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This was why I didn’t become a funeral director like the rest of my family. I couldn’t handle the sight of blood.
Decca pried the hori hori knife out of my other hand, throwing it away from me as though I’d intentionally used it as a weapon for self-harm.Hadn’t I, though?“Okay, let me help you up. We’re going to go inside and take a look. Wash up a bit. See if the bleeding slows.”
She said it so sweetly, I willed myself to be whisked away by her words. But her voice was still thick with our unresolved tension. “Come on. Up you get,” she said, firmer now, as she tugged my elbow.
She brushed the dirt off her dress and the bottoms of her feet as much as possible before dragging me into the kitchen and jerking my hands—my right cupped under my left to catch the slick, viscous blood that was threatening to upset my delicate stomach—under the stream of water, mottling the white enamelsink a Valentine’s Day medley of reds and pinks. I closed my eyes before my vision blacked out.
“This needs stitches. You might have nicked a tendon.”
I groaned. “You’re a doctor. Can’t you just sew me up?” I knew saying it was stupid. I wasn’t even that alpha-type guy who pretended never to feel pain. Hell, maybe those alpha male types really didn’t feel pain. It was only that I hated hospitals almost as much as I hated mortuaries. I went often enough as it was, giving blessings and holy oil to the sick and dying. I didn’t begrudge going then, but this felt like going into the office on a day off.
She blinked at me, her face otherwise deadpan. “A doctor of philosophy, but sure, I’ll stitch you. Except, damn it, I left my doctor’s bag back in 1880.”
I opened my eyes. One of them, anyway.
“There’s this thing called an Emergency Room we have here in the twenty-first century suburbs. They can sew your hand back together using anesthetic and it won’t hurt a lick. Even give you a shot of penicillin.”
“Enough, I’m going.”
“Keep that towel on it while I get my shoes. I don’t think you hit any major vessels, but you want to try to keep the blood flow as minimal as possible.”
She’d wrapped an old tea towel around my palm. It was clean, but soft and old. Probably one of her granny’s. Used for decades. Maybe even passed down from before then. An heirloom.
Now the blood would never come out.
Decca hadn’t thought twice about ruining the towel. Or dropping everything, literally in the dirt, to help me.
She returned, bringing her keys and my wallet. Her firm and capable hands positioned me so she could tie the cloth. It felt so… nice to have her worrying over me. Her hand squeezed mine asshe raised it to my chest. Still holding. Not letting go. We stood so close I could pick out the rosemary greens from the squash vine greens in the striations of her eyes. I could map the fine lines etched across her lower eyelids and in the outer corners where she squinted when she laughed.
Then it was gone. The softness in her eyes morphed into something harsh and laced with pain.
“What were you thinking?” Her words bit.
“I was just trying to get that dandelion out.”
“It wasn’t a dandelion, it was a gobo burdock root, and it’s at least five feet deep. It wasn’t ever coming out with your little knife. No, Gus. I saw you. Saw the…” she took a breath, “change in you after you looked at me. For once, you looked at me like...” She stopped herself from finishing that statement and shook her head.
“Like what?” I pried. I had to pry. Maybe it would work one of these days. Maybe I’d push enough that we’d both let it all out. Whateveritwas. Something else was in the room with us whenever we were alone. Hauntings of past misdeeds and of people gone and missed.
All our ghosts.
“You looked at me like we had a connection. Like you did before we were married, when you could actually stand the sight of me. Like a husband looks at his wife.” Her statement was like a rockslide. The smaller pieces of gravel shifting at the cliff’s edge before giving way to the tumble of the big boulders.
“Decca, I… I want…”
I had nothing to say. She was right. I was frustrated. I was so fucking sexually frustrated I couldn’t fuck my wife when I felt all kinds of feelings for her because I let guilt and shame eat me up until I was a selfish, impotent bastard. There was nothing I could say.
“What’s gobo burdock?” I asked.
“Ugh!” She screamed in my face. “Just get in the car, Gus.”
Twenty minutes later, I’dgotten through intake. My hand was throbbing, and by now I was glad I was here. Decca met up with me in triage after parking. Luckily, they weren’t very busy, so I could be seen right away. All I had to do now was wait—in silence and boredom, since I had forgotten my phone, and since Decca wasn’t speaking to me—for drugs, imaging, and for someone to stitch my still-bleeding hand back together.
“Decca?”
“Sof, hi!” Decca folded the fishing magazine she’d been reading while I had dozed off in the ER bed. She dropped the magazine on my legs and wrapped her arms around Bethany’s daughter.
George and Bethany followed Sofia into my room. From the looks on their faces, I knew they weren’t here for me. Suddenly, all the leftover drowsiness had burned off.
