Charlie stayed at Queen of Angels hospital for nearly 72 hours, long after he'd been officially released. A chatty internist at the start of her shift had arranged a blood transfusion and stitched him up.
"How do you feel?" she'd asked solicitously.
That had confused him. "I don't feel anything," he'd answered.
"Oh, good," she smiled, "that means the painkillers are working!"
She'd offered to show him the X-rays—"you can actually see a chip on the ulna. Takes a lot of force to do that with a kitchen knife!"—but Charlie declined.
After that, he'd given statements to the police, confirming that the attacks were not related to ongoing FBI investigations, promising to notify them if he had to suddenly leave the state. Terry had shown up to walk him through that part and he left a lot of it in her hands. David had come, too, and offered to drive him home but Charlie explained that Larry was coming to pick him up.
He didn't call Larry, though, and when he saw the physicist wandering around the intake area, trying to catch the nurse's attention, Charlie quietly walked the other way.
There were signs reminding him to turn off his cellphone lest it bother other patients. So he turned it off. And then he left it on the ledge above the sink in one of the men's room.
On the second day, he was paged over the hospital intercom: "Charles Edward Eppes, your party is waiting at B Exit; Dr. Eppes, please meet your party at B Exit." Charlie was in the elevator when he heard the announcement and the man next to him joked about medicine's finest getting lost in their own hospital. It wasn't a funny joke, but Charlie laughed anyway. He decided not to explain to the man that someone had made a mistake. His party was in the thoracic trauma unit, where his father lay behind a battery of machines, and in Don's observation cubicle on the second floor.
Charlie spent visiting hours dozing in various lounges with outpatients and daily visitors. He bought packets of crackers at vending machines and drank weak coffee from the depressing hospital café, thinking that this was how his classmates had lived when they were starving on student loans and he was at home eating his mother's cooking. He worked a newspaper crossword with a woman waiting for her dialysis appointment but left the waiting room before they got to the math puzzle on the facing page. Only one person asked him what he was doing there, a kid who'd busted her ankle playing soccer and seemed impressed by the amount of bandages swathing Charlie's right arm.
"An accident," Charlie explained, "I was involved in a very bad accident."
He spent the night in a chair next to Alan's bed. He wasn't supposed to be there—visiting hours were over and this was a closed ward. But he still wore his hospital intake bracelet and no one noticed that it was outdated. Besides, he was young and quiet and politely held the doors for the nurses when they came around with trolleys of supplies. For the most part he sat quietly, occasionally reaching through the web of wired and tubes to straighten Alan's blankets.
Only 17 percent of shots fired at less than 10 feet in a crisis situation actually hit their target, so Charlie figured Anthony probably hadn't even been aiming. He'd just gotten lucky. Or maybe Alan had gotten unlucky. Like a math problem, there was no human agent: just cause and effect. The gun fired a bullet, the bullet chipped a rib, the rib punctured a lung, there's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza. The 17 percent statistic had come from Don. Don had looked it up at work somewhere, written it down on a scrap of paper and brought the paper home to Charlie. A sort of peace offering after the sniper case, an acknowledgment that he had convinced Charlie to do something that Charlie would rather not have done.
Alan came to early in the morning, just briefly enough to recognize Charlie's presence and smile at him. He didn't talk and obviously didn't remember exactly what had happened. If he had, Charlie thought, he wouldn't have looked so pleased to see his younger son.
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