Sandra was mid-forties, with strong hands, a no-nonsense salt-and-pepper haircut, and deep lines etching her face. She was calm but intent. “Is it the man you came in with? Should I call the police?”
“Oh, God no, please don’t call the police. The man I came with is trying to help me. The problem is my ex-husband.” This was part of their plan, to provide a more reasonable explanation of their secretive behavior. June had added the embellishments. “He’s been stalking me. He’s a lawyer, a powerful man, and he knows a million cops. Somebody drove us off the road this morning, and I’m afraid he’s getting ready to do something worse. I’m trying to disappear.”
“Have you talked with the police?”
“I have a restraining order, but my ex-husband doesn’t care about that. He might send people to look for us. Please don’t tell them anything you don’t have to.”
“You’re certain he didn’t do this to you? The man you’re with?”
“No way,” said June. “He’s one of the good guys.”
Sandra put a warm hand on June’s shoulder. “Wait here a minute, okay? We’ll take care of you.”
When she came back, Sandra walked June to an exam room with a hospital bed and a clutter of noisy medical equipment. The nurse practitioner asked the usual questions, but the only truthful answers June gave were about her physical symptoms. She was tempted to give the woman her real cell number. She didn’t know why. Maybe she wanted someone to know how to find her, even if it was just a nurse practitioner in Springfield, Oregon.
For the rest of the world, she’d fallen off the map.
When Sandra touched June’s swollen lip with an alcohol swab, June flinched. “Sorry,” Sandra said, dabbing only a little more gently. “It hurts, I know. It’s actually started to split at the impact point. You could use a few stitches and ice to bring the swelling down, twenty minutes every two hours, through tomorrow. Might as well start now.”
She rolled her chair to a cabinet, pulled out a chemical cold pack, thumped it on the edge of the counter to activate it, and handed it to June. “Hold that on your lip.”
Then she turned her attention to June’s shredded arm, again scrubbing harder than June liked, although she did dab on a topical anesthetic where she needed to use tweezers to take out embedded shards of glass. “Mostly scrapes and scratches,” she said. “A few more stitches here on this nice cut right below the elbow.”
She pulled a suture kit from a cabinet, dabbed on some more anesthetic, and began to sew with a steady, practiced hand. June watched curiously as the curved needle passed through her skin. There was no pain, only the strange tug of the thread as it pulled the skin together.
When the needle came toward her lip, she had to close her eyes.
“All done,” Sandra finally announced, then applied some kind of goo to the worst areas, wound June’s arm with gauze from the forearm to the armpit, and wrapped it with a stretchy strip like an Ace bandage. “Take that off for cleaning every day, then apply fresh gauze. When everything’s scabbed over, you’re done, two days, maybe three. The stitches will dissolve in two weeks or so. The lip we’ll just leave open, no dressing. Those stitches you’ll need to have removed in three or four days. If things get red or inflamed, you may have an infection. You’ll need to see another doctor.”
“I’ll do that.” June took the woman’s hand in her own. “Thank you.”
Sandra gave her a gentle hug. “Your secret’s safe with me,” she said.
“Thank you,” whispered June, returning the hug, absurdly grateful.
? ? ?
SHE MADE HER WAY through the maze of exam areas to the waiting area, but Peter was gone. The young woman at the reception desk told her that he was with the doctor, which June took as a good sign. “Would you like someone to walk you back to his exam room?”
“In a few minutes,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She went out to the car and got her bag, then walked back to a covered bench in the parking area outside the ER and opened her laptop. The first thing she did was turn off the cell modem and the Wi-Fi. It was killing her to stay off the Internet, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t make a few notes about what had happened that day.
As she began to type, a notification popped up, announcing that the cell modem was now connected. She turned it off again, but it began to show the little circle icon that meant the computer was working on something. Then the cell modem notification popped up again.
That was a weird little bug, she thought. Her laptop was getting peculiar in its old age.
She shut down the laptop and put it back in the car, then returned to the reception area.