Free Monday's Child by Patricia Wallace Page B

back, ushered her along.
    Jill glanced back over her shoulder, wanting to see, but one of the nurses approached and pulled the curtain back around the bed.
     
     
     

Seventeen
     
    Before the nurse closed the curtain, Cheryl saw Jill Baker staring at her and felt a jolt of fear.
    “Is anything wrong, dear?” the lab technician asked. “You’ve tensed up on me all of a sudden. Is something hurting you?”
    Cheryl tried to take a breath so she could answer, but it was as though every muscle in her chest had tightened and now refused to move. The shot the doctor had given her had blunted the pain, thank God, but it hadn’t made moving any easier.
    “Now there’s a foolish question,” the technician went on. “All anyone has to do is look at you. Of course something’s hurting, you poor thing.”
    Cheryl widened her eyes to show her alarm, but to no avail; the technician had turned her attention back to the drawing of blood.
    “I’ll be as gentle as I can. It’ll just be a minute, so hold on for me.”
    “Jill,” she whispered with great effort. It sounded slurred even to her. “She’s here.”
    “What was that?”
    “I think she asked for a pain pill.” The nurse, who’d gone directly to the head of the bed, stepped around to where she was in Cheryl’s line of sight. “You shouldn’t try to talk, honey. Just relax.”
    She tried again: “That . . . little girl.”
    “What did she say?”
    “I’m not sure.” The nurse turned away. “If I had that much Demerol in me, I’d be off in la-la-land.”
    “I know what you mean.” The technician withdrew the needle from her arm, placed a cotton ball over the site and taped it. “There you go, bend your arm.”
    Cheryl tried to keep her arm straight so that the technician would realize she was resisting and make eye contact again, but she might as well have been a rag doll for all the control she had.
    “Actually,” the nurse said, “a margarita at lunch and I am in la-la-land. Ooh, a margarita! Doesn’t that sound great?”
    “I’m all for it.” The technician had half-turned away and was sticking labels on the vials of blood. “You know any place that delivers?”
    “I wish.”
    “Well that’s it for me. I’m off.” The technician picked up her blood collection tray and disappeared through the curtain.
    The nurse continued whatever she was doing at the head of the bed.
    Cheryl closed her eyes, exhausted.
    A disembodied voice woke her by saying her name.
    “Cheryl with a C, last name Appleton, spelled like it sounds.”
    There was a buzzing in her ears but she recognized the voice as Dr. Costa’s. Through partially open eyelids, she looked for him, turning her head ever-so-slightly one way and then the other, but he was not in the cubicle.
    “It was a bus versus pedestrian, and as usual the bus won. She has simple fractures of the lower left asternal ribs. We’re going to tape her up.”
    Being taped didn’t sound bad—it was certainly preferable to surgery—but whatever anyone said, there was nothing simple about her fractured ribs.
    “Otherwise, she’s got more than her share of abrasions, which were debrided in ER, contusions, and what is essentially a total body sprain. She’s in a great deal of pain and can hardly move.”
    Perversely, Cheryl felt a sense of satisfaction at hearing the doctor confirm the legitimacy of her injuries. Her own family doctor had once suggested that she was a prime candidate for hypochondria.
    No one could accuse her of that now.
    “I don’t have the heart to tell her she’s going to feel worse tomorrow.”
    She didn’t want to hear any more.
    “Fine. I’ll admit her to your service and tell the floor nurse that you’ll be in to check on her this evening when you make rounds.”
    Dr. Costa came to her bedside some time later and she tried to tell him about Jill, to warn him about what the child had done and could do, but no matter how hard she tried to form the words, or how slowly she