Chapter 22 #2
She holds the gaze. Doesn't flinch. Her eyes do something clinical — pupil check, reading neurological function without admitting it.
She's clocking my speech: clear, linear, no slur, no trailing off.
Watching my stance: weight even, no list, no favoring a side.
Running the math on a man who says he can walk and looks like he means it, and the math is coming out in my favor despite every line on that chart.
"Someone to drive you?"
"No."
"You understand you're leaving against medical advice. The hospital bears no liability for anything that happens after you walk out."
"Yes."
One beat. The plant does nothing helpful. The diploma continues its slow argument with the wall.
She sets the chart down. Opens a drawer.
The AMA form lives where AMA forms live — bottom right, under a stack of prescription pads and a half-empty box of gloves.
She slides it across without ceremony. Before I can reach it, she tears a Post-it off a pad, writes a number in quick slanted handwriting, and sticks it to the top of the form.
"Direct line." She doesn't look at me. "If the headache gets worse, the vision blurs, or you cough up anything that isn't saliva, call it. Day or night. That's not a courtesy. It's the job."
I take the pen — cheap hospital ballpoint, writes exactly well enough to be legal and no better.
The form's standard: I understand the risks, absolve the hospital, acknowledge that leaving is stupid but apparently necessary.
I sign. Trevor Hollander. The signature comes out steadier than my hand has any right to be — concussion defiance, or muscle memory from signing too many forms in too many places where the paperwork was the least dangerous part of the day.
She countersigns. A quick slash, efficient, the hand of a woman with six more charts before a lunch that's already late.
I'm out the door before she finishes her notes.
The hallway is linoleum and fluorescents and industrial cleaner that doesn't quite cover the smell of human anxiety underneath.
My bare foot's cold. The sock helps, not enough.
The gown flaps. I don't care. Whatever dignity I had left the building hours ago, around the time someone pulled a phone from my wreck and erased the only leverage we had on a man who owns this town and everything in it.
The nurses' station blurs past. Aides look up, look away.
Nobody stops me. There's something in how I'm moving — direct, the gait of a man who's decided pain is information, not instruction — that tells them what kind of conversation would be waiting if they stepped in my path, and they've all decided, collectively, it isn't worth having.
The bathroom's at the end of the hall. Men's. Single stall. Flickering light. A plastic bag on the counter labeled PATIENT BELONGINGS in block letters from a marker that was running out of ink.
I need my clothes.
The bag gives up its treasures one at a time, like Christmas morning if Santa specialized in vehicular trauma and held a grudge against footwear.
Jeans first. Stiff down the left leg with dried mud that cracked when they folded them, the terracotta crust of Pennsylvania roadside after rain.
I step in one leg at a time. The left goes fine.
The right involves bending, and bending involves ribs, and ribs answer in a dialect I'm fluent in.
I grit through it. Button. Zip. The denim sits wrong on my hips — too loose, or my body's a different shape than it was yesterday, or a stretch in a hospital gown recalibrates your sense of how clothes fit, and the recalibration is no improvement.
The henley's worse. Dark gray, or it was before the rust-brown smear moved into the collar.
One sleeve torn cuff to elbow by glass or metal or both, the fabric reeking of blood and motor oil and the acrid note of a deployed airbag.
I pull it over my head. The movement's wrong — arms up, ribs flex — and I hiss through my teeth.
The sound bounces off tile. Nobody hears.
Nobody cares. The bathroom's mine and the pain's mine and we're having a conversation that needs no audience.
The boot. Singular. Right foot only. The left one's presumably still wedged in the wreck, doing its part as evidence in whatever story Calloway's telling about how a veteran rolled his truck on a county road and lived to complain.
Scuffed toe, laces intact. I jam my foot in, don't bother lacing, and the boot takes my foot with the grudging hospitality of an old friend who's seen better days.
The mirror's above the sink. Small, the silvering giving up at the edges from too many wipe-downs.
The fluorescent flickers at about the frequency of my headache, which is either cosmic cruelty or a design feature I'm too concussed to appreciate.
I avoid my own face as long as the task allows — about four seconds, enough to confirm I have one, not enough for a detailed inventory.
The bandage is white against my tan. The skin around it's purpling — not black yet, the lavender-gray of a bruise still deciding how serious it wants to be.
My stubble's reached the stage where it's neither stubble nor beard, the transitional phase that makes you look like you just got out of jail or are thinking of checking in.
Both eyes bloodshot, the roadmap of burst capillaries that says my body took a hit and shared the damage out evenly.
I look away. The face has seen enough. We're in negotiations about our future, the face and I, and it's asking more than I'll give.
Outside, Pennsylvania August is waiting with the enthusiasm of a climate that's never heard the word moderation and wouldn't use it if it had.
Heat presses down. Thick. Wet. The kind that sits on your chest like a neighbor's cat — heavy, present, vaguely resentful of your existence.
No cab worth calling in Roan. No rideshare; the sharing economy looked at this town on a map and decided some places are meant to suffer, and Roan qualified with honors.
I could call someone. Mick. June. Someone with a car and a willingness to come four miles for a man who just signed himself out AMA and is standing on a sidewalk in one boot and a bloody shirt looking like the losing half of a bar fight that spilled into a demolition derby.
I don't call anyone.
The route to Cembrook Road is four and a half miles of cracked sidewalk, weedy lots, and the occasional stray dog deciding whether I'm worth biting.
I set a pace. Steady — fast would mean breathing, and breathing means ribs, and the ribs are on strike.
One boot heel clicking concrete. One sock foot silent.
The asymmetry is its own rhythm and I fall into it the way I fall into most rhythms, by necessity rather than choice.
Past the pharmacy with its hand-lettered window.
PAIN RELIEVERS IN AISLE 3. PRESCRIPTIONS FILLED WHILE U WAIT.
The pharmacist inside, sixties, glasses on a chain, looks up as I pass and doesn't wave, her expression saying everything her mouth doesn't: you look like hell, Hollander, and whatever this is, I want no part of it. Fair.