Mia and the Mafia, Part 2

Mia and the Mafia, Part 2

To discover the destination, Mia slowly got out of Jonathan’s car. Standing by the vehicle, she looked around, finding herself in the middle of a forest. Beside the car park, she saw the friendly scatter of the houses beyond the trees. The mind-calming peacefulness touched her heart, and she just started to the listening to the chorus of birdsong. This remote location was a perfect place for anyone to hide from the world.

‘What is this place?’ Mia asked.

‘Officially, it is tagged as a special residential district on the maps. The St. Helen Nursing Home was built for the patients who need for long-term medical care. Each of them has it her or his own apartment like this one,’ he said, pointing at a building, which was the closest to them. ‘They live here with their caregiver or assistant.’

‘And does Cynthia live here, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why doesn’t she live with you? Or with your parents?’

‘After she was released from hospital, she was with mammy and daddy for a short time. Of course, my parents treated and served her, but they didn’t stop crying, and they always blamed me for what happened to her. Cynthia was fed up with this, and she moved to our place. But, frankly..., this is very hard to tell you..., the kids were too young at that time, and they were terribly afraid of my sister. Because of the horrible burn scars, they didn’t recognise her. They called her Creepy Monster, and they didn’t believe that the Creepy Monster living in the room upstairs was their loved Aunt Cynthia. When she heard it, she didn’t want to live with us, either. And partly, she was right, but I wasn’t able to stop the kids. So, Cynthia decided to withdraw from social life. She hasn’t left this estate for eight years.’

‘Oh, this is so sad.’

‘I came here to meet her every month. But...,’ he said, just before they crossed the gate of the sanatorium. He stopped, and he grabbed Mia’s hand to halt her, too. ‘I must tell you everything about her to prepare you for the sight. I don’t want you to be shocked.’

‘I’m a tough girl.’

‘Maybe, not tough enough for this. Well, somehow, she could survive the car bomb, and she could be saved from burning alive. But the consequences of the blast and the heat were mostly incurable. She had suffered third-degree burns all over her body. The surgeons had resuscitated her ten times in the first two weeks alone. She was in a temporary coma for one hundred days. She underwent more than fifty operations in the first year. The explosion tore both of her legs off. Although she was treated in a germ-free room of the intensive station, her wounds became septic. To save her life, the surgeons had to amputate both arms. Due to the explosion, she lost her eyesight. And the blast wave damaged the auditory system, too.'

‘Do you mean that she’s got no arms and legs, and she is blind, mostly deaf, and her skin is full of severe scarring?’ Mia said, just to be sure that she comprehended Jonathan’s story.

Jonathan just nodded to confirm the horrible summary.

‘Cynthia was treated in an intensive care unit for ten months. Later, she was under the care of a sub-intensive room of a surgery department for one more year. Then she lived with us for a couple of weeks. Finally, she moved here.’

‘Oh,’ she sighed, listening to the timeline of tragedy.

‘After she was allowed to leave the isolated chamber, she was transferred to a normal hospital department. Can you imagine how heart-breaking it was for us to personally meet her for the first time when she was released from the sterile room? When I saw her, I could see nothing else but a head and torso fully swaddled in white gauzes. She wore patches over her eyes, and she could hardly speak. And when she heard mammy's voice, she started to cry terribly, soaking the bandages covering her face...’

‘Please, tell me nothing more. I feel prepared.’

Jonathan nodded. Led by her boss, Mia moved toward the grassy yard inside the facility. Just a bit later, he pointed at a place in the middle of the garden.

‘She’s there,’ he said, and changing direction, he started to walk toward a willow tree.

Mia shadowed him, and soon, she, too, could see somebody sitting in a wheelchair. When Cynthia’s assistant noticed the visitors coming, he stood up and removed the earphones from Cynthia’s head. By the time Jonathan and Mia got there, the caregiver had already stepped back so that the patient and her visitors could be in private.

Approaching the shadow of the tree, Mia had some time to look closely at Jonathan’s unfortunate little sister. The girl wore a loose T-shirt and sported a pair of shorts. The pieces of clothes were big enough to hide the short stumps of the amputated arms and legs. A wide and padded seatbelt run across her body to glue the disfigured torso onto the softly cushioned backrest of the wheelchair.

After listening to the story, which her boss had just told her, Mia expected to see a rather scarred face. But, unexpectedly, she couldn’t see anything else but heavy bandages, which encircled the whole complexion from the forehead down to the neck. Besides, Cynthia sported a fashionable baseball cap, and she had a pair of black sunglasses to hide the blind eyes. However, its lenses were big enough to cover a good part of the bandage-bound face, too. Her blond hair was middle-length, yet it appeared to be a wig because of its perfectly cut fashion. And, behind the deformed ears, she wore a pair of big hearing aids to compensate the sensory faculty, which had been heavily demolished in the explosion.

‘Hello, Cynthia,’ Jonathan said while taking a bunch of flowers on the table between the wheelchair and the tree.

‘Hello, golden daisies,’ Cynthia replied, smelling the scent in the air through the overlappingly arranged bandages, which overlaid the nostrils.

‘You’ve got a good nose.’

‘This is the only part of my body, which still works. More or less. By the way, has your wife changed the perfume she uses?’ she turned her blind eyes toward Mia, after sensing the new fragrance.

‘No, this is not Sarah. Let me introduce the new rising star of our newspaper.’

‘Hello, my name's Mia Marshall,’ the journalist said, after stepping closer to the wheelchair-bound quad amputee.

‘Hello, Mia. I used to be Cynthia Taylor.’

Hearing the reply, Mia couldn’t decide whether it was a cynical joke or not.

‘A new operation?’ Jon asked his sister so casually as if they had been talking about the previous day’s supper.

‘Just the usual yearly renovation,’ Cynthia said through the tightly bandaged lips. ‘In total, seventy-third or seventy-ninth. I gave up counting... The doctors want to prepare me for a face transplant.’

‘That sounds good. I brought you a couple of new audiobooks,’ Jonathan said and placed some disks on the wooden table.

‘Thanks.’

‘How are you?’

‘How can I be?’ said the limbless and blind girl, who was nothing else but a gauze-wrapped head and a mutilated torso. ‘But a weird thing happened to me. Nick told me that he loves me.’

‘Nick who?’

‘My new caregiver,’ she turned her head back as if she had been able to see the man, who kept some distance from them. ‘You must meet him. Well, Miss Marshall, what do you think about this relationship?’

‘Well,’ she said, slowly. Cynthia’s open question was like a hit below the belt for Mia. ‘There must be males in the world, who prefer women like you...’

‘Please, go on.’ Cynthia tried to press the answer out of her.

‘I think what you want is more important than what I think. So do you love him, Cynthia?’

‘Nick is a gentleman, but I don’t love him. But I do want to be loved, although I became a Creepy Monster.’

‘You’re not a Creepy Monster,’ Jonathan told her.

‘I know what I know. We’ve talked about it for a thousand times, Jon!’ she cried out. Then she spoke to Mia: ‘My face scared Jonathan’s children to death. I could be a monster in a horror movie without any makeup. I look like as if I had spent a wild night with Hannibal Lecter.’ Then she suddenly hopped to another topic. ‘Why did my brother bring you here? To discourage you?’

‘Ahem...,’ Jonathan coughed.

‘Exactly, Cynthia,’ Mia told her the truth. ‘Your brother doesn’t want me to investigate the Mafia business.’

‘Hey, Mia...,’ Jonathan butted in.

‘I appreciate your openness, Mia,’ Cynthia said. ‘And now, I would like you to be honest with me. Am I a Creepy Monster?’

‘You’re an unpleasant sight, but you are not a Creepy Monster,’ she said.

‘Jonathan, this is what I could call sisterhood. No family members were so open to me. They always obligingly tried to pad my world with soft words. Mia, please be my honorary sister.’

‘With pleasure, Cynthia,’ Mia said.

‘Hey, sis, would you mind telling Jon that he should give back my artificial limbs?’

‘Oh, where are her arms?’ Turning into an interpreter between the siblings, Mia repeated Cynthia’s question.

‘Under repair. It’s too early to bring back,’ he replied in short, not feeling like talking anymore.

to be continued

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