He patted my shoulder. “We’re going to talk, Ms. W., we’re going to talk about how you knew to come to this place, but it’ll keep a few hours.”
And then the rotors started up, and despite the racket and the lurching, which made Mitch tremble and burrow into my side, I fell asleep again. I woke only when the techs carried me out of the helicopter into the emergency room, but the hospital didn’t want Mitch inside. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t talk. I sat on the floor next to him with my arms around his blood-stiffened fur. A security guard was trying to reason with me, and then to shout at me, but I couldn’t respond, and then somehow Mr. Contreras was there with Morrell and I was on a gurney, and asleep for good.
When I finally woke up, it was late evening. I blinked sleepily at the hospital room, not remembering how I’d gotten here but feeling too lazy to worry about it. I had that sense of pleasure in my body that comes when a fever breaks. I wasn’t sore anymore, or thirsty, and while I slept someone had washed me. I was wearing a hospital gown, and I smelled of Jergens.
After a while, a nurse’s aide came in. “So you’re awake. How you doing?”
She took my blood pressure and temperature, and told me, when I asked, that I was at Cook County Hospital. “You been asleep twelve hours, girl: I don’t know what war you were fighting in, but you definitely were going down for the count. Now you drink some juice; the orders are, fluids, fluids, fluids.”
I obediently drank the glass of apple juice she held out to me, and then a glass of water. While she bustled about the room, I slowly remembered what had brought me here. I tried out my voice. I could speak again, albeit still rather hoarsely, so I asked after Marcena.
“I don’t know, honey, I don’t know about anyone you came in with. If she was hurt bad, like you’re saying, she’d be in a different unit, you see. You ask the doc when he comes along.”
I slept for the rest of the night, although not as soundly as before. Now that the hardest edge was off my exhaustion, I couldn’t block out the hospital noise—or the parade of people who came to check on me. Leading the band, naturally, was someone from admissions who wanted my insurance information. My wallet had been in my jeans pocket; when I asked for my clothes, someone dug a nasty bundle out of the locker. By an act of mercy, my wallet was still there, with my credit cards and my insurance card.
When they woke me again for rounds at six Wednesday morning, Morrell was sitting next to me. He gave me a crooked smile.
The team of doctors pronounced me combat ready, or at least fit enough to get up and go. They asked about the hole in my shoulder, which had leaked a little from my travails but was basically healing, wrote up my discharge papers, and, finally, left me alone with my lover.
Morrell said, “So, Hippolyte, Queen of the Amazons. You survived another battle.”
“I guess they haven’t sent Hercules to fight me yet. How long have you been here?”
“About half an hour. They told me when I called last night they were going to discharge you in the morning, and I figured you might want a change of underwear.”
“You’re almost as good as a girl, Morrell, figuring that out. You can join my horde of wild women, you can set us an example of breastlessness.”
He leaned over to kiss me. “That’s a myth, you know, that they cut off their breasts. And I especially like yours, so don’t do anything rash. Although that’s the most futile statement ever made, considering the way you’ve been treating your body the last ten days.”
“Spoken by the man who still has a bullet chip near his spine.”
He handed me a carry-on bag, packed with his usual precision: toothbrush, hairbrush, bra, clean jeans, and a cotton sweater. The bra was my favorite rose-and-silver lace, which I’d left at his place several weeks ago, but the clothes were his. We’re the same height, and the clothes were a pretty good fit—although I’d never have gotten the jeans buttoned if I hadn’t been fasting for thirty-six hours.
We took a cab to my apartment, where Mr. Contreras and the dogs greeted me as a sailor returned from a shipwreck. My neighbor had bathed Mitch and taken him to the vet, who’d put stitches in one of his feet where he’d sliced it on a can or the barbed wire. After his initial ecstasy, Mitch went back inside my neighbor’s apartment and climbed up on the couch to sleep. Mr. Contreras didn’t want to leave him, so we settled in the old man’s kitchen. Mr. Contreras began making pancakes, and we exchanged war stories.