The precision of her speech and her frozen posture frightened me as much as her wounds. I wondered if I should get her to a hospital, but decided to take her home and try to find someone to come look at her there. Maybe she needed her head X-rayed, but hospital emergency rooms are cold comfort for someone in shock; I’d rather get her warm before a doctor decided on the next move. I fumbled in my purse for the bills to pay my tab, couldn’t find any and ended up just tossing a twenty on the bar.

I got an arm around Lotty and half lifted her to get her outside. She’d left the Trans Am parked rakishly against the curb. Despite the rain, which had darkened the sky, I could tell that the windshield was cracked. I couldn’t help inspecting the left fender as I ushered Lotty into her own car. The headlamp had sprung, and the grille and the body had inverted their normal positions. I suppressed a twinge of anger: Lotty was badly hurt. The car was only a chunk of glass and metal, repairable after all.

My place is just around the corner from the restaurant, but Lotty would be more comfortable in her own home. Cursing the Cressida’s slippery gears I made my way through the downpour to her building on Sheffield. She didn’t say anything during the fifteen-minute drive, just stared in front of her, occasionally pressing her left arm, the arm that had been bleeding.

As soon as I got her undressed and tucked into bed with a cup of hot milk I called Max. When I described her injuries he demanded to know why I hadn’t taken her to a hospital.

“Because—I don’t know—I don’t like hospitals. I’ve sat in emergency rooms with bruises and cuts like hers and they only make me feel worse. Can you find someone to look at her here? Let them decide whether she needs to be fed into the machine?”

Max didn’t like it. As a hospital administrator he sees the places differently than I do. But he agreed that since she was home it would be a mistake to move her again right now. He was coming over himself, but said he would first roust out Arthur Gioia, an internist at Beth Israel.

“You don’t know what happened?”

“She hasn’t been talking. I wanted to get her into bed first.”

When he finally hung up I went back to Lotty. I brought in a sponge and a bowl of warm water to clean the blood from her forehead and left arm. She had finished drinking the milk and was lying with her eyes closed, but I didn’t think she was asleep.