Chapter 4

Chrissy

I had been moved to a different room, and I worried that Tony wasn’t going to be able to find me. If I was even remembering things correctly, he’d been here every night since I had been admitted. The hospital had brought my dinner and the nurse had helped me by un-lidding everything so that I could eat. I guess I should be grateful that when the man who had shot me had aimed, that he’d shattered my left scapula or what people more commonly referred to as a shoulder blade. My left side was my non-dominant hand, but you never really appreciated how much it did for you until, well, it couldn’t anymore.

Right now it was in a navy blue sling that hugged my arm close to my body, cross ways over my chest and had another strap that buckled around my waist. It kept it pretty immobilized and I was told when I began occupational therapy to relearn both how to use the arm and how to walk because of my right hip and leg damaged by the other bullet, things were going to be tricky, but doable.

All I could focus on at the time was that I had to relearn how to walk and relearn how to use my arm to do things that I’d otherwise taken for granted until now. Things such as brushing my teeth, or stirring a pot. All I could think right now, with my thoughts still muddy and hazy from pain management was what did he do to me?

I went to raise a careful spoonful of soup to my mouth when someone shouted, “Ah! Hey! Put that down!” I jumped and immediately cried out in pain from the involuntary startle response reflex, my spoonful of soup flying and painting the napkin the nurse had laid over me orangey-red.

I froze and held still, breathing through the pain, a wall of black leather and blue denim approaching out of the corner of my eye saying, “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, I was just trying to save you from yourself there. I brought you dinner.”

I forced myself to relax a muscle group at a time, turning my head slowly and at an awkward angle to look up at who’d spoken.

“Hi,” I said faintly, and Tony smiled. Those dimples of his that just made my heart flutter every time they appeared, flashing out at me.

“I am so fucking sorry,” he said, setting down the bag of take-out on my tray table and picking up the hospital cafeteria-style dinner tray. He moved it out of the way over by the sink. He pulled paper towels from the dispenser and came back to me, lifting the napkin off and gently dabbing at me where the soup had hit me where the paper hadn’t covered.

“It’s okay, I guess I just startled easy… I’m fine, really.”

“Well, I’m glad to at least see you’re with it today.”

“Yeah, it hurts and I’m still medicated, but its pills now. A little easier to deal with than whatever they were putting through my IV. I just feel awful, though… like I ache all over.”

“Morphine will do that to you,” he said and began unpacking the takeout bag. I blinked and looked at the white paper containers with the red printed battling Chinese dragon and phoenix on them.

“Is that Wah-Kue café?” I asked, perking up a bit.

“Yeah, you still go there?” he asked.

“Only the best Chinese food in the city,” I said, “This guy I used to date had me meet him there for our first one.”

He grinned and those dimples came out again, “Aw yeah? What happened to you two?” he asked, playing along.

I gave a mocking light sigh, “Well you know, he’d just made detective and I was clawing my way up the ranks as a defense attorney at this prestigious firm and sadly, it just didn’t work out.”

“Yeah, I dated a chick like that once. A real go-getter, I liked her for that.”

“Yeah?” I asked, surprised. I hadn’t known that was one of the qualities he’d liked about me.

“Yeah,” he said and went back over to the tray and grabbed my fork. “Can you hold this or are you going to need a hand for the time being.”

“I think I can manage,” I said, opening my hand in the sling. “If you can just put it there.”

He put the carton in my hand and let me close my fingers around it in my lap, moving the tray table back some so I could manage better.

“Ah, hold on just a second.” He went and pulled more paper towels and laid them over me and I grimaced.

“Afraid I’m going to be eating like a toddler or an old person for a while,” I confessed. “Wearing more than I actually manage to get in my mouth.”

“You got shot twice and in a real bad place. All that really matters now is that you’re still here.”

There was no joking, no more clowning to his tone. If anything I swore I could hear relief in his voice and it very nearly brought me to tears. Of course, the tears did start to flow when I thought about Sami… guilt swamped me and I hated that I was here while she was gone. I swallowed hard and Tony just sat patiently beside me while I cried into my Shrimp Foo Young.

I was glad he was here. I mean, the nursing staff had been wonderful to me. All of them had been really great, the doctors, too, but that was their job. No one other than Tony had come to visit me from the outside world yet, and it meant a lot that I could hear it when he spoke, the gladness that I was still alive; the fact that someone would have missed me if I were I gone, too.

“Thank you,” I murmured, voice cracking and he smiled and wiped my tears.

“No crying into the Wah-Kue’s Shrimp Foo Young. I think it’s perfectly seasoned and doesn’t need any more salt.”

I laughed and bit down on the resulting moan. I said, “Don’t make me laugh please. It hurts to laugh.”

“Sorry, I’ll try to take it down a notch.”

He pulled up a chair and picked one of the containers, popping open the top and sliding a pair of chopsticks out of their paper wrapper. He snapped them apart and I smiled, remembering.

“You know that date was the first time I learned how to use chopsticks?”

“Oh yeah, I remember.” He laughed. “You got the hang of it pretty quick.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

He popped a bite of food into his mouth and said, “Mm-hmm,” as he chewed politely with his mouth shut.

We ate in silence for a bit, and I think that had more to do with him being polite and wanting me to get some food down because I could just tell he was burning to say something to me. To be honest, as good as the Chinese was, even if it was a bit cold, I wasn’t terribly hungry. I was pretty sure that had to do with all the medicine they had me on, though.

I asked, because I wanted to know, “Anything on my case, yet?”

He lit up and eagerly launched into telling me his news, “Actually yeah, we made an arrest today.”

I perked up, “Really?”

“Ah, yup. We got the guy who posted your address online, he’s being held on inciting violence in the third degree. Did a great job incriminating himself, despite being Mirandized, and the ADA is not only willing to prosecute, he’s pretty sure that the hate crime qualifier he’s dropping as the cherry on top is going to stick. Dude is looking at a ten to fifteen year bid for this with more charges potentially pending.”

“Let me guess,” I said quietly, appetite completely fled. “Those additional charges would be in relation to whoever killed Sami and shot me if it’s discovered that they acted on his posting my address…”

“Yeah.” He looked me over. “Look, I know it goes without saying, but we’ll get that guy, too. We just…”

“Have nothing to go on…” I said and nodded. “I didn’t know him. I mean, I could talk to a sketch artist, but that’s the best I could do.”

“You remember more of what he looks like?” he sat forward in his seat and set his Chinese food aside, whipping out a pad of paper and a pen from his inside jacket pocket.

“He was white, and skinny. Almost nerdy looking with light brown hair, I think.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I mean, he had his hood up on his sweatshirt, and I only saw his eyebrows. I know that’s silly, that sounds so stupid…”

“No, give me everything you’ve got Chrissy. You’re doing great.”

Bolstered by his small words of praise, which was silly when you stopped to think about it, but much needed given my awfully fragile psyche. I hated that I was this fragile and this vulnerable, but I also had to admit to myself that it was okay to be that way right now. That anyone in my position would be.

Still, I hated it. I was a successful defense attorney, defending my clients to the best of my ability and I was angry that I was judging that in a negative light all of a sudden. That I was questioning everything about it, because even though I knew in my heart that Miranda Maguire was innocent, that Skip really had abused her, and awfully so, I was the one lying here and Sami… It felt like I had killed my best friend. The guilt of that was overwhelming, a cloying, thick and choking thing that welled out of the center of my being like blood from a cut.

Tony was incredibly patient at the second sudden and fierce onset of tears when they came. Stopping, waiting them out, and snatching fresh tissues from the dispenser by the hospital room’s sink and bringing them to me as they were needed.

Did you know that you really needed both hands to blow your nose? I mean to get a really good blow in to clear things up. I found out, but only by virtue of being limited to the one. Tony didn’t judge at all, or even call a nurse when I tried to laughingly complain about it. He just went over by the door, put on a pair of the blue gloves with practiced precision and came over and helped me.

I wondered to myself why I hadn’t tried harder back then, while at the same time tried really hard not to think too much about where he’d learned to put on those gloves with such practiced ease because when I did? A fresh storm of survivor’s guilt raged and I hated myself even more for having been so selfish in asking her over, for having been so afraid and it turns out, for good reason.

“Thanks,” I said as he stripped the gloves off and into the trash. He used hand sanitizer from the wall and winked at me.

“Don’t mention it.”

“Afraid all the other cops and detectives will make fun of you for being a soft touch?” I asked.

“Something like that,” he agreed and came and sat back down.

“I… I don’t think I can do anymore today,” I confessed and he shook his head.

“Wasn’t going to ask you to. You’ve been at it the better part of an hour and you’ve given me way more to go on than most witnesses give me in twice that time. I’ll go back to the station and type up your witness statement and bring it back here tomorrow. We can go over it, you can make any corrections you need or want to it and when you’re satisfied, I’ll have you sign off on it.”

I nodded, “Sounds good.”

We were quiet for a time and I finally broke down and said, “I never thought I would ever see myself on this side of the process.”

“No one ever does, but you’re taking it like a champ.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

I didn’t know why that meant so much to me, but it did, so I said, “Thanks for saying…”

“Just telling you the truth.”

I nodded and sniffed and he asked, “You done eating?”

“Yeah, thank you. I’m sorry I couldn’t eat more, I mean, it was good I guess I’m just not that hungry.”

“I wouldn’t be either if I were you, and it’s fine. It really is.”

“Thank you for bringing it. It was a nice change from the hospital’s food, which really isn’t all that bad, honestly.”

“Jesus, if you don’t think this food is bad, then I should really get the doctors to reexamine that head of yours.”

I laughed and it broke off into another moan. “Don’t make me laugh!” I admonished and he smiled, those damn dimples in full force.

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, not sorry,” I accused and he smiled bigger.

“Yeah, not that time. Sorry, it was worth it to see you smile.”

I couldn’t help it, I smiled again and said, “Now for some reason that I believe.”