Charlie was wrapped in a hospital blanket in a chair next to the bed. When she saw Kit stirring, her eyes got big. She jumped and went to the door, the blanket trailing behind her. Instead of her clothes, she wore a pair of baggy green scrubs.
“Hey, somebody!” she called, halfway into the hall. “She’s awake!” Then she turned around and smiled at Kit. “Holy shit, you’re awake!” As she started back toward Kit, her feet got caught in the blanket and she tripped and fell, sliding across the floor, arms outstretched. Kit tried to reach for her and was hit by a wall of pain. She cried out. It hurt so bad she felt sickness rise up and turned her head to vomit. She retched, her stomach empty, and collapsed back on the pillow. Charlie appeared next to her, chewing on a thumbnail.
“I want to hug you,” Charlie said. “But I’m afraid I’ll fuck you up or something.”
Kit lifted her fingers to show her she wanted to be touched. Her throat and her mouth were dry, and she wasn’t sure if she could speak. Charlie covered Kit’s hand with hers, lightly, so as not to hurt her. There was blood beneath Charlie’s nails and in the curves of her cuticles. She came close and lay her head next to her mother’s. Kit drank in the feeling of her daughter, smelled the gun smoke in her hair, tasted her saltwater tears. All this and the vivid burn of a lifetime of hurt. She cried out again.
Charlie stepped back, wiped her tears with the soft side of her wrist, looking incredulous. “Wait a sec,” she said, looking stunned. “You’re hurting?”
Kit herself could not understand, but the numbness she had known nearly her whole life was indeed gone.
She nodded slightly, wincing. She tried to clear her throat and gagged on the paste of her spit. On a rolling table behind Charlie, there was a large plastic mug with a straw leaning out of it. Kit gestured with her head that she wanted some water.
“Oh!” Charlie said. “You’re thirsty. Okay, hang on, sorry I drank it all.” She went to the sink and filled up the mug, then she brought the water to Kit and bent the straw toward her split and bloodied lips. Kit sipped the cool water, let it fill her mouth and run down her throat.
There was a cursory knock at the door, and a short, spry nurse in colorful scrubs bustled in with a clipboard. She washed her hands briskly at the sink and snapped on a pair of rubber gloves.
“’Scuse me, hon, coming through,” she said, brushing past Charlie. “I need you to stand over there so I can work, mkay?” Charlie obeyed.
With a practiced efficiency, she checked and squeezed a bag of fluids that was dripping down a tube into Kit’s hand, wrote something down on her clipboard. Then she took Kit’s vitals and looked in her eyes. She smelled like coffee and iodine.
“You got pretty beat up, missy,” she said. “How’s your pain?” Her voice was a brassy trumpet in Kit’s ear. Kit shook her head to say she felt like shit.
“One to five, five’s the worst.”
Kit held up five fingers. She wanted to explain that all this was new to her. “Is it supposed to hurt this bad?” she croaked.
The nurse laughed sympathetically. “Well, of course it should! You got cut up to ribbons, you poor thing. Oughta hurt like the dickens! I’m awfully sorry you’re feeling so bad.”
Kit nodded, a little choked up at the kind way the nurse was talking to her.
“Bless your heart,” she said and put a little button attached to a wire in Kit’s hand. “This is your morphine pump. Hit it now and anytime the pain gets to three.” Kit fingered the button but didn’t press it. The pain was terrible, but she wanted to see how long she could stand it.
The nurse pulled a watch out of her pocket and, seeing the time, shook her head. “The doctor’s behind schedule today so I’m gonna explain a few things to you, mkay?” Kit nodded. She could see Charlie straighten up at attention, as if ready to commit what the nurse had to say to memory.
“You sustained a laceration to your right femoral artery. That’s this big one right here,” she said pointing to the front of her right hip. “You were taken right into surgery, where they sutured you up and took you to recovery. You lost a lot of blood, so we had to give you a transfusion of donor blood and kept you on fluids and electrolytes.” Kit remembered being thrust into the window, the sound of shattered glass.
“You could have died, but this little lady,” she said, pointing to Charlie, “she saved your life. Brave li’l sister you got there. Police said they found her leaning all her weight on the wound, trying to stem the blood.” Charlie fiddled with the drawstring on her scrubs.
“Aaanyhoo,” the nurse said and dropped her clipboard in a clear plastic box hanging by the door. “That’s all I got. Take small sips of water and Doctor will be by in a few hours.”
Charlie returned to her station and held the straw up for Kit again.
She sipped and swallowed.
“How did you know to do that?” Kit finally spoke, her voice raspy. “Stop the bleeding, I mean?”
Charlie shrugged. A lull fell between them. Kit had little memory of anything that happened after she killed Manny, and even that was devoid of imagery, just a spray of sensation and sound.
“Did you—did you see me do it?” Kit asked.
Charlie looked around the room, as if searching for distraction.
“Yeah,” she said. “I couldn’t just leave you with him. After he went down I ran to a pay phone I noticed on our way to the motel. There was some change on the floor of that car Manny stole.”
Kit shuddered at the many ways she had failed to protect Charlie that night. She could hardly stand the thought of her daughter, all alone, pressing her beautiful hands on a gushing wound, not knowing if her mother would make it.
“I don’t deserve you,” she said to Charlie, who, in her oversize scrubs, looked like a much younger child playing dress-up.
“Not gonna lie,” Charlie said. “It’s gonna be pretty tough to wipe that one out of my memory.” She stared loosely at the wall behind Kit. “I mean, you pretty much lopped his fuckin’ head off.”
Kit winced again. It was ghastly, and yet Charlie saying it aloud made it slightly less so.
Charlie got quiet. She began to cry, held the butts of her hands to her eyes, her ribs fluttering with sobs, her voice full and mournful.
Kit reached out her hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said, holding back tears for Charlie.
“No, it’s not that,” Charlie said. “I’m not crying about what I saw. I just—I know he’s bad, and I’m not sorry he’s dead. You know, after he took me to that place, I knew he was a creepy fucker. But like—” She looked up at the ceiling. “I was kind of excited to have a dad, and I’m just so sad that he’s gone. You know, not Manny exactly, but the person I thought was my dad.”
Kit half-smiled, aching with the truth of it and loving her daughter so much it became a new pain. She thumbed away the tears around Charlie’s eyes, then drew her near, so their foreheads touched. “I think maybe what you’re missing is a parent that doesn’t treat you like shit,” she said. Charlie let out a sniffly laugh. “I’d say I did my best, but my best was most people’s worst. I thought the best thing I could teach you was how to be tough.”