Chapter 2 - The Logic of the Ward
The interior of the ambulance did not smell of the river; it smelled of denatured alcohol, cold stainless steel, and the wet rubber of the technician’s gloves. The light was a hard, blue-white fluorescent bar that flickered every time the vehicle cleared the expansion joints on the Interstate 70 overpass.
"Keep the pressure on that temporal line, Davis," the paramedic said. His name was Miller; his badge was pinned crookedly to his gray shirt, and he had a small tattoo of an anchor on the web of his left thumb that moved every time he adjusted the saline drip. "She’s got a depressed fracture of the zygomatic arch. If that bone shifts another millimeter before the surgeon looks at the scan, the left optic nerve is going to split like a dry twig."
I lay flat on the narrow cot, my head locked into two orange foam blocks that were taped to the metal frame. My right eye was clear now, the blood cleared away by a sterile gauze pad that smelled of wintergreen.
Wyatt sat on the small bench by my feet. His hands were tucked between his knees to keep them from shaking, his knuckles raw and black with grease from where he had hit the foundation wall during his struggle with my father. He hadn't spoken since the utility truck driver had pulled his vehicle across the Davis driveway to block the garage door.
"Wyatt," I whispered. My jaw wouldn't move more than a quarter of an inch; the left side of my face felt like it had been filled with liquid lead that was slowly cooling into a solid block.
"Don't talk, Sadie," he said, his voice coming from somewhere behind his teeth. "The police are already at the house. The electrician stayed by the porch until the second cruiser arrived. They have your father in the back of the white car."
"The phone," I managed to say, the word tasting of salt. "The old man... behind the curtain."
Wyatt leaned forward, his face crossing into the blue-white light of the ambulance bar. "What old man?"
"The third window," I said. My right eye moved toward the small square window of the ambulance door, where the streetlamps of downtown Columbus were passing in a blur of wet yellow light. "Before they loaded the stretcher. There was an old man behind the lace curtain. In the spare room where my grandfather used to keep his trunks."
Wyatt looked at the paramedic, but Miller was busy adjusting the flow valve on the IV bag. "There shouldn't be anyone in that room, Sadie," Wyatt said softly, his hand reaching out to touch the clean cotton of my sleeve. "Your mother told the appraiser that the room had been nailed shut since ninety-four because of the dry rot in the floorboards. She said she kept nothing in there but the old Christmas boxes."
"He had his hand on the glass," I said. "He was shaking."
The ambulance turned hard to the left, the tires shrieking against the wet asphalt of the emergency ramp at Ohio State University Hospital. The blue-white lights of the bay hit the glass, replacing the image of the streetlamps with the hard, concrete geometry of the surgical receiving pavilion.
Within ten minutes, the room was full of women in blue smocks. They didn't talk to me about my family; they talked to each other in that fast, numeric language that belongs to people who spend their lives looking at internal bleeding.
"Get the maxillofacial tray," a woman said. She had a silver clip in her graying hair that looked like a surgical clamp. "We need a full CT of the orbit and the mandible. And get the legal kit from the supervisor's desk. The fiancé says it's a domestic with an instrument."
A younger nurse, a girl with wide, pale eyes and a nametag that read A. Jenkins, RN, knelt beside my head. She was holding a small camera—a black digital model with a heavy ring-light attached to the lens.
"Sadie," she said, her voice dropping into that low, professional register I had used myself when checking out rare books to the state trustees. "I'm going to take four photographs of the lateral line before we clean the tissue. I need you to keep your right eye fixed on the blue star on the ceiling, okay? Don't move your jaw."
"Preserve... everything," I whispered.
She stopped, her finger hovering over the shutter button. "What did you say, sweetheart?"
"The evidence," I said, the liquid in my throat thick and heavy. "The dress. The cotton. Don't let my mother’s sister come to the room to collect the bag. Tell the security officer that the clothes stay in the state locker until the detective signs the log."
The nurse looked up at the supervisor, who nodded once from the doorway.
May you like
"We have the chain of custody forms right here, Sadie," the supervisor said, her fingers snapping a blue plastic seal over a heavy canvas evidence sack. "Nothing leaves this room without a receipt from the county prosecutor. You just breathe through the medicine now."
The blue light from the camera flash hit my right eye four times, each flash leaving a dark, yellow disc that floated in the air between my face and the blue star on the ceiling. With each flash, I didn't see the hospital room; I saw the third window of the house on Glenwood Avenue—the gray lace curtain, the yellowed glass, and the five thin, trembling fingers that had been pressed against the pane like a row of dry bones.
