When I finally woke up, it was late evening. I blinked sleepily at the hospital room, not remembering how I’d gotten here but feeling too lazy to worry about it. I had that sense of pleasure in my body that comes when a fever breaks. I wasn’t sore anymore, or thirsty, and while I slept someone had washed me. I was wearing a hospital gown, and I smelled of Jergens.

After a while, a nurse’s aide came in. “So you’re awake. How you doing?”

She took my blood pressure and temperature, and told me, when I asked, that I was at Cook County Hospital. “You been asleep twelve hours, girl: I don’t know what war you were fighting in, but you definitely were going down for the count. Now you drink some juice; the orders are, fluids, fluids, fluids.”

I obediently drank the glass of apple juice she held out to me, and then a glass of water. While she bustled about the room, I slowly remembered what had brought me here. I tried out my voice. I could speak again, albeit still rather hoarsely, so I asked after Marcena.

“I don’t know, honey, I don’t know about anyone you came in with. If she was hurt bad, like you’re saying, she’d be in a different unit, you see. You ask the doc when he comes along.”

I slept for the rest of the night, although not as soundly as before. Now that the hardest edge was off my exhaustion, I couldn’t block out the hospital noise—or the parade of people who came to check on me. Leading the band, naturally, was someone from admissions who wanted my insurance information. My wallet had been in my jeans pocket; when I asked for my clothes, someone dug a nasty bundle out of the locker. By an act of mercy, my wallet was still there, with my credit cards and my insurance card.

When they woke me again for rounds at six Wednesday morning, Morrell was sitting next to me. He gave me a crooked smile.

The team of doctors pronounced me combat ready, or at least fit enough to get up and go. They asked about the hole in my shoulder, which had leaked a little from my travails but was basically healing, wrote up my discharge papers, and, finally, left me alone with my lover.

Morrell said, “So, Hippolyte, Queen of the Amazons. You survived another battle.”

“I guess they haven’t sent Hercules to fight me yet. How long have you been here?”

“About half an hour. They told me when I called last night they were going to discharge you in the morning, and I figured you might want a change of underwear.”

“You’re almost as good as a girl, Morrell, figuring that out. You can join my horde of wild women, you can set us an example of breastlessness.”