by Unknown
It took her only a few seconds to decide she wasn’t dead. Whatever the afterlife held, and Stella didn’t have any special convictions on the subject, she did believe that it probably wouldn’t include all this pain and sweaty nausea. But what really convinced her was the smell: a combination of industrial disinfectant, bleach, burned Salisbury steak, and an undercurrent of floral preservative.
Had to be the hospital again.
Goat must have come and got her. That thought sparkled into her brain like silvery glitter, bringing with it a little hoppity-skip sensation in her gut. She remembered dialing his number, but it had taken a long time.
Thoughts and images flashed by and Stella tried to seize them and make sense of them, but her thought processes seemed a bit compromised. No doubt they had her pumped up full of all kinds of drugs, which were preventing her from using all her powers of logic. But a few things stood out, now that she thought about it, like the fact that she’d been shot. Twice. And hadn’t she left most of her blood on the pale carpeting of Funzi’s lake house?
The scene came back to her in fits and starts until, after a dreamy little while, Stella remembered everything. She moved her fingers, under the hospital blanket, to her stomach, where the second bullet had slammed into her. Wasn’t all that surprised to find a thick layer of bandages. She tapped it experimentally and grimaced from the pain.
Hopefully they’d dug that sucker out. It, and its twin, lodged somewhere around her shoulder, a location that seemed like too much trouble to explore right now. Didn’t they leave the bullets in sometimes? Like if they were too close to an organ or something? Stella did not at all relish the thought of carrying around any souvenirs of the last few days.
Something to ask the doctor about.
Sighing, Stella opened her eyes. The left one seemed more eager than the right, but a little effort unstuck it, and she found herself looking around at a room very similar to the one she’d been in—what was it, two nights ago? It felt like a hundred years had gone by.
This time, Chrissy wouldn’t be arriving to spring her, a thought that made her heart hurt. She’d be all alone in her room in Sawyer County Regional Hospital, a place she’d visited dozens of times over the years. Funny how the humble act of everyday living brought her through the doors of this place from time to time: everything from Noelle’s stitches when she fell off a swing set, to Ollie’s emergency appendectomy, to friends’ and neighbors’ gallbladder surgeries and hysterectomies and cancers and strokes and basic human frailty.
But before this week, the only time she herself had been a patient was when Noelle was born. Almost three decades ago.
Stella remembered that the curtains had been yellow then, thick-woven polyester things, and the floor tiles had flecks of green in them, and the trays they brought the food on were turquoise plastic. She’d stayed three days, dozing and nursing and hobbling to the bathroom, marveling all the while at the tiny little life she’d brought into the world.
It had felt like a solo effort. Lots of men stayed in the waiting room during childbirth back then, but Ollie seemed uncomfortable not only with the baby’s arrival but with everything else about Noelle. He made only one appearance per day, hands in pockets, shifting from foot to foot uncomfortably and staring out the window, declining to hold his daughter.
Back then, Stella’s room had a view of the parking lot. Now, her view was of the tops of trees, so she knew she’d scored a room on the other side of the hospital complex, the side that overlooked the little park where patients were taken in their wheelchairs to get some sun.
She was moving up in the world.
An IV cart stood next to the bed, with a line that led under the covers. Stella flexed her fingers—tried to, at any rate, but they were covered with something. She pulled her hands out from under the covers and saw that they both had been bandaged and wrapped, the right one with enough layers that it looked like a mitten, the left wearing a wide band of dressing around the palm. The IV entered her arm in a neat little taped hole.
Gingerly, Stella tried to move her legs. They felt as if they had fallen asleep, but she saw the blanket shift a little on the bed. That was good news: she guessed it meant that neither bullet had nailed her spine. Sometimes bullets did all manner of pinball-style ricocheting around in the flesh, if the TV shows were to be believed. She wondered if the little bits of metal had punched through any of her organs or sliced up a lung, but decided she’d be hooked up to more than just an IV if that were the case.
The longer she was awake, the more Stella was beginning to realize she didn’t feel all that horrible. She was going to pull through. No doubt all that exercise had helped, her body too strong and stubborn to succumb to a mere double shooting. In fact, if she’d started Weight Watchers like she meant to six months ago, she’d probably be feeling even better. But hey, maybe this would be her wake-up call. They always talked about “wake-up calls” on the late-night weight-loss infomercials. “My reunion was coming up, and I weighed eighty pounds more than I did my senior year,” some little stick-thin gal would gush. Or “My doctor said I was headed straight for type-two diabetes if I didn’t make some changes.”
Stella pictured herself sitting in an armchair, staring into the camera, with an unctuous host sticking a microphone in front of her. She’d say, “I got my face pounded to a pulp, and then I got shot a couple times and nearly bled to death in the middle of a hotbed of organized crime.” Some wake-up call that would be. The thought made her frown.
Frowning, it turned out, hurt like a bitch. Sharp pain seared along the tender skin of her lips and around her forehead, and along the lines of her stitches. Hell, she probably had a whole new set of stitches by now; she probably looked like she was sporting zippers in every direction across her face. Or maybe they just took a staple gun to her, pushed that flap of skin in place and let fly. Why not? Might as well save the nit-picky detail work for a case where they could actually make a difference. Stella put the fingers of her left hand gingerly to her face and made an exploration, and it felt as if she hadn’t been far off : the ridges and bumps and sharp little knots were an unfamiliar landscape, with bulges and valleys nowhere near where they ought to be.
Stella sighed and put her hands back on top of the cool sheets. So her face was wrecked. So what. It would heal. She was trying so hard not to think of the other thing, the thing that had been slinking along the edges of her mind ever since she first woke up, the thought she’d taken down with her as she first sank into unconsciousness and which had featured in her hazy, troubled dreams as she came out of anesthesia.
There was no keeping it at bay any longer.
Chrissy.
Chrissy, braver than Stella had ever imagined, fearless to the end. Beautiful in her fury, rosebud lips focused in a deadly frown of concentration, those cornflower blue eyes glinting with fearless determination. Stella knew that even as she took the bullet, even as she fell, Chrissy hadn’t faltered.
Stella’s grief welled up, and it was stronger than any of the other emotions she’d experienced so far. She’d sworn she would never again endanger a woman while doing her job, but somehow along the way the task of finding Tucker had seized them both and thrown them together on this desperate journey, and it was only together that they had been able to get as far as they had. Stella didn’t regret taking the girl along with her—it was no more an option for Chrissy to stay home than it was for Stella to turn away when Chrissy had first arrived at her door.
They’d given their all: she was sure of that. Stella knew that neither of them had held anything back, that they’d put fear behind them and barreled ahead, knowing the situation could end up like this.
If only things had worked out differently.
The fact that Chrissy was the one to go down and stay down—it didn’t seem right. Stella should have been the one who died. No one needed her; no one waited for her. And besides, she’d rolled the dice more than most people ever had a chance to, taking risks, scraping
through situations that by all rights should have ended in disaster.
Why couldn’t Chrissy have been the lucky one this time?
Stella heard soft voices in the hall, and then the door to her room was pushed open wide and a young woman with spiked magenta hair came into the room, dropped the paper cup she was holding, and burst into tears.
Noelle.
“Baby girl,” Stella said, surprised to find that her voice was nothing more than a scratchy whisper, and she held out her arms and her sweet grown-up angel girl rushed straight into them, laying her head on Stella’s chest and immediately jerking back with a shriek, which might have been a good thing on balance since the pressure of the embrace felt like an axe cleaving Stella’s flesh. But she needed to hold her daughter, and she grasped Noelle’s hands and tugged her back.
Very gently Noelle knelt down next to the bed and laid her cheek on Stella’s arm, blinking tears from her big violet eyes. “Mama,” she said, “what on earth have you gone and done?”
She sounded so distraught, so dismayed, that Stella had to laugh. It was a hurtin’ little laugh, bumpy and rough, but it felt good. “Just makin’ trouble, sugar. I’m sorry to say it, but I can’t seem to stay away from it.”
“Oh, mama,” Noelle said. “You look just awful. You had me so scared. When the sheriff called me I—”
“Sheriff Jones?”
“Yes, he called this morning when I was getting ready to go to the shop. He said you were trying to rescue a kidnapped baby and got all shot up.”
“Did they find him?” Stella asked quickly. “The baby?”
Noelle’s pretty, worried face flashed confusion and she shook her head. “There wasn’t any baby, Mama. Nobody found anything like that, the sheriff said. He seemed mighty concerned about that part.”
Stella’s heart, which had been thrumming along with renewed vigor to see Noelle, gave a lurch. So: after all this, poor Tucker was still missing.
They’d failed.
If it hadn’t been for her daughter, warm and real and close enough to touch, Stella might have rolled over and prayed her way back to numb unconscious. Instead, she forced a ghost of a smile onto her lips and told a mother’s lie: “That’s all right, sweetheart.”
“Sheriff offered to send somebody over to get me,” Noelle said, “but I just jumped in the car and came straight here. Mama, I been here for hours, waitin’ on you to wake up. And now all’s I did was go get a cup of coffee, and I wasn’t gone but a minute and look at you, wakin’ up when I was out of the room.”
This brought a fresh onslaught of tears, and Stella reached to brush them off Noelle’s cheek. Her daughter’s skin was soft and creamy, as beautiful as it had always been, and Stella let her fingers linger there, her heart swelling with the knowledge that one thing she’d done, anyway, had turned out better than she ever could have dreamed.
“How long have I been out, anyway?” she asked. It was hard to tell if the light in the room signaled morning or afternoon. “What time is it?”
“It’s almost three. They took you to surgery as soon as they got you in here, but time I got over here, you were in recovery.”
Stella thought of the thick dressing on her stomach, the pain in her shoulder. “How bad am I?” she asked.
“Oh, Mama, they said you were just incredibly lucky,” Noelle exclaimed. “It was small-caliber bullets, and the one in your shoulder just chipped your clavicle. The bullet came out the other side, so they didn’t have to hunt for it, but they had to dig around in there for the little bone pieces. But they did it arther—arther—”
“Arthroscopically?”
“Right, I just can’t seem to get that out. So you just got a few stitches there. And the one in your stomach, why, all’s it did was kind of bounce off your spleen, is what the doctor told me. They had to take out the bullet and repair some blood vessels, but they say your spleen’ll fix itself right back up. You’re just going to be mighty tender there for a while.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” Stella said, grimacing. “Do I have to stay here much longer?”
“Just a few days, Mama, and then I’m going to take you home and take care of you and make sure you don’t go jumping up trying to do too much before the doctor says it’s okay.”
Noelle’s declaration was so lovely and so unexpected that Stella couldn’t think of any kind of response. Noelle coming home, even if it was just for a while, was a gift she’d stopped hoping for long ago.
“That’s some hairdo you got there, baby girl,” she said instead.
The last time she’d seen Noelle, at the Sawyer county fair last September, her daughter had a yellow-blond bob with long pieces coming down past her chin and the back trimmed up short to the nape of her neck. In Stella’s view, her daughter would be gorgeous even shaved bald, but Noelle did manage to come up with unusual things to do to her hair.
That day at the fair, Stella stopped in the middle of the throng of people, unable to move forward, her friend Dotty Edwards chattering on about how she’d been robbed in the jam competition, and Noelle had turned in the bright early autumn sun and caught sight of her mother. For a fraction of a second the two women had stared at each other across the crowd of fairgoers, amid the screeches from the midway and the sweet-hay smell from the animal barns, and then Noelle had dashed off , looking stricken, and Stella had made her excuses to Dotty and gone home with a headache.
All those months ago, months that had gone by without seeing her daughter, without talking to her, without having a chance to hug her and hold her. The loss of it seized up in Stella’s throat, and she realized that no matter what, she was going to do whatever it took to stay in her girl’s life.
Noelle touched the spiky top of her head self-consciously. “I got an award, Mama,” she said shyly. “I did this competition up in Kansas City, with this new amino glycine color process? And I got the Judge’s Choice. I mean, it didn’t come with any cash or anything, but I got two hundred dollars in product and my picture’s going to be in Midwest Salon magazine.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, sweetie,” Stella said, pride swelling up in her battered chest. “Could I—when it comes out—do you think I could have a copy?”
The leaky tears Noelle had already produced were nothing compared to the torrent she unleashed then. Her face crumpled, and she buried it into the crook of Stella’s elbow and sobbed.
“Mama . . . I’ve been so terrible to you . . . and I just missed you so much and I don’t know why I was that way . . . just everything that happened, you know, and I—I—”
She finally pulled away, her face damp and splotchy and smeared with mascara, and went for the tissue box and snuffled and wiped at herself until she had most of her composure back. Stella waited patiently, choking back a tear or two herself.
“I’m sorry, Noelle,” she said. “You haven’t had an easy go of it. And I haven’t been, you know, Mother of the Year.”
Noelle shook her head. “Don’t, Mama. Let’s not even talk about the past, okay? It’s just—I mean . . .”
Stella reached for the girl’s hand and squeezed it. Noelle picked at the blanket for a minute, frowning.
“Mama,” she said. “I’m not seeing Gerald anymore. That guy, you know, my boyfriend.”
Relief and surprise flooded Stella, but she was careful not to react. She’d made the mistake of throwing in her two cents a few times too often to risk doing it now.
“Are you all right with that, sugar?” she asked.
Noelle snorted in disgust. “More than okay. Just—I just wanted you to know. I mean, I don’t know if I’m even going to date at all anymore, you know? It’s all so . . .”
She made a helpless gesture and glanced at her mother tentatively. Stella’s heart contracted. She knew all too well how it felt when you realized that the man who shared your bed wasn’t who you thought he was, how it felt when your hopes and illusions slowly shriveled and died. All that trust, all that hard work going into the hopeless project of mak
ing a broken relationship keep rolling along on sprung wheels.
Rejecting the whole mess might be a sign of sanity. But still, the thought of Noelle, barely a grown woman, shutting herself off from love hurt Stella to the core.
“Maybe don’t give up completely,” she suggested.
“Oh! I forgot. The sheriff ’s out in the waiting room, Mama. He wanted me to come get him the minute you woke up.”
“He is?”
“Yeah, he’s been here almost the whole time. He had to go on some call or something, and he’s been in to see that other girl a bunch of times, but—”
“Wait,” Stella said, grabbing Noelle’s arm. “What other girl?”
“That got shot with you, you know, that Lardner girl—”
“Chrissy’s alive?” Stella’s heart did a somersault, her throat dry. She didn’t dare hope, but—
“Um . . . I mean, she’s alive but they—but—Mama, I’m so sorry, they don’t know if she’s going to make it. She barely had a pulse when they got there, and the bullet went through her lung and there was some problems with her heart and they got her on all these machines.”
Slowly Stella relaxed her grip on Noelle’s arm. She nodded once. All right. Chrissy had made it this far. Good girl, she thought fiercely. There probably wasn’t a betting pool in the hospital, but if there were, Stella would put all her chips on Chrissy.
“She’s a good kid,” she said. “I think you’ll like her.”
For a moment Noelle’s expression wavered, her smile slipping, her eyes going a little opaque, and Stella realized something surprising: Noelle was jealous. Just a tiny bit, maybe she wasn’t even aware of it, but it was there nonetheless.
“I know you’ll like her,” Stella said quickly. “She’s not smart like a whip, the way you are, and she’s still got some growing up to do, but I think she’s got potential.”