Trauma

CHAPTER 51

Carrie woke to the sound of persistent knocking on her bedroom door. She panicked, thinking she was back in the on-call room, and whoever was knocking had come to do her harm.

“Carrie, are you awake?” Adam asked. “Can we talk?”

She shook her head to clear the cobwebs from her mind. “Yeah, come in,” she said, her voice raspy with sleep.

Adam entered, looking distraught.

Dressed in the same clothes she had worn to her interview with Detective Kowalski, Carrie sat up in bed and spun around to put her feet on the floor. She eyed her brother with concern. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

She knew what was wrong, of course. Adam was coming unhinged. It was obvious in the way he had threatened David. The encounter had left Carrie rattled and unnerved. David, to his credit, took it all in stride, but Carrie wished Adam had apologized to him in some way. Perhaps Adam had experienced a change of heart.

Adam eyed Limbic before plopping down on Carrie’s desk chair. He slouched forward, and Carrie waited for him to speak.

“What’s going on, Adam?” she asked at last.

“David,” Adam said in a hushed voice.

“I have his number. I’m sure he’d love to hear your apology.”

“That’s not why I came to talk to you.” Adam’s expression was grave, his haunted eyes encircled by dark rings.

Carrie felt the weight of his gaze. “What, then?” she asked.

“Outside, when I was toe to toe with him, I had thoughts that scared me.”

“Thoughts?”

Adam bounced his legs up and down. Evidently, it was not enough to settle him, because he took a ballpoint pen from Carrie’s desk and twirled it about his fingers like a miniature baton. He had learned the trick in high school and tried to teach Carrie the method, but she never quite caught on.

“I wanted to kill him,” Adam said.

Carrie gasped. “Adam, what are you saying?”

The pen tumbled from Adam’s hand and dropped to the floor. His gaze never left Carrie, and his cold stare sent a chill down her spine.

Adam’s eyes turned red, and he looked on the verge of tears. “I’m saying I didn’t just want to hurt him, I wanted to kill him.” His hushed voice was almost hypnotic. “It took everything in me not to grab his head and break his neck. I could have done it, too. I don’t know how I held back. If you hadn’t been there, I don’t think I would have.”

Carrie was stunned. A hollow pit in her gut allowed all sorts of feelings to roll in: fear, disgust, sadness, hopelessness. It was a cocktail of emotions she could not process.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“I’m telling you because I need your help,” Adam said.

Carrie’s guard fell immediately. She could look past Adam’s confession to focus instead on the guilt and fear that seemed to consume him. She reached for Adam’s hand, but he jerked away from her touch and rose to his feet.

“What can I do to help?” Carrie asked, rising as well. “We’ll talk to Mom and Dad. Maybe find you a new therapist.”

“I don’t need a therapist,” Adam said through clenched teeth. “I need the wires.”

Carrie blanched. “What did you say?”

“You heard me,” Adam said. “I want those wires in my brain. Scramble this shit up so I stop thinking the way I do.”

Carrie sank down onto her bed. “I can’t do that,” she said.

“What do you mean you can’t? You’re in charge of the thing.”

“No, no. I’m just a surgeon.” This was an odd bit of irony, to embrace the role Goodwin had tried to thrust upon her. But she did not know what else to say.

“You still have pull, don’t you? You’re the brain surgeon. You can get me in and get me cured.”

“It’s not that simple,” Carrie said.

“Why?”

“Because it might not work.” Carrie cringed inwardly, knowing her argument had holes.

“I was at dinner when you told Mom and Dad all about that Ramón guy. And who was the other one? Bushman or something. It worked for them. You said it worked for two others, too.”

“But they’re the exception, not the rule.”

“So? What’s the worst thing that can happen to me?” Adam asked. “I get some surgery that doesn’t do anything. Then I go back to being a walking time bomb, but this time with actual wires in my body.”

Carrie imagined Adam lying in a hospital bed, his head bandaged, muttering “Follow my light … follow my light … follow my light” the way Steve Abington had.

“No, it’s not that simple,” said Carrie. “I’m not entirely sure it’s safe.”

Adam looked flustered. “Have you done the surgery before?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And two of my patients are missing.”

“Because of the surgery?”

“No,” Carrie said, but corrected herself. “I just don’t know. I’m still trying to figure it all out.”

Carrie did not know how much to say. Yes, the DBS procedure could produce a specific side effect, but that was almost secondary to what Sandra Goodwin and Cal Trent were cooking up. And she still did not know how Bob Richardson from CerebroMed fit in this equation. Until she had some answers, she would never put Adam forward as a candidate for the surgery. Never.

“There’s a reason I’ve been followed and twice nearly killed,” Carrie said.

Adam glowered. “Yeah. And I think that reason is David. Who knows who he’s pissed off? Believe me, I’ve seen those embedded reporters in action. They can be like jackals. Maybe he dug up the wrong details on the wrong people and now that he’s hanging out with you, you’re a target, too.”

“I don’t think so,” Carrie said.

Adam fell to his knees and clutched Carrie’s hands with force. “Please,” he said. “I need to feel better.” He panted to catch his breath. His emotions choked back his voice, and his eyes brimmed with desperation.

“Until I know it’s completely safe, I just can’t do it. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care about any damn side effects!” Adam shouted. His ferocity took Carrie by surprise and frightened her. “I’ll take any side effect right now.” Adam sprang to his feet and began to pace. “What I’m afraid of is that next time I feel like I did with David, I won’t be able to hold back.”

“I’m sorry, Adam,” Carrie said. “But I just can’t. And I don’t want you to get your hopes up for this treatment, either. We need to focus on therapy. You need therapy.”

Adam nodded glumly, several times in quick succession. Without another word, he marched out of Carrie’s bedroom but left the door open. She had expected him to slam it shut.

Carrie exhaled loudly and took a moment to collect her thoughts. Part of her believed Adam would be fine if he did get the operation. That he’d be like Ramón or Terry Bushman, one of the fab four for whom DBS had been a life-saving procedure. Another part of her worried he’d vanish without a trace, like Abington and Fasciani. Until she had answers, there could be no wires.

A few minutes later, Carrie heard a loud crash followed by the shattering of glass. She raced downstairs, arriving in the foyer at the same instant as her worried parents.

Without words, Carrie followed her parents into the living room, where Adam perched upon the couch so he could reach the photographs on the wall. His face had a wicked look, a darkness she had never seen. In his hand, Adam wielded a massive hammer that Carrie recognized from his toolbox. He had already shattered one photo, and now Adam swung the hammer at a second, this one a picture of the siblings dressed in ski gear, taken at Sunday River in Maine. The hammer struck dead center, and the glass shattered into thousands of jagged pieces.

Adam was not selecting photos at random. Each picture was of him and Carrie. He swung again, and this time shattered the glass on a picture of brother and sister taken in front of Big Ben when they were in their teens. The face of the hammer put a large hole where Carrie’s head had been.

“Adam!” Irene screamed. “What are you doing?” She sank to the floor, her hands covering her mouth but not silencing her sobs.

Howard Bryant held Carrie back. Adam was in a blind rage; who knew what he would do if she approached?

Adam cocked his arm back once more, and aimed the hammer at another photograph, but paused to shoot his mother an annoyed look.

“I’m just showing my sister the same kind of love she showed me,” Adam said. He brought the hammer forward again, and the sound of breaking glass filled the room once more.