“Yes, you did. As neatly and with as much regard for public and private property as is your trademark,” Danny said. “You’ve been in and out for two days. Let’s call your doctor.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“Coming.” He pressed the call button and went on to fill a Dixie cup. “You lucky bastards got the room with a terrace.”
“Is that whiskey?”
“No, it’s water. Remember water? The thing you wash yourself with?”
“I want whiskey,” Zooey spoke like a toddler, but she still pulled the cup to their lips and drank it up. Then she gently held on to the cop’s wrist. “Danny.”
“Yes?”
“Your car.”
“What about it?”
“It’s not in Pristina.”
Danny laughed as hard as his broken ribs could bear.
“I know, you stupid bitch. Who gives a damn.”
* * *
—
The doctor joined in a few seconds later, stood arms akimbo before the bed.
“Do you know how much it upsets me every time I get a phone call and it’s about you?”
“Gwe-e-e-e-en!” Zooey sang, spreading her arms to the maximum width allowed by the tubes.
Gwen hugged Kimrean, and seeing the opportunity, she also read their pulse and checked their pupil reflex. She was wearing the compulsory white coat on top of street clothes. She then slapped Danny on the side; he bent in pain.
“You been smoking.”
“Aw, fuck! You too!”
“I’m a doctor, I do what I want.”
KIMREAN: I saved his life!
GWEN: (Reading the EEG.) I know.
DANNY: Yes, you did.
“Is Ursula okay?” Zooey wondered, concerned.
“She is; she was released yesterday,” Danny told. “And Victor Lyon will live too. He’s already trying to cut a deal. I talked to Demoines—he’s singing enough names to reset San Carnal to the pioneers’ age. They’re talking promotions all around.”
“Wow, I’m good,” Kimrean said, leaning back again. “Juno?”
“She escaped. Stole a car from the diner; the next day it was found on the Mexican border. No sign of the waitress either.”
“Damn. Almost a perfect ten.”
“That’s not important. You were hired to get me out alive and stop a gang war. You did that and made my time undercover worth it.” Danny raised his sunglasses, exposing some more bruises around the eyes, and clasped Kimrean’s left wrist. “To me, you outdid yourself. Selves.”
Adrian noticed the nuance. “To you. So, what did I miss?”
DANNY: Nothing.
GWEN: Well…
KIMREAN: What?
The radio cared to fill the pause by reminding everyone of how sunny it was outside.
“Well, some people resent how Juno and Cecilia were allowed to escape,” Danny said. “I mean, no one questions your allegiance, but there are some concerns from the brass about your methods. Because, you know, you’ve been linked to several instances of reckless driving in San Francisco and San Carnal…and then there’s the part where you brought a minor to a gunfight and played chicken with another car with said minor in your backseat, which kind of constitutes child endangerment.”
“I wasn’t putting her in danger,” Zooey protested. “I was looking after her.”
“Zooey,” Gwen intervened, “did you notice that she was safer in San Francisco before you took her back into the combat zone?”
Zooey gave the question a fair amount of thought.
“Well, I see it now,” she said.
“Look,” Danny resumed, “Demoines and Greggs and even Chief Carlyle—they all support you. But some people in the security bureau suggested to temporarily suspend your P.I. license. Which is expired, as it turns out.”
Kimrean blinked. Twice.
“I was planning on renewing it any day now.”
“The head of the bureau said you could have it back,” Gwen chimed in, “provided that you first…submit to some psychological evaluation. For a few days. In a suitable institution.”
She and Danny stood by while the patients digested that information.
“They can’t lock me up again,” Kimrean said. “I’ve only been out for a week.”
“Well, you gotta admit it’s been an intense week,” Danny remarked.
“No. Fuck you—where have you been all my life? This was a pretty smooth week. Bumpy, at most.”
Gwen tried to push them back to bed: “Listen, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there; first you two have to get better and—”
“No way,” Kimrean declared, flipping off the sheets. “I’m not gonna lie around for the orderlies to get me.”
GWEN: Ayzee—
KIMREAN: Aw, soothe your saggy bags, Mom! I’ll be fine, just give me— (Falls facefirst to the floor.)
Danny and Gwen stayed put, the former too hurt to help, the latter too surprised, while Kimrean, welcoming the smell of chlorophenol on their nostrils, muttered: “Okay. There might be a problem.”
* * *
—
Two more days elapsed in the same ward, whose pastel-green walls went from inefficiently soothing to frankly annoying.
The second day was going off like a cigarette in an ashtray. Greggs and Demoines and Danny Mojave were present, all passing the X-rays around and pretending to interpret them, while Dr. Gwen Temperance Quain, in the same white coat from two days ago and the same street clothes below, leafed through the results of the tests performed on A. Z. Kimrean—the ones sitting in the wheelchair.
“The legs are fine,” she said. “And the X-rays show no injury to your medulla, so the problem has to be in your head. That’s what got the worst of the trauma; the swelling when you were brought in might have pressed too hard on your brain, constricting the blood flow in your psychosomatic system. It would explain why you retain sensitivity in both legs, but no mobility in the right one.”
Kimrean said nothing. They weren’t looking. Nobody was. Gwen skipped a page of her notes. She had slept about four hours out of the last forty-eight.
“It’s difficult to establish a prognosis; brain traumas are already unpredictable, but in your case they’re worse. The asymmetry of the lesion is very infrequent. Your left leg is responding quite well, but the right one…in layman terms, your brain knows it’s there, but can’t talk to it.”
Greggs alighted a hand on Kimrean’s shoulder, white-skinned and bare under the gown. Kimrean swatted it off like a horsefly.
“We can try rehab,” Gwen continued. “If your left leg improves, you can switch to a crutch. As for the right one…I don’t think there’s much we can do.”
Kimrean’s mouth barely moved to ask, “Whose leg is it?”
“That’s irrelevant; you are both—”
“Whose leg?”
The doctor sighed. She pretended to search for the answer on a different page, but she knew it without a doubt. It was not irrelevant; she had performed the DNA tests herself.
“It’s Adrian’s.”
Gwen lowered her clipboard shield and confronted her patients.
Their reaction was undetectable. Barely a minimal pursing of the already inconspicuous lips, nothing else. Whereas the cops surrounding them rubbed their jaws, clicked their tongues, swayed away from the blow, Kimrean never flinched, never took their eyes off the same spot on the floor tiles beyond their bare feet propped on the footrests. The hands did not shift; the chest did not heave; the brow remained taut like a lying sphinx’s. The eyes didn’t blink; the brown and green irises didn’t glint, or dim, or show a glimpse of what was happening behind. Nothing in that mouthless, colorless mannequin mien moved—and yet, after a minute, the whole meaning of that expression had changed.
And by
the time the lips reappeared, the only thing to come out of Kimrean’s lips was “I’m sorry.”
Those were their last words for another two days.
* * *
—
Visits ceased. Danny was released the morning after, and even though he considered staying, rightfully guessing that somebody might need him close, he also guessed that somebody else, like a dog guarding its turf, would bark him away. He didn’t need to ask, because he feared the barks.
In the end, he gave priority to Adrian’s explicit will over Zooey’s unspoken wish, and he took a cab home. Half an hour later, he arrived at the apartment he had not stepped into for eighteen months. He removed his black jacket and shirt, as fast as his injuries allowed, and put on an old campy tee. After that, no other indulgence seemed urgent—not his music, not the TV, not a drink, not even a cigarette. He sat down in a shrouded armchair by the window and pondered the full meaning of the phrase “permanent condition.”
* * *
—
On the third day, a psychiatrist was due to visit Kimrean to evaluate their state and recommend their transfer to a different hospital. The patients’ left leg had improved remarkably, perhaps upon realizing that its fitness was the only thing now separating the Kimreans from a full-time caretaker. That was a scenario that Adrian would simply not consent to. Two is already a crowd. Three is a prologue to homicide.
Gwen had respected Kimrean’s muteness for the first day, she had tried to break it on the second, and she was still mad about the results on the third, when she rapped on their door.
“Got a visitor.”
Kimrean lay on the bed, facing the balcony, their left side buried in the pillow. The visitor was smart enough not to block their line of sight; she approached them from behind instead.
Adrian had recognized her well before she entered the room: by her gait, by the rustle of her clothes, by her smell. In all fairness, the scent of marijuana had disappeared.
“Gwen told me about your leg,” Ursula said. “How are you?”
There was no answer.
“How are you, Zooey?”
Adrian spoke into the pillow. “Zooey’s grounded.”
Ursula didn’t dare go around the bed. Her arm was still in a sling—the only memento of the car crash she kept.
“I wanted to explain to everyone that you did what you had to do, but no one listens to me. They arrested my mom in the Caymans. They’re going to send me to a foster home. Just like you.”
The parallels did not stir any sympathy.
“Can I speak to Zooey, please?”
“Get lost.”
A seagull landed clumsily on the balcony’s stone rail. Ursula checked her hands: they were trembling. She immediately knew that this realization would trigger all the other symptoms, like an avalanche; next would be the lump in her throat and the tears in her eyes. She hurried to speak her mind before it happened.
“It wasn’t her fault, you know that. You injected yourself with the medicine; you were trying to block her out. You overdosed, and she had to take the wheel. She did the best she could.”
“Hoo-fucking-ray.”
“She solved the case.”
“She showed up for the climax.”
“She saved my life,” Ursula whimpered right before the sob.
Kimrean went off, rolling over, their face red with anger:
“She traded it for my fucking leg!! Had anyone asked for my opinion, I would have said it was a shit deal!! And so would she!!”
Gwen, from the nurses’ station outside, saw the child dart out of the room, tears running freely down her cheeks. Ursula fended off the social services worker who’d accompanied her and crashed through the restroom door.
The social services worker, a sweet lady in her thirties who had allowed Ursula to do most of the talking to Gwen, locked eyes with the doctor and then, looking helpless, sat back down.
A messenger was coming up the hallway now, carrying a bunch of flowers. He stopped by the counter and showed Gwen the card. She read it; in her face gleamed a private smile. She tipped the messenger and took the flowers to Kimrean’s room, without knocking.
“You can punish her as much as you want, Adrian. She’ll always have more fans than you.”
She tossed the flowers on the bedside table behind the patient and left.
The perfume reached Kimrean’s nose a second later. They turned over. Erithra lunis. A dozen red roses.
The outside of the card bore only two initials, Z.K. On the inside, there was a small home-printed picture and a frugal message. The picture—a selfie—described two girls on a boardwalk by the beach. Juno, eyes the color of a lagoon in the Pacific, held the camera with her left arm, which was in a cast, while kissing the other girl’s cheek. Cecilia, the former waitress, had red hair, gray eyes, and a round face with many freckles and a candid, small-toothed smile.
Kimrean stayed on her for a minute, and resolved: “Well, she wasn’t that great.”
The handwritten message read, Well played.
Adrian lowered the card and confronted the big toe at the end of his right leg wiggling at him.
“What the…Are you doing that?”
“Yup. Can’t you?”
The toe stopped moving. Adrian focused on it, ordered it to twitch. He tried shaking his whole leg: the response stopped at his hip; the rest only jolted with inertia.
Then Zooey tried again. All five toes waved hello.
“This can’t be. We share a somatic system.”
“I don’t think this was the trauma after all. I think it was the overdose,” Zooey said. “You got brain damage. You lost your leg. I didn’t.”
Adrian stuttered, but Zooey cut him off:
“Don’t fret—I’ll treat it as if it were mine.”
* * *
—
Running on crutches is not particularly difficult if circumstances demand it; stealth mode on crutches is something more of a challenge. Kimrean poked their head out into the hallway and took a census of the waiting room and the nurses’ station beyond. Nurses, doctors, a social worker cracking the USA Today sudoku, and Gwen browsing Kimrean’s clinical history. It was easy to spot—it was the only file that came in two volumes.
Kimrean hopped across to the neighboring room, yanked the monitoring sensors from the mortal coil of an old man who had been dozing there for two weeks, and returned to their own room as soon as the alarms went amok, summoning all medical personnel next door. Kimrean scurried along the empty hallway behind them.
Gwen, in her role as guest doctor, had not joined the others, but she leaned into the hallway anyway. Bewildered though she was to see Kimrean moving around, a natural and long-tested inclination to secrecy when it came to her star patients’ life prevailed. She just mouthed, Your legs! to which Zooey cartoonishly mimed, I know, right? while Adrian signaled at the waiting area outside.
She did not require any more instructions: she breathed in, put on her best unambitious doctor smile, said something friendly yet professional to the social worker, and pointed at the file as if she wanted to share something under the window light. Her own body stance subtly forced the woman to turn her back to Kimrean as they stole the few yards to the ladies’ room.
They hurried past the stalls and checked the window. It was a short jump to the balcony, and then a fire ladder down to the ambulance parking lot. In Kimrean’s rating system of medical institutions based on breakout convenience, the SF General had always been a solid 8. Exhilarated, Zooey couldn’t refrain from singing the “Best of Buddies” theme from Snoopy, Come Home while she hopped onto the sill and helped their legs up:
Me and you,
A two-man crew
“Zooey?”
A door banged and Ursula emerged from a stall, her face tear-stroked.
&nbs
p; “Zooey, is it you?”
“Heeeey, Ursy!”
She considered the safest way to hop back to the floor, but before she could the child was hugging her legs, asking, “Where are you going? You can walk?! Where are you going?!”
“I’ll walk fine in a few days, but I need to disappear for a while. There’s people intent on putting a jacket on me, and you know I hate business attire.”
“Well, I’ll go with you!”
Zooey repressed a quip, as though she had been given the wrong cue. She gazed down into Ursula’s starry black eyes.
“I will,” the child insisted. “I’m a fugitive too! They want to put me in a foster home, we can hide together, I…It’s what I want to do,” she said, stiffening up, making sure she looked composed enough. “It’s the role I want. I want to be the girl.”
Kimrean stayed frozen, perched on the windowsill, through a soft, snowy silence.
Slowly an honest yet crooked smirk appeared on their face.
“Ursy, I’m so sorry. You can’t.”
The air around them was still and crystal clear, like a beautiful sunny day atop Mount Everest.
“But—but they’re going to take me away,” Ursula stuttered. “They’ll put me in a foster home! I can’t go to a foster home! I—”
“I know, I know it’s tough, but…Look, some foster families are fine, and where I’m going—”
“I can go!” Ursula cut her off. “I can look after myself!”
“Yes, you can. But you can’t look after me.”
The mannequin face looked disarmingly calm, the smirk never fading away. Her whisper could stop a charging army.
“And I need to be looked after,” she resumed. “I do. The jerk is right sometimes. I can’t just block him out. It’s dangerous.”
“But they’re gonna take me away, and they’ll make me change schools, and—and you promised! You promised!” Ursula rapid-fired, burning through every argument, just because she feared that any words now could be the last words, and none of them would matter, and she was sobbing, and she could only hold Zooey with one hand because the other one was in the stupid sling, and there was no way this could be the end because they were so close now, face-to-face.
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