Free Critical Injuries by Joan Barfoot

don’t know much about what’s happened since. I haven’t heard if they’ve caught him. We took off in the ambulance, stopped at the hospital just long enough for them to say we’d better keep going, so now we’re at Northern where they say the best specialists are. So you’re in really good hands.” He smiles at her in a hopeful sort of way; or he is making an effort to look endearing.
    One question answered, though: the inessential where. So she’s in the huge teaching hospital in, obviously, the north part of the city, not that far, as a matter of fact, from her office. She regularly drives past Northern, and sometimes reads in the newspapers about its research projects and various miracles, but has never had occasion to enter it. Now and then it conducts fundraising projects of one sort and another. She should, perhaps, have contributed.
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œWhen what?” But how much clearer can she be, for God’s sake? “You mean, what time is it, or when did it all happen? It’s morning now. You were out for quite a while, and then they gave you something to keep your system shut down while they did more tests, poked around.” She would shudder, if she could shudder, at the notion of people testing and poking around while she was helpless. Not that, apparently, anyone couldn’t do anything they wanted to her as she is, awake and conscious.
    Morning. She has meetings, although at the moment has no idea with whom or why, and who cares? All that was probably vital yesterday, but it means shit today. Lyle’s supposed to be in court first thing. He must be exhausted. A small, forty-watt bulb of compassion flickers on briefly: she would, after all, like to reach for his hand, to thank him for being here.
    For all she knows, they are holding hands.
    â€œThe cops will want to talk to you whenever you’re up to it. They need to nail everything down.”
    What the fuck does she care about cops and what they might need? “Doctors,” she whispers irritably. Surely to God a lawyer knows what is important to a narration, a case, and what is not. In her business of advertising, she wouldn’t make that mistake. In her business, there’s a little space or a little air to make the point and that’s it, time’s up.
    He looks hesitant, his eyes shifting. This is not the look of a man offering any form of good news. “I’ve already told you pretty much everything the doctors had to say: we wait, then there’ll likely be some kind of surgery, and plenty of hope everything will go right. It’s just really a matter of getting strong and being patient, that’s all.”
    Well no, that’s hardly all. “Exactly,” she says. “Details,” she manages.
    It’s interesting to see somebody actually coming to a decision. She watches his face open up and grow clear, a small, relaxing movement of mouth, and then a drawing down of the nostrils, a widening of the eyes, lifting of eyebrows. Little lines in his forehead iron out, larger ones alongside his mouth deepen. He looks at her with something resembling the way he often looks at her in difficult or tenuous moments. This is an expression likely to contain more respect than, at those particular moments, affection.
    Which is reassuring. She’s the human Isla again in his eyes, not the patient, or wife, or responsibility, or burden, or problem.
    Not quite a cripple.
    Where did that forbidden word come from?
    â€œOkay,” he says. “What they know so far is that the bullet nicked into your spine. Fairly high up. And that you’re lucky, really, in a way, because just a tiny difference in the angle and it could have gone through soft tissue and drilled right into one of the vital organs. Or angled higher the other way, it could have gone into your brain.” As if her brain is not one of the vital organs. “It’s a very good thing you were