“Hiya.” Her lips spread into a shy smile, revealing a rotten tooth in the front.
“Hi, Janie.” Dan walked over to her bed and bent down to get closer to her.
She reached her arms up. “Hug?”
He leaned over and wrapped his arms around her delicately, afraid to hurt her. She clung to his lab coat. Dan looked uncomfortable.
“I like your smell,” she said in a small voice, barely above a whisper.
She refused to let go, so he turned to look at me, motioning me over. I stepped around one of the nurses and into her view.
“Hi, Janie. My name’s Christopher. I’m going to be one of your doctors,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I’m going to help take care of you.”
She let go of Dan and reached out to grab my hand. Her nails were long, caked with dirt. Her fingers were so bent they couldn’t coil naturally around mine.
“Hi,” she said hesitantly. “Are you going to fix me?”
I nodded. “I am, sweetheart. I promise.”
THREE
HANNAH BAUER
I was in the kitchen packing my lunch for my shift when the front door opened, signaling Christopher’s arrival. “Hey, honey, I’m in here. I still haven’t finished getting my stuff ready for tonight. I got caught up in some stupid documentary.”
He came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me. He kissed the top of my head and let out a deep sigh. I dried my hands on the towel next to the sink and turned around. Sadness clouded his face.
“Did you lose a patient?” I asked. He rarely lost patients, but sometimes it happened when they had other complications.
He shook his head. “I met the abandoned girl.”
“You did?” I motioned for him to sit down at the table.
“That poor little girl. She’s so beat up and starved.” His voice caught in his throat. “People treat their pets better than she was treated.”
“It’s that bad, huh?” I asked.
He nodded.
I prepared a tumbler full of his favorite scotch and took the seat across from him. He took a small sip, then fingered the top of the glass as he stared out the window above the sink. I reached across the table and took his hand in mine, rubbing the top of his palm with my thumb. I understood his sensitivity toward children. Neither of us had had it when we first married, but years of infertility problems had made us emotional about almost everything involving kids, especially young ones.
“Her name is Janie, and she’s adorable. She has these massive pale-blue eyes that blow you away.” He took another drink. “I reviewed her notes before I left, and she’s been starved for so long her body started eating itself. She has so many old breaks that went untreated and never healed right, so some of the bones fused together. There wasn’t a part of her that went untouched.” His eyes flashed with anger. “Who would do such a thing?”
We both knew the answer to his question—a monster. It went without saying.
“She’s going to need surgery on her elbow. It was a complicated break and healed into almost a ninety-degree angle because it was never set properly. Lots of her bones have fused together from other untreated breaks and injuries. Dan and I are coming up with a game plan first thing tomorrow morning.”
“You’ve got this,” I said. We sat in silence, enjoying our brief time together before I had to leave for my shift. “By the way, I read through all the information Bianella sent us about that seminar you told me about. I even watched the videos. I think we should go,” I said after a few more minutes had passed.
“Really?”
I nodded. “No matter which direction we go, there’re going to be challenges, and we’re going to need the advice of other people who’ve done it before. Just think how helpful our RESOLVE meetings have been.”
After our third round of failed IVF, our doctor had suggested attending a support group for other parents going through similar challenges. Nobody understood the dramatic highs and crushing lows of infertility unless they’d been through it too. Christopher had balked at the idea at first because he hadn’t liked the thought of baring our souls in a room full of strangers, but he’d gotten used to it. A few of the couples had grown to be some of our closest friends, and we went out for dinner and drinks on a regular basis.
“Do you want me to sign us up, or are you going to do it?” he asked.
“I can do it on my break tonight. Why don’t you just relax and prepare for tomorrow?”
“Janie isn’t in the ER anymore,” he said, reading my mind before I could ask the question.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“They moved her to the third floor. She’s tucked in with all the geriatric patients to keep her safe.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Do they really think someone is going to come looking for her?”
He shook his head. “I think they’re just being extra cautious. I can’t imagine that someone who dropped their kid off in a parking lot in the middle of the night would show up to claim her later, but you never know.”
CASE #5243
INTERVIEW:
PIPER GOLDSTEIN
“When did you first meet Janie?” The first officer had been joined by a former detective turned private investigator who’d introduced himself as Ron with a firm handshake. He tried to play himself off as a fellow cop, but his civilian clothes were a dead giveaway. I had no idea why he was so critical to the case.
“On her third day in the hospital.”
“Is that how long it usually takes for a social worker to meet their client? I thought social workers were required to speak with the victim at least twenty-four hours after the incident.”
I hated when they asked me questions that they already knew the answers to. “They are, but she wasn’t stable enough for me to see her.” The bad fluorescent lighting was starting to give me a headache. I rubbed my temples, trying to stave it off for as long as possible.
“She was that sick?” the officer, Luke, asked. Ron had clued me into his name. They both wore the same close-cropped haircut.
I shook my head. “Not sick—starved. Did you know you can’t just feed a starving person or you can actually kill them?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “I had no idea that could happen. She went into cardiac arrest a few hours after being admitted because they fed her too much. It took two days to stabilize her, so I didn’t get a chance to meet her until she’d been there for almost three days.”
“What did you think about her when you met?”
“She was a complete surprise,” I said.
“How so?” Luke cocked his head to the side, eyeing me quizzically.
I didn’t know how to explain Janie. It was difficult to put into words unless you’d been there at the time and seen how she looked. Thankfully, they’d seen some of the crime scene photos, so the responsibility of a perfect description didn’t fall on my shoulders.
“I’d expected to find a really frightened and traumatized girl, but Janie was talking and smiling with her nurses when I walked into the room.” Her room had been an explosion of color that day, filled with balloons and stuffed animals donated by the hospital staff. Everyone who had met her had brought something with them, and I was no different. I’d come with a small teddy bear holding a heart in its paws. She’d sat in the center of the room perched on her bed while the nurses took turns trying to coax smiles out of her. “She wasn’t incapacitated with fear like I’d expected. People had made her sound like she was some kind of feral child, but she wasn’t.”