—
Vega sat straight up in bed, hips and torso shuddering with a single jolt. She looked around quickly for clues. Green plaid curtains, green plaid chair, television mounted to the wall. It could have passed for the world’s most uncomfortable motel room until she looked down at the stiff white sheets, flimsy gray blanket, adjustable side rails, remote with worn arrow buttons. Another goddamn hospital.
She saw the IV needle stuck in the top of her left hand. With her right she touched her chest, looked down the gown in the front. Bra and underwear still on. She pressed her lips against her teeth, then rubbed them together, realized she was taking too long to do these things and enjoying things too much—they must have given her painkillers. She touched her lips, smelled her fingers, saw the residue sprinkle on the tips and the imprint from the handle of the Springfield like little tire tracks on her palms.
Then she remembered Dena Macht on the ground, Bailey Brandt with her arms hooked around Caplan’s waist, the snapping of a wooden plank over McKie’s back, and then she lifted her hand and touched the bandage above her eye. The pain was dulled by the drugs but pulsed from the pressure, a drop rippling through a puddle.
Vega heard noise outside the window—voices, vehicles. The first thing she thought of was a stock car race, the time her mother took her and Tommy to see NASCAR racing at the Sonoma tracks, the swell and grind of the engines, the hiss and howl of the crowd. But this was not a sprint.
Vega pushed the twisted sheet off of her and swung her legs to the floor. Slowly she stood, one hand on the rail, the other on the IV stand. The bottoms of her feet felt spongy, the muscles in her legs weak, but she knew it was just the drugs; she hadn’t been in a coma, for Christ’s sake. She walked to the window, tugging the IV stand behind her, and pulled back the curtain.
She saw Jamie Brandt, Gail and Arlen White on either side of her, holding her arms, and Maggie behind them, in the middle of a herd of vans. A pack of newspeople waving mikes and cameras. Gail shoved one of their arms away as they ran toward the emergency room doors, leaving Maggie Shambley’s lawyer in her unwrinkled suit behind to talk to the press.
Vega went back to the bed to sit, pushing the IV stand in front of her. She examined the needle in her hand and thought. She’d seen enough nurses do this with her mother. Only one or two of them were good, the rest were always stabbing and re-stabbing her hands, muttering, “Small veins,” with disdain like it was her mother’s fault. But by the end she was so high most of the time it didn’t matter. She didn’t notice the blood drops on the mattress or the bruised skin below her knuckles.
Those were actually sweet memories for Vega, when her mother was stoned on morphine, because she seemed to enjoy things and she wasn’t debilitated by anxiety as she’d been before the cancer. Her mother had stopped driving a couple of years previously because she was afraid she’d crash, so she’d made Vega and Tommy and her second husband, TJ, drive her everywhere. Then she stopped riding in cars altogether because she said they felt too small.
But on the morphine, she laughed and swore, leaned back on the pillow and gazed at Vega as if she were a gently waving daffodil. Vega thought her mother looked pretty then, with her little scraps of hair and thinned eyebrows, clear white skin and deep-end eyes, like an old elf queen.
Vega stared at the bag and the slow drip of liquid into the tubing. She reached up and rolled her thumb on the little wheel to pinch off the tube inside, shutting down the flow. Then she looked around, grabbed a tissue from the tray table next to the bed and folded it into a tiny square. She unpeeled the tape from the needle, pressed the tissue square over the entry point into her skin, and pulled the needle out, slow and careful, then strapped the tape over the tissue.
I could have done that for her, she thought briefly, sadly. She slapped her palms against her thighs, rubbed them through the gown. For a moment she felt very old and very scared. Then she stood and walked on her rubbery legs to the door and pushed it closed. Her shirt and jacket hung on a hook on the back, pants folded neatly over a hanger, black boots against the wall. She gave them a tight little smile and pulled the gown off over her head.
—
Bailey didn’t seem to hear the noise coming from outside. She had finished the Pedialyte, and had asked for more, which Cap didn’t have access to in the administrator’s office, so he’d given her a small cup of water. He knew he couldn’t give her too much, that she was at least mildly dehydrated and would need more electrolytes, salt, and sugar. Cap squatted in front of her while the Fed looked at his phone.
“She’s here,” he said to Cap.
Cap smiled at Bailey, examined the slender curvature of her cheeks and chin. She really did look like the Shrinky Dinks version of Jamie, not just younger, but everything in miniature, down to the expressive almond eyes.
The child was calm and seemed to trust him. He didn’t flatter himself that he had a way with kids; he knew to her right now he was merely the agent of change, taking her from somewhere terrifying to another place, and considering the instability of Dena’s and McKie’s state of mind, another place was better no matter where it was. Because there were a ton of worse things you could do to an eight-year-old girl besides kill her.
But she had held on to him after Vega passed out, listened to him when he asked her to wait in the car while he went inside the house of the old man with the truck to use the phone, stood next to him and pressed her head into his side and under his arm when the sheriff and the ambulance showed up.
“Your mom’s here,” said Cap to her.
“Is she sick?” asked Bailey.
Cap breathed out an airy laugh and tried not to burst into tears like a maniac. Having had what would probably prove to be the singular most traumatic experience of her life, here was Bailey Brandt worried about her mother.
Before he could say yes, there was the ding of the elevator and then a rush of noise in the hallway, chatter and footsteps and Jamie Brandt’s burnt voice above them all, yelling, “Bailey!”
Bailey jumped in her chair and stood. She looked once more at Cap, and he smiled at her and nodded. She appeared unsure of everything, but not afraid. She peered toward the doorway.