By some accident of nature, probably that she had needed less triage than Roderick, Kellen’s ambulance got to the hospital first. Some cute young guys wheeled her through the ER entrance—they probably weren’t any younger than her, but really, they were cute, for all the good that did her—and down the hall to a room occupied by tall female in a white coat:
DR. CHERYL BRUNDAGE:
FEMALE, INDIAN ANCESTRY, 45, 6', 160 LBS. BROWN EYES, HEAVY BAGS BENEATH, BROWN SKIN, BROWN HAIR WITH GRAY STRANDS. SITTING ON A TALL STOOL, FEET PROPPED ON ONE ANOTHER, LEANING AGAINST THE WALL. WEARY.
Dr. Brundage took one look at the roof tile protruding from Kellen’s hip. Her eyes lit up, she stood, and in a booming voice, she said, “We don’t usually get good stuff like this in here. Usually it’s car wrecks and home canning accidents. Now this—this is something interesting.”
“Thanks,” Kellen muttered. “I do my best.”
With an air of efficient competence, Dr. Brundage helped transfer Kellen off the stretcher and onto the table beneath the overhead light. She cut the jeans off Kellen’s hip. “How’d you do it?”
The adrenaline that had kept Kellen going through the rescue attempt had faded, and she couldn’t come close to meeting the doctor’s enthusiasm. “Tile fell off the roof. Broke. Got me.”
“I’ll say!” The doctor glanced up. “Max, this happen at your place?”
“Yes.” He stood in the door, looking visibly displeased.
“You taking care of the insurance?”
“Yes.”
“Great. Don’t worry about it. Shouldn’t cost you too much. Unless she decides to sue.” Dr. Brundage peered at Kellen. “She doesn’t look like the type.”
“I won’t sue,” Kellen said.
“There you go, Max. Now go fill out the forms so I can work on my patient.”
“Right,” Max snapped back and headed toward the waiting room.
He didn’t even ask Kellen how she was feeling. She guessed right now he considered her more trouble than she was worth. “Maybe that’s true, but I did save the guy’s life.” She blinked at the doctor’s face. “Know what I mean?”
“Not really, but I am glad you saved someone’s life.” Dr. Brundage’s voice changed. “Hi, Rae, how are you? Any more trouble with shutting your finger in the car door?”
Rae’s high piping seven-year-old voice said, “I only shut my finger in once. It hurt. I won’t do it again.”
“Max needs to take her with him,” Kellen said.
“She’s fine,” Dr. Brundage assured her. “We’re good friends. Aren’t we, Rae?”
Kellen heard the sound of a stool scraping across the linoleum toward her.
“I like you except when you stick me with needles.” Rae’s voice got closer. She was the stool scraper. “Know what? I climbed the ladder all the way to the top, just like my mommy.”
In a normal voice, Dr. Brundage said to Kellen, “This is going to hurt a little,” and plunged a hypodermic needle about the size of a Craftsman screwdriver into her hip. In a return to that cajoling kid-talk voice, Dr. Brundage asked Rae, “Who’s your mommy?”
“She is!”
Kellen didn’t have to look to know Rae was pointing at the examining table.
Dr. Brundage’s voice changed to sharply inquisitive. “This is your mommy?”
“It’s a long story,” Kellen said. “Not interesting at all.”
“I beg to differ!” Kellen suspected Dr. Brundage always said what she thought.
Out in the corridor, they heard a scuffle: shouting and swearing. “What’s going on out there?” Dr. Brundage asked.
“Roderick Blake has arrived,” Kellen said.
“My mommy saved that man’s life,” Rae confided.
“Did she? Sounds like he didn’t appreciate it,” Dr. Brundage said.
Impatient voices murmured around Roderick’s wildly abusive language.
“We love getting those kinds of guys into Emergency.” Dr. Brundage looked closely at Kellen. “How’s your pain on a level from one to ten?”
“About eight. Seven. Six...” Kellen’s voice slurred as her grip on reality slipped. “What did you give me?”
“The good stuff.” Dr. Brundage yelled, “Brenda, I need you! We’ve got some irrigation and sewing to do in here.”
The sound of Roderick’s yelling faded, followed by an indistinct swell of indignation from the hospital staff as those who could hurried away.
In her cajole-a-kid voice, Dr. Brundage said, “Honey, we’re going to fix your mommy now, so you need to go find your daddy.”
“I want to stay! My mommy is ThunderBoomer.”
“ThunderBoomer?” Kellen and Dr. Brundage said at the same time.
“What happened to Warrior Woman?” Kellen asked.
“No, you can’t be Warrior Woman, because I’m LightningBlast.”
“ThunderBoomer sounds like I have a flatulence problem,” Kellen complained.
Dr. Brundage snorted and laughed—and snorted. Then she sobered and with a grim intensity, said, “Rae, your mommy’s going to spout a lot of blood.”
“Oo. No. Gross.” Without hesitation, Rae abandoned ThunderBoomer. The stool scraped away. From the door, her piping voice admonished, “Mommy, you be good and don’t cry too much.”
“More likely I’ll dance.” Kellen wasn’t sure the words came out right, she was slurring so much.
“Brenda’s my nurse,” Dr. Brundage said. “Once she gets in here, we’ll have you cleaned up in no time. This is going to hurt a little. I’m removing the tile.”
She wasn’t finished speaking before she’d done it.
Bright pain spots on a black humming background. How was it possible to hurt so much coming out when it hurt so much being in there?
“You going to toss your cookies?” Dr. Brundage asked.
Kellen folded her lips tightly over her nausea and shook her head.
“That’s official doctor talk,” Dr. Brundage informed her. “This is more official doctor talk. I’m going to irrigate the wound now. With saline. It’s going to sting.”
In the hallway outside the room, Kellen heard a woman say, “Hi, honey, how are you? Have you fallen out of a tree and scared your daddy again?”
“Hi, Nurse Brenda. No way, I haven’t fallen out, and Daddy doesn’t know about the walnut tree, so it’s okay.”
“The walnut tree?” Brenda asked.
“I made a tree house.”
Kellen squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them wide. A tree house? Rae had made a tree house? The kid was seven. How could she make a tree house?
“How did you make a tree house?” Brenda must be channeling Kellen.
“I got the boards from the, um, place where Daddy’s new shed is getting built.”
“You stole the boards?” Brenda sounded surprised and maybe a little admiring.
“No! Stealing is against the law. I took boards from the scrap pile.” In a confidential tone, Rae said, “That’s another way of saying the garbage dump.”
“Daddy doesn’t know you confiscated those boards, does he?” Brenda asked.
“No way.” Rae sounded absolutely unrepentant. “You know what? My mommy’s in there bleeding.”
“Is she?” Brenda sounded interested and a little skeptical. “Who’s your mommy?”
“My mommy is a superhero. She’s secretly ThunderBoomer. See, she got shot in the head by a bad man.”
Kellen felt Dr. Brundage brush the bangs off her forehead.
Dr. Brundage made a “hmm” sound as she revealed the round red scar. She didn’t call Brenda in, either, but started irrigating.
“Mommy was in comma.”
“A comma?” Brenda sounded as if she was torn between amusement and a vast captivated interest.
“She couldn’t wake up,” Rae explained.
“That’s not good.”
“It was bad.” Rae sounded like she was telling a horror story. “Because she was pregnant with me and she didn’t know it.”
“That’s really not good,” Brenda agreed.
“She had me early.” Rae’s voice got gloomy. “My daddy and my grandma took care of me, and they were sad. Then one day, my mommy woke from her comma.”
“Coma... Never mind. What happened?” Brenda sounded eager.
Dr. Brundage was clearly riveted, too, because she pulled up a stool, said in a quick low voice, “I’m stitching now,” and went to work.
Lucky for them both Rae had such a piercing voice.
“She woke up and...?” Brenda’s voice trailed off invitingly.
“She didn’t remember she had a little baby girl. She didn’t remember my daddy. She didn’t know where she was. So she got up and got dressed and left the hospital, and we didn’t know where she was!”
“Wow. That’s quite a story.” Brenda sounded as if she wasn’t sure she believed it. Sensible woman.
“Don’t you want to know where she was?” Rae asked.
“Sure!”
“She joined the Army. She got to be a captain. She got shot and blown up and stuff. That’s how she got to be ThunderFlash.”
“I thought she was ThunderBoomer,” Brenda said.
“I haven’t decided.”
“Makes total sense.”
Rae continued, “One day she came back from the war and she still didn’t remember.”
The stitches pulled and tugged at Kellen’s hip. She could hear Rae’s voice grow uncertain.
“She went to work at Yearning Sands Resort for Annie and Leo—they’re my great-great-aunt and uncle, because I like them a lot and they’re great. Mommy met my daddy and she saved people’s lives and she kind of remembered and she almost got killed and then I told her she was my mommy.” Rae’s voice wavered more and more.
“And then?”
“I think she believed me.”
Oh, God. Kellen was such a bad mother. Maybe a bad person. She had a daughter, a daughter she hadn’t known, and sure, she was trying to be a mother now. But it was tough. She didn’t know much, but she knew she wasn’t supposed to make Rae uncertain and scared. Mothers were supposed to be smart. She was supposed to be right. She was supposed to know what she was doing—and she didn’t know anything!
She had no instincts.
She was a bad mother.
“Stop worrying about it. No mother knows what she’s doing.” Dr. Brundage was reading her mind.
Or maybe Kellen was thinking out loud.
Dr. Brundage continued, “I had my daughter when I was in high school, I wouldn’t give her up to a good family, and I did everything wrong. But she’s a good kid, and she’s in premed. Rae’s a good kid, too. She’ll be okay.”
Out in the corridor, Max’s voice, wry and amused. “Honey, are you telling the whole hospital our family secrets?”
“No, Daddy, only about Mommy and me and you.”
“That’ll do it,” Max said. “Hi, Brenda.”
His tone must have made the elusive Brenda nervous, because she suddenly appeared at Kellen’s bedside. “I’m here, Doctor.”
Outside the door, Max said, “Grandma has arrived. She’s in the waiting room, and she’s going to the cafeteria.”
Kellen heard the steady thump-thump of Rae’s heels against the linoleum. “I want ice cream!”
“You’ll have to talk to Grandma about that,” Max said.
“Ice cream!”
“Don’t tell her I said you could.” Max could get quite a stern tone to his voice. “That would be lying!”
“Okay...” Rae’s enthusiasm audibly waned, and the sound of her boots faded in the distance.
Max stepped through the door.
Dr. Brundage finished her sutures, pulled off her gloves and stepped back to let Brenda cover the wound. “Who’s your next of kin?” she asked Kellen.
“I guess...Max. Why?” Kellen asked warily.
“You’re going to need care. Are you going home with him?”
“Yes,” Max said.
Dr. Brundage looked at Kellen for confirmation.
“Yes,” Kellen said.
“Good. Listen up, you two.” Dr. Brundage stared into Kellen’s eyes. “Although with the drugs I put into you, I don’t think you’ll remember. I’m keeping you here overnight. I’m not happy about the look of this puncture. We never want any kind of puncture with an unsterile object. I think we can safely say the roof tile was not sterile. We’re going to do a course of intravenous antibiotics. Then we’ll send you home with instructions and pain pills and—”
“I want to see the bitch!” In the corridor, Roderick’s belligerent voice got louder again. “Let me see the bitch. I want to see her now!”
Dr. Brundage looked up in annoyance. “Shut that door,” she said to Max.
But a harried-looking intern stuck his head in. “Dr. Brundage, I’m sorry. We’re transporting this guy to Portland for surgery, and he’s throwing a fit. He wants to speak to your patient.”
Max clearly didn’t give a damn. “Drug him!”
“We can’t give him any more drugs. He’s had the limit and he’s still yelling.” The intern turned his head back toward the continued shouting, then looked at Kellen. “Is it possible...?”
“No, it is not possible!” Dr. Brundage said.
The synapses in Kellen’s brain flashed her an urgent dispatch. “I’ll see him. I want to see him.” Because what message was so important to a guy with a compound fracture that he stayed conscious to say it?
Dr. Brundage sighed. “All right. Is she ready to be transported to a room?”
“Yes, doctor.” Brenda removed the brakes from the bed and Dr. Brundage helped her wheeled it toward the door. They maneuvered Kellen into the corridor and placed her so her head was even with Roderick’s.
What few strands of hair the guy had were stuck together with blood and perspiration. His skin was sweaty pale green. Both legs were wrapped and elevated. Clearly, despite whatever drugs they had given him, he was in agony. Yet his bulging blue eyes narrowed on Kellen. He rolled onto his shoulder toward her. His hand shot out and grabbed her neck, and he spoke.
Max struck his fingers away.
Dr. Brundage shouted, “Get him out!”
The staff shoved him toward the door.
But Kellen had heard him loud and clear. As he stared into her eyes and squeezed her throat, he had clearly said, “Run, bitch.”