Dr. Myrtle Gibbons held the door with a gentle hand as I delivered the young girl’s doll-sized body. The child felt like a feather made of crystal in my arms and every step threatened to shatter her into millions of tiny shards. 

Walls the color of a robin’s egg greeted us beyond the threshold of the examination room. A hint of antiseptic and medicine offset the anticipated warmth. The child’s shallow and uneven breathing immediately caught the doctor’s attention, and Doc reached out to brush a strand of hair from the girl’s eyes as we passed.

“Oh my Lord,” she said. “It is Kayla. She’s a mess.” Her snowy mane of elegant hair blended nicely with the ashen hue that had spread across Doc Myrtle’s face. 

Kayla remained still, eyes focused on nothing. 

Doc’s voice directed me to an examination table covered in crisp white paper, though I wished for a downy comforter. I eased Kayla onto the stark medical bed. The absence of childish animation folded my heart inside out. The abandoned koala bulged from my pocket with sudden urgency. I tucked the stuffy in the gap between Kayla’s bent knees and chin. She ignored this reunion, blank-eyed and unresponsive.

Hopelessness washed over me. Despair at Kayla’s wretched future, an existence bound by the cords of a brutal killing, sliced into my brain like a hot knife. The sterile room with its medicinal bouquet reeked of the last stop on the train to nowhere. 

Doc Gibbons pushed me aside, stroking the little girl’s head. “Hi, Kayla. Do you remember me?”

Kayla resumed tapping her knee with a clenched fist. Tangled and matted hair stuck to the exposed side of her face. 

Doc wrapped the tiny clenched hand in her own, pulling the other hand up to join them. “It’s okay now, Kayla. I’m going to look at your body and make sure you are physically well. Is that okay with you?”

The grungy child shifted her stare to the Doctor’s hands. Her grimy mop flopped sideways as she moved her head toward the calming face. She offered an almost imperceptible nod. 

Doc switched on a small cassette recorder and nodded at me. She lowered her voice as she spoke into the device. “Examination of Kayla Peale, age 5, discovered in a state of distress after some unknown but prolonged time alone in the woods.” The doctor then set the recorder on a rolling tray table within arms reach.

Doc Gibbon’s natural polish, now draped in a pale green smock that only mildly reduced her elegance, served to intensify the scraggly figure of her patient. She proceeded to observe in a slightly mechanical fashion the child’s overall appearance, ducking down to get a clearer view of various areas of the child’s body. Her vocal tone was quiet and monotone as she itemized the outwardly visible evidence of Kayla’s feral adventure in the forest. 

“Visible bruising on the patient’s left cheek, along with a small laceration on her earlobe that is encrusted with dried blood. There is also an abrasion present on her right elbow.” She stopped for a moment to check on Kayla’s reactions. “Are we still doing okay, sweetie? Just let me know if you need anything.” 

The child remained stoic while Doc Myrtle itemized her wounds. 

My heart pumped furiously with each beat pounding a deeper ache into my soul. Despite mental arguments against it, I’d failed this child. My marrow told the story.

When Doc had completed her review of outward signs of injuries, abrasions, and the “absence of visible rashes or physical abnormalities upon initial examination,” she allowed herself a slow, deep breath and gave me a reassuring smile. 

The encouragement did little to mollify the unexpected anger at my mother, which had begun to boil in my gut and knot into a ball behind my breastbone. Mother always made her suffering the point around which all else turned. Failures to connect and guide us through life’s traumas had made me stupid with the obsession to prove her wrong. Misery and loss steered her life choices. Now I stared into the face of a compulsion based on the same malady. Mother’s suffering had been funneled across time and space, onto an innocent little girl six hundred miles away from her.

Doc Myrtle spoke softly as she prepared Kayla for taking vital signs. “Very good job, sweetheart. Now I will be checking if your body is working properly on the inside.” 

“Vitals,” Kayla said, with no perceived change in her overall demeanor. 

Warmth flooded the room. 

I teared up. 

Doc Myrtle beamed. “Yes, sweetheart! Precisely.” She picked up a thermometer and held it out for the girl to see. “Let’s test your body temperature with the thermometer. Will that be okay?”

Kayla offered no resistance as the gentle woman drug the thermometer across her forehead. Doc Myrtle reported it for the recording at ninety-seven point four degrees.

“Now we’ll check your pulse rate and breathing,” Doc said to Kayla. “But I’ll have to remove your jacket and shirt for this. Will that be okay?”

Kayla offered a tiny nod, and then began to peel off the small coat she wore. Doc Myrtle assisted her and placed the article of clothing in a paper bag from beneath the tray table. Together, they lifted Kayla’s shirt off. This item also went into a paper bag. The child’s torso was as clean and neat as my own young daughter’s after a bath, with the exception of a significant bluish red discoloration on her lower chest area. 

Doc noted this for the recording. She touched it lightly. 

Kayla flinched. 

“That hurts a bit, I see,” Doc Myrtle said. 

Kayla kept quiet.

The doctor cupped the chest piece of the stethoscope she had draped around her neck in her palms. “This may be a little cold at first, Kayla. But I need to get all of those vitals down.”

Kayla didn’t move a muscle as Doc Myrtle placed the shiny metal disc against her chest. The doctor listened for a few seconds and spoke numbers for the recording. She removed the scope and counted breaths and recorded those numbers. She repositioned and rested the stethoscope on Kayla’s back.

I fumed with a resurgence of bitterness towards mothers the world round. My sister had landed in jail due to her need to love better than our mother, better than Kayla’s mother. Both women ignored emotional needs to crush the father. Mother meant to kill anything Dixon Pierce with that damned big Chrysler New Yorker. I hated her for it. 

But I’d played along, hadn’t I? My big idea to disprove Mother propelled me into the mountains under a delusion that I could solve this case and save Renée. Ignorance resulting in stupid, inept actions that left Aidan Peale dead and his young daughter traumatized. 

Doc took to navigating the tangled mess on Kayla’s head with her fingertips. Sounds of the girl’s shallow breathing mingled with the rustling of her natty hair as the doctor examined her. 

“This will be just like checking for ticks, Kayla. I’m going to look you over and make sure none of those sneaky creatures are trying to hitch a free ride.”

Kayla offered no resistance to Doc’s manipulations beyond a soft tap of that fist against her knee at a random interval. 

“It sure has been a while since I’ve seen you. You are getting so grown up. Usually so talkative. You must have a really big secret.” Doc’s smile beamed and her voice remained steady and calm. She tipped Kayla’s head forward and examined behind her ears. She gently lifted and rotated, peeking beneath the child’s chin. “You sure got yourself a mess wandering the woods, little girl. We’ll have to get you a nice hot bath quick as we can.”

Doc picked up an otoscope and tugged Kayla’s earlobe. “But first we better take a look inside and see if there are any giggles tucked away.” Kayla’s lips twitched the tiniest bit at the humor. The doctor inspected her ear while she continued. “Yes, I believe I do see something funny lodged in there.” She moved around to inspect the other ear. “It may take some time to work those bits loose, little lady. Like that drop of water that gets in your ears when swimming.” The doctor then took a quick look into Kayla’s nose. “Nice and clean in your nostrils, though,” she said, placing the tool back on the side tray. “Good job, Kayla.”

The child’s minimal response perpetuated rumination on my idiotic investigation. Things done wrong. Things not done at all. I should have pushed Sheriff de Lude harder. Started a car chase and forced the policeman to follow. Done something radical, risked my license. Something. Instead I chose to prove the mad skills. 

Doc eased a hand down the girl’s back and looked at me. “What were the conditions where you found her?” she asked. She raised one of the child’s arms and gently worked it to test mobility.

“She was hiding in her father’s greenhouse.” I kept my voice steady, thinking about the words I would use. “There’d been an accident out front. You’ll see the results of that a bit later, I’m sure.”

Myrtle’s glance expressed a fear of the worst. 

I nodded. “Not sure if she was witness to anything. She was mumbling a phrase when I came to her, ‘glass castle dreaming.’ Pounding a fist on her knees, like you noticed when we came in.”

The line in Doc’s jaw tightened as she moved the opposite arm through its range until she was satisfied. “That man,” she said, easing Kayla’s arm back against her bruised side. “I told him and told him to get on it. Trouble with his wife got him all twisted up in his head. You’ve got to talk to someone, I told him. But these kind have to go it alone, be strong, fight the bear with their empty hands.” 

I wondered if the doctor meant Aidan.

She shifted focus to Kayla’s shoulders and chest. “Does it hurt anywhere else I touch?” she asked the girl.

If she got an answer, I couldn’t tell, but she acted as if she had.

“Good,” she said to Kayla. “Now, lie back, sweetheart.” She eased the small body until the girl was stretched out on her back. “I’m going to press around your belly, dear. Just tell me if anything hurts.” While probing and poking the girl’s abdomen for tenderness, Doc began shaking her head, mumbling to the general public. 

“It’s a lot of unhelpful machismo, bound to cost him eventually. How many stumbles before you miss a step completely? I pressed him on it, too. Told him straight out, someone will be in need and you’ll be lost in your personal problems. Made a point of saying, find a helper with a good head, not a mule who trails along behind you.” She gave her head one strong shake. “Fat lot of good it did.”

Sheriff de Lude was the target of this harangue. But it might have been me. What had I become? Blind with indignation at my own mother, I’d leapt at the opportunity to crack a great mystery even cops couldn’t solve. The outcome left a man dead and a baby girl emotionally shattered. 

“This kind of thing is unconscionable.” Doc kept testing pressure points along the length of the child’s body. “No telling how much abuse the girl has suffered.” She worked her way down Kayla’s legs. “Just tell me if anything hurts, Kayla dear.” The shifts from motherly love to mother bear came more smoothly than honey.

Her maternal kindness engendered affection, which quickly fostered disappointment at my mother’s lack of compassion for her children. Disillusion turned to anger and mingled with my own pain of failure, generating a laser beam of hostility that ricocheted off of multiple targets—Mother, Lorna, de Lude, and the little girl’s father. With the kind of trauma Aidan had put the child through, I could have stuck him in the chest with that pitchfork myself. 

The train of thought circled back on the psychological damage perpetrated by our Mother onto me. And onto my sister. Recollections of Renée storming off from numerous supposed “nice” dinners, muttering threats of violence. The natural progression revealed itself. What if she killed Aidan? What if she lost control and went after Kayla’s abusive father? Maybe her own painful experiences built up until it was too much for her conscience to contain? No way to know where she went after she left the diner. She didn’t weigh a hundred and ten pounds, but I knew from personal experience, her rages pumped enough adrenaline to knock over a hundred and eighty pound man.

Doc had arrived at the tattered shoes. She unlaced the first and pulled the shoe off with great care. “Oh my, Kayla. You must have walked a far piece.” While her voice came steady, concern showed in her eyes.

I perked up. “She walked to the junkyard? Where could she have been if not with Aidan?” 

Doc worked the other shoe free. “Her feet are swollen and beat up bad enough it had to be miles. How you doing little angel? I’m trying to be careful with these. Looks like you used them up today.”

Kayla didn’t wince.

A hot burn swelled behind my eyes—tears reaching for daylight, creating pressure on my throat, choking off painful words. An image of Renée wearing a bright orange jumpsuit interjected itself, me and Mother sitting across from her on a picnic bench of grated steel for Thanksgiving dinner. Attempts to push it off failed. The nightmare hunted and killed rational thought. Guilt and regret crowded onto my stooped shoulders, wrestling for control of the emotional chaos.

I straightened my back, swiping a hand across my eyes. The grudge against Mother had stolen energy needed for relevant measures. Now,  the next right action was breaking the news to my sister, to Vicky, and mostly to Kayla’s mother, Lorna.

Doc Myrtle stood beside me. “I need to check her for sexual trauma.” She spoke so softly I wasn’t sure what I’d heard. “Maybe step out for a minute to use the phone or something?”

I stared at Kayla, afraid to leave the child without protection. My heart pounded. I struggled to breathe. “Okay,” I said but couldn’t move.

“Go ahead and do what you need to, Connor.” Doc stepped away and spoke in a normal voice. “Kayla and I have got this. Am I right child?” She gave Kayla a glowing smile.

The little girl looked at me. Her face softened just a smidge.

“I’ll be right back.” I held up my cell phone. “Better call to make sure my friend Tony is okay.” I gave her a big grin. “He’s a little afraid of the dark.” With a quick turn I walked away. No need for her to see me crumble.