"Kalinda. Kalinda, wake up."
Kalinda breaks from a shallow, tumbling sleep to feel Grace Florrick's hand shaking her elbow, the ends of the girl's reddish hair brushing Kalinda's jacket.
"Wake up."
Kalinda tries to assess from the movement in the corridor what time it is. She's spent the last three days at the hospital, and thus recognizes that it's the night-shift nurses who are bustling by, that the orderlies have parked their dinner carts and moved on to other floors.
"Come on, Kalinda. My mom's awake."
The adrenaline shoots through Kalinda before she's consciously processed the words, and she's on a well-trod path down the corridor, Grace trotting at her heels. Alicia's nurses have recommended only two visitors at a time, so when afternoon rolls around Kalinda's been happy to cede her seat to the Florrick children, to wait in the lounge or in the chairs near the front desk, where the receptionist is clearly unnerved by her stares. Often that's when she falls asleep. When Peter finally takes Zach and Grace back up to Highland Park she's stayed, listening all night to the barrage of machines that monitor Alicia, the beeping and hissing and exhaling that mean she's still there. Still there. She knows every one of the night nurses by sight, though she has yet to ask their names.
But Alicia's been unconscious, first from the surgeries and then the morphine. She's risen out of it for a moment or two, but it's been a blurred, murmuring sort of awake, her crisp speech submerged, ghostly pale face and messy hair and nasal cannula and IVs completing the picture. Seeing Alicia wake up like that has scared Kalinda so much that she's gently encouraged Alicia's thumb to the morphine button every time. Kalinda stops by the door of Alicia's room, one hand on the wall.
"She was asking for you," Grace says. "Come on, come in."
Zach's by the bed, hunched over his mother's hand, and he smiles at them over his shoulder. "Dad's coming," he says to Grace. "Look, Mom, Kalinda's here."
Kalinda can't move. Alicia's face is still chalky, barely distinguished in hue from her hospital gown or the dressing on her shoulder. Her fingers move slowly over Zach's. The cannula is gone, for which Kalinda is grateful—it feels like she's looking at the whole of Alicia's face for the first time in much too long. Someone, probably Grace, has smoothed her hair back. Her lips look dry, so cracked that when she offers a little smile Kalinda fears it might hurt her.
"You're alive," Alicia says, and her voice sounds rusty and choked.
Kalinda's startled. "No, you are," she says. It is absolutely the only thing she can think of to say. She sways a little on her feet, and the limited range of expression on Alicia's face expands to include alarm or something like it.
"Sit down," she says. "Grace, honey, get a chair for her."
At the authority in Alicia's tone, so familiar even with her voice so thin, Kalinda really does smile. Zach has already shifted from his chair to Alicia's bed, and Grace guides Kalinda over. She doesn't want to cry, not in front of Alicia and certainly not in front of her kids, so she looks at Alicia's pale hand, the one without the IV, and doesn't say anything.
By hovering near Tony Burton's elbow as he fruitlessly questions the Florricks, and by being around Alicia's nurses so much that she's basically wallpaper, Kalinda has ascertained some of the details of the case. Both bullets hit the left side of Alicia's body, one passing through her shoulder, the other lodging into her spleen. The sole witness had heard the shots from a nearby stairwell, but the assailant was gone by the time he saw Alicia, who most likely would have bled out were it not for his immediate action. When the paramedics arrived the witness, a total stranger without a trace of gunshot residue on his hands, was leaning bare-backed over Alicia, upper body in push-up position, pressing his own jacket and shirt over each wound. (Kalinda hasn't even dared to contemplate her debt to him.) As the ambulance pulled out he noticed Alicia's cellphone had slipped from her pocket, grabbed it as the crime scene techs were arriving, and called the most recently dialed number, Will's. Will had contacted Peter as he rushed from the office.
No one saw the shooter, and Alicia's savior hadn't even heard a voice; to search for DNA or prints in a public parking structure was next to useless. So the case has been stalled until Alicia's fully conscious, which has agitated Peter to no end. He thinks it might have something to do with him, with the Kresteva or Hayward campaigns, a proposition so outlandish it shocked even Eli.
But desperate to support the candidate (and once they learned Alicia was out of the woods Kalinda could tell he was pleased, very much in spite of himself, that this tragedy would forestall his corruption investigation), Eli asked Kalinda to look into it. She had just shaken her head, still numb, and offered Eli a phone number for Sophia Russo. He wouldn't call, she knew, and even if he did it would take Sophia long enough to put it all together that Kalinda could tie up the loose ends. But she couldn't leave the trauma ward, couldn't even plan on it.
"Are you all right?" Alicia breathes, her gaze sliding over Kalinda, and Kalinda can't believe she's even asking.
"Yeah. You?" For now, all her sentences will have to contain one word or less.
"I'm okay."
She's not, though. Kalinda can see her swallowing the pain. She nods towards the morphine button. "Need that?"
"Not yet. I want to see you all. I want to … pay attention." Grace has come to perch on the hospital bed as well, opposite Zach on the other side of her mother's legs. Each of them rests a hand gently on one of Alicia's ankles beneath the covers, as if to prevent her from floating away. "How was school?" Alicia asks her children.
"Fine."
"Fine."
"Fascinating," says Alicia, and Grace giggles. Kalinda thinks she knows what they mean, that their school days, insofar as they've had them, must have consisted only of waiting to see Alicia. There's a reason she hasn't gone to work. "Kalinda, was there a verdict in the … the Merrithew case?"
"I don't know."
"Kalinda's been here all the time, Mom," Zach says.
"Really," Grace adds. "All the time."
Kalinda nods, her throat tight. Alicia studies her.
"Dad's glad you're awake, Mom," Grace says. "He said he'd be here in …" She looks at her brother, who checks his cellphone.
"Like, five minutes," he says. Grace's lip is trembling, Kalinda notices, but she just holds her mother's ankle a little tighter.
For the last three days Peter and Kalinda have jointly kept a cordial, if silent, vigil. Both felt responsible, though Kalinda lacked the fortitude or the voice to tell Peter this wasn't his fault, there was no way it was his fault; each acknowledged, implicitly, the depth of the other's need to be present. It's been oddly comforting to have someone else in the room for the long, empty mornings. (Will's been delegating Alicia's cases at work, has only stopped by for the odd hour when Kalinda remembers to text him that Peter has left.)
But sharing a watch with Peter Florrick is one thing, sharing an even moderately alert Alicia with him quite another. Attention to Alicia's physical pain takes all Kalinda has, and she doesn't think she can handle any more. She rises from the chair a little too quickly. "I'm getting lunch," she says. "Grace, you, um, want anything? Zach?"
Both of them look surprised. "No thanks, we're okay," Zach says quickly, and Grace nods her assent.
"I'd ask you, Alicia, but …" Kalinda has to stop starting sentences she can't finish.
Alicia's trying to hide surprise, though it's hard to hide anything on her haggard, naked face. "Thanks, Kalinda." She shakes her left hand with its IV a tiny bit, though it looks like it hurts. "I have a few more bags of this coming. Go eat something real."
This kind of social grace from a gunshot victim means Kalinda needs to leave the room, fast. She nods to all three Florricks, already absorbed in each other's company, the children's relief already filling Kalinda's chair.
She rounds two corners before she has to stop and bend over, covering her mouth to block breaths like sobs. A distracted, overweight white nurse, just a trace too busy for her shift, pats Kalinda absently on the shoulder and keeps walking by.
Kalinda stares after her, then straightens up, slips her phone out of her pocket. Probably she ought to call Will.
/
Sometime after midnight, Kalinda wakes with a jolt in the lounge. Automatically she glides down the hall to Alicia's room (private, thanks to Peter). She slips through the door and stares at Alicia.
Alicia's face is raw and white beneath the dimmed fluorescents. Both arms, the bare and the bandaged and intubated, lie palm down above her whitish blanket, one short sleeve of her hospital gown rippling in the gust from an air vent and the other crumpled over her bandaged shoulder. She stirs a little in thin, drugged sleep, favoring her right side.
She's going to be all right. Kalinda would have gone crazy if she hadn't known for sure, and if she hadn't gotten to see for herself she never would have believed it. But now she knows. Barring hospital infection (and Kalinda's watched the medical team closely enough to feel reassured about their caution), Alicia has a rough couple of weeks of recovery, then months of physical therapy and adjustment ahead of her, but she'll return to her children fundamentally the mother she was, won't leave Lockhart/Gardner shorthanded. Won't leave the next governor of Illinois a widower, nor even a tragic martyr to a grievously disabled spouse.
That was what Kalinda needed to know. Now she'll do what she should have done months ago, the second the words "F & E Construction" fell from Alicia's lips.
Alicia's lips. For just another second Kalinda watches them, moving gently with her exhalations. They're not as dry now; the nursing staff has been attentive since Kalinda alerted them to the problem this afternoon. She steps forward, brushes her hand against Alicia's, and then heads back to the door.
"You leaving?" Alicia murmurs.
Kalinda freezes. "Yeah."
"Yeah, you should rest." Alicia's voice is like water. "Come back tomorrow?"
Kalinda doesn't know what to say. She turns back toward Alicia slowly. "No."
There's silence, and then Alicia gets it. Her eyes open fully, and Kalinda can tell she would sit up if she could. Kalinda watches helplessly as Alicia fumbles for the button that raises the back of her bed. "Leaving leaving?" Alicia finally says when she's as close to upright as she can manage. And even that's a strain; Kalinda can see the pain in her face.
Kalinda nods, one jerk of her head.
"Why?"
"I didn't kill him." The words are out in a rush before Kalinda knew she was thinking them.
"You killed someone?" Alicia sounds measured, the way she's always reacted when Kalinda reveals shocking news.
"No, I didn't."
"I don't understand." Alicia's brow creases like it does when she's in pain, and it's all Kalinda can do not to run her hand across Alicia's forehead to soothe it. "You're running away because you didn't kill someone?"
"I couldn't, Alicia."
Alicia looks at her, and the least Kalinda can do is meet her expectations, so she goes on. She's talking slowly, each word an egg in her throat. "Not and get to you. There wasn't time and I couldn't—think. I just wanted to know you were … I—I think he went. I think he'll stay gone. But if he didn't, or he doesn't … then I shouldn't be where you are."
Alicia looks at Kalinda for long enough that Kalinda thinks she's fallen asleep again.
"Do you have to go tonight?" she finally asks.
Kalinda doesn't know how to answer that.
"Can you stay? Just until the kids come?"
The Florrick kids have the day off tomorrow, one of those imaginary holidays that only fancy private schools seem to celebrate. This afternoon when Peter wanted a few moments alone with Alicia, they were eagerly detailing to Kalinda their plans for a day with their mother. The efforts both Zach and Grace were putting into sounding normal took Kalinda's breath away.
"Please, Kalinda?" Alicia's rough, reedy voice splinters, and she sounds like what she is, someone who realizes that the pain is just beginning. "I don't want to be alone tonight."
If there ever was a time Kalinda could have said no to Alicia, it certainly isn't now. Without assenting—she's not sure that she can speak—she slides into the chair by Alicia's right hand, her usual seat. Alicia pushes her morphine button, then reaches out for Kalinda's hand, a gesture that seems to take a lot of effort, and without hesitation Kalinda takes it. She runs her thumb over Alicia's knuckles, back and forth slowly and gently, until Alicia's eyelids fall and there's nothing but the monitor and her breath and the air vents and the glint of the IV stand in the dark and the nurses, taking silent vitals in the dark, and a smog-smeared sky outside the window that lightens to pearly gray as dawn approaches.