Twenty-One

children picking up guns
for that is what it means to be a man

We have lived with violence for seven years
It was not worth one single life-

from Natural Resources, Adrienne Rich

"Ma'am?"

There was a child crying. The noise echoed over the rows of red metal and plastic chairs that had been screwed into the cold vinyl-coated floor. The little girl was sitting on her daddy's knee in one corner of the room. He was trying to soothe her without jarring her arm, which was clearly bent at an odd angle. The sound went on and on. It wasn't piercing. The child wasn't screaming. She was just sobbing, quietly, helplessly. She hurt and she was too little to know that the future might be different and so to her everything about life was just pain: horrible, inescapable, unending pain.

There was tragedy in that sound.

Kathryn couldn't tear her gaze away.

"Ma'am?"

It took her another moment still to realise the impatient voice was speaking to her. Kathryn turned towards it. She was standing in front of the ER's reception desk. The frazzled receptionist behind it was holding out a clipboard with a form attached to it. The look on her face suggested she had been in that position for a few minutes.

"Ma'am, I need you to fill this out for me."

Kathryn reached for it and then had to clutch at the blanket around her shoulders before it slid to the floor. It wasn't hers. One of Chakotay's neighbours had wrapped it around her as they had waited for the ambulance to arrive.

As she took the clipboard, she saw the woman's gaze drift to the dried blood on her hands.

"Ma'am, are you hurt?"

She shook her head.

Kathryn focused on the boxes on the form, which represented an opportunity for action in a void of helplessness. After a moment she was forced to hand it back.

"I can't."

The woman took the clipboard, put it down in front of her and picked up a ballpoint pen. Kathryn's 'can't' had apparently translated itself into 'can't right now.'

"Name?" the woman asked, head bent towards the form.

"Chakotay," Kathryn said. "His name is Chakotay."

"Is that his given name, or his family name?"

"His given name."

"And his family name?"

Kathryn swallowed. "I don't know."

The woman looked up.

Kathryn felt forced to defend herself. "I don't know that he has one."

"You're not family?"

"No."

"Can you inform the next of kin?"

"No." Then, suddenly: "He – he has a sister. In New Mexico…" she belatedly realised how fatuous this information was, given the lack of what else she could supply with it. It occurred to her that one of the neighbours would have been more use than she could be at that moment. "He's a Phys. Ed teacher at Maywood High School, Los Angeles County. I don't know his social security number. I don't know if he has insurance. I don't know if he has allergies or a heart condition or if he takes medication. I don't know-"

The woman put down her pen and held up her hand. "All right, ma'am."

"Where is he?" Kathryn asked. "What's – what's happening, right now?"

The woman shook her head. "Ma'am, if you're not next of kin, I can't tell you anything."

"But I was with him," she said. "I was there, when the ambulance arrived. I-" she held up her hands, her caked-with-his-blood hands.

"I understand, but-"

"I don't even know if he's alive."

The woman looked at her for a moment, and then nodded. She reached for a keyboard amid the debris of a hectic night and tapped in a few commands.

"Latino male, gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen, Maywood?"

Kathryn nodded. Something began to open up in her heart, like a hollow bullet that had taken its time to impact.

"He's in surgery. That's all I can tell you."

"Chakotay," she said. "His name is Chakotay."

The woman nodded. "I'll be sure to amend his notes."

"I'm going to wait."

"Ma'am, that's really not-"

"I'm going to wait."

Kathryn crossed to one of the cold chairs and sat down. She thought she could still hear the little girl crying, the one who had been sitting on her daddy's knee, but when she turned she saw that they had gone. The sound lingered, somehow.

She folded her hands in her lap and stared at the blood on them.

She sat there for hours. No one came. At 6am the nightshift ended. She was vaguely aware of the woman behind the desk walking past her as she made for the exit. Kathryn saw her pause, the woman's legs just visible from the corner of her eye. Then she backtracked, went back the other way, through a different set of doors.

A few minutes later the woman emerged again and there was someone with her, a man marked out as a doctor by the white coat that fell to his knees. He looked to Kathryn to be in his late 40s, with a narrow face and high forehead, a ring of dark hair around his balding head. He and the woman parted ways with a nod and then the doctor walked towards Kathryn. She went to get up, but he waved her back with a smile.

"Ma'am, my name is Doctor Zimmerman, I'm one of the attending physicians in the ER. May I?" he indicated the seat beside her.

She nodded and he sat, turning towards her slightly.

"I understand that you've been waiting for news of a friend, a Mr Chakotay, Ms-?"

"Janeway," she supplied. "Kathryn Janeway."

"I've just checked his notes and he's still in surgery. I really would advise you to go home. There's nothing you can do here and you must be cold and tired."

"But what-" she began, and then stopped as her voice descended into an unintelligible croak. She cleared her throat and began again. "He's been in surgery for hours. What – what's happening? Is he going to survive? He lost so much blood. There was so much-" she stopped herself.

Doctor Zimmerman smiled again. It was gentle, aimed at providing reassurance. It was a practiced expression and Kathryn wondered how many times he'd used it during the course of this night. How many times, in fact, he'd used it when he knew there was nothing else he could do and in truth nothing that he could be reassuring about.

"There's nothing more I can tell you at this time, Ms Janeway."

She made a sound in her throat. "You can't, or you won't?"

He smiled again, then reached into his pocket and took out a card. "If you dial this number the switchboard will page me. I promise that I will tell you whatever I can. But right now, sitting here is doing neither you nor Mr Chakotay any good. Go home. Get warm. Get some sleep. By the time you've done that I may have more to tell you. Do you need me to ask reception to call you a taxi?"

Kathryn shook her head. "I followed the ambulance. My car is here."

"All right. So you'll go home?"

She nodded and he smiled again as he stood up. She stood too, but she couldn't smile.

The sun was coming up as she drove back to Pasadena. Another beautiful Californian day.

When she unlocked the door of the house Molly came running. The dog sniffed the blood on her and then whined, looking up at Kathryn with worried eyes. Kathryn went into the kitchen, put down a fresh bowl of food, scratched the setter behind her ears with numb fingers. She did all this silently, in her silent house.

Kathryn kicked off her absurd heels and then went upstairs and into the bathroom. She walked into the shower and turned it on, the heat cranked up as high as it would go. The water hit her in the chest, soaking the dress she had not removed. Steam rose around her, the thick vapour enveloping her, flaying open all her pores as if it was aiming to leave her raw. Kathryn raised her hands into the stream, watching Chakotay's blood dissolve and run from her fingers, flowing from her hands to run down her arms like rivers of spilled watercolour. Her cleansed skin remained pink in its wake. The water must have been too hot, but she couldn't feel it.

She looked down at her toes, bare beneath the drenched carnage of her dress. Chakotay's blood swirled chaotically around them for a while. Then it streamed across the white tiles and flowed out of sight, into the drain. Gone.

She reached behind her and tugged down her zip. She let the dress sag around her, the weight of water dragging it down over her stomach, over her thighs. It folded over her feet, a crumpled ruin of crushed silk. Kathryn kicked it out of the way and then did the same with her panties. Then she reached for the pins in her hair. One by one she pulled them out and dropped them. She heard each faint tinkle as they fell.

Eventually she reached for the shower gel.

Later, she dressed in jeans and a white shirt. She dried her hair and pushed it behind her ears. It was 9am when she took the house phone from its' cradle and called Doctor Zimmerman.

Chakotay was still in surgery.

Kathryn wondered how many times he had died since he'd been on the operating table. To her it seemed that the longer he was there the less hope there was of survival. As she considered these things she realised that there was no emotion behind the queries. The numbness she had put down to physical cold was inside as well as out. She was calcified, hardened. She couldn't feel a thing.

When the knock at the door came, she was sitting at the kitchen table, staring out into the garden beyond. Molly leapt to her feet and barked, barked, barked.

Tom Paris was standing on the doorstep in jeans and a Hilfiger sweater, the morning sun glinting off his blonde hair and his face white with anxiety. Beside him was B'Elanna Torres, pale, her dark eyes raw and rimmed in red.

"We've been trying to call you," Tom said. "We've been trying to call you for hours."

Her cell had died, apparently. Kathryn let them follow her into the kitchen and plugged it in as it became apparent that B'Elanna's phone had been very much full of charge when her cousin Emilio had sent her a photograph of the blood-spattered entranceway to Chakotay's apartment block. He'd accompanied it with the words, 'You knew what would be owed.'

"I know someone who can get me a gun," were the first words B'Elanna Torres said, her voice rasping with rage and grief. "A semi-automatic. I'll get the money from somewhere. I'll kill them. I'll cut them to pieces. I'll kill them all, Emilio first and then every one, every-"

Kathryn grabbed her shoulders, hard. "Stop that," she said. "Stop it. Don't even think it. Don't even imagine it. That's not who you are. It's not who he would want you to become and you know it. Don't make this even worse. You can't. You must not. You'd ruin your life before it's even begun. Chakotay won't want that."

"But it's my fault," B'Elanna said. "You know it is. It's my fault. He's going to die and it's my fault, it's my fault, it's-"

Kathryn cupped the girl's face in her hands. "It's not your fault. B'Elanna, it's not your fault. Listen to me. If you let yourself think that way now, you'll always think that way. And it's not true. Whatever happens, Chakotay would tell you the same. You are not responsible for this and I won't let you think that you are. They are responsible. It's not your fault. Do you hear me? It's not your fault."

Her phone rang.

"The hospital has my number," she said, pulling away from the girl to reach for it. "The Doctor promised to call back as soon as he could."

But it wasn't the hospital. It was Neelix. Kathryn stared at the name on the screen, her finger hovering over the 'ignore' button. She didn't really want to talk to him. She didn't really want to talk to anyone. Word must have spread already. Bad news travels fast but tragedy travels at light-speed.

"Oh, Ms Janeway," Neelix babbled, as soon as she answered. "Thank goodness. I've been trying to call you all night. I'm so sorry to bear bad news, but I have something to tell you and-"

"Neelix," she said, shutting her eyes and rubbing her fingers into them. They felt gritty, despite being stripped of make-up.

"-I really wanted you to hear it from me, you know, someone who cares rather than-"

"Neelix," she said, more forcefully. "I already know. I was there. I know what happened."

There was a moment of silence. When he spoke next Neelix sounded confused.

"You already know about the garden?"

[TBC]