Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

Something to ask the doctor about.

Sighing, Stella opened her eyes. The left one seemed more eager than the right, but a little effort unstuck it, and she found herself looking around at a room very similar to the one she’d been in—what was it, two nights ago? It felt like a hundred years had gone by.

This time, Chrissy wouldn’t be arriving to spring her, a thought that made her heart hurt. She’d be all alone in her room in Sawyer County Regional Hospital, a place she’d visited dozens of times over the years. Funny how the humble act of everyday living brought her through the doors of this place from time to time: everything from Noelle’s stitches when she fell off a swing set, to Ollie’s emergency appendectomy, to friends’ and neighbors’ gallbladder surgeries and hysterectomies and cancers and strokes and basic human frailty.

But before this week, the only time she herself had been a patient was when Noelle was born. Almost three decades ago.

Stella remembered that the curtains had been yellow then, thick-woven polyester things, and the floor tiles had flecks of green in them, and the trays they brought the food on were turquoise plastic. She’d stayed three days, dozing and nursing and hobbling to the bathroom, marveling all the while at the tiny little life she’d brought into the world.

It had felt like a solo effort. Lots of men stayed in the waiting room during childbirth back then, but Ollie seemed uncomfortable not only with the baby’s arrival but with everything else about Noelle. He made only one appearance per day, hands in pockets, shifting from foot to foot uncomfortably and staring out the window, declining to hold his daughter.

Back then, Stella’s room had a view of the parking lot. Now, her view was of the tops of trees, so she knew she’d scored a room on the other side of the hospital complex, the side that overlooked the little park where patients were taken in their wheelchairs to get some sun.

She was moving up in the world.

An IV cart stood next to the bed, with a line that led under the covers. Stella flexed her fingers—tried to, at any rate, but they were covered with something. She pulled her hands out from under the covers and saw that they both had been bandaged and wrapped, the right one with enough layers that it looked like a mitten, the left wearing a wide band of dressing around the palm. The IV entered her arm in a neat little taped hole.

Gingerly, Stella tried to move her legs. They felt as if they had fallen asleep, but she saw the blanket shift a little on the bed. That was good news: she guessed it meant that neither bullet had nailed her spine. Sometimes bullets did all manner of pinball-style ricocheting around in the flesh, if the TV shows were to be believed. She wondered if the little bits of metal had punched through any of her organs or sliced up a lung, but decided she’d be hooked up to more than just an IV if that were the case.

The longer she was awake, the more Stella was beginning to realize she didn’t feel all that horrible. She was going to pull through. No doubt all that exercise had helped, her body too strong and stubborn to succumb to a mere double shooting. In fact, if she’d started Weight Watchers like she meant to six months ago, she’d probably be feeling even better. But hey, maybe this would be her wake-up call. They always talked about “wake-up calls” on the late-night weight-loss infomercials. “My reunion was coming up, and I weighed eighty pounds more than I did my senior year,” some little stick-thin gal would gush. Or “My doctor said I was headed straight for type-two diabetes if I didn’t make some changes.”

Stella pictured herself sitting in an armchair, staring into the camera, with an unctuous host sticking a microphone in front of her. She’d say, “I got my face pounded to a pulp, and then I got shot a couple times and nearly bled to death in the middle of a hotbed of organized crime.” Some wake-up call that would be. The thought made her frown.

Frowning, it turned out, hurt like a bitch. Sharp pain seared along the tender skin of her lips and around her forehead, and along the lines of her stitches. Hell, she probably had a whole new set of stitches by now; she probably looked like she was sporting zippers in every direction across her face. Or maybe they just took a staple gun to her, pushed that flap of skin in place and let fly. Why not? Might as well save the nit-picky detail work for a case where they could actually make a difference. Stella put the fingers of her left hand gingerly to her face and made an exploration, and it felt as if she hadn’t been far off : the ridges and bumps and sharp little knots were an unfamiliar landscape, with bulges and valleys nowhere near where they ought to be.

Stella sighed and put her hands back on top of the cool sheets. So her face was wrecked. So what. It would heal. She was trying so hard not to think of the other thing, the thing that had been slinking along the edges of her mind ever since she first woke up, the thought she’d taken down with her as she first sank into unconsciousness and which had featured in her hazy, troubled dreams as she came out of anesthesia.

There was no keeping it at bay any longer.

Chrissy.

Chrissy, braver than Stella had ever imagined, fearless to the end. Beautiful in her fury, rosebud lips focused in a deadly frown of concentration, those cornflower blue eyes glinting with fearless determination. Stella knew that even as she took the bullet, even as she fell, Chrissy hadn’t faltered.

Stella’s grief welled up, and it was stronger than any of the other emotions she’d experienced so far. She’d sworn she would never again endanger a woman while doing her job, but somehow along the way the task of finding Tucker had seized them both and thrown them together on this desperate journey, and it was only together that they had been able to get as far as they had. Stella didn’t regret taking the girl along with her—it was no more an option for Chrissy to stay home than it was for Stella to turn away when Chrissy had first arrived at her door.

They’d given their all: she was sure of that. Stella knew that neither of them had held anything back, that they’d put fear behind them and barreled ahead, knowing the situation could end up like this.

If only things had worked out differently.

The fact that Chrissy was the one to go down and stay down—it didn’t seem right. Stella should have been the one who died. No one needed her; no one waited for her. And besides, she’d rolled the dice more than most people ever had a chance to, taking risks, scraping through situations that by all rights should have ended in disaster.

Why couldn’t Chrissy have been the lucky one this time?

Stella heard soft voices in the hall, and then the door to her room was pushed open wide and a young woman with spiked magenta hair came into the room, dropped the paper cup she was holding, and burst into tears.

Noelle .

“Baby girl,” Stella said, surprised to find that her voice was nothing more than a scratchy whisper, and she held out her arms and her sweet grown-up angel girl rushed straight into them, laying her head on Stella’s chest and immediately jerking back with a shriek, which might have been a good thing on balance since the pressure of the embrace felt like an axe cleaving Stella’s flesh. But she needed to hold her daughter, and she grasped Noelle’s hands and tugged her back.

Very gently Noelle knelt down next to the bed and laid her cheek on Stella’s arm, blinking tears from her big violet eyes. “Mama,” she said, “what on earth have you gone and done?”

She sounded so distraught, so dismayed, that Stella had to laugh. It was a hurtin’ little laugh, bumpy and rough, but it felt good. “Just makin’ trouble, sugar. I’m sorry to say it, but I can’t seem to stay away from it.”