An Angel in the Dark

Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

Melanie

         I felt my heart beat in my chest as I pondered my impending doom. The feeling of my beating heart was strange, and despite my incessant fear, I relished it. I hadn’t felt my heart beat in such a long time. My mind wandered from death to delight as I counted every heartbeat. One, two, three, four, five…  It was ironic, really. After all this time, the day I begin to pull out of the abyss will be the day I die.

         I hoped with all of my might that Darcy would find a way to save me. She held my life in her hands, and it was slipping. Yet she had saved me, so didn’t she have the right to take my life away again? I had anticipated and hoped for death on many occasions, but that was before Darcy had come along. Now I had a reason to live, I had hope.

         Darcy had saved me with her voice, but she needed to do a lot more than speak to me this time to save my life. She needed to let someone know I was in here, and unless she could somehow escape from that mean old nurse to find Lydia, I was as good as dead.

         Suddenly, I heard footsteps. If I could have cried, I would have. They were here, and soon I would be gone. I didn’t pay attention to the weight of the footsteps, only that they were coming. If I had paid attention, I would have noticed that they were too light to belong to anyone I recognized, even Darcy.

I heard the door creak open, and I cringed, preparing for the worst. Yet a soft voice spoke, one that I loved and missed.

“Melanie?” Ryan, my sweet little nine-year-old brother, had come to visit me for both the first and last time.

I heard the loud screech of a metal chair being pulled up to my bedside, and then a small thud as he plopped himself down on the chair.

“Melanie, I’m sorry I haven’t visited yet,” he murmured. “Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me. They said I shouldn’t see you like this… They still won’t let me see you. I just… I had to sneak in before you were gone forever.”

And then my sweet little brother broke into tearful sobs so quiet I could barely hear them. My heart broke all over again.

“Ryan, don’t cry!” I wanted to call out. I wanted to hold him and let him cry on my shoulder, the nightly ritual we had shared when he woke up crying from nightmares.

Suddenly, a thought occurred to me. If I could move my thumb for Darcy, surely I could move my whole hand for Ryan. I focused all of my energy to my fingertips. I longed to just stretch them out, to maybe, just maybe reach Ryan to let him know I was in there.

As I felt the stiff joints of the fingers on my left hand relax, I knew I could do it. I could have cried with joy as my fingers stretched out exactly as I had willed them to. My pointer finger came in contact with the soft, bony flesh of another finger that I knew belonged to my brother.

“Melanie!” Ryan’s sobbing ceased at once. I heard the chair fall, and he must have knocked it over when he jumped up. “You’re in there, aren’t you? You’re listening to every word I say!”

“Yes!” I wanted to shout back to him. “Yes!”

“Well listen to this,” he continued, a determination so fierce in his voice that I barely recognized it. “I swear by everything I own and everything I am that I won’t let them hurt you. If you’re still in there, and I honestly believe you are, you’ll stay right here until you can come back to us again. If they want to pull the plug on you, they’ll have to go through me first!”

I smiled inside as Ryan vowed to be my advocate. I had a strong sense of déjà vu, and I realized it reminded me of our tag team we had going for a while before the incident. If one of us got in a fight with a parent, the other would always come to the rescue of the other without fail, no matter what it took or how much we lost from it. In a way, this felt like just a more extreme variation of our tag team. Even though we had been separated from each other for months, our love prevailed.