Page 10 of Patch

“Good.”

She drew the medication and put it into the muscle of his thigh and his eyes rolled back and his breathing slowed, and then she started talking and didn’t stop for forty minutes.

“Irrigating. Watch the splash zone. Don’t move that hand.” That was for Brazil. The irrigation hit the wound and blood watered pink across the steel. “Debriding. Scissors. Gauze. More gauze.”

I handed her each thing as she named it. Into her field and back out. That much I could do.

“Suture. Four-ought. Cutting needle.”

I put it in her hand. Our fingers didn’t touch. She took the needle driver off the tray and started closing the entry wound in small even bites, the way you’d sew anything that mattered, and I watched a woman half my age put a brother of mine back together on a table meant for a Labrador.

“Exit next. Deeper.” She had both hands in the wound and Brazil on the retractor, and Brazil’s grip had been slipping for a minute because there was blood to his wrists and nothing to wipe them on.

The handle slid. He caught it. The tissue moved and she made a sound I hadn’t heard her make yet.

“Don’t let that close,” she said. “Somebody take it off him.”

Brazil looked at me. I put my hand over his on the handle and he pulled his out from under it and stepped back, shaking the blood off his fingers.

My hands were steady.

Not a shake. Not a tremor. A lock. My fingers closed on those handles and simply did not move, and my knuckles went white, and I stood there looking into a hole in my brother’s shoulder and saw a county road twenty years back and a shop rag and a pulse skipping under my palm.

She took it out of my hand.

No comment. No pause. She didn’t look at my face while she did it. She turned and gave it to Brazil, who took it without a word, and put it where she wanted it.

“Hold there. Don’t move it.”

Brazil held.

I stepped back. One step, then another, until the wall stopped me. I stayed there with my arms at my sides and the blood drying brown in the creases of my forearms.

Nobody said anything about it. That was worse. If she had said one word I could have answered it.

She worked the exit wound. Debrided the edges, closed the fascia, then the layer under the skin, then the skin. Her voice kept going the whole time, low and flat, narrating into a room where nobody was listening but me.

“Dressing. Triple antibiotic. Non-adherent. Tape.”

Nobody handed her anything. She reached for it herself.

She taped it in a cross pattern, checked the edges, and straightened up. Her scrubs were soaked through at the chest and the sleeves. The drain protruded from the bottom of the dressing running clear.

* * *

Freak was stable. The drain ran clear. The dressing held.

Her hands stopped moving.

They had been moving nonstop without a gap in them. Suture, scissors, gauze, tape, each motion running into the next, and when the last strip of tape went down they simply stopped, and she put both palms flat on the edge of that table.

Then she started shaking. Hard. It started in the wrists and ran up through the elbows into the shoulders. Her fingers spread against the steel. The table shifted half an inch on its rubber feet, enough that Brazil looked up.

She breathed through it. Jaw set. Eyes down on the drain tubing. She didn’t make a sound.

Nobody in that room said a word.

Brazil looked at me. Twenty years of shared silence in one glance, and what it said was do something, and I didn’t do anything, because there was nothing in me that knew what to do.