Chapter 5
Matt
I made it three blocks before the guilt started checking me into the boards.
Four blocks before I told myself to drop it.
Five before I had the argument settled. She'd be fine. People are fine. She had two friends in that bar and a phone and a working set of survival instincts, none of which were my problem.
At six blocks, I heard the scream.
My foot was on the brake before I'd decided anything, the car lurching to a stop, and I twisted around to read the back window through the rain.
She was on the ground.
Carrie. On the pavement. Not moving.
"No. No, no."
I threw it in reverse. The tires complained, somebody leaned on a horn, and none of it made my hands on the wheel any steadier as I backed across a lane against a small crowd of furious drivers who could file their complaints later.
She was still down. Still not getting up.
The questions came fast and ugly. Hit by a car. Hit hard. Bleeding out on wet asphalt while I'd been six blocks away congratulating myself on a clean exit.
I stopped the car at an angle, left the door hanging open, and ran.
"Carrie!"
She was sitting up by the time I reached her. Sitting up was good. Sitting up was a vital sign. Hands flat on the wet ground, hair down around her face, and a dark line of blood on one forearm that put a cold drop straight through the center of me.
"Are you okay? What happened?"
I went down on my knees beside her and reached for her before I'd cleared it with myself. My hands found her shoulders. She flinched, but she didn't pull back.
"I'm fine," she said.
She wasn't fine. The scrape on her arm was red and raw against pale skin. Not deep, not surgical, but bleeding enough to turn my stomach over once, hard.
"You're bleeding."
"It's a scratch."
"What happened. Did a car hit you?"
"One came in too close. I jumped back and—" A wince. "I went down."
The relief moved through me so fast it left me lightheaded. Not hit. Not under a bumper. Not broken open on the pavement because I hadn't had the spine to stay in a parking lot for one more minute.
"Can you stand?"
"I think so."
I got an arm under hers. She caught my shoulder, we both pushed, and she made it halfway up before the sound tore out of her.
"Stop. Stop."
I froze with her half-lifted.
She was balanced on one leg, the other foot held just off the ground, face gone white, jaw locked down on it.
"What is it?"
"My ankle."
"Broken?"
"I don't know. I just—" She tested it with a fraction of her weight and gasped. "I can't."
I looked down. The ankle was already going up, swelling against the line of her shoe, and even in the bad orange light off the streetlamps I could see it had no business being that size.
Turned. Sprained, if we were lucky. Worse, if we weren't.
"You need a hospital."
"I'm fine."
"You can't stand on it."
"I need a minute."
"Carrie."
"I said I'm fine."
She wasn't. She was hurt and stubborn and stranded in the middle of a parking lot on a wrecked ankle, and the chain of events that put her there ran straight back through a man who'd driven off rather than answer a question.
My fault. Maybe not on the stat sheet. Close enough on the tape.
"Let me take you to the hospital," I said.
"No."
"It needs to get looked at."
"I don't need—"
"Please."
It came out lower than I meant it. Quieter. Close to the edge of asking for something, and maybe that's what it was, because the picture of leaving her here — hurt, alone, in the dark — pulled at something that wasn't guilt and that I had no interest in turning over to see what was under it.
She looked at me. Actually looked, the same as she had in the parking lot, except this time there was no fight loaded behind it. Tired, mostly. Like the day had finally caught her and collected.
"Okay," she said.
* * *
The ER waiting room smelled like antiseptic and burnt coffee, and under that, the thing every one of these rooms smells like. Too many people in too few chairs, all of them braced for news they hadn't decided they could take.
I'd gotten her to the car. Driven to Boston General.
Walked her in while she hopped on one foot with most of her weight handed over to my side, and her body against mine the whole way had been warm, solid, an actual real thing, and every step had run a current through me that I'd worked to ignore.
The intake nurse took one look at the ankle and went for a wheelchair at a jog.
So now I was in a plastic chair built for someone smaller, under a TV turned up louder than the room needed, surrounded by strangers whose problems I had no way to fix.
Waiting.
I'd told the nurse I'd wait. That I wanted to know she was okay. The nurse had nodded and given me a look I'd have to call experienced, and wheeled Carrie through the double doors, and left me there with my own company and the stone in my gut.
I should leave.
I'd done the job. Gotten her here, gotten her into the system, gotten her in front of people who actually knew what to do for an ankle. She'd told me to go. Had all but signed the release. No reason to still be in this chair.
I couldn't get out of the chair.
Couldn't lose the picture of her on the ground, bleeding, hurt at the end of a sequence I'd started. Too far inside my own head to think about anyone standing next to me. So set on outskating whatever this was that I hadn't run the simple read. She might need a hand.
My phone buzzed. Mason. Wanting to know where I'd gone, probably, or whether I'd talked to her, or just lining up the next round of grief. I let it buzz out.
The TV kept going. Markets, weather, none of it landing, because the tape in my head was on a loop with better audio. The scream. The blood on her arm. The grab of her hand on my shoulder, like I was the one fixed thing in a room that had tipped on its axis.
A kid started crying across the waiting room. His mother worked at it and lost. The crying climbed.
I shut my eyes and tried to black it all out, and got Carrie instead. On the ground. In pain. Bleeding, at the back end of a chain of events with my name on the first link.
"Excuse me?"
A nurse stood over me. Young, running on too little sleep, a clipboard in one hand and a smile that didn't have the energy to reach the rest of her face.
"Are you here with Carrie Wilson?"
"Yeah. Is she okay?"
"She's fine. A sprain. We're wrapping it now, she'll be out in a few minutes." She checked the clipboard, looked back up. "Are you her husband?"
The word caught me square.
Husband. Like we were a unit. Like we were anything other than two people a rainstorm kept shoving into the same hallway.
"What? No. No, we're not—I'm not—I just—"
Clean delivery, Baker. Real composed.
"Boyfriend?"
"No."
"Family?"
"No. I just wanted to be sure she was all right."
The nurse's smile shifted into something that had seen this exact man in this exact chair a hundred times and knew the whole script.
"That's sweet," she said.
It wasn't sweet. It was a debt. It was guilt wearing a coat. It was a man trying to be somebody other than the one who'd looked a woman in the eye a couple of hours ago and told her he didn't care about anything.
"Can I see her?"
"She'll be out soon. You can wait here."
She was gone before I could answer. I sat back down. The chair complained about it.
Fifteen minutes. Then twenty. I read the ceiling the way I read a defensive zone when there was nothing else to do with my eyes. Counted tiles, ran the grid, eighteen across and twenty-four down, did the multiplication just to give my head a play to run that wasn't the parking lot.
At thirty minutes the double doors opened and Carrie came through on crutches.
She moved like the crutches were a system she hadn't learned yet, off-rhythm, fighting them.
The same nurse walked her out, talking ice and weight and painkillers every six hours and follow up with your own doctor if it doesn't settle.
Carrie nodded at all of it. But the exhaustion was sitting right on the surface of her, in the slump of her shoulders, in how much visible effort it took her to stay assembled.
She saw me.
Something crossed her face. Surprise, I thought, like me still being here didn't match the read she'd had on me. Or relief. Or a third thing I couldn't label, because I was busy not noticing how pale she was and how small the crutches made her look.
She came over. Every step cost her something.
"Hey."
"Hey." I stood. "You okay?"
A useless question. She was visibly not okay.
"Just a sprain. Crutches and painkillers." She shifted, hunting for a way to stand that didn't pull on it. "I'm fine."
She wasn't. I let it go.
"Good."
"Yeah."
The silence came down between us, awkward and heavy, carrying the full weight of everything we were both leaving unsaid.
"Well," she said. "Thanks for the ride. You can go. I'll call a cab."
She was handing me the out. Clean release, no penalty, walk away with the guilt signed off.
And I should take it. Go home. Let the worst day in recent memory finally end.
Stop running the tape of how she'd felt against my side, how she'd tasted, how she'd looked at me in that hallway like I was a person worth the trouble of knowing.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
I started for the exit. Made it three steps, hand on the door.
Then I heard barking.
I turned. A golden retriever was coming down the hall at a dead run, no leash, no owner anywhere behind it, just a dog moving through a hospital like it had a reservation, tongue out, tail going.
A security guard chased it, calling for somebody to grab it, and the dog was simply faster.
It cut left, cut right, and was gone around a corner with the guard still yelling.
And the guilt came back in with the tide. Heavier this time. With an edge on it.
She'd helped that dog. Stood out in the rain for it.
Got soaked to the skin and cut her hands raw working a chain off a bike rim for an animal that had nothing to do with her.
And my contribution had been to snap the chain, carry it inside, and then tell her to drop it at a shelter.
Figure it out. Told her I didn't care what happened to it.
Told her I didn't care about anything.
Now she was the one hurt. On crutches. Alone. Days into a job she couldn't take time off from, facing a flight of stairs and a week of small impossible tasks with nobody to spot her on any of it.
She'd helped the dog.
The least I could do was get her home.