Wynne's War (16 page)

“What did you give me?” asked Russell.

“Fentanyl,” said the surgeon. His tone suggested they'd already been over this. Maybe several times.

Russell closed his eyes. Opened and closed them. He kept sucking his bottom lip inside his mouth to wet it. The man said something else about concussions. It seemed to be a question.

“I've had three concussions,” said Russell. “I had two in one semester playing high school ball. I had another not too long ago.” He made a plosive noise with his lips and lifted one hand to mime a detonation.

“There are different kinds,” the surgeon told him. “Are you having trouble hearing?”

“Not now,” Russell said.

The doctor nodded. He had gray hair in a buzz cut and wire-rimmed glasses. He pulled a penlight from his jacket.

“Follow my finger,” he said.

He held his index finger six inches from Russell's nose, and shining his light into Russell's eyes, moved the finger up, down, and then from left to right, like a priest administering rites. He seemed satisfied. He nodded again and patted Russell's shoulder.

“You've strained the muscles in your lumbar spine, but I don't believe it's in the vertebrae or discs. Can't know without an MRI, but I'd be very surprised. You're not having any numbness and you're not having referred pain. Doesn't mean it won't hurt, but it seems to be muscular. You might need a CT at some point. We'll get those wounds stitched up.”

“What did you give me?” Russell asked.

“Fentanyl,” said the surgeon, smiling.

Russell closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was sure only a few seconds had passed, but the light in the room had slanted into evening and Sara stood beside him wearing surgical scrubs. There was a stainless-steel tray beside his bed, and Sara laid something on it, some kind of instrument, and began repositioning the lamps so they focused along his rib cage and leg. She set about cleaning the wounds, opening two packs of Betadine swabs, working along the cuts in a circular motion. She used all six of the swabs and then gave him a shot of penicillin, explaining everything to him as she went. She gave him a tetanus booster and then she took another syringe from the tray, held it up to her eyes, and pressed the plunger. Fluid sprayed from the needle's tip.

“All ready?” she asked.

Russell nodded. He didn't know quite what he was agreeing to and he was still too high to care. He could feel his lips again, but the lamps glowed with a warm narcotic light, and he watched her put the needle into the skin beside the inch-long wound on his thigh—red in the lamplight and gaping from debridement, like a bright toothless mouth. Sara injected about a third of the fluid into one side of the gash and then she retracted the needle, put it in the skin on the other side, and injected the rest.

She reached over and sat the syringe on the tray and looked at him.

“We'll give you a few minutes to numb up,” she said.

“What was it?”

“Just your local,” she told him. “Lidocaine.”

Russell nodded. He lay for a moment.

“They blew up Sergeant Pike,” he said.

“I know,” Sara whispered.

“He had blood coming from his ears.”

She cleared her throat. Said she needed him to relax.

He looked away and blinked the wet from his eyes. He said there wasn't anything he could do.

When he turned and looked back at her, she was staring at him. She reached and laid a hand on his cheek.

“We'll get you good and numb,” she said.

 

Sara started with the wound on his thigh, removing the suture from its pack, taking it in the jaws of the needle driver. Russell drew his chin to his chest and watched Sara with a detached, academic interest. He'd learned to administer stitches from a Ranger medic at FOB Marez, cross-training in case he ever had to do it in the field, but that opportunity had never arisen. Sara pushed the needle through the flap of skin on one side of the wound, then the flap on the other. She glanced at his face as she drew the thread taut.

“How we doing?” she asked.

Russell couldn't feel a thing through the local, just a kind of pressure. He told her he was doing fine.

She nodded, made another stitch, tied off and snipped it, then started on the next. She worked quickly, effortlessly: through, through, and pull. Through, through, and pull. Under, through the loop, tighten up, snip. She was very good it at. She told him she used to practice on quilt squares.

When she was finished, she dressed the site with antibiotic salve, then reached to angle her light toward the wound on his side. She glanced over at the tray, said she'd need to get more lidocaine, took off her gloves, and exited the curtained enclosure.

Russell lay there. The fentanyl had started to fade. The sensation had returned to his face, and he could no longer feel his heartbeat in his skull. He closed his eyes and inhaled a deep breath. There was Sergeant Pike, standing in the clearing with the morning sun coppering his face. Head tilted to one side, his good ear inclined toward the sky, listening. Then he was lying in the snow like a discarded doll. One moment standing, the next moment prone. Russell opened his eyes and exhaled. He lifted a hand and massaged his temples with his thumb and middle finger. As if he could rub it all away.

When Sara came back, she bent to study the wound below his rib cage, and she studied the one she'd just sutured on his thigh. There was a worried expression on her face. She shook her head.

“That was the last of the lidocaine,” she told him.

Russell lay there. He asked her what she meant.

“They used it all,” she said. “Not supposed to be able to do that, but they did. We don't have any other locals, so I can't give you anything for pain. Not with a concussion, I can't. I was surprised they gave it to you in the first place. I don't think they realized yet you'd been concussed.” She stopped and stared at him a moment. “Are you understanding me?”

Russell nodded. He was understanding parts.

“I've got to suture this other one,” she said. “I can't just leave it open.”

Russell nodded. He could see the wound on his thigh without straining, but he couldn't manage to twist his neck far enough to get a glimpse of the one on his side.

“It's going to hurt,” she told him. “It's going to hurt you really bad.”

Russell said that was all right, but that didn't seem to be what Sara wanted to hear. Her face seemed to tighten. She pulled on another pair of latex gloves, opened another suture pack, and took up the needle driver. She asked once again if he was ready.

“Ready,” Russell said.

There was pressure and then pain, so sharp it nearly took his breath. Then the pain vanished for a moment, as if the fentanyl was chewing it. Then the opposite started to happen: the pain was eating the fentanyl and the fentanyl was consumed. Suddenly, he felt very sober, very alert. The pain was warm, then hot, and then his side was on fire. He clenched his teeth, clenched shut his eyes. The pain moved up his torso and reached his chest. Then it crept toward his throat and took up residence in his jaw. He'd heard that courage was holding on for one more second, but he thought if there were many more seconds of this, he'd crack his teeth. He had the feeling she was stitching herself to him, stitching the two of them together. He was going to ask for something to bite down on, but the pain wouldn't allow him to work his mouth, and then it moved to his sinus cavity and finally behind his eyes. They burned red-hot. He opened them.

Sara's face was a mask of concentration. She said to stay with her. She said it'd only take another minute. She seemed to have said this several times. It had taken several minutes. It would take several minutes more.

Something strange happened. He felt his entire body begin to lift, lift and then hover above the bed. It wasn't the drugs and it wasn't the concussion. He didn't think that's what it was, but he wasn't exactly thinking. The pain seemed to lift him, buoy him up. It was in his side, his chest, and his chin, then behind his eyes, and now it had brought him out of himself, out and away from his body. It might have been the drugs. Might have been the concussion. Didn't really matter what it was or wasn't: he was definitely rising. At first, centimeters. Then actual inches. He'd left his body back behind him. He was floating free. Sara was driving the needle, drawing the thread, tying off, and snipping. She paused and looked at him. There wasn't anything to say. He was floating and his eyes were inches away from hers. If they'd been any closer, her eyes would have blurred, both eyes merging into a single olive orb. His junior year of high school, he and his girlfriend would drive back from the ball game in his pickup, his hair still wet from the showers, muscles aching. He'd turn onto the gravel drive that went snaking up through the black oaks toward the ranch house, but they'd pull off onto the lease road, turn off the headlights, and navigate by the moon. Twin ruts in the milkweed and thistle, grass brushing the undercarriage. They'd park down beside the oil tanks overlooking a field of alfalfa, roll down the windows. In spring they rolled them down, stripped each other in seconds, that teenage impatience with buttons and snaps—can't get the clothes off too fast. He'd remove the bulb from the cab's dome light, open the passenger door so they could stretch out their legs. And after they'd made love there on the bench seat, he'd lie with her beneath him, nose to nose. He couldn't recall them saying much. She'd stroke her nails very gently along his back, and he'd hold her face between his palms, watching her eyes. And then it would happen. His vision would tire, or they'd be near enough, and her eyes would creep closer and closer until it was one blue eye staring up at him. It was the closest he could get to the feeling that this wasn't just a high school romance that would end as soon as Elaine left for college on her tennis scholarship—which it was; and she would. But to have that brief narrowing—it was enough to make him forget.

Russell closed his eyes and the pain reached up and took him. He could feel himself begin to fall. Wasn't more than a few inches, but there was definitely the plunge of it, coming back inside himself, everything in reverse. Elaine on the seat beside him, the door shutting, his pickup backing down the lease road, backing down the gravel drive. They were on the highway. They were in the parking lot behind the stadium. He was standing under the stream of the locker-room shower with the water hot on his neck.

He lay there several moments, trying to get his breath.

When he opened his eyes, Sara was standing at his bedside, sorting through her tray. She reached over and picked up the tube of antibiotic ointment and squeezed a dollop onto her finger. Then she saw him staring at her. She told him how good he'd been for her, how brave. Her eyes were moist and her face looked very soft. It seemed to glow in the light of her lamp. She smeared the salve across the row of sutures she'd just made, the swipe of her finger like an electric lash below his ribs. Then she removed her gloves and placed them inside the tray.

“How we doing?” she asked.

Russell didn't answer. He lifted his hand from the mattress and she took it between her palms and held it.

They stayed like that for several minutes. He could feel the residue of talcum powder on her skin. He thought she was beautiful. He thought she'd hurt him very badly. He thought of how the universe had conspired to place both of them right here. He cleared his throat to tell her what he was thinking, but she stopped him.

“Hey now,” she said. “Shhhhhh.”

 

He woke past midnight in the dark of the tent, the only light coming from the electrocardiograph propped on its stand beside his bed. The doctor had explained as he'd hooked up the device that he was just being cautious. The concussion Russell had sustained was minor, but he wanted to hook him up to the EKG in the event of a seizure. Russell wasn't certain this would help. Would it record the seizure or notify the medical team he was having one? It certainly couldn't prevent it. The green line on the monitor beside him dipped and rose, strobing the room with a pulse of emerald light.

He'd been awake a few seconds when he realized someone was in the room with him. He hadn't seen or heard anything. He could just tell. He craned his neck to the right—the muscles very tight in his shoulders and his upper trapezius—and saw a thin form standing just inside the room. Rising from the pillows, he reached to pull the IV catheter free of his arm, but the form stepped closer and the light from the EKG flickered across Sara's face.

She placed a hand to his chest and pushed him gently back against the pillows. He'd been sleeping in an elevated position to accommodate the wires and tubes, and the woman reached to the back of the heart monitor and switched it off. The machine gave a just-audible whine. He could no longer see her but imagined he could, a darker form against the black. She smelled of shampoo. Something with the scent of berries. He could hear her breathing. Neither of them said a word. They'd never been alone like this, and he was afraid that the smallest thing might break the spell.

He felt her weight on the mattress and then her thighs on either side of his hips. All that was between the two of them were his boxers and a sheet. He didn't know what she was wearing, but he could feel her struggling out of it, and then her lips were on his forehead. His forehead and cheeks and then his mouth. He smelled the lotion on her skin.

She ran a hand down his stomach and slipped him inside of her. She did it softly and expertly and with a strange kind of care. He'd never been handled this way—as though he were somehow precious. She stifled a cry and the world swam and he couldn't feel his body, and he placed his hands on her hips to slow her movements. She leaned forward and cupped the back of his skull with her hands and put her mouth next to his ear. He thought she was going to tell him something, but she didn't, and when he came, it seemed to trigger something in her and she trembled violently for several seconds and gripped him very hard. She was panting and her face was wet. He moved his palms up her torso, but she rose and slid off him, gathered her things, and before he realized, she was gone.