Chapter 22 Lucky
Lucky
In the Uber, Anca stared out the window, one hand curled around her seat belt. Sitting beside her, Evan could make out part of her face in the window’s reflection. Stone expression, lips a grim line, hair a tangled mess.
The driver wore a backward snap cap with PLAYAH embroidered on the front panel, shocks of Irish red hair curling out over his ears like wings. His head bopped to softly played rap.
Anca squirmed, pressing her legs together, and hunched forward. She glanced over at him, winced, said quietly, “Itches.”
Evan said, “Almost there.”
Her face spasmed in grief but she fought it down. “I’m not married.” Her voice was hoarse, so quiet he could barely hear her. “I have not been with a man.”
Her hands gripped her thighs, squeezing, her knuckles bloodless.
He understood. There weren’t words for something like this. There just weren’t.
He said, “I’m very sorry.”
“I want to shower. I can’t stand this another second.”
“Would you like to turn back?”
She stared out the window. “Will they poke and prod me?”
“They won’t do anything you don’t allow.”
“That is not,” she said, “the question I asked.”
“They will want to examine you,” Evan said. “And treat you.”
Her nod came like a quiver. “Will they make me … describe what happened?”
“Yes. They will ask. And if you decide to do a kit—”
“I can’t put it into words. It was impossible, what happened to me.” She turned away again. Passing lights strobed across her reflection. “But of course, everything is possible.”
The driver was in a world of his own, softly mouthing lyrics from the next track, something about putting Molly all in her champagne.
Evan said, “Maybe you can describe it from outside yourself.”
Her head snapped over. “Outside myself?”
“Like a scene. Like something that happened to someone else.”
“Do you think you have any right, in any way,” and here she clenched her teeth with Eastern European ire, “any right to tell me anything right now?”
“No,” Evan said.
“What then? More instructions that you’re going to explain to me about what I need to do next?”
“No,” Evan said.
“Good. Okay, then. I don’t want to hear your advice.” She turned back to her window, her fist shoved to her mouth.
The Uber accelerated and then braked hard, a horn blaring at them for five full seconds. Their driver cut hard around a corner, and then they skimmed beneath streetlights, bars of shadow flurrying across them.
Anca squeezed her legs together again, curled into herself.
To give her some privacy, Evan focused on the back of the driver’s seat, the bopping PLAYAH cap. Took her home, ’n’ I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it.
Anca’s gaze remained fixed out the window. When she spoke, her cracked voice surprised him: “She sat on the subway. And clutched the laminated seizure plan to her belly.”
Evan waited. Gave her room.
She swallowed dryly. Reset herself.
“A mother with children. That’s who she looked for first. The second choice was a couple with kids. Third: a woman, alone.” At last she turned her bruised face to him. “She needed to pay attention for when it started to happen.”
Anca sat on the crinkly paper of the ER exam-room table.
A face peered back from the mirror across, blanched and haggard in the harsh fluorescent lighting.
They’d taken photos of her bruises already and the word written across her face.
The gap in her hospital gown revealed the dick drawn in Magic Marker across her shoulder blade, a match for the image tagging the subway car she’d been kidnapped out of.
She’d required a hand mirror to see it. The sexual-assault nurse examiner had helped her try to wash it off, along with the WHORE on her cheek; though faded, stains still stood out against the reddened skin.
She could scrub all she wanted but it would always be there on that spot, an echo of her violation, a reminder that her own skin could be claimed by someone else.
They were talking now, the nurse, police officer, social worker, a resident, and the attending.
It was crowded, little space, no privacy.
The examination and treatment had been excruciating, though as compassionate as possible.
Out in the hall, the statue of Saint Bernadette Soubirous kneeling with a rosary laced across her praying hands had given Anca some comfort. Thank goodness for Catholic hospitals.
They’d started her on antibiotics to protect against … diseases. She’d be HIV-tested in seventy-two hours. She had needed stitches. Significant signs of tearing and—and—
Her thoughts left her.
Aches and burns. Aside from that, only numbness.
Flesh deadened from local anesthetics, mind deadened from Ativan, her body an empty warehouse.
She wondered if she would ever feel again, feel any sensation not inflicted by them, something, anything to let her know she was alive—the burn of an oven-hot pan against her palm, a glob of peanut butter trudging down her throat, the ache in her hip flexors from standing during the Paschal Vigil.
I will never be the same again, she told herself.
It was something she needed to hear. She gave herself permission to be here in this anguish in this moment, to let it have as much of her as it demanded.
The police officer jotted more notes for her report, the physician more notes for his chart. Proficiency on display. They’d done this plenty. Words from the discussion flew in at her.
She’d been soaked in hydrogen peroxide to remove traces of DNA.
The officer said, not quite sufficiently under her breath, “What kind of fucking brain do you have to have to do that to someone.” A bite mark on Anca’s shoulder was not sufficiently defined to make a dental impression from.
Opiates had shown up on the urine tox screen.
While the doctor couldn’t say for sure, she’d seen this before and guessed it was something like four to five hundred micrograms of fentanyl.
The officer said they’d been seeing lots of overdoses and Anca was lucky it hadn’t been more.
Lucky.
They couldn’t risk stepping on the fentanyl with morphine, so they’d injected her with ketorolac for the pain.
Her body, punctured again and again, shot through with things that did not belong inside her.
Plus the hours lost to trauma meant she’d missed two doses of meds.
Along with stress and sleep deprivation that meant she had an uptick of seizures to look forward to.
She crossed herself, wound up with her hands hugging opposite shoulders, hunched.
She did not want to be inside her body. It was not safe in here.
“Please excuse me. I need a moment.” Anca slid off the exam table gingerly and walked up the hall. Entering the bathroom, she gathered two hand towels, lowered the toilet seat, and sat. Burying her face in the wad of paper, she wept silently.
Five minutes passed. Perhaps ten.
There came a banging at the door. “C’mon, lady! Hurry up in there!”
She lifted her face. The paper towels were soaked through. Her throat clutched and her mouth gasp-gasp-gasped, still in sobbing rhythm. It took a moment longer but she found her voice: “Yes, yes. I’m sorry. Just a moment.”
“You’re not the only one has to take a shit.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
The orange plastic chair in the waiting room seemed designed for maximum discomfort. Evan wasn’t sure whether Anca would want his help or not after her examination but wanted to be here in the event that she did.
Aside from being maximally gentle, he was unsure how to interact with her.
This was always the hardest part for him, understanding the cryptic give-and-take of human engagement, the strange language of intimacy.
For the first time in a while, he thought of Mia Hall, the district attorney who lived downstairs from him at Castle Heights.
She always seemed to know what to do in situations like these.
A devoted single mother to her ten-year-old boy, Peter, she was warm and tough, maternal and strong, and had an unerring sense of how to provide care and comfort.
Evan wasn’t great at care and comfort. He was much better at inflicting retribution.
Through the big window behind the intake desks, he’d seen Anca limp to the bathroom.
She’d looked on the verge of crumbling. If she broke down in front of him, was he supposed to hug her?
Ask if she wanted to be hugged? Or not intrude on her personal space no matter what?
Mia would’ve just gone over and done whatever the right Mia thing was to do.
Last month he’d discovered that she’d been temporarily assigned to the San Francisco DA’s office to help them dig out from a heavy workload.
Between that and her extended trip back East with Peter, he hadn’t seen her in months.
He wished she were here as a resource for Anca.
But.
As great as Mia was, she couldn’t do what Candy McClure could do.
Barring Evan, Candy—aka Orphan V—was the deadliest graduate of the Program. Soon enough, he would go on the hunt for YngTl69 and his associates. When he did, he had to ensure that Anca was protected.
Candy McClure knew how to break any of the 206 bones in the human body.
Knew how to dissolve them, too, in concentrated sulfuric acid.
She’d once attempted to liquefy Evan, back when he’d first escaped the Orphan Program and she’d been tasked with neutralizing him.
Instead she’d fallen atop her plastic jugs herself in the course of a fight between them, turning her back into a topography of scar tissue.
Aside from the mottled skin she kept hidden beneath high-backed dresses, she was a flawless physical specimen, able to render men paralyzed through soft power or hard.
He dialed, waiting through several rings.
And then she answered: “X.”
Wind whipped across the receiver. She was driving with her windows rolled down. Or galloping on a horse. Or perhaps riding a precision-guided missile. With Candy, one never quite knew.
“I’m in the Bronx,” Evan said. “I need you here to help watch a woman.”
“Why the hell,” Candy said, “do I have to watch her?”
Evan told her.
“Be there tomorrow,” Candy said.
Bundled in a too-big sweater and a coat, damp hair finger-combed into place, Anca stood before Evan, her arms crossed low over her midsection.
The staff had shown her to a care room with a shower, a merciful bit of privacy after all she’d been through.
She’d taken nearly a half hour to clean herself.
He’d waited dutifully in the hall.
As he’d advised, she’d requested her ER medical report, and handed it to him wordlessly on her way into the care room.
He’d reviewed it, her degradation spelled out in antiseptic clinical phrasing.
He’d read plenty of forensic files and after-action reports, seen bodily wreckage reduced to unavoidable data points.
These words were particularly difficult to apply to Anca, her delicate body, her gentle, dignified nature.
He offered the report back now and she folded it into a pocket.
The swelling on her eye had come down considerably. She looked like a different person. Faint lettering persisted on her cheek. Her hand floated by it. “It won’t come off. And my back…”
“Rubbing alcohol,” Evan said.
She smelled sharply clean, antibacterial soap and tea-tree shampoo. “You have experience with this?”
“Camo paint,” Evan told her. “Sniper black.”
“I see,” she said.
She was short, around five foot three. Slender wrists poked from the cuffed-back sleeves of her sweater, the pisiform bone at the outer edge of her wrist no bigger than a pea.
Despite his average size, Evan felt large and rough before her.
“My seizure plan, I am … I am naked without it. I had an extra in my backpack but it is lost. The backups are in my office at the church.” A flash of irises, the color of clear sky, met him. She started to talk, stopped, bit her lower lip.
“I can stay with you,” Evan said. “If you’d like.”
She nodded.
“Would you like me to call a car?”
Her lips firmed. She blinked several times rapidly, getting up her nerve. “The subway,” she said. “I will take the subway.”
At first Evan didn’t understand.
And then he did.
Wind whipped Anca’s hair. She’d halted about twenty feet from the mouth of the subway entrance. Hot air rushed upward across their cheeks, smelling of grease, peanuts, industrial heat.
“I don’t think … I’m not sure I can.”
Evan said, “Okay.”
He didn’t move. She didn’t either.
She took a wobbling step forward. Another.
He followed her.
People bumped up against him from behind, the pedestrian current spilling around them, but he made sure to block for her, a boulder in the stream. A few grumbles and passive-aggressive sighs.
Moving even more hesitantly, Anca drew closer to the top step.
She stopped at the verge, peering down. A sense of depth was suddenly apparent, stairs tunneling sharply into the underworld.
And yet, she faced it. She set a trembling hand on the metal rail, cringing at the bustle drifting past them, and the screech and rumble of trains moving invisibly below.
“Move it, buddy, wouldja?”
Anca didn’t seem to hear. Evan kept his back squared, shielding the lane behind her. In front of him, her shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell.
Tentatively she started down.
He followed.