“What would you like to know?” Hawley asked, trying to be friendly.
Mabel Ridge leaned in. “Lily never told me where you’re from.”
“I grew up near Galveston Bay.” When she blinked at him he added, “Texas.”
“And what is it you do for work?”
“He’s a mechanic,” said Charlie.
Hawley gave the boy a look in the rearview. “I’m in between jobs.”
“That’s too bad.” Mabel wrapped her fingers around the headrest of the driver’s seat, close to Hawley’s face. “Well,” she said. “You must be good at something.”
“He’s good at beating people up,” Charlie said, then wiped his bloody nose with the sleeve of his leather coat.
This kept Mabel Ridge quiet for a while. Hawley watched her stew and slowly add up the details. Meanwhile, in the passenger seat, Lily seemed to be shrinking, sliding down bit by bit as her mother hovered between them. Before long she’d end up in the wheel well. Hawley knew they were in trouble but he wasn’t sure what to do next. They’d barely made it fifteen minutes, and Mabel Ridge was supposed to be staying for a week.
By the time they reached the hospital, the silence in the car had taken on its own weight and substance. Hawley pulled next to the emergency entrance and parked. All he wanted was to get out of the car. “I better take him in,” he said.
Lily touched his good leg and gave a squeeze that said not to take long.
“Goodbye, Charlie. Remember what I said.”
Charlie nodded, then wrinkled his brow like he was already trying to remember Lily’s words, his fingers pressed against his swollen jaw. He struggled with the handle and slid out, dragging along some pieces of the broken window that rang like tiny bells as they hit the asphalt.
“It was nice to meet you,” said Mabel Ridge, but her smile wasn’t nice at all.
The hospital was a low brick building with wheelchair ramps coming out both sides. As they passed through the sliding doors, Hawley saw half a dozen people waiting on metal chairs and a TV on in the corner with the sound off, playing the news. The room smelled of moldy carpets even though the floor was covered in tile. Clustered together on one side was a middle-aged lady with her arm in a sling; an old man clutching a crying toddler; and a Chinese woman patting the back of her son, who was getting sick in a bucket on his lap. Sitting away from everyone was a homeless guy, his stuff piled in garbage bags around him, holding a plastic burger container on his lap. Behind a glass booth, a nurse shuffled papers.
“What do I say?” said Charlie.
“Just tell them you got in a fight at school,” said Hawley.
The boy went up to the counter and talked to the nurse. Hawley considered ducking out but then remembered that Mabel Ridge was in the car, probably pumping his wife for information, and decided he should wait until the kid was admitted. He dropped into one of the empty seats near the homeless guy and held his breath against the man’s stale, dank smell. Inside the burger container was an ear, resting on a paper napkin.
“What happened?” Hawley asked.
“Oh,” said the homeless man, “it’s not my ear. It belongs to a friend of mine. I’m just holding it for him.”
“Is he in the hospital?”
“Not yet,” said the man.
The ear was only half an ear—the lobe and a bit of the outer cartilage. The knife must have been sharp. It was a clean cut. There was hardly any blood.
The nurse gave Charlie an ice pack and a clipboard and a pen. He carried the stuff all back over to Hawley and touched the ice pack gingerly against his lower jaw.
“I need you to sign this.”
“What is it?” Hawley asked.
“A parental permission form.”
“No way.”
“You have to,” said the boy, “or they’ll call my dad.”
“That’s probably a good idea.”
“Trust me,” said Charlie. “It isn’t.”
Hawley glanced up and caught the eye of the homeless man. He thought about the missing ear resting inside the plastic container, and the other guy out there wandering around without it, and this man waiting here for his friend, just on the chance he’d show.
“What did my wife say to you?”
“She gave me a hundred bucks,” said Charlie. “And she told me to keep my mouth shut.”
“What else?” Hawley asked. He knew there was something.
The boy shuffled the papers. He clipped them back onto the clipboard. “She said to stop stealing cars, and doing other bad stuff. Otherwise I’d end up like you.”
There it was.
Hawley signed the paper.
After a while the nurse called Charlie’s name and he followed her behind the glass partition. Hawley stepped into the bathroom and got some paper towels and washed out his leg again. It looked more like a knife wound than a bullet wound, the skin sliced off clean, but the blood had completely soaked through the bandage and run down over his boots and changed the color of his laces. He needed stitches. And antibiotics. When he got home he’d sew it up, or use Super Glue to bind the skin together (a trick that Jove had taught him). For now he took off his belt and wrapped some paper towels around the cut and then tied it off tight with the belt and rolled his pants back down.
When he came out of the bathroom, Lily was there talking to the nurse. “Where’ve you been?” she asked.
“It won’t be that much longer,” said Hawley.
“We’re out there waiting.” Whatever Mabel Ridge had said in the truck, Hawley could tell it had done its job. Lily was blinking at him with tight, tired eyes, and then they widened.
“There’s blood all over your boots.”
She was going to leave him, Hawley thought. Maybe not today but someday. Hawley couldn’t hide his Old Me, or detox from it or talk it away at meetings. He untied his jacket from around his waist and held it open. He gave his wife a good look.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Lily cried, and then she sneezed. It was a great big honking sneeze, exploding over the waiting room in a spray. Lily’s hands came up and covered her face, and then she sneezed again, and again and again. She swayed and Hawley caught her arm. Her face blossomed into splotches, her eyes became glassy as she sneezed and sneezed and sneezed, until everyone, even the homeless guy holding the ear, was staring at Hawley like it was his fault. And he guessed it was.
He walked his wife outside, back into the rain. The automatic doors opened wide and then shut the hospital away behind them. “It doesn’t even hurt,” he said.
“You looked like you were going to kill him,” said Lily.
“I wasn’t,” said Hawley.
“You looked like you were.” She sneezed again.
Hawley thought back to the way Lily had stepped out of the trees, holding the gun just right. Her arms braced and steady. Her eye trained on her target. All those hours spent practicing together in the woods. It had been for something, after all.
“You meant to shoot me?”