Free Close Encounters by Sandra Kitt

stood up. “Why don’t we continue this later? The doctors say if all goes well they’ll send you home…”
    “Can I ask a question?” Carol interrupted again as the three men prepared to leave.
    “Certainly.”
    “Who shot me?”
    None of the officers answered as they straightened their jackets and put on identical trench coats. Carol stared at the one who had been questioning her and waited.
    “We’re trying to establish that, Ms. Taggart. The ballistics report hasn’t been completed yet—”
    “But it happened three days ago.”
    “Yes, but there’s a procedure that has to be followed before any official announcement can be made. Someone in the department will notify you when we’re ready with the findings.”
    One by one they filed out the door, the last one thanking Carol for her cooperation and, finally, wishing her well. Almost as an afterthought. She watched the empty doorway, puzzled by the interview. Certainly the police would want to clarify the events of that early morning, but they seemed to have so little understanding of what had actually happened. Or perhaps they just didn’t want her to know what they knew.
    Something else nagged at Carol. All the questions had been framed to suggest that the police were not responsible for what had happened to her. And yet the newspapers were beginning to suggest otherwise. There were unconfirmed reports that the bullet that had struck her came from a police-issue semiautomatic. The idea had not occurred to her before. What if it were true?
    Carol gnawed the inside of her cheek as she imagined the public outcry in a city where charges of police brutality and excessive force constantly stirred the pot of racial tensions. For the moment the reports were unsubstantiated.
    But what if they could be?
    Tired of lying in bed, she’d taken to spending much of her time here in the lounge. She was armed with a small sketch pad that Matt had brought her, and she entertained herself by doing covert studies of the staff, patients, and visitors. She had also attempted other sketches of people from memory. Vignettes from that night, although it had been too dark for details—except for the large, still body of Max. She would always remember exactly what he had looked like in death.
    Carol flipped past the most recent sketch of Max she’d been working on and revealed beneath it a half-constructed face of a man. She remembered the eyes, the set of the mouth, the shape of the jaw. But when she tried to put the parts together the image didn’t quite mesh. It wasn’t a face she recognized. So where had the details come from?
    She sighed, frustrated. She really wanted to go home.
    As soon as the thought was formed, Carol realized that she didn’t mean home to her one-bedroom apartment, where she would be alone, but rather to the large wood-frame house in which she’d been raised, just north of Chicago. The evening before, her parents had urged her to come home for a visit as soon as she was able to travel.
    They’d brought her a new bathrobe, mail from her apartment, and a small bag of her favorite powdered-donut holes. The thought of going for a visit appealed to her. They would coddle and fuss over her… and maybe she would let them. Their love had been a sure and steady force all her life, though often she hadn’t fully appreciated it. Now she needed their unconditional love. Right now, it was the only thing she was absolutely sure of.
    Carol sat still and waited for the rise of anger, which she’d allowed to rule her emotions for much of her life. The sense of great injustice because she had been a hand-off, an afterthought, a remainder. She recognized that she had let the circumstances of her family define her whole life. Until that night a few days ago, when who and what she was hadn’t mattered.
    She’d almost been killed. She had survived, but everything had changed. Forever. She was still trying to figure out how. She only sensed that perhaps things had