Chapter 6
The new room had no cot. Just a low table and two chairs that didn't match and a rug with road maps on it that was supposed to make kids feel better. The fluorescents were warmer here. Someone had tried to make it not look like the clinic. There was a box of tissues and a plastic bin of toys I didn't touch.
The nurse walked me there herself. She didn't hold my hand, she just kept her hand near my back so I knew where she was. She set the blue splint on the counter outside the door. I watched it go by.
"I'll be right outside that door," she said. "Okay?"
I nodded. My leg throbbed under the paper sheet they'd put over it after they looked. They hadn't wrapped it again. They'd cleaned around the edges and left it open to air and it felt strange to have it uncovered.
The woman who came in after wasn't wearing scrubs. She wore a gray cardigan and jeans and had a clipboard but she didn't hold it like the nurse did. She sat down in the smaller chair so we were eye level. Her name tag said County Family Services and her first name was Ms. Delgado.
"Hey," she said. "I'm Carla. I'm here to talk with you for a little while. Is that okay?"
I said yeah. My voice sounded small.
She didn't start with questions. She asked if I wanted water. I didn't. She asked if the chair was okay. I said yeah. She had a little stuffed bear on the table but she didn't push it toward me.
"I heard you said something really interesting earlier," she said after a minute. Her voice was even. Not like she was excited. "You said, 'My dad gave me those colors.' Can you tell me what you meant by that?"
I looked at my hands. My nails had dirt under them.
"He did," I said. "It's his. He let me have it."
"The blue splint?" she asked.
I nodded. "The bright blue. With the black straps. He said it was like mine now. Like my colors."
Ms. Delgado wrote something down, but slow, like she wasn't in a hurry. "When did he give it to you?" she asked.
I had to think. The clock on the wall ticked. "After," I said. "After I got hurt."
"When after?" she said.
"That night," I said. "I fell, and my knee was bleeding, and he came in and saw. He had it in the garage. From soccer maybe. He said here, this will hold it, this will make it better. And he put it on."
She nodded a little. "Did he put it on tight?"
"Yeah," I said. "He pulled the straps. He said don't take it off at school. Or at the clinic. Just leave it."
"Did you see the hurt before he put it on?" she asked.
I swallowed. I didn't want to remember that part but I did. "Yeah. It was red. And then it went dark. It hurt when he pushed the splint."
The nurse had left the door cracked an inch. I could see her blue shoes outside. That helped me keep talking.
Ms. Delgado leaned forward just a little. "You did a really good job remembering that," she said. "Can you remember what day that was? Was it yesterday? The day before?"
I frowned. Time felt smeared. "Not yesterday," I said. "Yesterday was Sunday. We didn't go anywhere. It was... it was after the park. On Friday maybe. He put it on Friday night."
She wrote again. Her pen didn't make a scratchy sound. She looked at me kindly, not like I was in trouble.
"Thank you for telling me," she said. "One more thing. When the nurse took it off today, what did you think was going to happen?"
I felt my eyes get hot. "I thought he'd be mad," I said. My voice cracked. "Because I didn't keep the colors on."
She didn't say anything bad about him. She just nodded and said, "That makes sense you'd worry about that."
There was a quiet knock then and the nurse stepped in. She had a folder. She didn't look at Ms. Delgado first, she looked at me.
"Hey, buddy," she said to me. "You okay to keep going for a minute?"
I nodded. My leg had started to sting again.
The nurse set the folder on the table and opened it. Inside was a printed form with times on it and a couple of photos they had taken of my leg right after they removed the splint. She turned it slightly so Ms. Delgado could see.
"Carla, can I show you the note from Dr. Evans?" she said, quiet.
Ms. Delgado looked. I tried to see but I couldn't read the handwriting.
"He wrote here that the bruising pattern and the wound edges look aged," the nurse said. Her voice was still calm, even clinical, but her eyes flicked to me and back. "He estimated the injury is at least three to four days old. Maybe five. With some healing underneath and then fresh bleeding on top where the splint rubbed."
Ms. Delgado's eyebrows drew together just a fraction. Not big. Just enough.
I didn't understand at first. Then I did. Friday night was only two days ago. If Sunday was yesterday, Friday was three days. But the doctor said four or five.
Ms. Delgado looked back at me. "So you remember getting hurt Friday?" she asked gently.
I nodded, but now I wasn't sure. "I think Friday," I whispered. "Maybe... maybe Thursday? I don't know."
"It's okay not to know exactly," she said quickly. "You told me what you remember and that's what matters."
The nurse closed the folder. She didn't make it feel like I'd done something wrong. She just rested her hand near my ankle, not touching the hurt, just near it.
"The thing is," she said to Ms. Delgado, more than to me, "the swelling and the color change here — this deep purple and the yellow at the edges — that doesn't happen in a day or two. That's an older bruise. The splint went on after, not before."
Ms. Delgado wrote one more line and underlined it. She thanked me again and asked if I needed anything. I asked if I could have the water now. She got it for me herself.
May you like
When she left to make a call, the nurse stayed. She didn't move the blue splint back. It was still out in the hall on the counter, bright even from far away.
I stared at the doorway and held the cold paper cup with both hands so they would stop shaking.
