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patient—may have been stalking his ex-wife for months. The staff at Denholm
Consolidated High School had been alerted, and principal Ellen Dockerty had
obtained a picture, but Clayton was said to have disguised his appearance.
Miss Dunhill was transported by ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in
Dallas, where her condition is listed as fair.
2
I wasn’t able to see her until Saturday. I spent most of the intervening hours in the waiting room with
a book I couldn’t seem to read. Which was all right, because I had plenty of company—most of the
DCHS teachers dropped by to check on Sadie’s condition, as did almost a hundred students, those
without licenses driven into Dallas by their parents. Many stayed to give blood to replace the pints
Sadie had used. Soon my briefcase was stuffed with get-well cards and notes of concern. There were
enough flowers to make the nurses’ station look like a greenhouse.
I thought I’d gotten used to living in the past, but I was still shocked by Sadie’s room at Parkland
when I was finally allowed inside. It was an overheated single not much bigger than a closet. There
was no bathroom; an ugly commode that only a dwarf could have used comfortably squatted in the
corner, with a semi-opaque plastic curtain to pull across (for semi-privacy). Instead of buttons to raise
and lower the bed, there was a crank, its white paint worn off by many hands. Of course there were no
monitors showing computer-generated vital signs, and no TV for the patient, either.
A single glass bottle of something—maybe saline—hung from a metal stand. A tube went from it
to the back of Sadie’s left hand, where it disappeared beneath a bulky bandage.
Not as bulky as the one wrapped around the left side of her head, though. A sheaf of her hair had
been cut off on that side, giving her a lopsided punished look . . . and of course, she had been
punished. The docs had left a tiny slit for her eye. It and the one on the unbandaged, undamaged side
of her face fluttered open when she heard my footsteps, and although she was doped up, those eyes
registered a momentary flash of terror that squeezed my heart.
Then, wearily, she turned her face to the wall.
“Sadie—honey, it’s me.”
“Hi, me,” she said, not turning back.
I touched her shoulder, which the gown left bare, and she twitched it away. “Please don’t look at
me.”
“Sadie, it doesn’t matter.”
She turned back. Sad, morphine-loaded eyes looked at me, one peering out of a gauze peephole. An
ugly yellowish-red stain was oozing through the bandages. Blood and some sort of ointment, I
supposed.
“It matters,” she said. “This isn’t like what happened to Bobbi Jill.” She tried to smile. “You know
how a baseball looks, all those red stitches? That’s what Sadie looks like now. They go up and down
and all around.”
“They’ll fade.”
“You don’t get it. He cut all the way through my cheek to the inside of my mouth.”
“But you’re alive. And I love you.”
“Say that when the bandages come off,” she said in her dull, doped-up voice. “I make the Bride of
Frankenstein look like Liz Taylor.”
I took her hand. “I read something once—”