by Pike, JJ
Petra’s eyes were almost swollen shut and her lips still trembling but she wasn’t sobbing. (Thank the Lord!) It wouldn’t take much to send her back over the edge. “I should be allowed to help. You understand, don’t you? I need to do this. I did this. I didn’t mean to…”
“Are you a trained surgeon?” Betsy meant it kindly, but she kept her tone deliberately hard.
Petra shook her head.
“In that case I’m going to side with your boyfriend here and recommend that you step back for the time being. You have me, Nigel, and the good doctor (she momentarily couldn’t remember the pediatrician’s name) on the case. Your brother is in excellent hands. We’ll update you regularly and you’ll be able to see him as soon as he goes into recovery.”
Petra covered her face with both hands and returned to her former state of uncontrolled emotion. Perhaps that was best for a girl of her type? Perhaps if she were allowed to let the tears take their course she’d feel better, sooner? It wasn’t Betsy’s personal preference, but then she’d always prided herself on her ability to hold it together under extreme pressure. But her way wasn’t the only way, she knew that. Petra would have to find her own path and walk it. To think otherwise was nothing more than hubris.
She handed Petra back to Sean, muttering what she hoped were soothing words. “Take care of her. Perhaps find a task? Keep her hands busy?” Bullseye! That’s what Petra needed: work! “Build us a fire. Boil water. We have no idea how long the power will be down. The more you do, the less time you have to indulge…” It would be impolitic to say what she was thinking out loud. She slammed on the brakes before some judgmental pronouncement passed her lips.
From the outside, she looked like a pleasant and pleasing old woman. Competent (she hoped), kind (especially if you were able to read “canned fruit and homemade pies” as a love language), and in control (house: neat as a pin; personal appearance: second to none; deportment: flawless). She passed into the house with the ease and calm of a tall ship coming into port on an idyllic summer’s day; no hint of the turmoil or turbulence within.
Sean steered Petra into the front room (wrong way, you kids need to build the fire outside). He was talking, low and light. He was a good boy, if a tad naïve. Petra sobbed into his shoulder. No longer Betsy’s problem. Good.
Mimi was wailing in the kitchen. Dear Lord. She’d just rid herself of one hysteric only to be met by another. Perhaps if she put the two women together they’d cancel themselves out?
“What happened?” Mimi at least her had sobs down in the manageable range.
Best not say who had done what to whom. That whole tangle of guilt and finger-pointing could wait until another day. Keep your comments in the neutral lane, Betsy. “Paul was shot.”
“I can see that.” Mimi had been a problem since her arrival.
Betsy had never spent much time with the old woman when she’d come to visit the family up at the cabin, but she’d heard the stories: cancer, chemo, radiation, remission. They’d all celebrated, but remission never lasted long with these more aggressive cancers. Sure, Mimi might be the 1 in a 100,000 who fought back and made it, but it didn’t seem likely. The Everlee grandmother had all the hallmarks of a quitter: she argued when the argument was long past, had taken to the bottle at the first sign of real trouble, and was generally a freeloader rather than a go-getter.
There it was again, Betsy’s tried-and-true judgmental self. A lifetime of AA meetings and she still didn’t have that voice completely quieted. Gosh, there’d be no more meetings for a long while yet. She’d be on her own. Still, she had her Big Blue Book and Little Red Book and 20 years of sobriety to bolster her. She wouldn’t fall off the wagon. She’d be fine.
“God,” she thought, “I offer myself to Thee. To build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will.” It was a third-step prayer, but she’d always loved that moment when she actively invited Him to take the wheel.
In His way, He showed her what she needed to do immediately. Mimi wasn’t merely weak and vacillating. That was a symptom, not a cause. Underneath all that fretting, she was a wounded soul, hurting precisely because of her inaction. Mimi (like her granddaughter, Petra) wanted to feel useful. How easy was His path? Not that it was the path of least resistance, but rather it was clear and well-lit as soon as you allowed His beneficence to guide your feet. There was plenty enough to do and Mimi was the right person to do it. “Petra needs you.”
Mimi looked over Betsy’s shoulder into the kitchen towards Paul and the surgical team, rather than into the front room where Petra and Sean had taken up residence. Really? Why did they always think they should be in the thick of it? Most of them hadn’t so much as skinned a rabbit, let alone fished around inside a wounded soldier and fixed what needed fixing.
“I’m not kidding. Your granddaughter is what the young people today call ‘a hot mess.’ If you can calm her for me, we will all do better.”
“A shot of brandy, maybe?” Mimi wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t crying and pouting any more either.
Were they a family with a tendency towards alcoholism? Betsy had never seen it in Bill or Alice—they were measured, casual drinkers—but Mimi had that possessive, almost loving vibe when she grasped her mug of Baileys. Of course, Betsy knew she could be over-reading that one instance. It might just be that Mimi had been in shock and in need of a calming tonic. Not every drinker she’d ever encountered drank to excess or did it to ward off their demons and quiet their unquiet soul. That was her own path. Give Mimi the benefit of the doubt. She might be suggesting brandy because she wanted to calm her granddaughter in the only way she knew how. Offering brandy wasn’t so unusual. Still, if there was a choice between “alcohol” and “not alcohol” Betsy would always choose the latter, to be on the safe side.
“I’d say not yet, but I’ll leave it up to you, Mimi. Let Petra cry and talk and find her way back to her calm center. I’ve asked them to head out and build us a fire. We need boiling water. We’re headed into surgery. Perhaps you can encourage them in that regard? Tell her we’re doing our best. And Mimi?” She waited until she was certain the old woman was paying full attention. “Don’t let Petra, or anyone else, into the kitchen. It’s not sterile, I know, but we want it to be as contaminant-free as possible. Can you do that for me?”
Mimi nodded and went on her way.
Hedwig stood on the threshold between the kitchen and the living room. She, too, needed a task. “I want you to be back up to Mimi.”
“Who’s Mimi?”
Betsy pointed at the Everlee’s grandmother. “She’s going to work on keeping Petra calm and out of our way. They’re building a fire. Do you know how to do that?”
Hedwig nodded. “Yes, but I thought I’d go back and get Jim and Bryony, if I can find the motorbikes and free up another set of hands.”
Betsy’s heartbeat pounded in her ears. Had she heard it right? Jim?
“Is there someone else around who’s free? Someone who can help me? Paul said there were motorbikes someplace…”
“Who are Bryony and Jim?” She didn’t dare ask directly if the Jim Hedwig had mentioned was her Jim.
Hedwig frowned. “Bryony is one of little kids from the camp, but I’d have thought ‘Jim’ was self-explanatory.”
Betsy smiled, the corners of her mouth almost splitting her face in half.
“We need you in here.” Nigel’s tone brooked no push back. They had a kid on the table who needed her immediate attention.
“Talk to Sean. He knows where the motorbikes are. Go. Bring my man home. Thank you.” She didn’t allow the tears of gratitude to rise, even though in that moment she could have rivaled Petra in the waterworks department. “Thank you.”
Hedwig didn’t hang around. She went right to Sean and struck up a conversation.
Betsy snapped her gloves off—too much dirt, not suitable for the surgical suite—and made her way towards the action. She couldn’t put Ji
m out of her mind entirely—she wasn’t inhuman—but she consigned him to a small, comfortable room in her mind where he’d remain until she was free to deal with her own emotion. Her attention was needed right here, right now. Always remain in the present. She’d learned it the hard way, but she’d learned it.
Dr. Frederick Handel—right, that was his name, Fred—was a pediatrician. Chances were good he hadn’t seen the inside of a surgical suite since he’d done his student rotation. He couldn’t take the lead. Nigel was by far the more qualified of the two men, but there could be no doubt: she was the surgical expert. Her time in the field had made her an old hand at everything the battlefield might throw at them.
A lesser woman would have been thinking about her glory days. All those saves in Vietnam. All the broken bodies, shredded organs, fractured minds she’d stitched back together. Jim bragged about her natural aptitude for rescuing what had been adjudged unsalvageable and mending the unmendable, but she was only ever as good as her last save, she knew that.
Paul had been lucky in as much as he hadn’t bled out, but a gut shot was never a “lucky” break. Not really. Not with all the things that could have gone wrong or could yet rise up to surprise them.
Nurse Nigel and Doctor Fred had prepped the site and draped it but, miraculously, were waiting on her. She could only do her best, but that’s precisely what she intended to do. Her best.
“Do we have a line in?”
Nigel nodded.
“Right.” She went to her kitchen sink, which Nigel had already stocked with a proper nail brush and some chlorohexidine. She ran through what she was going to do one more time. In Betsy’s considered opinion, you could never do too much prep; and that included rehearsing what you were going to do in which order. On the surface it was simple enough: find the bleeders and sew them up, but microsurgery was never simple. They were going to be tending to this young man for hours.
Nigel was an excellent addition to the team, trained as he was in anesthesia. With no machines to do the work for them, they were going to need to be alert to every rise and fall of the young man’s chest. The doctor was less useful, in spite of his credentials, and they all knew it. By tacit agreement, Betsy and Nigel took the lead, making the pediatrician their runner.
Sean had been proud—boastful even—of his new opioid stash, but that meant nothing when you were faced with an open wound. Especially when it was an open wound that required delicate, detailed work. The Everlee children had bragged about all the things they’d “boosted when they busted Sean out of the hospital” but, again, drugs aren’t needles or suture thread or the hands that demark that fine, delicate line between life and death. If it hadn’t been for the supplies that Nigel had brought with him from the hospital (and, she thought modestly, her own not-inconsiderable skill) Paul would almost certainly have died already.
God bless Nigel. He’d brought her a set of surgical binocular loupes. Though the headset was heavy on the bridge of her nose, she was still able to track the bullet’s trajectory, extract it, check the stomach for tears, irrigate the field, suture the perineal sac, and get out of there in under three hours.
Her assistants had been stellar and the patient’s underlying health meant there were no complications. She pulled off her gown, snapped off her gloves, tidied her hair, and went in search of Petra et al.
Mimi stood by the unlit fire in Betsy’s front room, her hand on the mantel and her foot on top of the base of the fire guard. “If the bullet hits you dead center, your spine is cut and you die. If it’s a little off center and hits your mesentery artery, you die. If it hits your spleen or liver, you die slower; slowly enough that medical intervention may save you, but you’re still a write-off. If it hits low, you leak from your bladder and that leads to peritonitis, which is like internal poisoning and will kill you but only after you’ve been in agony.” Thirty seconds of listening to Mimi lecturing her grandchildren and Betsy knew the old woman was sharing the most un-useful factoids she’d gleaned from who-knows-who during her many stays at the hospital. Betsy coughed, hoping Mimi would take the hint, but the Everlees grandmother met her gaze, took a deep breath, and continued unabashed. “If the bullet goes in and out, while missing all these targets plus the bottom of your lungs, you are faced with leaking intestinal fluids. You may possibly live with that, if it’s treated immediately, then croak because of the peritonitis. The most that can be said for getting hit in the stomach is that it is not a sure death the way a bullet through the chest is.”
Petra was crying quietly, her face still buried in her hands.
Sean sat on the edge of Petra’s chair looking helpless.
How or why Mimi thought this was an appropriate way to talk to her granddaughter was baffling, though it didn’t take long for Betsy to spot the brandy on the mantel and work out that Mimi was running through her own fears as a way to retain a modicum of control over the situation. Betsy had met people like her in the Program, in her early days: Doomsday Thinkers who believed in the predictive—sometimes protective—power of negative thinking. If they imagined the worse, their argument went, they could prepare themselves for anything.
Betsy had no time for someone who was self-medicating with alcohol. She had bullet wounds and the ever-present threat of sepsis to deal with. If Mimi asked for help she’d give it, but not before. She knocked on the wall to draw their attention. “In spite of Mimi’s doom-laden predictions, I’m happy to report that Paul had the best injury we could have hoped for.”
“None. We would have, could have, and did hope for none,” said Petra. “But he’s alive?”
Betsy nodded. “He made it through surgery. We’ll have to monitor him for bleeds, but we’re cautiously optimistic.”
Calm had once again been restored in Betsy’s house and she was glad.
Aggie threw open the front door. “Where is everybody? We’ve got to go. Now. Get your stuff together. Whatever you can carry. We’re headed to the salt mines now.”
“Plans have changed,” said Betsy. “I was prepared to move Midge, with the full support of the medical team, but we’re down to three medics now and Paul’s been hit, so we’re staying put for the time being.”
“No,” said Aggie. “You don’t understand. Indian Point is on fire. We’ve got to move. We have no choice.”
CHAPTER THREE
Bill Everlee did not want to hear what his glorious, brilliant, much-loved wife, Alice, had to say. He was trapped in a car with a woman who wouldn’t stop talking, two dogs he’d never seen before in his life, a radio that spewed nonsense and, to top it all off, he was an arm short of being his full self.
He slapped at the dashboard with his good hand but missed the dial. No, not his “good” hand, his only hand. And even that wasn’t any good.
“Is it annoying you? Do you want me to turn it off?”
Bill grunted. The car was filled with a few seconds of blessed silence. It didn’t take long for his brain to pick up on the subtle panting of two dogs who were wedged in the back seat between the mountains of provisions Alice had crammed into the van. What was she thinking, bringing strange dogs on a road trip? That wasn’t like her. She called them by their names—Maggie-loo and Mouse, apparently—as well as “cutie, sweetie, muffin, and saucisse” which was even weirder. It was like she’d formed a bond with them or something.
“Going back to what we were saying…”
Bill turned his head to look out the window. Didn’t she understand? He didn’t want to talk about it. He’d said nothing in the hopes that she’d pick up on his silence and do the same.
“Of course you’re not crazy. No one with an ounce of intelligence would say that. The pain is real, even if the limb is phantom. Pain is felt in the brain. Your hand is still mapped onto your brain as an existing limb, which is why you’re feeling what you’re feeling.” Alice was trying to be kind—in her own way—by using the truth.
It wasn’t helping.
He already knew that any decent doctor wou
ld treat him for the pain in his hand, even though that hand was jammed tight in a crevice under Manhattan and he was in a stranger’s van in Connecticut. Or Rhode Island. Or Massachusetts, he wasn’t sure which. The pain, as Alice said, was in the brain and his brain was still very much intact, recoding every bump in the sub-standard road by sending long, hot needles under his nails (which no longer existed); up his fingers (which were rotting in the fetid waters that had filled the sewers when he’d been trapped down there); into the wrist (that he’d broken by leveraging his entire body weight to snap the bones); and thence the flesh of his missing lower arm (where it burned with the fire of a dwarf star as it flipped around the lip of a black hole), even though he’d sawn through that flesh with his favorite knife; the one with the handle made with the horns of Aggie’s first buck.
He was in an agony of pain emanating from a limb that was no longer part of him.
He knew what he had to do.
Rewire his brain.
Yep. Only that. Only the impossible.