61

 

 

Aside from Strodtz and Harrity, the doctor and hospital staff were the only ones to visit my room. I got a bouquet of flowers, but when I opened the card, the brief message was signed with a single letter.

Get better. R.

I sat in my bed and laughed at that. Rolo. It had to be.

Rolo was a pimp I’d come across a few times in the course of a couple of different cases. We’d clashed, but we’d also come to an understanding. No one would confuse it as a friendship, but there was some form of mutual respect there.

That was it.

No Clell.

No Adam.

No Anna.

Clell may not have heard, and Adam I understood. Maybe Anna, too. But all three absences still hurt. I was sitting in the hospital after almost dying, with half a leg missing, and the only person who seemed to care was a pimp I hadn’t seen in a year.

I was that alone.

If I could have cried, I would have. But I couldn’t, so I tried to laugh instead. It came out as a strangled cry, and a nurse poked her head into my room.

“You okay, sir?”

I couldn’t bring myself to say yes, and I couldn’t bring myself to say no, so I just stared at her until she left, too.

 

 

I sat in that bed, rambling around in my own thoughts. Sometime the drugs jumbled them up, other times I felt clear as the summer sky.

I thought about my past, and every turn I took on those streets brought me somewhere painful. I escaped it by thinking about my present, but that took me right back to that single bouquet of flowers that Rolo sent.

So I thought about the future. I knew the media was going to be all over me when I got out of the hospital. I wouldn’t give them anything but I’d seen how they usually handled that. They’d hound the target, then fill in the gaps with speculation, none of which would be positive.

I didn’t want that. I just wanted to return to the relative obscurity I’d enjoyed before all of this occurred. I wanted things to return to normal.

Then I’d look down at the nub below my left knee and wonder what the new normal was going to look like.

I thought about leaving River City like Katie had suggested. Maybe I should have done that years ago. But I knew I wouldn’t. I tried to convince myself that I was too old to be starting over somewhere new, but that argument fell flat. The reason was simpler than that.

I was too stubborn.

I treated being stubborn like it was a virtue, but really, where did it get me?

Alone and broken in a hospital bed, I thought.

I raised my plastic glass of cranberry juice with a short, bent straw and toasted being stubborn. Because, vice or virtue, being stubborn was all I had.