“What happened to you, girl?” Flo clucks, intoning her displeasure as if I am her wayward child who’s gone and done that thing she’s warned me about a dozen times. Her tongue is stained yellow with tobacco and late shift coffee and her breath smells sour as she mouths the words to a song playing in her head. She hacks into her sleeve then pours herself a glass of water from my nightstand, drinks it in a shot, reaches over me, and pulls a strip of antiseptic wipes from a drawer.

I’m reminded of another rainy night when I was maybe five or six. My mother had stumbled into my room crying (as she often did) dragging an old afghan of Daddy’s that she kept throwing away and that he kept saving. It was wet from where he’d retrieved it that evening from the trashcan outside. She was mumbling parts of a lullaby she insisted I knew but that I had no recollection of ever hearing. “The north wind did blow and what does the poor robin do then. Remember baby?”

I pretended to fall asleep as she hummed and sobbed and tucked the smelly blanket hard up under my chin.

Wheezing, Flo B. squints down at my face as if reading a menu without the benefit of glasses. Still in her raincoat and without stopping to don the customary sterile gloves, she hurriedly unwinds the bandage on my forehead, tears open one of the packets, and swabs the coarse stitches of my Frankenstein scar. The smell of antiseptic is perfume compared to Flo’s breath and the sting of the alcohol reassuringly familiar, like Bactine on a skinned knee. With uncharacteristically shaky hands Flo B. winds a fresh layer of gauze around my skull then tucks the frayed end under, wipes the sweat from her own forehead, and slides her palms down the front of her thighs. Puffing and huffing, she lumbers to the window, cracks it open, and leans into the fresh air. I hear the drone of traffic and faint sounds of the crowd, reduced now in the rain. I imagine the media hauling tarps, covering their cameras. I wonder if Nicole is among them and if she’ll ever work up the guts to see me.

Flo lowers the blinds and returns to my bed. She brings her face close and peers down into my half-open eyes as though looking for keys dropped down a subway grate.

“Anybody home?” she whispers, snapping her thick fingers in front of my eyes. Glancing at the door, she pinches open the clasp of her pocketbook and pulls out a disposable camera.

She aims, shoots—nothing happens.