Free Pain & Wastings by Carrie Mac

she had something to do with what happened. I try to rearrange my anger into something less loaded.
    â€œThat’s where I met her first. You were just a baby. She was trying to get you back from the courts, and going to NA was one of the things they wanted her to do.”
    â€œYou were in NA?”
    â€œStill am.” A big grin. “Seventeen years clean.”
    John calls for us from inside the guy’s room. Holly stubs out her cigarette.
    â€œDid you know her when...I mean, just before?”
    â€œI hadn’t seen her in a while,” she says softly and takes a step inside the room. “Later, okay?”

Chapter Eighteen
    At first I thought she was asleep, and then I thought she’d overdosed. I knew about that. She’d done it before. But this time was different. The man had finished, zipped up his pants and had a drink of water she offered him in the coffee mug with her real name on it. Christina. They murmured back and forth for a bit, and then their voices got louder and he told her she wasn’t worth a penny let alone the price she was asking. And then he hit her, and she fell and he kept on hitting her. I was in the closet by thefront door where she tucked me when she had no other option but to bring them home. I heard him punching her. She made little “ooph, ooph” sounds. She didn’t scream, not once. Sometimes I think it’s because she didn’t want me to be afraid. Maybe she thought he would leave, and I would run into the hall and scream for help. Like the other times we needed help. When he was finished with her, he opened the closet, almost like an afterthought, and found me there.
    He took a stick of gum from his pocket and offered it to me. He held his fingers to his lips and said, “Shhhh.” And then he climbed out the window and left by the fire escape. I sat beside my mother in the bathroom, her head bloody, one hand reaching for the shower stall, like all she wanted was to rinse him off.
    I go through the rest of that night in a haze. We are out until 5:00 AM, dealing with assaults and sick people, little old ladies with chest pain, an old man who passed out during an all-night game of mah jong in a storefront in Chinatown.
    â€œAny pain?” Holly asks, pointing to various places. Head, heart, gut. “
Tong ma
?”
    I want to answer in his place. Yes, pain. I have pain in all those places. Head, heart. Gut. I want to ask her more about my mother, but our night is so busy that we don’t get a chance to eat, let alone sit for a minute and talk about my mother. I want to hear what she has to say now, and now that I am willing to hear it, we can’t get a second of quiet.
    We go back to the station at 5:00 AM, only to be called out again ten minutes later for a car accident at Main and Hastings.
    Pain and Wastings
    We careen around the corner and stop off to the side of the crash. A motorcycle had been going straight through the green light when a cargo van turned left in front of him. The biker plowed into the side of the van and flew another thirty feet, landing in a crumpled heap in the middle of the road. His motorcycle is totaled. His helmet is cracked in four places, and he is unconscious.
    â€œGet the spine board,” Holly orders as we get out of the ambulance. “And collar kit.”
    I collect both from the cubby at the back and run to her side. A fireman is already holding theguy’s head steady as he sucks in irregular gasps. John thrusts his cut-all scissors at me and tells me to cut off the man’s leather jacket while he puts on the hard collar.
    â€œDon’t jostle him!” Collar on, John lines himself up beside the fireman to orchestrate the roll that will get the man onto the spine board.
    The man comes to as I am cutting through his jacket. “Brand-new...” he blurts through a mouthful of blood. “Bastard...” He gurgles something more, but I can’t make out what it