Wildfire Heart – Chapter 06 – ScarsLikeVelvet

Chapter 06

July 3, 1991 – Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA

Evalynn Buckley arrived home as the last member of her family. The cars of her children and their spouses were already in the driveway, and her husband George was waiting for her on the front steps. She walked straight into his waiting arms, and he folded her into a hug without saying a word.

“This is so fucked up, I don’t even have words,” Evalynn mumbled against his chest, clinging to him while she was fighting to get her equilibrium back.

“Are you sure you want to have this conversation tonight?” George asked her, running his hands up and down her back, one cupping the back of her neck, giving it a gentle squeeze.

“Whether I want to or not, we need to have this conversation tonight for the sake of the children,” Evalynn mumbled and rubbed her face against his shoulder, drying of the tears she couldn’t stop from falling.

George took a shuddering breath and released it slowly, trying to keep his composure though it was hard because his children and grandchildren had always been the one point that could get his even temper to break and he wasn’t sure what exactly his youngest son had been up to, but whatever it was, his wife’s reaction pointed toward nothing good and he expected needing to head out to vent his temper in a safe way sooner rather than later.

“Let’s go inside,” he said, gently guiding his wife inside where their children and grandchildren were waiting for them.

Lucas stood by the fireplace and looked at the pictures sitting on the mantel. He studied the last family picture that showed all the siblings and sighed. Somewhere between the time this picture had been taken and now, his youngest brother had changed in ways not one of them had anticipated.

The moment his parents entered, he turned and looked at his mother, who looked rather pale and shaken, something he hadn’t seen since they all had learned that Little Daniel suffered from leukemia.

“Mom?” he asked, sounding worried, even if he didn’t look like it.

His siblings and all their spouses were silently watching, while Juli-Anne, the oldest of the grandchildren, kept her cousins occupied in the kitchen.

Evalynn walked over to her favourite chair and sat down heavily. George sat down on the arm of the chair, resting his arm protectively around her shoulder without saying a word.

“What happened? Did someone die?” Maria, their only girl, asked, her voice shaking a bit, though she forced it down ruthlessly the way she did in court.

“No one died,” Evalynn replied. “Yet …,” she amended a second later.

“So what happened?” Gabriel, her second oldest, asked.

Evalynn gave them a rundown of what had been going on in their youngest sibling’s life since Daniel’s diagnosis and what had happened the day Margaret had given birth to their third child. Her voice was calm and steady as she spoke about her being sectioned and her husband getting arrested after both of them flipped their shit, even if she was feeling anything but calm.

“The children?” Mary, Lucas’ wife, inquired quietly.

“Madeline is in the care of a foster family, where she will remain. That has already been decided and is non-negotiable. Her behavioural issues make her a threat to both her brothers, and her therapist thinks it is best to keep the children apart with no chance of reuniting them before Daniel and Evan are adults, and even then only with their consent. She knows no boundaries she isn’t willing to cross if it gets her what she wants, is entitled from the tips of her hair down to her little toes, and also willing to get violent, from what Daniel reported. The foster family chosen for her is willing to keep her and even foster to adopt if that is something we can agree to, as Margaret and Phillip will both loose their parental rights. In Margaret’s case they have already been severed because she has proven herself a serious threat to all three children, and once Phillip’s case lands in front of a judge, he will loose the rights to his children too. He paid off people to look the other way, threatened, and blackmailed, and in one case nearly beat a teenager, who babysat for him, to death. There is no way he will walk free,” Evalynn explained what she had read in the folder.

“What about Daniel and … Evan, was it?” Julia, the wife of Evalynn’s third oldest child, Matthias, asked.

“They are currently in the care of the nurses of the oncology ward. Both of them could be released from the hospital if the Department of Children and Family Services had a foster family prepared to take both a severely sick pre-teen, and a newborn, but they don’t. People want to foster-to-adopt Evan by the dozen, but no one is willing to take on Daniel because of his medical issues. The one family they have on file, already took on two terminally ill children that have been remanded into DCFS’s care, and they can’t take another one,” Evalynn explained what Bridget Walsh had told her.

“So this is a conversation about which of us is willing to take them?” Michael, Maria’s husband, who had been sitting quietly beside his wife, listening to the conversation.

“I think all of us are willing to take the children,” George spoke up. “Because there is no way we will let either of them go into the system.”

Everyone nodded. No hesitation at all.

“I think, we shouldn’t take them,” Julia said after a moment. “Not because we don’t have the space or the means, or anything, but Judith and I both are around a lot of sick people at public school, and we could bring something home unintentionally that could be harmful to Daniel in his compromised state.”

Maria and Michael exchanged a speaking look with each other before she spoke up next.

“We are child free for a reason. While we would be willing to take them before they go into the system, our lives are ill-suited for children given how many hours we both work. It wouldn’t serve either of the boys to be taken in by us just to be handed off to a nanny,” she explained.

Gabriel and Lucas, along with their wives, Mary and Anna, looked at each other, having a silent conversation. It was Mary who eventually spoke up.

“As you guys know, I can’t have any more children after what happened during Juli-Anne’s birth,” she began. “But I would love to fill my house with the laughter of children and the pitter-patter of little feet again. So we will take the boys in, adopt them if the courts will allow it, and fold them into our family. They will know the love of the family they’ve been denied so far. They will get to know their cousins and spend time with them, and we will make sure that even though she isn’t allowed to see the boys, we will support Madeline if we can.”

Lucas just grinned at the thought of not being outnumbered in the house anymore and nodded.

“If DCFS doesn’t agree with Lucas and Mary taking the boys, then we will,” Gabriel added. “While Anna and I are happy with Jenny and Darius being old enough to mostly take care of themselves, we wouldn’t allow them to vanish into the system. We’ll support Luke and Mary in any way they need us to.”

Anna nodded, and George smiled when Evalynn relaxed against his side.

“Alright,” Evalynn said, and stood. “I’ll need to get some paperwork from my office, so we can line out our plans properly for Mrs Walsh to review. While I do that, get the children in here and explain the situation to them.”

Before anyone could say something, she walked away.

George watched her leave, and he sighed.

“Ladies?” he addressed his daughter and daughters-in-law, “Would you be willing to take care of that particular conversation, while the boys and I come up with a plan of attack when it comes to getting Daniel and Evan home and settled into the family?”

“Of course,” Maria said. “We’ve got this.”

“Let’s join the children in the kitchen and leave the men to getting their bad mood out in a safe way,” Julia added.

Michael stood.

“I’ll join the women. I think they might need a male perspective on the situation,” he offered, slipping out of the room before any of the military men could protest.

— — —

“Do you think any of our family will take us in?” Daniel asked softly, when Nurse Hadley left them alone for a moment to go to the toilet.

Evan made a soft sound in his lap and looked at his older brother more intently than normal for a child his age. His lips twitched into the facsimile of a smile, and eventually, he answered, “I think they would have the first time around, had they known what was going on in our lives.”

“You really think so?” Daniel prodded Evan, who had lived a lot longer than he had.

“I know so. They took care of me the only way they could, which was leaving me money. The paperwork that came with it made it clear it wasn’t what any of them wanted, but our parental units did a number on their family, that left all of them flailing. Margaret’s parents died from a broken heart shortly after you did, and Dad’s family got hit with a series of accidents that broke them in ways that made them unable to try and reach out to me when I was an adult. I don’t blame them, but I am glad things are different this time around. While the money was nice it doesn’t substitute well for interpersonal relationships … and Maddie was after that money a lot. They didn’t leave her anything due to her leaving me with Margaret and Phillip and never reaching out to me again while I lived with with them. It was a whole thing between us,” Evan explained and fell silent when footsteps could be heard approaching Daniel’s room.

Moments later, a soft knock sounded, and the door opened.

Daniel looked up from his brother and looked at the woman standing in the door.

“Where is the nurse?” she snapped.

Evan immediately disliked her and her rude behaviour, so he did what he did best at the moment when people pissed him off, he screamed in a way that alerted every nurse on the floor that something was going on that shouldn’t be.

Fast approaching steps joined the woman by the door.

“What are you doing here, Mrs O’Hara? You were told a nurse would be with you shortly,” the charge nurse said. “You can’t just enter other patients’ rooms nilly willy. Especially if the rooms are designated as single rooms and with the need to mask and shit. You could very well kill our other patients with the germs you bring in here from the outside world!”

The woman, Mrs O’Hara apparently, looked appalled at being called out the way she was.

“Don’t you dare talk to me this way! I’ve been waiting ages for one of you lazy bastards to come to take care of my Emily. She’s sick and she needs her medication and you don’t do anything to ease her!” the woman screeched, causing Evan to respond in kind.

“Shut up, you stupid woman! You are scaring my brother!!!” Daniel screamed at her. “Nurse Hadley is my nurse, and you won’t get her, you cunt!”

“Daniel!” Nurse Hadley, who just came out of the bathroom, chastised him gently.

“What? She is! She screamed from the moment she entered the room. Didn’t even introduce herself … that’s just bad manners, and I don’t have to be nice to people who have bad manners,” Daniel told his nurse with an innocent expression.

Evan laughed heartily in Daniel’s mind but squirmed in his lap. He had one other weapon at his disposal that would clear out the room real quick, and he silently apologised to his brother before he had a really unfortunate situation going on in his diaper that smelled so bad that Mrs O’Hara stopped screaming, and instead gagged and vomited down the front of her expensive dress and into the hallway.

The charge nurse bit her lip, and Nurse Hadley shook her head.

“If I didn’t know better than I would say he did that on purpose,” she remarked as she got the supplies to clean Evan up ready.

Daniel scrunched up his nose and shrugged.

“I don’t know what’s going on in his head … he’s really little and doesn’t talk yet,” he remarked as he started to strip Evan out of his onesie. “I think he needs a bath.”

Nurse Hadley looked at the baby on the changing mat and sighed. Evan really needed a bath. His diaper hadn’t been able to hold the abrupt emptying of his bowels, and well, it was a rather unfortunate situation for everyone around.

“Can we bathe him in the sink? Maddie said Mum did that with me when I was as little as Evan is now,” Daniel asked.

“I’ll call the nursery to get some supplies down here to make a bath possible. They have bathing tubs they can carry around, so we can fill it in the sink and bathe Evan on the counter beside it,” Nurse Hadley explained.

Daniel just nodded and watched her make the call using the phone by the door.

It took the nurse who was assigned to Evan’s care from the nursery only five minutes to bring down what was needed to clean Evan up, and Daniel watched Evan enjoy his first proper bath from his bed.

Nurse Hadley had told him he wasn’t tall enough to give Evan a bath here, but that he could ask whoever became their guardian that he wished to share a bath with Evan as soon as he was big enough.

Daniel had pouted in response, but hadn’t protested because he knew the nurse was right. While he was strong enough to hold his little brother, he wasn’t currently strong enough to carry him around. Nurse Hadley had repeatedly assured him that he eventually would be strong enough to do so if he did his physical therapy exercises and ate the nutritious food he was given along with drinking the protein shakes that were designed to help his body rebuild after the chemotherapy.

Evan had told him she was right, and Daniel had reluctantly given in once he realised his brother was speaking from personal experience due to recovery from a dozen serious injuries and cancer himself at one point in his life. Hearing about all the things Evan had been through in his long life had been hard, but neither of the boys believed they should keep anything back if they wished to have a good life this time around.

— — —

Margaret Buckley was not a happy camper when she finally surfaced from the sedation the doctors had used to stop her from giving herself a heart attack or an aneurysm. She realised quickly that she was in the one place she had been avoiding like the plague since she was a teenager—the care of a therapist/psychiatrist.

She also knew that the only way to escape their questionable—to her mind—care was to kill herself, and achieving that in a psychiatric facility was going to be hard, but not impossible. Well, as long as they didn’t restrain her at least.

Margaret needed to be a little clearer before she could plan how to take care of her issue. She closed her eyes and ignored the people stepping into her room to check on her. She was great at ignoring people she didn’t want to interact with.

— — —

Phillip Buckley listened to his lawyer explaining the charges he was facing, and he knew that his ass was toast. He didn’t have enough money to pay everyone off who could make his life hard, so all he could do was to stand trial and accept whatever came his way like the man he had been raised to be.

He had realised a while ago that his wife was insane, but he hadn’t known what to do with that fact. He couldn’t actually leave her with the children, and he also couldn’t take the children with him because he had no clue how to handle them.

Paying off the people who had realised that something was seriously wrong in their household and joining his wife in the insanity of the situation she had brought down on them was the only way he could think of to handle the situation, because admitting defeat and asking for help was beneath him.

Just the thought of reaching out to his parents and asking them to help him handle the whole mess made him want to vomit, so he fell back onto the only thing he had left—the discipline his parents had instilled in him as a child.

So he just told his lawyer that he would accept whatever the courts offered, and he would go to jail without protest, pay whatever he could, and do what he could to redeem himself if that was possible.

His lawyer looked incredibly surprised because for the first time since Phillip Buckley put him on retainer, the man showed some self-awareness and acceptance of fault. There seemed to be no way that this would hold true long-term, but he would take what he got, and do what he did best, which was negotiating with the courts.

After having his client sign some additional paperwork, he left the meeting room he had been led to by the prison guards and returned to his office, while Phillip Buckley was taken back to the cell he was occupying. He slumped onto his cot and closed his eyes and focused on his breathing. His life was changing a lot and so fast he had no idea how to handle it all, but he knew that there were no other options to be had.

He just hoped the children would be fine without Margaret or him to care for them.

Please be aware that the third chapter took a darker turn than expected, and there are mentions of a child being abused by another with what seems like a sexual component.
While I had most of the relevant tags added from the start, I wanted to let people know about the added incest tag so that they could avoid it if it might trigger them in any way.