He rolls her head as gently as he can against his chest and gathers her up.
She moans. “ ‘god.”
“Not even close. I’m taking you to the hospital now, so just be quiet.”
Though she’s very light to carry, the bag is slippery and he’s afraid of stumbling in the woods and causing her pain. By the time they reach the truck, he suspects he smells nearly as bad from nervous sweat as she does. He drives with a tense tenderness, her head resting against his shoulder. The ridges of her chained arm are palpable through the sleeping bag. With one hand, he tugs the arm free and unwinds the chains, reassuring her she doesn’t need them now.
He touches the right corner of her mouth carefully. “What happened?”
Her breath hitches. On the exhalation, almost inaudibly she tells him. “Tony.”
His fingers strangle the wheel and his teeth grind in his jaw as a murderous enmity engages the gears of his heart. At the sudden tightening of his muscles, she moans again. Taking a hand from the wheel, Sam caresses the right side of her face with his fingertips, finds wetness welling from her eye.
“What was it this time? You kite the whole fucking pack of butts?”
The bitter query releases a quiver that is almost a laugh.
“No,” she whispers. The words are slow and effortful and thick with stiffened muscle. “You.”
It is as incomprehensible as his first sight of the damage to her face and then his nerve ends begin to register it. He feels the blood drain from his face, the lurch of heart and cramp of gut, the sudden coldness as if his insides were shrinking away from his skin. And the hospital is in sight, for whatever good it will do.
In the cubicle into which they are shunted on arrival at the Emergency Room, the triage nurse wants her out of the sleeping bag. Deanie clings to him while he eases her out of it as if she would crawl inside him if she could only find the zipper. Trying to get her out of her clothes provokes her to near hysteria. The nurse puts out a Johnnie and leaves it to Sam.
Sitting on the examination table, he continues to cradle her, holding both her hands. Now they are in the institutional embrace of the hospital, she has the shakes and can’t stop weeping silently. He wipes at the right side of her face with a tissue, trying to clean it up a little. All the while he reassures her, the same short phrases that have little objective meaning beyond a kind of verbal caress.
“It’s over, it’ll never happen again,” he promises, as the door opens to admit an unfamiliar middle-aged woman.
She is short and chunky and brisk. Her gaze sharpens as it passes over the scabs on his nose, her eyes go to Deanie’s hands clutching his and then travel to the half of Deanie’s face that is exposed.
“I’m Dr. Spellman. What do we have here?” the doctor asks, in a tone of conspicuous neutrality, lifting the linen brocade to look at the left side.
“Her face is too swollen for her to talk very well,” Sam explains. He gives Deanie’s name and his own.
“I see. We’ll manage something. Would you leave us alone now?”
Deanie’s nails dig into his hands as he eases her onto the table.
“I’ll be right outside,” he promises.
Closing the door behind him, he hears her ask Deanie what happened to her. Loitering by the door, he feels awkward and still in the way. From the examining room, the rhythm of the doctor’s questioning voice spikes in frustration and Deanie sobs for him and he shoulders open the door and Deanie dives for him.
The doctor’s cheeks are flushed.
“All right,” Dr. Spellman demands. “You tell me what happened, mister.”
Stiffening in his arms, Deanie speaks. She sounds as if she is trying to speak through a gag but she repeats herself and the meaning sinks in. “ ‘s an accident.”
He’s too stunned to do anything but stare at her. Face and head exposed, she hardly looks human at all. Her face, what’s left of it, is like a mask seated insecurely on the bones of the skull. Half of it is gruesomely ravaged, the face of the walking dead from a slasher flick. Yet her mouth moves, struggling against resistant fluid-filled tissue, against pain. All the desperate effort goes into telling a grotesque lie—she claims she went face first down the slide at the Playground, just goofing around, couldn’t stop at the bottom and knocked herself insensible. Somehow she made it to the Mill but has no memory of it.
“It’s a fucking lie,” Sam says.
Deanie’s nails tear at his hands. “Shut up!”
“Her mother’s boyfriend did it.”
—frantically, she strikes at his chest with her closed fist: “No, don’t tell!”
“—he hit her.” Sam continues with matching stubbornness. “His name is Tony Lord.”
A little gleam comes into Spellman’s eyes.
“Lord, did you say?” She smiles slyly. “What a coincidence. There’s a fellow of that name in one of our beds. Lost an eyelid and some other bits last night. He also has a good many of the same kind of small lacerations as you, young lady. His story is he fell into a mirror while intoxicated. Did you fall into a mirror?”
Deanie doesn’t answer.
The doctor is suddenly chillingly cheerful, as if she has finally gotten her rocking chair arranged with a good view of the guillotine and only needs to decide what color yarn she’s going to work. She’s also friendlier to Sam.
It comes to him she’s been assuming he did the damage to Deanie, that he was the one Deanie was protecting, and feels himself going incandescently red in the face. For a moment he thinks he’s going to vomit but he manages to steady himself.
“But let’s take care of
