"Sarah's lost," she said. "Nothing I can do about it. Life with her mother will warp her incontrovertibly. Her father is barely functional. Dresses in whatever's to the left in his closet and through the month moves steadily right, has his CDs numbered and plays them in order. Books on his shelves are arranged by size."
"Maybe she'll save herself."
"Maybe. Some of us do, don't we? It's just others that we can never save."
Within the hour I saw Val to her car. Knew she wouldn't stay but asked anyway. She pulled me close and we stood in silent embrace. That embrace and the warmth of her body, not to mention the silence, seemed answer enough just then to any questions the world might throw me. From the rooftop a barn owl, perhaps the one we'd heard earlier, looked on.
"Fabulous dinner," she said.
"Fabulous companion."
"Yes. You are."
Owl and I watched as the Volvo backed out to begin the long swing around the lake and away. Owl then swiveled his head right around, 180 degrees, like a gun turret. As the sound of Val's motor racketed off the water, I remembered listening to Lonnie's Jeep as it came around the lake that first time. I'd put a spray of iris in the trunk where Val kept her briefcase and enjoyed thinking of her finding the flowers there.
Bit of Glenfiddich left in the bottle, meanwhile.
I poured as the owl flew off to be about its business. This Scotch was mine, and I was going to be about it.
I'd been close to two years on the streets when I came awake in a white room, hearing beeps and a soughing as of pumps close by, garbled conversation further away, ringing phones. I tried to sit up and couldn't. A matronly face appeared above me.
"You've been shot, Officer. You're fine now. But you need to rest."
Her hand rose to the IV beside me and thumbed a tiny wheel there-as I sank.
When next I came around, a different face loomed above me, peering into my eyes from behind a conical light.
"Feeling better, I hope?"
Male this time, British or Australian accent.
Next he moved to the foot of my bed, prodded at my feet. Checking for pulses, as I later learned. He made some notations on a clipboard, set it aside, and reached towards the IV.
I grabbed hold of his hand, shook my head.
"Doctor's orders," he said.
"The doctor's here?"
"Not at the moment, mate."
"He's not, and we are. But he's still making decisions for both of us?'"
"You're refusing medication?"
"Do I need it?"
"You have to tell me."
"That I refuse?"
"Yes. So I can chart it."
"Okay, I refuse medication."
"Right you are, then." He picked up the clipboard, made another notation. "Surgeons here like to keep their patients snowed the first twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Some of the nurses question that, and rightly so. But who are we?"
"Besides the ones at bedside going through this shit with us, you mean."
"That's exactly what I mean."
"How long have I been here?"
"Came in around six, p.m. that is, not long before my shift started. That's to intensive care, mind you. You were in OR before, I'd guess an hour or so, started off in ER. They wouldn't have kept you down there long with a GSW, you being police and all."
"What's your name?"
" Ion."
Dawn nibbled at the window.
"Do you know what happened to me, Ion?"
"Shot on duty's what I got at report, just back from OR, standard ICU orders, no complications. Always anxious to get home to her young husband, Billie is. Hold on a sec. I'll get the chart, we can sort this out."
He was back in moments. Phones rang incessantly at the nurse's station outside my door. There must have been an elevator shaft close by. I kept hearing the deep-throated whine of the elevator's voyage, the thunk of it coming into port, the shift in hallway sounds when the doors opened.
Ion pulled a molded plastic visitor's chair up beside the bed, went rummaging through the chart.
"Looks as though you responded to a domestic dispute called in by neighbors. Got there and found a man beating his wife with a segment of garden hose. You took him down-"
"From behind, with a choke hold."
"Oh?"
"And the wife shot me."
"Coming back to you, is it?"
"Not really. But I know how these things usually go."
Perfunctory rap at the door, around the sill of which a face then leant. Young woman with something very close to a Marine buzz cut and a diamond stud in her nose.
"That time already?" Ion said. "Be right with you, C.C. Just give me a minute.
"Shift change," he told me, looking back down at the chart. "Here we go… Bullet passed cleanly through your upper thigh, no major vessels involved. There'd have been a lot of blood, I imagine. A couple of major muscle groups got more or less dissected. All put back right, but muscles take an amazing time to forgive you."
"That why I can't move?"
"That would be the restraints. Sorry." Ion unlashed trailing nylon ties from sidebars of the bed, slipped padded cuffs off wrists and ankles. "Seems you reacted poorly to one of the sedatives, hardly uncommon. But all that lot should be well out of your system by now."
The stud-nosed face appeared again in the doorway.
"C.C. What is it, you've a bloody bus to catch? You're here for twelve hours. Go take some vitals, pretend you're a nurse. I'll be along straightaway, just as I said."
I thanked him.
Standing, he pulled up a trouser leg and rapped knuckles at the pinkish leg thereunder, which gave off a hollow sound. "I've been where you are, Officer, right enough. Compliments of Miss Thatcher."
He never showed up beside my bed again. When I asked, I was told that he'd been assigned to another unit, that all the nurses rotated through the various intensive cares.
"How many ICUs are there?"
"Seeks." Six.
"That's a lot of care."
"Is hard world."
Angie was, what, twenty-four? On the other hand, she was Korean-so maybe she did know, from direct experience, how hard the world could be.
I thought I knew, of course. Weeks of physical therapy, weeks of furiously sending messages down the spinal column to a leg that first ignored the signals then barely acknowledged them, weeks of watching those around me-MS patients, people with birth defects, victims of severe trauma or strokes-taught me different. My world was easy.
Four months later, back at work though still on desk duty, I had personally thanked everyone else involved in my medical care, but in trying to track down Ion found that he'd not merely been assigned to another ICU, as I'd been told, but had left the hospital's employ.
Two or three purportedly official calls from Officer Turner at MPD, and I was pulling into the parking lot of an apartment complex in south Memphis. No sign of air conditioning and the mercury pushing ninety degrees, so most of the apartments had doors and windows open, inviting in a nonexistent breeze. Parking lot filled with pickups drooling oil and boxy sedans well past expiration date. The one-time swimming pool had been filled in with cement, the cement painted blue.
I knocked at the door of 1-C. Had in hand a sack of goodies with a gift bow threaded through the paper handles-candy, cookies, cheese and water biscuits, thumb-sized salamis, and summer sausage.
"Whot?" he said as the door opened. Puffy face, sclera gone red. Wearing shorts and T-shirt. The foot on his good leg was bare; a shoe remained on the other. Van Morrison playing back in the depths. "Tupelo Honey."
"Whot?" he said again.
"You don't remember me, do you?"
"And I should?"
"Officer Turner. Came in with a GSW long about August. You took care of me."
"Sorry, mate. All a blur to me."
Motion behind him became a body moving towards us. Buzz-cut blond hair, diamond stud, not much else by way of disguise. Or of clothes, for that matter.