum. If she didn’t know that he was awake, she wouldn’t drug him back to sleep again. But there had to have been a reason that they had wanted him to be asleep. They would explain it.
He cleared his throat and tried to wet his dry, sticky mouth as she approached him again.
“Where’s my mom?” he croaked.
“Everything is just fine, Gabriel. You need to stay calm and relaxed so that you can get better, okay?”
“But I want to know.” He looked at his body for signs of injury. Had he been in a car accident? Maybe Keisha had been hurt too. Maybe she was also in hospital, in a bed somewhere close by. Maybe she was badly hurt. “Please tell me why I’m here.”
“You’re here to get better. You need to listen to what we tell you so that you can get better.”
“But where is my mom?” Gabriel raised his voice insistently.
“You need to calm down. Just stay relaxed, everything will be all right.”
“It’s not all right!” Gabriel looked at the untouched visitor’s chair. “I want my mom!”
The nurse shook her head, frowning in disapproval. She injected another syringe into his IV.
“Don’t do that!” Gabriel shouted. “I want to talk to the doctor! I want to know what’s going on!”
“Go back to sleep. Everything is fine.”
Gabriel didn’t know how long he had cycled between sleeping and waking. Whenever he was awake, he felt nauseated, and muscle cramps racked his limbs. He was confused, sometimes not able to remember what was going on, and sometimes remembering the nurses and being put back to sleep again. He was exhausted just from lying in bed, unable to get up or to think straight. He stopped asking questions about why he was there or where his mother was. Whenever a nurse came in, he just closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep.
A doctor and a nurse came in and talked at his bedside. He knew that one was a doctor, not because he was a man, but because of the authority in his voice and the nurse’s subservience to him.
“How’s our young Mr. Tate coming along?”
“He seems to be calming down. He’s less agitated when he wakes up. Not so confrontational.”
“Good. How are his vitals?”
The nurse made a tsk sound. “Up and down. His body is still adjusting to the withdrawal of all the medications he has been on. I’m afraid it’s going to be a while before we have any kind of baseline.”
“Well, continue with the demedicalization protocol. There’s no way of telling what he really needs until we can see how his body behaves without any intervention. His system has been poisoned for too many years.”
“It would be easier if we could get his cooperation.”
“You know that’s not likely. Just continue with what you’ve been doing.”
“Yes, doctor.”
They walked back out of the room, rustling papers and talking in low voices. Gabriel opened his eyes a crack to watch them go.
He wanted to stay awake, but a headache throbbed in the back of his neck. Even the painful cramps in his legs were not enough to keep the darkness from closing in again.