Chapter 4
James Perry carried me toward the cars.
There was a whole row of black cars parked there.
There were grown-ups everywhere, and all of them wore neat clothes.
Some of them looked at me and turned their faces away.
One woman's eyes had gone red.
James carried me into one of the cars.
It was warm inside.
The heater blew across my face, soft and gentle.
I had never been in a car like that.
The seats were soft, softer than the bed at Linda's house.
He kept holding me and didn't let go.
The young man in the suit sat in the front and turned around.
"Mr. Perry, the nearest hospital is twenty minutes from here."
He had called him Mr. Perry.
Perry.
It was the same last name as the one on the poster.
I was against his chest, and I looked down and saw his hand.
There was a bracelet tied around his wrist.
It was old, as if he had worn it for years.
A small silver lock hung from the bracelet.
There were words cut into the back of the lock.
The letters were tiny.
[Keep Emma safe.]
My heart jumped.
I put my face into his coat.
The coat had a smell to it.
It wasn't the beer and cigarettes that always hung on David.
It was a smell I couldn't name.
It was clean.
It smelled like a blanket that had been dried in the sun after a rain.
The lights in the hospital were too bright.
When James carried me in, every nurse in the emergency room stood up.
Maybe it was because of all the people behind him.
A woman doctor in a white lab coat came over.
She said, "Set her down so we can look at her."
Then she saw my face and stopped.
Her expression changed.
She turned all business in about a second.
She said, "Get the pediatric exam room ready, and page the on-call doctors for orthopedics and dermatology."
He set me down on the exam table.
I grabbed the sleeve of the coat and held on as hard as I could.
I didn't want to let go.
James looked down at my hand.
He didn't pull away.
He laid his other hand on my head, so light I could barely feel it.
He said, "Don't be scared, Emma. Daddy's right outside."
I let go.
I wanted to tell him my name wasn't Emma.
But I didn't say it.
When he called me Emma, his voice went soft.
It was soft enough that I would rather have been her.
The doctor started looking me over.
When she helped me out of the torn jacket, her hand stopped.
There was no sweater under it.
There was only a thin shirt with two holes in it.
She lifted the shirt up.
Then she didn't say anything.
For about ten seconds, there was no sound in the room at all.
I watched her turn to the nurse and say something.
Her voice was low, but I heard it.
She said, "Call the police."
I didn't know why she was calling the police.
I looked down at myself.
It all looked the same as always to me.
There was a bruise on my ribs because David had kicked me the week before.
There were red lines across my back from a switch, and they had scabbed over.
My arms were covered with marks, some new and some old.
My right pinky sat a little crooked, because a door had slammed on it the year before, and nobody had taken me to a doctor.
I thought all of it was normal.
Linda had always said that a kid who didn't listen had it coming.
But the doctor's hands were shaking.
The pen kept jumping when she wrote in her notebook.
When she got to my left arm, she noticed the big bruise.
She pressed the edge of it gently with one finger.
She said, "There's something under this bruise."
She pulled the light closer. "I think I can see it."
She got a bottle of something and dabbed at the edge of the bruise with a cotton ball.
It felt cold on my skin.
The bruise was darker in some places and lighter in others.
At the very edge, where it had started to fade, a dark red mark came through.
The edges of it were uneven.
It was shaped like a small leaf.
The doctor stood up fast.
She said, "Get Mr. Perry in here."
The door opened.
James was already standing there.
He had been holding himself together for hours, and it showed.
His eyes were red, but his face was set.
The doctor turned my arm so he could see it.
"Mr. Perry, look right here."
James came two steps closer.
He saw the mark under the bruise.
His breath caught.
Then he went down slowly until he was crouched beside me.