The first night my mother worked in the ER, the ambulance brought in a little girl who was unconscious and suffering from a bad concussion. Mom said she was maybe six or seven years old. The girl’s arm and face were broken, and she was bleeding from her vagina. People found her like that on the side of a road, where she had been dumped and left for dead. Social Services thought maybe the parents—there were scars on her where she had been burned before and places she had been cut—but it would be difficult to prove unless the girl talked, and even then. The girl made it through the night and her parents came for her the next day. Mom said the girl cried like nothing else when they took her out of the hospital. She stayed on at the hospital for ten years after that, my mother, and she saw a lot of bad shit. Probably worse than what happened to that girl, but she never talked about it. She just tucked it away into some pocket in her mind we never got to see. The only one she mentioned was the girl. I don’t think she ever got over that. It was too much for my mom to take on her first night. It took something from her.