One morning, she woke up and felt something moist and sticky by her hip, and when she lifted her hand, her fingers were crimson. It was blood. She felt around her body and noticed that it wasn’t coming from a wound or a cut. “Andy!” she yelled for her friend.
In her pajamas, Andy scrambled into Morgan’s room and upon seeing the blood she rushed over to her side and began to evaluate the situation. “We have to take you the hospital. I need to do an ultrasound…I haven’t done it before, but it’s the only way to know if…if it’s gone…”
“Don’t say that…not yet…”
“Are you in pain?”
Morgan shook her head. “No, not really.”
Andy quietly got Morgan out of the house and into the car without anyone noticing. She sped to the hospital as Morgan sat beside her with tears in her eyes.
“Don’t think the worst until we know. There’s no need to panic.”
Morgan nodded and blinked away the tears. When they arrived at the hospital, Andy set up the ultrasound machine and prepared Morgan for the test. Just then, Jim, Charlie, and Ben came running in.
“What’s happened?” asked Jim out of breath. “I walked into your room and saw blood.”
“Are you injured or sick?” Charlie begged for an explanation.
“Guys, I need to help Morgan right now…we can talk about it after,” Andy said, waving them out of the room.
Charlie and Ben retreated from the room to give Andy some space to perform the exam, but Jim stayed put. He took hold of Morgan’s hand as Andy gently ran the probe with jelly over her stomach.
“Why are you checking her stomach?” asked Jim.
“Jim, I’m pregnant…or I was,” Morgan said as she quietly cried.
“Pregnant? But…”
Then suddenly all three of them heard a faint beating sound. It was a heartbeat.
“Andy, is that…” Morgan began.
“Yes. The baby’s alive. You didn’t miscarry.”
Morgan hugged Jim tightly and began to cry harder into his shoulder, but now she was crying out of relief.
Jim held onto her without saying another word.
***
“What is it?” Ben asked as Andy stepped out of the exam room.
Unsure how to begin, she said, “Do you remember Morgan having a bruised eye the day we met?”
Ben nodded. “I remember.”
“Well, the reason is because she was attacked…raped, actually. That’s why we left Bermuda.”
“What?”
“And…well, now she’s pregnant.”
“Oh my God,” he said breathlessly. “I mean, I figured there was something you guys were keeping from us, but I never would’ve guessed this.”
“It was awful. I found her after…after it happened.”
Ben started to ask something, but Andy held up her hand before he could speak. She couldn’t bring herself to talk anymore about that night. “Sorry, but there are images from that day that I will never be able to get out of my head. I’d rather not relive them right now.”
“Is she still pregnant?” Charlie asked.
“Yes, the baby’s heart is beating. But I need to run more tests to see what caused the bleeding and if the baby is healthy. I think that Morgan overworked herself so for now I’ve put her on bed rest.”
“Can I go in and see her?
“Yes. But give Jim a few more minutes with her. I think he’s a bit shocked.”
After that terrifying morning in the hospital, Jim would not leave Morgan’s side. He made sure she didn’t have to lift a finger. Andy made it a priority to learn how to operate the x-ray, the ultrasound, and the MRI properly. She needed to make sure that she could test if Morgan and her child were healthy, and she used the ultrasound machine regularly to check on both her friend and her fetus.
Slowly, Morgan strengthened not just physically but emotionally. She enjoyed helping Susan care for the animals on her farm and found the work therapeutic. Three days a week she taught reading and math to children at Aspen Elementary School. Diana, the young woman who was the head teacher at the school, was a quiet but genial girl, and they got along very well from the beginning. There were half a dozen teachers who taught nearly three hundred children between the ages of five and twelve. After turning thirteen, the children stopped going to school and began working, although Morgan offered to continue teaching some of them more advanced reading and writing classes two evenings a week. Several accepted her offer, and she quickly became a favorite at the school.
Once it became known that there was a “doctor” working at the hospital, people began seeking Andy’s assistance for injuries and ailments that they had typically ignored in the past. Using the x-ray, she reset dislocated shoulders and other small bones that had suffered from improper alignment when fractured the first time. In early September, a friend of Brian’s had a bullet lodged in his shoulder when it ricocheted off a tree while hunting elk. Not confident enough to use anesthesia properly, Andy gave the boy a few shots of whiskey to dull the pain and successfully removed the bullet from the muscle tissue.
Gradually, her expertise grew, and it pleased her to know that she was learning how to do things that very few others could. At night, she stayed up late reading books and old medical articles on childbirth, and together with Charlie, they planned for every contingency in the event that something went wrong.
To Andy’s surprise, she and Ben slowly formed a close friendship, and though she wondered privately about the possibility of it becoming something more, she never acted on it. She was too timid—scared even. She would have moments of extreme self-doubt. Yet their friendship was solid, founded on mutual respect. They shared many interests, including a profound love of history. Both had read several books on various periods of human civilization, from ancient Greece to the end of the twentieth century. They would often debate late into the night on how the course of history would have changed if one small and seemingly minor event had occurred differently or not at all.
Ben seemed to appreciate that Andy was the only girl he’d ever met who could not only use a gun with great skill and accuracy, but could also shoot an animal without flinching. When he mentioned this to her, she explained that it had been difficult to kill her first fish in Bermuda, adding, “I hope you don’t think of me as cold-blooded just because I don’t mind shooting a deer.”
He laughed. “Of course not. No one wants to kill Bambi, but we don’t want to starve either.”
As for Charlie, when it came to deciding what to do each day he was like a kid in a candy store. He picked tasks as he liked, though everything he did was helpful. Some days he would help Ben and Jim, proving to be a competent mechanic and repairer of various machines. Other days, he helped Susan and Brian on their farm, and Susan quickly developed a crush on him. Though initially wandering into unfamiliar territory, Susan soon got the better of him. After all, she was a fun, vibrant fourteen-year-old who worked hard and enjoyed being outdoors. Andy and her friends were quick to like her; she had spunk and wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.
Despite the work involved to keep the town running, there was also time for fun. The habits of a generation born and raised during the age of online social networking, cell phones, and high-definition televisions were replaced by more old-fashioned entertainment. For the first time in years, Andy played games like tag and hide-and-go-seek with many of the younger children. Football, soccer, and baseball games became a regular occurrence after dinner during the longer summer and early autumn evenings. Storytelling around campfires would often follow, or they’d watch old movies shown on a big screen downtown in the park. All of it brought back a piece of childhood, something that had been missing during the years of pain, fear, and uncertainty. Sometimes Andy would think about Maria and her brother and sister, and how they would be much happier in Aspen. She hoped to see them again one day, but doubted she would.
The only consistent source of aggravation that marred an otherwise tranquil life was the very existence of Nataliya and her friends, all of whom seemed to believe they were somehow better than the rest of the town and therefore too good to do any real work.
“Can’t we just force them out of town at gunpoint?” Andy once asked Brian, partly joking but mostly serious.
“They have guns too, Andy.’”
“Did you ever think of leaving Aspen and going elsewhere?”
“Sure, but I would feel like I was giving into them if I left. They’d win out of forfeit.”
“I understand. I wouldn’t give in either.”
For the most part, Andy and her friends ignored Nataliya’s inner circle and their transgressions. As new residents of Aspen, it wasn’t their place to make waves.
***
Tensions escalated one snowy day in mid-November. As usual, Andy was working at the hospital. That morning, she gave Morgan another sonogram, and following an uneventful afternoon, she headed toward the main entrance of the hospital to end her day. As she passed one of the operating rooms, she heard a commotion from inside. When she entered the room, three boys were in the midst of a struggle in the far corner. One of the boys, Nathan, a rather frail kid of eleven that Morgan taught, was pinned against the wall by Mikhail and his friend Heath. They were threatening Nathan with the defibrillator and were about to shock him when Andy quickly intervened.
“What the hell are you doing? Let go of him!”
Mikhail and Heath immediately looked as if they’d been caught with their pants down around their ankles, though they maintained a firm grip on Nathan.
“Did you hear me? Let go of him!”
“And if we don’t, what are you going to do?” Mikhail sputtered as Heath sneered viciously at Andy.
Staying calm, she reached her hand inside the backpack she carried to the hospital every day and fished around until she found her loaded pistol. Using both hands to hold the weapon, she pointed the barrel back and forth between Heath and Mikhail.
“Let him go or you’ll both get a bullet to the leg, and I won’t pull them out.”
After a tense silence, Heath and Mikhail reluctantly released Nathan. Gesturing with her pistol, she ordered the two out of the room. Fuming with anger, Heath and Mikhail skulked to the door.
“You’ll regret this, bitch!” Mikhail said with a flourish as he followed Heath outside.
Wordlessly, she followed and watched them exit the hospital with her pistol grip remaining firm. Then she returned to the operating room and tucked the weapon back into her bag.
“Did they hurt you?” she asked Nathan, moving toward him.
He shook his head. There were tears in his eyes. She gently placed her hands on his shoulders. Only after touching him did she become aware that her own hands were shaking.
“What happened, Nathan?”
But he was too upset to answer. A tear that had been hanging on precariously to his left eyelid finally gave up its fight and fell to the floor.
“Nathan, it’s okay, you can tell me. I won’t let them get away with it. I promise.”
Wearily, he lifted his gaze to meet Andy’s. She took a step back to give him space. Huddled in the corner, Nathan appeared smaller than usual. “They thought I saw something that I wasn’t supposed to, but when I told them I didn’t see anything, they didn’t believe me.”
“What did they think you saw?”
He shrugged weakly. “I don’t know. I mean I don’t know exactly what I saw.”
“But you did see something. What was it?”
He bit his lower lip and his gaze went to the floor.
“Nathan, please. I can’t help if you don’t tell me.”
He wiped his tears and looked up. “It was last night. I was over at a friend’s house for dinner with a few others from school. It was Alison’s house. Her older sister makes the best hamburgers.” This remark brought a brief smile to his face, and Andy smiled in return. “Anyway, after dinner, I went to the store to see if Mark was still there and if he needed any help.”
Mark was Nathan’s older brother and a friend of Charlie’s who ran the grocery store in town. Andy would often see him there cleaning up after closing.
“I didn’t see Mark inside the store when I got there, but I saw that the lights had been left on. I figured Mark must have forgotten, so I went inside to turn them off.” He paused and wiped at his eyes again. “I heard noises coming from the back of the store, like people talking or something. So I went to the back and saw that the back door was open, and that all the freezers were empty. I figured that the store was getting robbed, so I hid behind one of the shelves near the freezers. I should’ve just left the store, but I wanted to see who was robbing us. I saw three people standing in front of a truck outside. It was Heath and his brother, Garrett, talking to someone else. I didn’t recognize him, which I thought was strange, because I know everyone in town.”
Another pause and a trembling breath.
“Then I decided to leave before they saw me, but when I moved, I accidentally knocked over a jar of applesauce. It crashed and broke on the floor. They heard the noise and came running inside the store. I turned off the light switch so they couldn’t see and went out the front. When I got outside, I ran as fast as I could all the way home. I didn’t think they saw me, but they knew it was either me or Mark. We’re the only ones with keys to the store.”