She tries to make eye contact, but just as abruptly, the heavy boots step forward and crush her fingers underneath what are surely steel-encased toes.
Before she can scream, a swift kick lands on her forehead, and she tastes blood as it slides from above her left eye, down her nose, and into her mouth.
The assailant steps around her, and before Deborah can try for another shriek, she’s being dragged down the porch steps by her feet, each clunk the sound of her head hitting the concrete.
Usually, the stars give her comfort, but tonight they seem to be frozen stiff in the sky, as if they are too cold and numb to twinkle. Her body mimics this behavior, and she shuts her eyes against the blustery wind, her scarf like a noose as it gets tangled in frozen pieces of grass and gravel as Deborah’s hauled across the stretch of property.
Her hands clench at the ground, but it’s futile; the solid clumps of snow are unforgiving against her swollen hands.
A sorry excuse for a scream catches on her chapped lips, emerging as nothing more than a pleading whisper.
Deborah silently begs for it to be over, but she can’t form a coherent thought, with shock settling in every fiber of her being. It’s not until something hard jabs into her skull that she realizes too late the rifle is in the hands of the intruder. Deborah doesn’t remember much of what happens next or how long she’s beaten against the ice-covered ground. She does know that if it weren’t for the weather and the lingering smell of manure and hay, she probably wouldn’t have woken up and crawled into the ramshackle barn for cover.
Later, baffled to wake up in a hospital bed, Deborah stares in loathing at the uniform four walls. They’re a dizzying reminder of the life-changing news delivered to her in the same medicinal environment. Even with the decades gone past, she gets goose bumps at the similarities when she’s face to face with a doctor.
This time when the white coat rests a hand on her shoulder, she flinches. His hands are smooth and less calloused than before. Back then, the doctor’s rough hands felt gritty like sandpaper when they inspected between her legs, poking and prodding during the examination.
Before, when she wanted to interrogate the doctor and ask him questions, he refused to meet her eyes. His stare was fixated on the ugly watercolor painting behind her.
Deborah still recalls how her husband, Jonathan, was seated beside her, clawing her wrist with his bear-size hands. Both he and the doctor couldn’t refrain from digging their fingers into her skin. Staring down at her lap, she clutched the thin cotton hospital blanket wrapped around her protruding abdomen.
“I’m afraid I have some news to share,” the doctor told her. He stumbled over the “news” part, as if he couldn’t decide if that was the right word to use.
“News?”
“I’m sorry, Deborah. It’s unfortunate what happened to her.”
But this isn’t thirty-four years ago, and presently the man in the white lab coat speaks to her with compassion and makes eye contact, explaining it’s a good thing she made it into the dilapidated structure because she was this close to dying of hypothermia.
He warmly tells her, “You must have a guardian angel watching over you.”
Puzzled, she asks, “What do you mean?”
“If the police chief hadn’t stopped by after the department received a call about a potential UFO sighting in the sky, you’d be a frozen carcass, found in the spring when the ground thawed.”
Deborah does remember hearing a blast, but she figured she imagined it, and she says so. Her brain feels like mush, all the events a jumbled blur.
“Nope,” the doctor says. “It was some dumb kid trying to set off fireworks.”
“In the middle of winter?”
“Yep. In the middle of winter.” He rolls his eyes. “Stupid kid. But it got the police out to investigate.”
Reaching a hand to her forehead, Deborah touches an elastic bandage. “It feels like someone lit them inside my brain,” Deborah moans.
“That’s not surprising, considering you have some circular lesions from the butt of the rifle, called friction blisters. We’re going to keep you under observation for a few days.” The doctor looks jubilant. “But I must say, you have a thick skull, Mrs. Sawyer.”
“I’ve had to have one,” she mumbles, more to herself.
“You have some surface lacerations from being dragged, but you’re fortunate to be alive. We did a CT scan, an x-ray, but we’re going to do an MRI today for a more comprehensive view, make sure there isn’t abnormal brain activity like a concussion. My concern was an intracerebral hemorrhage, a brain bleed, but there’s no evidence of that.”
“That’s comforting.” Deborah sighs with relief. “What about the farm? Is it still standing? Did they take anything from the house?”
The doctor shrugs. “The police didn’t say anything about a robbery.”
Deborah’s asking out of concern for her safety. It’s not like she has anything to confiscate. Deborah’s lucky she wasn’t shot with the old rifle for having nothing of value but a few old antiques. Her intention has never been to draw attention to herself. Any person with a lick of common sense knows that people get caught by being too flashy or materialistic. When you give someone a reason to pay attention, that’s when the spotlight shines brighter on you.
But why now? she wonders.
And did the letters have anything to do with this unplanned visit?
If Deborah had perished, she could picture the people in town clucking their tongues, shrugging their shoulders in mock grief, and speaking about the irony. She was found mere feet away from where Jonathan had tragically died.
And most would have said she got what she deserved—karma at its finest. The religious zealots would claim God had a hand; others might say the ghost of Cindy had a hand, that it should’ve been Deborah, not Cindy, who died all those years ago, as she was an innocent
