In a glass-walled ICU room, Tamsin Merritt lay surrounded by a tangle of tubes, wires, and machines. Mia stepped lightly across the threshold, unconsciously holding her breath, as if she might waken her. In part she had come here to escape the parade of concerned co-workers, but now that she was here she found herself even more off balance.
Tamsin’s face was swollen and discolored, her eyes shallow, purple slits. White gauze was wrapped around the top of her head. The edges of the gauze were marked with a brownish ooze of bloody fluid. The air smelled of disinfectant mingled with other, deeper scents that Mia couldn’t name.
A narrow foam pad was wrapped around the back of Tamsin’s neck, cushioning her from the tie that held in place the flexible white breathing tube inserted into the hollow of her throat. Two more large flexible tubes were joined to it, one white and one blue, and they were connected to an accordion-like pump on a stand by the bed. The room was filled with the sound of its rhythmic wheezing. The machine’s pace was much slower than normal breathing, so it seemed to Mia as if Tamsin were holding each breath. The long pause before the air was released in a whoosh heightened Mia’s anxiety.
From a pole, three IV bags dripped into Tamsin’s arm. At the far end of the bed hung another bag half filled with pale urine. Above her head, a monitor showed various numbers and graphs that constantly changed. The woman at the center of it all, the one being kept alive by the beeping and whooshing machines, lay as still as if she were already in her grave.
When Mia thought of the two boys who had done this, her heart hardened. Anyone who was capable of inflicting this kind of terrible injury certainly deserved to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
She stepped closer. Tamsin was covered by a doubled sheet. A folded blue blanket, splotched with dried blood, rested under her head and on top of the pillow. Half her dark hair had been shaved, and the remnants were matted together with more blood. Large black stitches ran across her forehead and then back along the stubbled part of her skull.
A doctor entered the room. He was in his midthirties, with a muscular physique that loose blue scrubs couldn’t hide. A stethoscope was draped over his neck, and under his blue cloth cap his head was shaved. He frowned at her. “Are you a family member?”
“I’m from the King County prosecutor’s office,” Mia said. “We’ll be handling her case.”
“You do know she can’t talk to you?” he asked as he leaned over to check Tamsin’s IVs.
“I just wanted to see her for myself. So I can fully understand what they did to her.”
He turned toward Mia and his upper lip curled back. “They dropped a shopping cart on her from four stories up. And why? For fun? Even animals don’t do that to each other.”
Mia didn’t say anything, but she wondered if the doctor was right. When she was growing up, their cat, Applesauce, had liked to play with his prey. He would let a mouse run off a few inches, squeaking desperately, then pounce on it again and idly bat it about or carry it in his mouth for a few yards. Then he would drop the mouse and start the game all over again, turning with a hiss on any human who tried to intervene. And when the poor thing was finally dead, half the time he wouldn’t even eat it.
Mia gathered up her courage and stepped closer to Tamsin. It was hard to look at her and think of the woman she had been only a few days ago. Just heading to the store with her son to do some shopping. How many times had Mia been in her shoes? Now she was a seemingly lifeless body on a bed.
“So that’s where the shopping cart hit her?” Mia said in a near whisper, pointing at the stitches.
“There?” the doctor answered, making no effort to keep his voice down. “Yes, but we also had to remove a piece of her skull.” Mia must have made a face, because he said, “If your brain starts to swell, it has no place to go. So we do what’s called a hemicraniectomy. We removed a portion of her skull to allow her brain to swell beyond the confines of the bone without causing further elevations in brain pressure.” One of the numbers on the monitor went higher, to ninety-five.
It wasn’t so long ago that Mia had nursed Brooke, watched her heartbeat pulsing on the soft spot of her skull. But eventually her fontanel had knit together, as it was designed to do. How could you go out into the world with only a stretch of skin protecting your brain?
Mia shivered. “So she’s always going to be missing part of her skull?”
He shook his head. “No, no. We froze it. Once the swelling has resolved, we can suture it back onto its original place.”
She had no desire to learn how you sewed bone to bone. “And she’s still in a coma?”
“Yes, but remember we put her in it. So it’s a medically induced coma, not one caused by the trauma to her brain. We did it to slow things down. While she’s in the coma, her brain doesn’t need as much energy. So hopefully it’s less likely that parts of it will die.” He sighed. “Still, even if she recovers, anyone surviving a cranial injury of this magnitude should expect to contend with some degree of permanent disability. There could be memory problems, difficulty with solving problems or planning actions, changes in personality, physical impairment—it’s a wide range, and hard to predict. She’s going to need extensive physical therapy at a minimum, and probably some type of long-term care.”
Mia wondered if they should be talking about Tamsin like this right in front of her. Wasn’t it true that hearing was the last sense to go?
The doctor was looking up at something, and Mia followed his gaze. The numbers on the monitor kept going up even as she watched: 99, 102, 108, 115. An alarm began to sound. He reached up to turn it down and then leaned over Tamsin. “I don’t like this tachycardia. It can cause blood clots, and she could have a heart attack or a stroke. I need you to leave. Now.”
Mia hurried out of the room as a half dozen people in scrubs ran toward it.