WEDNESDAY || AUGUST 4th || 2021
[Present time, 3 days after incident]
Lizzie Olsen's POV ~
Dried blood.
Silver staples.
White bandage.
Black eyes.
Lizzie sat uncomfortably at the edge of the long window seat; fingers curled so tightly around the edge of the vinyl cushion that her knuckles had gone pale.
She watched as an ICU nurse and two trauma team members moved around Elsie's motionless body. Their gloved hands worked methodically, peeling back thick, blood-soaked bandages from the little girl's skull. Each layer came away slowly, revealing darker stains underneath.
When Elsie's scalp was exposed, Lizzie counted fourteen staples arching across the crown of her head, each one pulling together swollen skin over a jagged laceration. Her once-sleek brown hair was clumped with dried blood, stubbornly matted and untouched, serving as yet another testament to the violence she had endured.
It took Lizzie's mind right back to the park, when her phone flashlight had cut through the dark and found a child drenched in crimson from head to toe. It had felt like a horror movie, blood streaming down Elsie's face in thick, glistening rivulets, except there was no one to call "cut", no lights snapping on, no chance to reset the scene. There was only Lizzie, shaking and screaming for help, pressing against real, deadly wounds, terrified she might be the last person to see Elsie alive.
She hadn't been. But sitting here now, under the hospital's harsh, unforgiving light, Lizzie could see the devastating cost of survival laid bare.
Clear saline.
Blue gloves.
White mask.
Patterned scrubs.
Elsie's bulky head dressing was replaced with a neat square of gauze and a mesh cap fitted snugly on top to hold it in place. The IV bag was swapped out, clear fluid resuming its steady drip into the back of her hand. Tubes were checked, wires shifted, each one feeding back to the monitor at her bedside where green and blue lines moved in quiet rhythms beside numbers Lizzie didn't fully understand.
She tried to keep herself calm by picking out objects around the room and repeating their names and colors in her head.
If the professionals weren't worried, then she didn't need to be either... at least that's what she kept telling herself.
One by one, the medical team drifted from the room, their voices low, their movements unhurried. The main nurse peeled off her gloves and discarded them, crossing over to the window seat.
"Her vitals are improving," she informed chipperly. "We've reduced her sedatives significantly. She should be waking up any time now."
The words were directed toward Maya Romero, who sat on the other end of the window seat, a folder balanced on her knee. Maya looked up from the pages and offered a tight smile that was more a grimace of acknowledgment than relief.
Lizzie suspected that the social worker was getting just as impatient as she was.
They'd heard the same reassurances all morning: at nine, after the nurse had adjusted the ventilator and changed the feeding-tube formula; at ten, during the stitch check on Elsie's hip; at eleven, when the respiratory therapist came in to suction her airways and wheel in the portable X-ray.
"Any time now," everyone kept saying.
And yet Elsie hadn't stirred once since she'd gone into respiratory distress Monday night.
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