A Beauteous Flower

Chapter 33 - The Sound of Silence

Silence.

That's all she had heard from Daniel since he showed her the picture of her in the arms of Steve the Oaf. Madison sulked in that silence and wondered if Daniel would ever give her a chance to explain. She wished he would do anything, laugh, cry, scream, just as long as he did it where she could see him and interact with him. Instead, Daniel locked her out of his life and Madison was at a total loss for what to do next.

Madison tried to go to Daniel to talk. Her siege of the bedroom began in the early morning after the party. She tried everything she could think of to get Daniel to answer the door and speak to her.  She knocked politely, pounded incessantly, whined petulantly, threatened ominously, begged, and pleaded and screamed and cried herself hoarse, but Daniel didn't even acknowledge her. She tried to call his cell phones, but she heard them both ring in the kitchen.

Just silence.

Next, she decided to be a little more aggressive. Madison went outside under the balcony and called Daniel to come out while she threw little pebbles at the glass French doors of the balcony. She walked back to the woods and tried to get an angle where she could look into the bedroom windows. Finally, she went a little crazy and played loud music and danced naked by the pool.

More silence.

Unable to think of anything else to do, she tried to lure Daniel out with the aroma of food. She ordered a steak and baked potato from Outback, put it by the door and wafted the scent under the door. She yelled to him that she had Oreo cookies with milk for dessert and shoved an Oreo under the door after she twisted it apart. After she returned from a bathroom break, she found the Oreo shoved back out uneaten. The next day she ordered a pizza and left that by the door while she loudly stomped down the hall to lead the illusion she was not perched outside. For a solid hour Madison peered around a corner to ambush him when he opened the door to get the pizza, but to no avail. Dejectedly, she ate a slice of cold pizza for dinner while she sat in the hallway outside her room.

Still more silence.

Then Madison tried to force her way in and tried to defeat the button lock with a straightened coat hanger. The lock popped open, and the knob turned, but Madison discovered that Daniel had braced the door from the inside so it would not open. No matter what she tried Daniel would not open the door or speak to her. He didn't even tell her to go away.

Nothing but silence.

Finally, on the evening of the second day she gave up and settled on the living room sofa for a long snivel with a fresh box of Kleenex. How long Daniel could keep this silence up? He was a quiet man, but this was something else again. It was like he was gone, or maybe he intended to ignore her out of his life. If she had not heard the toilet flush and the shower run a couple of times, she could have sworn he was not in their room at all. Madison shivered uncomfortably as the silence mocked her.

Exhaustion finally took over and she fell asleep on the sofa with the last of the Kleenex clutched in her hand. A few hours later she screamed herself awake from a nightmare where she found Daniel in their bedroom dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Terrified, she sprinted up the stairs and pounded on the door and called tearfully to Daniel to at least let her know if he was alright. In a panic, she tried the doorknob again and, to her surprise, the door opened before her.

"Daniel?" Madison called through the open door. "Daniel?"

Still empty silence reigned. Carefully she entered the room with her heart in her throat, her chest tight with the expectation of Daniel's dead body sprawled in a pool of blood on the floor. It took her the better part of fifteen minutes to search the room and closet and then work up the courage to enter the bathroom. Nothing. No Daniel. No Gandalf. Nothing.