legbreaker part 2
When I come to, it’s all sterile white sheets and a curtain and the buzzing of complicated machinery. Hospital. Haven’t been to one of these in a while.
Someone’s talking.
“Well, Mr. McGinnis, welcome back to the world of the living,”
It’s a man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. He’s wearing glasses and looking at a clipboard.
“Legs,” I grumble. He raises an eyebrow.
“No, you were shot in the head, Mr. McGinnis, your legs are fine.”
“My name. My name is Legs.”
My head hurts. It’s hard to think. Not that it was particularly easy before. This doctor is making my head hurt.
“Oh,” he says, finally understanding. “Well um…Legs. You’re very lucky. The bullet took off a chunk of your ear and part of your skull, but your brain was untouched. You’ve already been through surgery and you’ll make a full recovery in just a couple days,” he smiles and takes a step closer to me. He snaps his fingers in my ear. I flinch reflexively and glare at him. He nods.
“And you haven’t suffered any hearing loss, either. Very lucky indeed.”
He taps his pen against the clipboard and says he’ll come back to check on me in a couple of hours. He tells me there’s a little button to push if I need anything, food or water or maybe a newspaper. I ask when I can leave and he tells me tomorrow.
“Oh, and one other thing,” he says. “You’ve got a visitor. A Miss…Partridge? Perkins? There’s a little blonde girl here to see you, I didn’t catch her name.”
“Parker,” I tell him. It’s Gracie. She came to see me. I can’t help but smile.
“Right, Miss Parker. Would you like me to send her in?”
I nod, or try to, but my neck is very stiff. I wonder how long I’ve been here. The doctor winks at me and says he’ll send her right in.
A little while later, there she is.
“Look at you,” she says. “They fixed you up good, huh, you big lug?”
Gracie. What a doll. Five-five, a hundred and twenty pounds. I could lift her up with one arm like you’d lift a bag of groceries. She’s got her hair pinned up in a cute little bun with chopsticks stuck in it. She’s wearing a brown fur overcoat and black heels. I smile.
“Hi, Gracie,” I say, but my voice cracks like it used to when I was a kid, before my growth spurt. I cough and clear my throat and she smiles.
“Easy, killer,” she says and comes to stand next to me. She takes my hand in both of hers and it reminds me of Russian dolls. “You don’t have to talk or anything, I didn’t expect you to be awake. I hear you’ll be fine in a couple days though,” she says and smiles wide, full red lips peeling back like curtains on ivory piano keys. I nod and tell her I feel fine now, even better with her there. She squeezes my hand and smiles.
“Yeah, well, you aren’t going anywhere, least not til tomorrow.”
When she smiles, she shows her dimples, the left one with a tiny black speck in the center.
“You’re very lucky to be alive,” she says after a pause. “I’m glad they only grazed you. You can hardly tell there’s anything wrong with your ear,” she goes on, but stops and then blushes. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it at all, I mean…You know what I mean, Legs.”
She purses her lips and slightly narrows her eyebrows. I smile and tell her I don’t mind. Not like I’m the one who has to look at me.
“Who put the nasty idea in your head that you’re so ugly, huh?” she asks and gently strokes my hand. I shrug. No one, I tell her. That’s just the way it happens.
She frowns. “You’re a silly fool, Legs,” she says just above a whisper.
I tell her I know.
“And you’re not ugly. Whoever told you that is the ugly one,”
Normally I don’t take to people talking to me like that, insults are always out of line; coming from Gracie, though, it doesn’t sound unreasonable that I might be a fool. I try to think, though my head still hurts and my ears start to ring, to prove that I’m not a fool, about the first time I heard someone call me ugly.
“It was the Boss,” I say.
“Who?”
“The Boss. Mr. Cosmo. Mr. Cosmo told me I was ugly. But he didn’t mean it bad or anything,” I hesitate. It never occurred to me that he could have meant it as anything but a statement of a fact. I didn’t mind being ugly. That’s just how things were.
Gracie’s turned red again.
“Well that horrible man got what he had coming,” she says. I ask what she means and she looks at me, eyes suddenly wide and round and mint green, like lifesavers caught in headlights.
“They didn’t tell you?”
I ask, tell me what? And she covers her mouth with her hand.