Part One ~ Bereft of Feeling ~

Chapter One

Fort Walton Beach, Florida

Friday April 16, 1999

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

 Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Thirty-four-year-old Lindy Alvarez Ames entered the emergency room at a local hospital in Fort Walton Beach in a near panic. She cradled her infant son and was crying uncontrollably. Despite her intelligence and usual poised demeanor, she was suddenly thrust into a very unnerving position. Her six-month-old son, Jake, was congested, wheezing, and shaking, and she didn’t know what was wrong with him. She was also still shaken from the heated words her dad and her boyfriend, David, exchanged over who would drive them to the hospital. She flinched involuntarily as she heard thunder rumble in the distance as the sliding doors closed behind her.

“Help me, please!” she shouted. “Could someone look at my son? He’s not breathing right. Please!” She wasn’t sure if she had been heard. Everyone in the emergency room looked so busy. She was afraid her voice was failing her, so she began again, this time louder. “Excuse me, please!”

An older-looking woman wearing burgundy scrubs with faded red hair came up to her and asked if she needed help. Lindy could scarcely breathe; much less make her words come out right.  “It’s my son. He is not breathing right. I don’t know if he has congestion or what. See, his little hands are shaking. Please God help him!”

“Doctor Rohm, come here right away please!” called out the red-haired lady. The urgency and resonance of the woman’s voice made Lindy even more upset, though she didn’t know why exactly.

In that moment, Lindy looked down at her helpless six-month-old little boy and felt as though she would faint. Indistinctly, she saw dark bruising marks as they were coming up on Jake’s neck and chest. If he was still in the process of bruising then his injures were very recent. The realization made her want to vomit. The wheezing sounds coming from Jake’s lungs were getting progressively louder. A doctor, maybe the Dr. Rohm who was summoned, came over and took the child from Lindy and started looking at him intently.

“Is this your son? How old is he?” The doctor waited for her responses expectantly. Lindy knew she should say something, but a dark menacing weight pushed down on her whole being, severely limiting her ability to think clearly.  Finally she spoke. “Jake; his name is Jake Ames. He’s six months old. I am his mother.”

“I think your son is in some sort of respiratory distress, ma’am. He needs to be examined right away. We don’t have time to get to the paperwork; Rachel will have someone help you with it later,” the doctor said, looking toward the red-haired lady. “Just stay here and we will get back to you as soon as we can” he finished, surveying Lindy with concern.

In an instant, an onslaught of medical personnel began tending to Jake. Lindy got lost in the shuffle of barking orders, equipment, and people. Jake looked so tiny, frail and helpless. She wanted desperately to hold him and try to make everything better, but strangers were now tending to him and despair enveloped her. She was so uncomfortable she wanted to cry and scream in the same breath. Jake was taken into one of the many examination rooms of the emergency room. The room with his gurney was only about ten feet away; a gulf that Lindy could no longer bridge. She wanted to know what was wrong with her son. Yet no one was telling her anything.

            As she paced back and forth near where they were working on Jake, Lindy’s gaze found additional doctors and nurses that were tending to other patients. Dully, she wondered what was wrong with the other patients. She speculated about what on earth happened to her son. Her eyes drifted from room to room, trying to hear what other patients were facing. She figured if she distracted herself with the concerns of the others in the emergency room, then she wouldn’t have to digest everything that Jake faced. Concentrating on Jake’s condition had caused a rip in her soul, revealing a pain so deep that she wished she could fade away into nothingness. Over the course of the next few minutes, Lindy drank some water and was ushered out from the room where they were treating Jake. She stood out in the hall, transfixed against the window, trying to see exactly what they were doing to her baby. Another half an hour came and went before anyone spoke directly to her.

XXXXX

Donna rolled her eyes. Once again, her husband, Peter, was rushing to his oldest daughter’s defense. He had been gone for a while and had not called yet. But a few seconds later, she heard him turn the lock on the front door. She waited for him to make if halfway down the hall leading to their bedroom before she yelled.

  “What’s up with Lindy this time?”

“Nothing’s with Lindy. Jake is sick or hurt or something. I don’t know for sure.” Peter wished Lindy didn’t bother his wife, Donna, so badly. He also wished Donna didn’t take every opportunity to make that known.

“Aren’t you coming back to bed?” asked Donna.

“No, I was actually going to make some coffee. Want some?”

“You are not going stay up, are you? Why do we go through this every time Lindy needs something? She is grown, Peter. And making mistakes left and right, I might add. So why do we have to stay up?”

At that moment, their home telephone rang.

“This is unreal,” Donna said before answering the phone.

“Yes, this is Mrs. Peter Alvarez.”

Peter left the bedroom to go and start a pot of coffee. He knew Jake’s condition couldn’t have been very good based upon how panicked Lindy was earlier. He sensed it was going to be a very long night.

Five minutes later, Donna joined her husband in the kitchen.

“Who was on the phone?” he questioned.

“Lindy’s friend Patty. I guess the best she can tell Jake is unresponsive. They are deciding if he should be transported to the women and children’s hospital.”

“Oh,” was Peter’s only utterance.

“Peter, what is going on?” Donna insisted.

Peter took a deep breath and tried to convey as much information as he knew. Jake wasn’t breathing right. Lindy wanted to take him to the hospital, but David hadn’t wanted her to.  David had a meltdown. Lindy told him off. Lindy and Jake made it to one of the other local hospitals safely. Nikki was now spending the night with David’s brother, Jimmy, and his wife across town.

XXXXX

            “Mrs. Ames, do you understand any of what I am saying to you?” a stern-looking female doctor asked.

            “I think so,” Lindy replied. The doctor then motioned for one of the nurses to escort her into a side room in the emergency department. This nurse, a middle-aged blond-haired man, cleared his throat and asked Lindy if she needed anything. Then she was urged to sit down. Already her mind spiraled at the revelations.

            “Look, Mrs. Ames, I am not going to screw around with this,” started the female doctor again. “Someone has been beating the daylights out of your son. We need to know what you know about it.” Lindy was unable to hide her revulsion. She knew nothing about it. She thought she was bringing Jake to the hospital because of congestion or even a possible seizure. What the doctors and nurses were saying was shattering.

XXXXX

            It was storming that evening, but late afternoon and evening thunderstorms were common in the spring in Florida. It was just after eight o’clock when she and Jake arrived at the doors to the emergency room. The winds pressed in on her as she walked up the sidewalk just a few moments earlier. Lindy wasn’t normally intimidated by bad weather, in fact she loved thunderstorms, but this storm and this night were very different somehow. Everything about the looming rainstorm that night was disheartening, intense, and felt personal to her. And now with every lightning strike and rumble of thunder, she shuddered and winced. She felt like some sort of perfunctory creature required to go through these ghastly circumstances against her will. Somewhere from the depths of her being, she succumbed to fear and she worried what would happen to Jake if the power in the hospital all of a sudden failed. Tears sprang forth upon her cheeks. A few moments later Lindy was escorted to the radiology department by the older red-haired lady, named Rachel, she encountered earlier. She was informed that Jake’s neurologist would be in to talk with her soon. Lindy smiled and thanked her. For the next few minutes, she starred mindlessly out of a window that overlooked the MRI machinery. She was assaulted with negative thoughts.

            “Do you know much about the human brain?” Lindy’s imaginings were interrupted by the head of neurology.

            “I know a little bit, I guess,” she offered pitifully.

            “This is the MRI of a healthy, normally developing six-month-old infant,” the neurologist said, pointing to the screen image on the right. “And this, Mrs. Ames, is your son’s brain,” he said, indicating the other image on the left.

            The second image disturbed Lindy so completely it made her breath catch in her chest.  Jake’s brain was not intact. She saw the lines on the film that represented the points of fracture; there were three of them. In addition, the section of Jake’s brain in his occipital lobe looked nothing like the healthy child’s brain. Lindy felt herself growing cold, sweaty, and faint. She sensed herself getting physically sick. She compared the image to a plate of jostled of noodles, not unlike the dinner she fixed earlier in the evening. Children’s brains should not look like Jake’s looked. As Lindy was escorted back to the waiting room, she wanted a cigarette. She had smoked off and on since her parents’ divorce in the late 1970s. That night she decided against it, not even thinking about from where her resolve stemmed.

            The occipital lobe in Jake’s brain was severely damaged and there was bleeding into his brain. There were a total of three fractures; two fractures were behind one of his eyes. That type of fracture was most associated with shaken-baby syndrome. There was no outward sign of injury, except for the bruising on Jake’s neck and chest. Lindy had never been suicidal in her life, but that night that she wanted to die. However, she reasoned that she couldn’t die; because she was all her two children had. The doctor was being thorough because Lindy asked him to do so; a huge part of her that wished that she hadn’t asked to see the hideous, mangled images at all. Her face was completely ashen, her expression frozen in disbelief. The doctor told her that there was so much damage to Jake’s brain that it was probable that he wouldn’t survive the night. She listened in horror and disbelief. Lindy sat silently, wishing for the infamous Alvarez denial mechanism to shield her heart. Over the years, the Alvarez family rarely discussed anything of significance. Varying degrees of shock washed over her soul like waves that pound at the shoreline, without mercy. Lindy listened patiently for what seemed like hours. Though the actual conversation with the neurologist only lasted fifteen minutes, it felt like an eternity to her, the memory of which caused knots in her stomach and heart for years and years to come.