“Why’d they bring me here?” My voice sounded weak and incredibly irritating to my ears, but I was stuck with it.
“Good question,” she said. She held up a crumpled three-by-five-inch card. “My name and the address of the clinic were on this. It was in your pocket.” And she put one hand on her hip and raised an eyebrow at me, like a first-grade teacher who caught the class clown with a handful of spitwads.
I tried to organize my answer. I was making some progress with my head, but it still took me a moment to put together a thought with as many parts to it as this one had. There were several different things to say, and I knew they had to go in the right order. So I let my head roll forward and I just breathed for a moment before I answered.
“Oh. It—I wrote it down. The—address. I was going to be down here…on business…I wanted to stop by. Maybe—have lunch.” It was tough, but so am I; I made it through the whole sentence without fainting.
I looked up at Nancy. She looked very serious.
“You could have just called,” she said. “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble.” She watched my face as I figured out she was kidding. Then she gave me a little of her warm, low chuckle and I closed my eyes. I opened them up again after a moment and she was still looking at me.
“Would you like to have lunch now?” she asked.
I gulped some air and closed my eyes. “Not if it involves eating,” I said. “Or even looking at food.”
“Hm,” she said. “Well, that’s the way I usually do it, so I guess lunch is out.”
Nancy leaned forward and put a thumb on my eyelid. She peeled it back and looked inside, then whipped a small penlight up and into my face. She looked a moment longer, switched eyes, then nodded, putting the light into a pocket of her uniform.
“I think you’ll live,” she said. I closed my eyes again, remembering the last time I’d heard that. “Do you remember what happened?”
I shook my head. It was a bad idea.
“Well, somebody apparently gave you a pretty good knock on the skull.”
“Yeah. That seems about right.” I started to remember the outline of what happened. The details were still too much work.
I raised a hand to feel my forehead. The hand was trembling. The forehead was throbbing. There was a brand-new place on my head that stuck out about four feet further than it ever had before. I felt like a very sick unicorn.
What they never tell you in the movies is that getting whacked on the head can ruin your whole day. It’s like the cinematic tough guys who say, “It’s just a flesh wound,” and yank a hanky on tight with their teeth and then jump on their horses, draw their sabres, and fire two shotguns with their lips.
Sorry: I’ve had flesh wounds. They hurt. They make you want to gnash your teeth and howl, and when the pain settles in to a constant throbbing you just want to sit quietly by yourself and whimper.
A good head-whacking is about the same. When you come to, you’re not sure where you are, or even who you are sometimes. You want to crawl into a dark, well-ventilated corner, preferably with some kind of drain in it, and stay there until you can stand to take aspirin without gagging. It can take a day or two for things to settle down and lose their bright yellow edge.
Nancy put a cool, dry hand on my forehead. It felt very good. “You had me worried,” she said.
That was the best news I’d had for a while. “Really?” I asked her, managing to get one eye opened and pointed pretty much in her direction. I thought maybe opening one eye would only hurt half as much, but it didn’t work out that way.
She smiled. She didn’t take her hand away. It felt good. “You did not look good when those kids brought you in. You still don’t.”
“Thank you,” I said, leaning my head gratefully onto her hand.
“But the doctor had a look at you. He said whoever hit you got you in a good place, hit mostly bone.” She chuckled again but had the good taste not to make any of the obvious jokes about bone and my head. “Anyway, he doesn’t think you’ll have a concussion or any other serious problems. Just a headache.”
“It’s a serious headache,” I told her weakly.
“Maybe. But it could have been a lot worse. Two inches lower and it would have been the bridge of your nose. Off to either side and it could have been your temple.” She touched each place as she named it. “They’re not as hard as your forehead.”
I was starting to feel a little better. And as her hand moved over my head, I was starting to feel other things, too. Her hand had an almost electric feeling to it as it passed across my face. It made my skin feel like a Santa Ana wind was blowing over me and charging all my pores with static electricity.
I stood up. For a minute I forgot all about Nancy. Then light and sound came back and I was still standing.
“Thanks,” I said. I managed to make the room hold still long enough to look her in the eye. “I appreciate the TLC. Sorry about lunch.”
“That’s okay.” She smiled a little. “You can spend a little extra on dinner.”
I had actually turned away before I registered what she said and it took me a couple of seconds to turn back and wait for the sloshing in my head to slow down.