He steered her back past the nurses’ station to the dented, paint-chipped double doors that led to the waiting room. She went willingly at first but then suddenly, with an expression of disgust, twisted out of his grasp. Her supported arm fell from its cradle, the hand hanging from the wrist like a dead goose.

An East Indian doctor, petite, slender, and almost prim in his self-possession, strolled down the hallway eating a sandwich. His face registered a look of grudging interest as he noticed the floppiness of the hand.

“What happened to you,” he asked flatly, between bites, taking in the glassy dislocation of her eyes, the labored workings of her chest. His identification tag read “ANIL CHATTERJEE.”

“He threw me down. I couldn’t even get the words out.” Her voice was smoky and deep, vibrating with a kind of retroactive panic.

“Down where.” He lifted her limp hand, gently felt the outer wrist bones.

She ignored the question, her head jerking like a bird’s.

“What happened to you?”

Still no response.

He gave his sandwich to the security guard and took both her hands. Her palms were embedded with shards of glass, clear and beer-bottle green, bits of gravel, some rusted wedges of tin, sharp fragments of various colored plastic, and in one hand a fine, small coil of metal, the inner spring of a cheap ballpoint pen—all of it implanted in the red-and-blue rawness of abraded flesh.

“I want you to answer my question,” he said sternly. “What happened to you?”

“He threw me out of the car…” Suddenly she stomped her foot like a child, her voice soaring. “I couldn’t get the words out! He didn’t give me a chance! I tried, I swear to God!”

“Threw you out. Was the car moving?” Chatterjee gripped her above the wrists to prevent her from flailing and complicating the damage.

She turned away, her face bunching, tears popping like glass beads.

Casually bypassing the screening drill, he walked her directly to the surgery room, escorting her in an awkward sideways scuttle, still holding her in that double-handed grip. The guard followed tentatively with the doctor’s sandwich.

The surgery room was crowded, the floor sticky, littered with torn gauze wrappers. Along the walls, patients sat quietly. A frazzled doctor with a Russian accent held a bouquet of MRIs, CAT scans, and X rays to his chest and read out names, mail-call-style.

“Salazar?”

No answer.

“Vega?”

Two men, both wearing blood-drizzled shirts, cautiously raised their hands, then, noticing each other, simultaneously lowered them.

Chatterjee sat her on a backless stool and took her pulse, which was racing like a hummingbird. He strapped a blood pressure cuff on her arm, holding himself still. Ninety over seventy, the blood somewhere in her feet at this point.

“I need to know what happened to you. I cannot treat you if I don’t know what happened to you,” he said, locking his eyes into hers, staring into that dazzling lupine gray.

She looked away again, exhaling in graduated shudders, trying.

“I was lost,” she began, in that smoky, stunned vibrato. “He said, he said he could help me get through the park. The guy, he didn’t…” Her voice fluttered away. “He didn’t even—I got out of the car, OK? He didn’t even let me get a word out. He threw me down.” She looked off, clenching her teeth.

“Were you raped?”

She balled her impaled palms into white knots, blood dripping. Chatterjee quickly backed away to save his pants, then, leaning forward from a safe distance, forcibly pried her fingers open again. The security guard placed the doctor’s sandwich on a stack of X rays and left the room.

“Listen to me. I speak six different languages. Just answer in human range. Were you raped?”

The triage nurse, a woman in her fifties with frosted red hair and a giant button reading “#1 NANA” pinned under her collar, slipped in behind Chatterjee. She held an admissions form on a clipboard. The doctor waited for an answer as the young woman looked at both of them with a pleading muteness. His gaze compulsively returning to those eyes, he nudged her stool with his knee, moving it along on its casters to a sink. He worked on a pair of latex gloves, then took one of her palms and began to wash it gently.

“Listen to me. I’m going to tell you something to calm you down, make you think about something else, OK? Then we’ll talk again.” He cleared his throat.