Nick
There's someone cutting my suit.
That's the first thing I understand when I come back to myself. The pain in my arm, the ringing in my head, the way my leg won’t move. None of it even registers. Because my first instinct is threat.
My hand goes to the blurry outline of a jaw. I feel soft skin under my palm that tells me this is a woman leaning over me. Her pulse is rapid beneath my grip. I could kill her from this position. My body knows how, even if my mind is foggy and unclear.
Then my vision clears, and I see her face.
She isn't flinching.
My blood is on her gloved hands, but her eyes are the calm blue of a peaceful ocean.
What stops me is the simple fact that a woman with my fingers tight around her jaw is not afraid of me.
Everyone is afraid of me, usually. She isn’t trying to pull back, or hitting out at me, or even screaming.
Instead, she's breathing evenly through her nose and watching me like she's waiting for me to remember where I am.
She is speaking, keeping her voice low and calm, and so soothing that I wonder for a moment if any of this is real.
My brain assembles the scene in pieces.
The sedan. I was in the back of the sedan. Yuri was driving. We were on the freeway coming back from the meeting in Westbrook, and I was reading something on my phone, and then the world moved sideways. I remember hearing glass shatter, metal crunch, and everything went black.
My arm is bleeding. I can feel it now. I can feel the tack of drying blood along my ribs where it's run down inside my shirt, and a duller ache in the meat of my bicep where something cut me deep.
I look at the woman.
Sadie.
She said her name on purpose, I realize. The way you do with a frightened child. My name is Sadie. She's trying to give me something to hold onto so I don't rip her apart.
I open my fingers.
I don't let go entirely. My hand slides down her jaw to the line of her throat, and I feel her swallow against my palm. For a breath, I understand that I could close my hand right now and end this, and some part of me considers it. Not because I want to hurt her but because I don't know who she is. It’s the not knowing that’s a risk, and every instinct my father ever drilled into me says remove the unknown, eliminate the risks.
But she doesn't move.
She continues to look at me in that patient and present and present way that unnerves me as much as it settles me.
I drop my hand to the seat and make myself breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The way I was taught when I was fourteen and my hands wouldn't stop shaking after the first time I killed a man.
"Sadie," I say. My voice sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a well. There's an accent in it that I’m usually able to keep buried. "Go ahead."
She nods once and finishes cutting the sleeve.
She presses gauze into the wound with exactly the right pressure, taping it down with exactly the right tension, and she does all of it without looking me in the eye again.
She's professional. Trained. She's not a nurse, though.
A nurse moves differently. Sadie moves like someone who is moving on instinct and chance.
Interesting.
I watch her hands. They're small and steady. No rings. Blunt nails, short, clean. Chapped knuckles. The hands of a woman who works and doesn't get paid enough to take care of them. There's a thin white scar on her top lip that looks old, older than the fresh cut on my arm by years.
She takes my blood pressure, my pulse. She writes numbers on the inside of my wrist and the intimacy of it, the point of the marker against my skin, is more obscene than any touch I've had in a lifetime.
BP 130/85. P 96. Conscious. Laceration L upper arm. ? concussion. 2:54 PM.
I watch her. I watch every small motion of her hands, every shift of her shoulders under the cotton of her t-shirt, every strand of blonde hair that has come loose from the knot at the back of her head and is stuck to her temple with a thin gloss of sweat.
I watch her mouth as she concentrates. I watch her lashes, fair and long, fan across her cheeks when she blinks.
I watch her the way a man watches something he has just found and wants to study.
Wants to keep.
When she's done, she caps the marker and moves to go.
Something in me reaches for her without my permission.
"Sadie."
She stops. She doesn't turn all the way around. Just her face, over her shoulder, fair and ordinary and completely extraordinary.
"Yes?"
I want to ask her a dozen things. Her last name.
Where she lives. What she was doing on this freeway.
Who taught her to move through a wreck with that kind of composure.
Why she didn't scream when I put my hand on her.
Whether she understood, in that second, exactly what I was, and if she did, why she stayed.
"Thank you," I say.
Her eyes move over my face and I realize I can't read her.
She nods once and climbs out of the sedan.
I watch her through the cracked window as she walks away. She doesn't look back. Her shoulders are set, her head is up, and she's already reaching into her back pocket for something I can’t see. I try to move, but my leg is trapped between the front seat and the door.
I push at the seat with my good arm, but it doesn’t move. I try to open the door, but it’s crushed in such a way that the latch must be jammed.
I look back in the direction she went and I file all of it away.
The Sharpie on her hands. The way she favors her left knee slightly when she steps over debris.
The make and model of the empty Corolla crumpled on the shoulder, dusty green, twelve years old, packed to capacity with boxes and a lamp.
The corner of what looks like a mattress is pressed against the back window. She was moving. Alone.
The sirens are close now. I hear boots on asphalt; the hydraulic whine of machinery being pulled from a truck. My door is pinned. The roof is warped. They're going to have to cut me out.
I look down at my wrist.
BP 130/85. P 96.
Her handwriting is neat. Almost prim. Each number carefully placed, as if she knew someone would need to read it and wanted to make it easy for them.
I brush my thumb over the ink.
It doesn't smudge.
A paramedic's face appears at the window.
He's saying something to me, asking me questions in the slow careful voice they use for head injuries, and I answer him in the slow careful voice I use when I don't want someone to know what I'm thinking. Yes, I can hear him. Yes, I know my name. I’m Nikolai Zhirinovsky.
Yes, I know the date. No, I don't remember the impact.
My arm is the worst of it and my leg is pinned.
The driver, Yuri, is my priority, please see to him first.
He tells me they are on it. A woman at the scene already took care of the most urgent triage before they arrived.
"The blond?" I ask.
He looks at me oddly. "Yeah. You know her?"
"No." I lift my wrist to show the evidence of her on me.
He nods and starts working on the door.
I turn my head, slowly, because the ache in my skull is only just starting to fade. Through the shattered window I can see her. She's being led to a patrol car with a foil blanket around her shoulders. She doesn't look at me.
But I can see the line of her throat when she tips her head back to swallow some juice, and I can see the place where my hand was, even though there’s no mark there. I didn't press hard enough to leave one.
The firemen arrive with the cutters. The noise when they start on the roof is a shriek of metal that I feel in my teeth. I close my eyes and let it happen. I think about the blond woman who helped strangers in a pile up.
When the roof is peeled back, I open my eyes.
She's standing now. The paramedic is gesturing toward the ambulance. She's shaking her head no. She points toward the Corolla and says something, and the paramedic says something back. Her shoulders tighten in a way that tells me she's being told something she doesn't want to hear.
The fireman tells me to put my head down.
When I look up again through the collapsing metal, she is still there, at the edge of the scene.
A curvy figure in a t-shirt covered in black and red smudges, a first aid kit at her feet, and a foil blanket around her shoulders.
Her whole life totaled on the shoulder behind her.
I memorize her.
The pitch of her shoulders. The height of her. The exact shade of her hair in sunlight. The shape of her hands wrapped around a juice box. The way she looked at me when my fingers were on her throat and she didn’t flinch.
Sadie.
They lift me out and onto a stretcher. The pain hits properly for the first time as they move my arm, a hot bright line from my shoulder to my elbow, and I bite down on it and don't make a sound. The paramedic on my left whistles low.
"You've got a hell of a pain tolerance, man."
"Mm." It’s a sound but it’s all I can manage through the searing pain.
"Your arm's going to need stitches. Maybe twenty or so,” he observes as he wheels me towards an empty ambulance.
I turn my head as they roll me the short distance.
I see the exact moment she feels it, the way her shoulders go still and her chin lifts. She turns her head slowly, as if she doesn't want to, and her eyes find mine across the wreckage the way mine already found her.
Her face does something small and complicated, a tightening around the mouth that could be fear or could be something else, and her hand closes a little tighter around the juice box.
I hold her eyes until the stretcher clears the ambulance door. Then she's gone from sight, and I'm figuring out how to see her again.