Pure Iron (39 page)

Jay arrived at the county jail early the next afternoon after a late morning meeting with Candace. He was accompanied by a high-powered lawyer who quickly obtained the band’s release from jail. Jay paid bail. He was tired and angry.

“Jet did it,” Jack muttered. “The crazy bitch is responsible for this mess.”

“You have no evidence,” the lawyer said.

“Doesn’t mean she didn’t do it,” Jack stubbornly insisted.

Jay escorted the band to a local discount department store where he bought them each a change of clothing. Then he took them to a motel and rented rooms where they could shower and change. Meals came next. Mick could hardly eat.

They traveled to the hospital, where Mick obtained his wife’s location and raced to the intensive care unit. The men stood in the hall, looked through the glass at the gauze wrapped form from which tubes and cords sprouted, and prayed.

“Are you her family?” a nurse quietly asked.

“I’m her husband,” Mick said.

The nurse, a pretty, young woman, recognized the ICU’s visitor and visibly refrained from asking him for an autograph. It just wasn’t appropriate, considering.

“She resting comfortably,” the nurse said. “She’s on a morphine drip for pain. The IV keeps her hydrated. Considering what new reports tell of the bus, she’s not badly burned. Most of the burns are second degree burns. They’re unsightly now, but she won’t scar too badly.”

“Can I go in to see her?”

“If you sit quietly. Her left hand is mostly untouched, so you may hold her hand if you like.”

Mick nodded and followed the nurse into the dim quiet room. Beeps and buzzes and the various noises of machinery and computers permeated the weak hope in that room. He sat in a chair beside the bed and picked up her left hand. The wedding ring was still there, blackened and filthy.

“I’m here, baby,” he said softly. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner, but I’m here now and I won’t leave you. You won’t be left alone. I love you, Sonia. I love you so much.”

Tears trickled down his stubbled cheeks and he bent his head to the narrow mattress and wept. He looked up and noticed bright red bleeding through the blanket and shouted for help.

A nurse came running, took one look at the spreading spot of blood and hit the emergency button. Seconds later a team of doctors and nurses surrounded the bed, snapping orders and reporting vital signs.

“What’s going on? Tell me!” Mick demanded, but they ignored him. Two orderlies wheeled in a gurney and Sonia was transferred to it on the count of three. They raced down corridors to an operating room which Mick was barred from entering. Not wanting to land in jail again, he hovered outside the doors and watched through the narrow windows as doctors worked on his wife.

Finally, finally, one of the doctors emerged.

“What is it? What’s wrong with
my wife
?”

The doctor leveled tired brown eyes at him and said tonelessly, “She miscarried and hemorrhaged.”

“I didn’t know she was pregnant,” Mick whispered, his heart clenching with loss.

“About ten weeks.”

Mick counted back and dropped his face into his hands. She’d conceived on their wedding night. “But she had her periods,” he muttered.

“Was she on the Pill?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not all that uncommon for that to happen in the first trimester, especially if the woman is still taking contraceptives and doesn’t realize she’s pregnant.”

“The baby?”

“We don’t know whether it was male or female,” the doctor said and patted his shoulder. “I’m truly sorry for your loss. But your wife’s alive and you still have the opportunity to have children.”

Mick nodded and followed the gurney back to ICU.

“How is she?” Jay asked when he arrived at the hospital. Candace and an Armani-dressed lawyer followed in his wake. Kris, Jack, Davis, and Angelo sat in uncomfortable plastic and steel chairs outside the ICU.

Kris shook his head. “The docs won’t tell us anything. Mick won’t leave her side. He told us that she miscarried. We didn’t even know she was pregnant.”

“Has the press been a problem?”

“Hospital security won’t allow them on this floor, thank God.”

Jay nodded. “I’ll hire extra security and clear it with hospital administration. You guys will have to find a place to stay, some better clothing. Candace will help you with that.” He gestured toward the lawyer. “This is Jude Q. Ellesworth. He’ll help ensure that whoever did this will spend a long, long time in jail.”

The lawyer, who looked like the human version of a Doberman pinscher, acknowledged the introduction with a curt nod.

Jay continued: “This won’t be cheap, boys.”

“I don’t care,” Kris snarled. “I want to nail that bitch to the wall for hurting Sonia and setting fire to our bus.”

He glanced through the plate glass windows beyond which an exhausted and distressed Mick sat beside his wife, holding her hand, lips moving as he spoke softly to her.

The lawyer nodded his understanding. “I’m sorry to meet you under these unfortunate circumstances, but rest assured that I’ll get justice for you and Mrs. Hendriksen.”

“This guy’s good?” Jack whispered to their agent.

Sotto voce
, Jay replied, “If you have to swim with sharks, then you want the biggest, baddest shark on your side. That’s him.”

“Good.”

“You guys just do as he tells you and don’t fuck up.”

Jack nodded.

Days passed with unbearable slowness. Mick refused to resume the tour and the band was forced to cancel several weeks of concert dates. The press mobbed band members whenever they ventured from the hospital. Cards, gift baskets, stuffed animals and mail inundated the hospital as tabloid reporters spread rumors of miraculous recovery, tragic death, bitter divorce, and group separation. Arson investigators picked through the wreckage of the tour bus and officially determined found no trace of an accelerant or other specific flammable used to ignite the fire. Police and private investigators searched for clues to whatever had caused the blunt force trauma to Sonia’s skull.

Law enforcement tracked down Hillary Ann Calder, otherwise known as Jet of Jet Fueled, and questioned her. But questioning a woman who was constantly high on illegal substances proved a repeated exercise in futility. The Jet Fueled band members endured interrogation, but were cleared of any wrongdoing connected to the assault. They suspected that Jet had something to do with the whole debacle and weary of her aggressive and unpredictable behavior, abandoned her. Two returned home to respectable haircuts, khaki pants, and golf shirts to work in their families’ businesses. One, envisioning himself to be the next Darius Rucker, decided to jump genres to country music and found a band willing to take him on. The fourth decided to get his G.E.D. and apply for college admission.

Of them, three never touched their instruments again in a professional capacity.

Deep within the safety of oblivion, Sonia shied away from the noise and pain of living. But a deep, strong voice sang softly and beckoned her up, up, up from the depths of a coma. The voice was beautiful. Sometimes it was joined by other voices in rich harmony. Sometimes another voice sang to her, deep and velvety, or light and smooth. The names attached to those voices tickled her memory, but she shunned those memories because they pulled her away from the comforting cocoon of dark painlessness.

As Sonia’s body healed, she spent more time in the twilight of consciousness where pain hovered just beyond the hazy edges of lucid thought. The beautiful voices called to her. The touch of gentle hands upon her hand formed a warm connection that her waking mind could not ignore.

She emerged from safe oblivion with a low groan as pain suffused her awareness.

“Hurts,” she rasped, the word escaping a parched throat, dry mouth, and chapped lips. Her eyelids fluttered open, eyes squinting against the ICU’s dim light. She wanted to flinch away from the exclamations of surprise and joy that erupted around her.

Blurry figures surrounded her. One of them shined a bright beam of light into each eye, making them blink and water.

“Water,” she croaked.

The tip of a straw was placed on her tongue. Her lips closed reflexively around it and she sucked. One swallow. And the precious liquid was taken away.

“Water,” she repeated.

The straw returned and she took a sip, let it rest on her tongue before swallowing. The straw was pulled back and she lacked the strength to pursue it.

“Water.”

The straw returned and she took a third drink.

“Baby, you’re awake!” a beloved voice whispered brokenly near her.

With enormous effort she turned her head in the direction of the voice and blinked hazily at the face that went with it. She blinked several times and then asked, bewildered, “Do I know you?”

“That’s not funny, Sonia,” a stern voice chided from the other side.

“She’s not joking,” the first man said, his haunted eyes searching her blank ones. He voice caught on a sob, “She doesn’t remember me.”

Cool, dry fingers pressed gently upon her neck, checking her pulse.

“Her skull was cracked. We had to remove some bone fragments from her brain. There was brain damage; we just don’t know how severe yet.” The responding voice was quiet, clinical, and strangely compassionate.

“Will she remember me ever?”

The fingers left her neck. “There’s no way to know, Mr. Hendriksen. We’ll just have to take it one day at a time.”

The man nodded and angled himself so that he looked directly into her eyes. Very clearly and distinctly, his softly spoken words penetrated her fading consciousness: “I am Mick Hendriksen and you are Sonia, my wife.” Her eyes fluttered shut and she drifted back off into the ease of black, soundless, painless oblivion.

“Mr. Hendriksen, she’s on the mend. Why don’t you get some rest? Eat. Take a shower and change your clothes.”

Mick looked up at the doctor, despair written on his face.

Kris came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Mick, I’ll stay with her until you get back. You’ll do her no good if you’re too exhausted and sick to take care of her.”

The rock star nodded in defeat and rose on shaky legs. Davis, Angelo, and Jack helped him walk to taxi and shielded him from the cameras and shouted questions of the paparazzi gathered at the hospital entrance.

With a tiny spark of hope burning deep within his heart, Kris sat down beside Sonia and took her hand in his own to keep vigil while Mick took care of his own needs. He leaned over to place a butterfly kiss on her cheek.

“Come back to us, Sonia,” he whispered, his voice thick with tears. “Mick needs you. He loves you and so do I.”

She woke for brief periods of time over the next several days, each time staying away a little longer. On the fifth day, the doctor ordered her moved out of intensive care.

Settled into her new bed, Sonia looked at the five men camped out in her room and asked, “Am I related to any of you?”

Eyebrows rose and jaws dropped.

“Shit. Oh, shit,” Angelo cursed. “Her family still doesn’t know.”

“You mean you’re not my family?” she asked, puzzled. “Then why are you here? I can’t be married to all of you. Or are you all Mick’s brothers?”

She glanced toward the tall, tattooed, muscular man in jeans, tee shirt, and heavy black boots who identified himself as her husband. He didn’t seem like the kind of person she’d marry, she thought, nose and forehead wrinkling as she pondered that one.

“Baby,” the big Black man who was called Davis moved beside her and took her hand. The other one was still bandaged. “Mick is your husband and none of is a blood relation to him or to you. You have a family back in Ohio. We’ve been remiss in not calling them and will fix that now.”

Angelo nodded even as Mick whipped out his cell phone and dialed. He rose and left the room for what was going to be a very uncomfortable conversation.

“Then where are we and why am I with you?”

“We’re in Portland.” He caught her puzzled look and clarified, “Oregon, not Maine.”

“Why are we in Portland?”

“We had a concert here.”

“Am I a singer? I don’t think I’m a singer. And I’m pretty sure I don’t play an instrument.”

Kris’ heart broke at her words, seeing that she’d lost so much of herself. But Davis answered, keeping his velvety baritone gentle and soft as he held her hand with a delicacy that any passerby would have found astounding in such a big, rough looking man.

“No, you’re not a singer and you don’t play any instruments that we’re aware of. But you do play a mean hand of euchre and you’re a fabulous cook. That’s what you were doing when … when you were hurt—cooking for us, for the roadies, for everyone on the tour. You’re generous like that.”

Unable to stand just hovering there in silence, Jack seated himself on the other side of her bed and ran a gentle knuckle down her cheek.

“Honey, we’re a band. Our best songs were inspired by you and are dedicated to you. We weren’t sure what to make of you when Mick introduced you to us, but we’ve all come to love you. You’re our little sister, the one whom we’d protect with our last breath.”