apartment brought her out to investigate the source of the sound. She opened the door and at first didn’t recognize the small figure leaning up against the doorjamb, arms wrapped around herself, backpack trailing onto the ground by her feet. It wasn’t until Izzy lifted her head that Kathy realized who it was. It took her a moment longer for Izzy’s battered condition to register on her.
“Sorry,” Izzy mumbled. “Couldn’t ... find ... my key ....”
“My god!” Kathy cried. “What happened to you?”
Izzy tried to focus as three or four images of her roommate’s face did a slow spin in her blurry gaze.
All the Kathys looked worried, so she attempted a smile to assure them that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, that she just wanted to have a bit of a lie down, really, and then she’d be fine, but her lips were so stiff from the cold, so bruised and swollen from the beating and subsequent falls, that after those first few words she couldn’t do much more than speak in monosyllables.
“Got ... got mugged,” she managed.
Now why did she say that? she found herself wondering. Why didn’t she just tell the truth? But what was the truth? The harder she tried, the less she could remember of what had happened. Memory and last night’s dreams were all mixed up in her head. Rushkin and John and Paddyjack. Rushkin attacking her, Rushkin attacking Paddyjack, John attacking Rushkin. Crossbow quarrels and dead cats with wings and ribbons fluttering in a crazy pattern that sounded like someone going
‘just need ... need to ... to lie down,” she mumbled through her swollen lips. “Tha’s all.”
And then she collapsed into Kathy’s arms.
As Kathy carefully pulled her into the apartment and stretched her out on the carpet, Izzy’s fingers finally relaxed enough to let go of her backpack. What happened next took place in a blur of disjointed images and sounds. Izzy kept fading in and out of consciousness, feeling like someone working a faulty radio dial who couldn’t quite tune into the station she was looking for. She heard Kathy on the phone.
She thought she remembered riding in the ambulance. She was sure she’d been lucid while the doctor was talking to her, but then why had the doctor looked exactly like Jilly? She closed her eyes so that she only had to listen.
“—couple of cracked ribs, multiple bruises, mild concussion,” the Jilly/doctor was saying in a Pakistani accent.
It was like she was ticking off items on a grocery list, Izzy thought. Standing inside Injuries ‘R.’ Us, saying, And yes, I’ll have one of those broken arms, too, but only if they’re fresh.
“You say she was mugged?” the doctor went on.
“That’s what she said.”
Kathy’s voice, responding. It sounded as though it came from very far away. The other side of the room. The other side of the city.
“Have you spoken to the police?”
“God, I hadn’t even thought of it. Is she going to be okay?”
“We’d like to keep her in for observation overnight, but I think with a little rest she’ll soon be back on her ...”
The station in Izzy’s head faded out again. It went to static, then blank. The next time she woke up she was in a hospital room. She stared up at the white-tiled ceiling and tried to remember what she was doing here. Behind her temples, a gang of little men appeared to have been commissioned by someone to dismantle her brain. She could feel the demolition ball swinging back and forth, crashing into either side of her head with a throbbing regularity. Then the image changed and it wasn’t little men inside her head, but a gang of teenage boys, surprising her in the lane by Rushkin’s studio, laughing as they knocked her down and then started to kick her ....
The mugging, she thought. That’s why she was here. She’d been mugged. She could remember curling up into as small a ball as she could, trying to shield herself from the blows, trying to survive. No wonder she felt the way she did. Every part of her body bruised and her head filled with this awful stabbing pain.
She wondered if there were any painkillers on her bedside table. Slowly turning her head, she found Kathy instead, dozing on the chair beside her bed. Kathy’s eyes flickered open as though sensing Izzy’s gaze upon her.
“How long have you been sitting there?” Izzy asked.
Her lips were still swollen and her mouth and jaw still hurt, but she could talk at least. She had a vague memory of standing in the hallway of their apartment and not being able to shape anything but the simplest of words.
“All night,” Kathy replied. “But I slept through most of it. How’re you doing?”
“Okay, I guess. My head hurts.”
“I don’t wonder.”
Izzy looked down at the length of her body, at the shape it made under the bedding that the hospital had provided.
“Is ... is anything broken?” she asked. She found she was too scared to try to move an arm or a leg.
Kathy shook her head. “Everything’s still there—bruised, but otherwise fine.”
“I guess I was lucky.”
Kathy sat on the side of the bed and gave her a gentle hug. “Oh, ma
“You and me both.”
The two detectives in charge of Izzy’s case came by to take her statement while she and Kathy were sharing Izzy’s lunch. They were both big men, looming impossibly tall and bulky above the bed in their rumpled suits. Izzy could sense Kathy’s protective instinct bristle as they introduced themselves, remembering Rochelle’s experience, but the one who did all the talking proved to be soft-spoken and polite and Izzy felt there was a genuine concern behind his questions. When she apologized and explained that she couldn’t really tell them much, they didn’t seem to be particularly surprised.
“It’s all right,” the detective assured her. “I think most people finding themselves in the situation you did would consider themselves lucky to remember their own names, never mind retain a useful description of their assailants.”
Still, Izzy tried. She closed her eyes, trying to call up a clear image of the kids who’d attacked her, but it was no use. Although she could make out their shapes, their faces were all an indistinguishable blur.
The memory of their attack woke a fit of shivers.
“The important thing to concentrate on now,” the detective went on, “is to get better. Everything else we can deal with later.”
Before they left, her doctor, an attractive Pakistani woman who didn’t look at all like Jilly this time, came by to check in on her, making for quite a crowd around Izzy’s bed. The detective who had done most of the talking left her his card with instructions for her to give him a call if she remembered anything else. He also wanted to set up an appointment for her to come down to the precinct to go through the mug books, but her doctor said that would have to wait a few days. Izzy was happy to follow her orders; the last thing she wanted to do was look at page after page of pictures of criminals.
The detectives left. The doctor left. And finally, Izzy was allowed to leave as well.
She was discharged from the hospital later that afternoon. When a nurse and Kathy took her down in the wheelchair, Izzy found herself blinking like a mole in the glare of the bright sun on the snow. After a few moments she realized that Alan and Jilly were waiting for them at the front door with Alan’s Volkswagen bug. They treated her with the exaggerated concern that friends will offer to the sick, and she would have been royally embarrassed if she hadn’t felt so awful. Her headache had subsided to a muted throb, but that seemed small consolation because every other part of her body hurt every time she moved or took a breath. She was so swollen and bruised she hadn’t recognized herself when she looked in the bathroom mirror before she left her room.
“Now you know how you’d look if you put on a few pounds,” Kathy had joked.
“And gone punk with my makeup.”
“Morbidly punk. But maybe it suits you. I think the yellowish green bruises bring out a green in your eyes. And
