"Yes," Noelle said. "Call Hedy. She should come. She should see Linnie's face. Somebody besides you should see it. And she can drive me to my mother's."
He called his sister. He went out onto the back step to do it, into the cold, with the light from the kitchen falling across the concrete and the CR-V sitting nose-in to the garage with its owner's keys still in the crisper drawer. Hedy answered on the second ring over the noise of boys and a television, and he said, "Hedy, I need you to come over," and something in his voice made her stop talking, and she walked into another room, and he heard a door close, and he told her.
There was a long silence on the line.
"I'm coming," she said. "Twenty minutes. Do you need me to call anybody? Are you calling anybody?"
"Like who?"
"Em." She said it carefully. "She hit a seven-year-old in the face. With a prior. You know I'm a mandated reporter at work. I'm not at work. I'm not going to do anything you don't know about. But you need to think about it. Not tonight. Tomorrow. You need to think about who needs to know."
"I know," he said. He didn't. He hadn't thought about it at all. He stood on his back step in the dark and understood that there was going to be a long list of things he hadn't thought about, and that he was going to have to start thinking now.
Hedy came in seventeen minutes, in a fleece jacket over the T-shirt she slept in, with her car keys in her fist. She walked through the kitchen and took in the drawers and the coffee grounds and the two bottles on the table without breaking stride, and she looked at Noelle sitting there, and Noelle looked back at her, and neither of them said anything. Then Hedy went up the stairs two at a time. Emery heard her knock on Linnea's door, and her voice, warm, unrecognizable, saying, Hey, Linnie Bug, it's Aunt Hedy, can I come look at your face? I look at faces all day, I'm very good at it.
She was up there twenty minutes. When she came down she stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at Noelle for a long time.
"It's going to bruise," Hedy said. "Her eye's fine. I'd have her pediatrician look at her tomorrow, Em, for the record, if nothing else. Get it written down." She turned to Noelle. "She asked me if you were okay. That's the first thing she asked me. Not if her face was okay. If you were."
Noelle bent forward over the table until her forehead almost touched the wood, and stayed there.