“I should look at those stitches of yours,” Anne, Doc’s wife says behind me.
“I’m fine,” I tell her. “It’s fine.”
She glances at my shoulder where my shirt is hard with dried blood, and shakes her head exasperatedly, making her neatly curled hair bounce around her head. She helped Doc out as his nurse for years before she started working at her halfway house full time.
“It’ll just take a look,” she insists. “And Hawk says you have something to ask me.”
If Hawk told her I want to speak to her, then his idea last night must’ve gotten a green light. Not that I think it’s going to do much good if Veronica’s parents want to go to the police.
“OK,” I say and follow her out of the lounge, down one of the side hallways and to the basement where Doc’s infirmary is.
The large room with three hospital tables and stainless steel shelves and cupboards lining the walls is brightly lit. This is where Doc treats the wounded that he can treat here and the room always smells of medicine and disinfectant. Next door is an even bigger room full of hospital beds.
Anne tells me to sit on one of the tables and goes to collect something from one of the drawers behind my back. A moment later, I feel the cool steel of scissors on my back as she cuts away my shirt. She wets it too, before peeling it away to reveal my stitches, but parts of it still tear at my skin pretty bad.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she says after cleaning it with iodine, the smell of which reminds me of the sea, of sitting on the sandy shore right before it rains. “I won’t redo them. I’ll just cover it up. You should take better care to keep it covered.”
Keeping a bandage over my stitches has been the last thing on my mind these last couple of days, but if I tell her that she’ll just start fussing even worse. I extend my arms towards her. “Better wrap these up fresh too.”
The bandages on my forearms are grimy, black in the places where they’re not a dark yellow. She shakes her head in exasperation at the state of them but doesn’t say anything. Just goes to get more materials from the drawers and shelves.
“So, you know Veronica, right?” I ask. “She knows you.”
She nods, her curls bouncing against her back. “She sends women who have nowhere else to go to me. And she really appreciates the work I do. She’s doing great work too, but I sometimes think she’s just too invested in it, that it’s swallowed up her whole life.”
Exactly what I’ve been thinking too.
She returns with more bandages and iodine, then proceeds to carefully remove the dirty wrappings on my forearms.
“If you want to do the kind of work we’re doing, you have to learn to keep an emotional distance,” she goes on while she works.
“She’s too invested for that,” I say and get a questioning glance from Anne, but there’s no time to tell her everything, so I don’t go on.
“Why do you want me to talk to her?” she asks.
“Something’s happened and now she’s involved in what we have going on with the Riders,” I say keeping it vague, because I don’t know how much she actually knows. “I think the Riders might go after her and her family, and I want to keep them safe. But none of them trust me, Veronica included. Hawk thought you might be able to put in a good word and I agree. Just tell her we’re not the monsters she thinks we are.”
I think that maybe Veronica’s thinking on that shifted sometime during last night, but she was on me like a righteous banshee before then, so I could be totally wrong.
Anne rips off a piece of tape to attach the bandage to my arm.
“I can tell her how much this club has done for the women that get chewed up and spit out by the likes of clubs such as the Riders,” she says angrily. “Is that what you had in mind?”
I nod. “But don’t get too specific. Just let her know you trust us and that she should too. It’d probably be best if the rest of the family heard it too.”
She’s finished with my bandages and now she’s just standing there holding all the equipment she used, looking at me kind of sadly. “We’re heading into a big carnage, aren’t we? The like of which we haven’t seen in years.”
I’m not sure she’s actually expecting me to answer her questions. Her eyes aren’t focused on me.
“Not if we do it right,” I say and hop off the table, then take my phone from my pocket.
“I’ll call Veronica now, tell her you’re coming over,” I say and she nods.
I’m actually happy to be making this call. Bordering on ecstatic kind of happy.
The thought of Veronica thawing out towards me enough so I can make my move, is like a bright beacon of better times up ahead amid this grim and grave mood around here. But that’s neither here nor there right now and I should push it out of my thoughts.
Not that I could if I tried.
Since the day we met, it’s been pretty much impossible to keep Veronica out of my mind. And last night, when it comes right down to it, all I wanted to do was hold her and tell her everything is gonna be OK. And that’s all I still want to do.