I’m still two blocks from home, hurrying beneath a pewter-gray sky streaked with black clouds that lower by the second, as always oblivious to weather forecasts, each day presumed to repeat the day before. My fellow citizens hustle along beside me, a sprinter in running gear, a mom pushing a stroller, a man who slaps frantically at the tires of his wheelchair. I’m moving a lot faster, too, but not fast enough, a few drops instantly becoming millions upon millions. I know I should see what’s there, should reach for a world far older than ours, the great surrender. That’s my job, but I’m not up to it. If I ever was.
I have an umbrella in my bag, one of those tiny folding umbrellas barely wide enough to cover my head. I grip the shaft in my right hand, hold down one edge of the fabric with my left, tuck my head between the struts, my clothing instantly soaked, rainwater flowing in streams the length of my body, exquisitely cold. The sidewalks empty as I push through, the cars on the street almost invisible, shrouded in the mist thrown up by their hissing tires.
I’m turning onto South Portland Avenue when I’m attacked fifty yards from home, thinking already of a warm shower and whatever meal can be put together. He’s on me before I know he’s there, fists slamming into my head, my face, my mouth, my nose. I taste blood on my tongue as I crash to the sidewalk, him on top of me, the weight unbearable as he drags my head back and forth across the concrete, hits me again, again, again while he talks to me, the words little more than grunts.
Confess, innocent, you better, better, better, next time you’re dead.
He stands up finally, backing slightly away. I know what he’s going to do and I know what Tina meant when she told me that I had only to endure. He lifts his right leg, draws it back, hesitates for seconds that seem like hours, finally drives the tip of his boot into my forehead.
Two women, one of them speaking words I can’t hear, slide me onto a hard, plastic board and begin to strap me down. I’m feeling no pain though I’m sure that I will, and soon. The right side of my face is numb, lower back as well, but I’m moving my legs as I offer myself and whoever else may be listening a conclusive self-diagnosis. Carolyn Grand will live.
They lift me up and my world begins to spin, only one more thought before I’m unconscious. The others, the little Carolyn Grands, the selves now gone. Were they exiled, or, worse, annihilated? Or did they simply give up, the struggle subject to the strictest of cost-benefit analyses, too great to be endured?
Hours later, I open one eye, the eye not swollen shut. I’m looking through a window at the blank night sky, my brain numbed by whatever opiate they’ve put into my system, yet the pain somehow still there, lying outside my body, waiting, waiting. I hear myself groan when I turn my head, the sound remote, my body following in slow motion, sultry almost, as if a lover awaited me, arms outstretched, lips already parted. But there’s no lover nearby, only the face of Detective Ortega, his gaze as always intense.
And me, Serena, I’m so relieved to see him that tears well up.
Ortega disappears for a moment, then returns with a Styrofoam cup in his hand, a pink straw poking through its lid. He places the straw between my lips, waits for me to sip, then asks, “Who?”
“Serena.”
“Name me a name, Serena. Who attacked you?”
“O’Neill.”
Ortega’s on his cell phone within seconds, saying, “Yeah, she just identified O’Neill. It’s a go.” He listens for a moment, then hangs up and returns to my bedside.
“Mirror,” I say, but it comes out “miwaw,” and I have to repeat myself three times before Ortega understands. I expect him to argue, to beg me to wait until the swelling goes down, until I’m beautiful again, as beautiful as Eleni, but he doesn’t. He fetches my purse from a patient’s locker, rummages through until he finds a small compact, opens it, places the glass before my single functioning eye. I’m as expected, one side of my swollen face as smooth and round as an overstretched balloon, the skin red turning blue, nose covered with gauze, a line of stitches running across the right side of my forehead. I’ve seen this face before, courtesy of our dead daddy, though he never let his daughter get within a thousand yards of a hospital, she left to heal on our own. Or not.
“They want to keep you here overnight,” Ortega tells me. “Possible concussion. The rest of it”—he shrugs—“the rest of it will heal in time.”
He stares at me for a long moment, his eyes flicking between emotions I can’t name, then pulls a chair close to the bed, sits down and takes my hand. “It never ends for you, does it?” He leans forward to kiss me, the touch of his lips a passing of feathers across my brow, and I know he loves us. “Rest now, Serena. I’ll stay with you as long as I can.”