The ambulance flies to the emergency room, a hospital close to where Kalinda shot Bill, far from Alicia, far from most things Kalinda considers familiar. Every breath is a struggle by the time she arrives, and she remembers little of the subsequent hours; she knows that there's something soft shoved between her shoulders, that she hears the words "emergency intubation," that she struggles even to nod her consent to something the doctor says and she can't quite understand, and that it hurts, it hurts, until an injection numbs it and she stares, dizzy, at the too-bright lights.
Before long, it's easier to breathe; a nurse places her fingers on the tube that's sticking out of her throat. She sleeps.
Gunshots swim through the tepid water of her dreams, finding paths into her temple, Cary's chest, Alicia's neck (the images of Alicia's bloodstains that seared her retinas weeks ago morph, pick up the glare of streetlights). Bill falls over and over, Nick sprawls like a malformed starfish, her throat hurts, her hands shake. As she watches them all, Kalinda cowers and evades, ducks beneath another time and another name; people crumple before her and she gazes at their collapsed forms and doesn't move and doesn't speak because she can't, because it hurts too much.
She drifts in and out for she doesn't even know how long, noting the tube when she wakes up, noting that she's breathing, actually breathing. She wonders if she's relieved. "They can take it out tomorrow," a young black male nurse says gently. She wonders if she's met him. "You're recovering fast, you're doing great."
The first time she wakes up fully, she's in another part of the hospital, a scar on her neck. (Turtlenecks for a while, she supposes. She knows she has a few.) A doctor, an older white man, drones the proper care and maintenance of the injury and the scar and if all goes well she will be released in two more days but she'll have to take care of herself.
"You've certainly caused plenty of uproar around here," the doctor says, smiling as if she's going to smile back.
Kalinda doesn't even care, doesn't even want to know.
Then Will sticks his head in the door. She hasn't updated her insurance information in a while, and so he's still her emergency contact, she supposes because he's the only person who would understand why he was her emergency contact.
He's been in the waiting room, and when he walks in he doesn't smile, or offer any kind of sympathy. He just sits beside her.
Probably Kalinda should care that Will's seeing her like this, scarred and voiceless and helpless, but she doesn't really; she's finding it hard to care about much of anything. She's hasn't stopped hearing the gunshot and with or without Will, all she really wants to do is sleep and forget.
Will explains that he'll be representing her too, because of course Lockhart/Gardner will be taking her case. "We've got your back, K," he says quietly, reaching out as if to touch the aforementioned part of her body, but of course it's flat against the cot.
Kalinda could see the worry behind his still eyes if she looked closely, she supposes, but she doesn't care to look too closely. Now Lockhart/Gardner—Will, Diane, even Cary—will know the details of her story, understand the clumsy violence of Bill and the intricate violence of Nick and how Kalinda stood by and let it all happen just to stay some form of Kalinda, as if she'd ever really had a choice, how she almost let Alicia become a casualty of it, how now it's killed, really killed.
How's it going? Kalinda scrawls. She can talk now, a little, but she's not supposed to yet.
"It's all a holding pattern right now. They have placed a cop here, Kalinda. Just so you know. He's outside the door, posted there. He has to be. I've gotten them not to make an arrest, but you are … a person of interest."
Kalinda nods, raises an eyebrow in the direction of the door.
"I think you know him. A Frank something?"
Kalinda smiles.
"We told them you're not going anywhere. He and I."
Kalinda nods again, sighing. The sharp exhale hurts a little, but it's breath, her own. Then she writes, Holding pattern?
"Until they can talk to you and Alicia."
Kalinda's eyes widen.
"I mean, they've spoken to Alicia, but she only went in for an official interview today."
In the worst of the dreams Alicia was the shooter. Kalinda felt nothing when the bullet hit, but she stared up from the ground, immobile, noting her blood seeping onto the concrete between her fingers, and watched the expression on Alicia's face pass from confusion to shock to unbridled horror. In the dream Kalinda was too weak, already, to reach for Alicia, to tell her it was all right.
She's out of the hospital? Kalinda writes.
"Yeah, for a few days. She got out the day after you went in." Will looks at her with an annoying, troubled and troubling understanding. "She wants to see you. But you still can't talk to each other, K. Not until the charges are cleared."
Kalinda nods. She supposes the charges should scare her, but they don't. She wonders if she can ever be scared again.
"She's the key witness," Will says. "A lot's riding on her."
Kalinda doesn't want that, but she doesn't have a lot of choice in the matter.
"You're in good hands, K. You know that," Will says quietly. "Alicia was … After your phone …"
There's a long silence. Kalinda is convinced he'll finish the sentence, and when he doesn't, she doesn't have anything to add.
Were you with her? Kalinda writes.
"Later. I got there after." Will nods, a smooth jerk of his head, looks past Kalinda's scar, past her shoulder. Kalinda looks over his in return, the cheap smeared beige of the wall, the cracks in the ceiling plaster. This place is falling apart in spots. Ideally she'd move herself to a different hospital, but moving herself is, of course, out of the question. "We were all … nobody was sure for a while. You gotta take care of yourself now, K," he says, quirking one side of his mouth into part of a smile. "The firm can't take much more of this."
Kalinda keeps staring at the careless paint on the wall.
"I don't like seeing her scared," Will says. "I don't like seeing you like this."
Kalinda considers writing Yeah on the pad, decides against it. But she isn't sure what else to say.
Will leans over and reaches for her notepad, scribbles. In almost illegible handwriting, Kalinda sees, he has scrawled You need a drink.
She smiles and clenches the sheet in her left hand. Her impulse is to bite her lip, but she thinks that it might hurt.