The hospital took him in through the doors that don't have a waiting room attached and kept him for three hours in the country of surgery, and in that time the waiting room filled, in a way the staff would talk about for months, with the most unlikely congregation in the hospital's recent memory: fourteen bikers in road leathers sitting in terrible plastic chairs with their helmets in their laps like hats at a funeral; one young mother with a sleeping five-year-old across three seats and a unicorn blanket over her that a biker had silently contributed; and, arriving in waves, the witnesses of Pump Seven, who had followed the ambulance the way people follow a hearse, out of a need they would have been unable to name, to see whether the story ended the way the child had promised them it would.
Among the congregation was the old man from the ice machine, who had appointed himself, without consultation, the keeper of the vigil's perimeter. He had been a medic in a war nobody at the plaza could have named and he had recognized, in Everett, a category of patient he knew from long ago: the kind who survives the wound and is in real danger from the quiet afterward. He stationed himself by the waiting-room door with a styrofoam cup and vetted visitors by instinct, waving through the bikers and the Whitmans and turning away, with a grandfather's immovable courtesy, two reporters and a man selling something. "He's got all the company he's short of," the old man told the second reporter. "Come back in a month. Man'll be a better story then anyway. This part's just the stitches."
The surgeon, when she finally came out, had the exhausted good humor of a woman who has won an argument with anatomy. She explained it to the room at large, because the room at large was plainly the family: the bullet had tracked along the outside of the hip, taken muscle, missed the joint, missed the artery — "by less than an inch, and I want credit for none of that, that was God's drafting" — and the big problem had been blood loss and the big solution had been that the patient was built like a bank vault and had arrived with his pressure held by a beach towel and good hands. He would walk, she said. He would limp a while and then mostly not. He would complain, in her professional experience of such men, precisely as much as would be useful for his dignity and not one complaint more. She advised the congregation to go home in shifts.
Nobody went home. The bikers established shifts of an entirely different kind, which the charge nurse discovered at midnight and regulated rather than fought: two in the room, four in the hall, the rest in the lot with the bikes, in case he woke up and needed to hear that the world was still staffed. The club's road captain, a man named Del Ferris who had known Everett since both of them had hair worth mentioning, stood at the foot of the bed for a long time looking at the ruin and repair of his oldest friend — the tubes, the pallor, the huge ruined calm of him — and said to no one, "Twelve years I've been trying to get that man to a hospital for his heart. Turns out it took a kindergartner and a war criminal."
Everett surfaced slowly, over a day and a night, through water that kept clearing. The first time he fully arrived, Del was in the chair and the room was dim and quiet except for the machines negotiating with his body in beeps. He took inventory the way he'd been taught in his one brief, long-ago brush with the military: limbs, yes; damage, right side, accounted for; memory — and here the inventory stopped him, because the memory came back all at once and entire, the forecourt, the unicorn, the drawing, the hand on his beard, winter's over — and he lay there with his eyes open in the dim room and wept without sound or ceremony, the way a man weeps who is not in trouble. Del, a professional of male silence for forty years, looked at the wall and did not look away, which in their language was a form of holding a hand.
"The girl," Everett said at last, when there was language again.
"Home. Ate two grilled cheeses at the hospital cafeteria and informed the staff she's his bear cousin and has visiting rights." Del scratched his chin. "Hospital's counsel is reviewing the bear cousin claim. Between you and me, I think she wins it."
Everett closed his eyes. A smile moved through the exhaustion on his face like weather changing counties.
"She wins everything, Del. That's the whole situation. Write it down somewhere so I don't have to re-learn it."
"Already in the minutes, brother." Del stood, and put his big hand over Everett's where it lay on the blanket, and held it a second longer than either of them would ever mention. "Welcome back to the living. Try to stay this time."