“It’s me,” Dario says as he runs to us.
I flash the light up at him, and he grimaces from the brightness, but he keeps coming. Moving fast, very fast, and he’s bleeding from somewhere above his eye, and his shirt is torn at the shoulder. More blood on the lower half of his shirt.
A lot of it.
He sweeps the light over me. Over Opal in the doorway.
“Are you hurt?” He says it to me. His voice is controlled, but his eyes are wild.
“No.” My voice comes out rough.
He goes to Opal. He crouches to her level, the way he always does, and says something I can’t hear over the ringing in my ears, and she launches herself at him, and he catches her and holds her against his chest with both arms. I watch his face over her shoulder in the beam of the flashlight.
What’s in his face, I have never seen there before. Something broken open.
I look down at the man on the floor in the flashlight beam. The gun is two feet away from his hand. Still too close for my comfort.
I walk steadily toward him, waiting for him to lunge for the gun. But a pool of blood spreads near him, and he only makes an occasional groaning sound.
Too alive for my comfort.
I make it to the gun and pick it up, and he still doesn’t budge. I pocket the gun and roll him onto his back.
Ed Esposito.
I stare at him for a moment, then I look at Dario, and what passes between us in the flashlight beam in the hallway doesn’t require any words.
My hands are shaking. I don’t feel it. I only know because the light trembles. There’s something warm and sticky on my forearm that I’m not going to look at right now.
Dario crouches with Opal for a moment longer—says something to her too low for me to hear, and she nods, and he smooths her hair back from her face the way I do when she’s scared, and she lets him—and then he stands and comes to me.
“The arm,” he says, meaning the warmth I didn’t look at.
“It’s fine.”
He quietly says, “You’re okay.”
I nod. But I can’t stop staring at Ed.
I kick him in the ribs.
He groans again. Too alive.
I kick again, and I keep kicking. I drop my heel on his chest, then go back to more kicking. Words come out of me. Words I don’t ever want to hear out of Opal, so I never say them around her.
Tonight, I make an exception.
Dario doesn’t stop me for a while, but then his hand is on my arm. He motions toward Opal, who has watched it all. “Go sit with her. I’ll handle this.”
I’m panting. All at once, pain comes in. My body aches. My head… throb does not begin to describe it. My hand hurts like when I fell off a pool ladder and broke it as a kid. And my toes tell me I might have broken them on Ed’s bony fucking ribs.
“Yeah. Okay.” I hobble to my daughter, take her in my arms, and we go to the couch. We don’t say much.
What is there to say?
Dario drags Ed to his office. A few minutes later, he has the power back on. Then he brings Opal her stuffed bunny before vanishing into his office again.
She clutches the animal tightly, and after a few minutes, she asks, “Did I help?”
