Borrowed Horses (28 page)

“I can’t believe that you of all people won’t let me take you to the hospital.” He applied each with the speed and skill of a field doctor.

“How’s your mother?” I said. “Better?”

“My mother is dead,” he said, low and matter of fact. “To tell you the truth, it feels like she’s been dead for years. The only difference is, now, we can bury her.” His face was dark, and he didn’t meet my eyes. This was forbidden ground.

“I’m sorry.” I had taken a wrong turn; I wanted to back up. “I didn’t realize.”

He cut the last strip of medical tape and gently smoothed it down. The throbbing pain spread into the entire hand: too much blood. When he looked up, his face had grown still darker. “How are the wedding plans?”

I didn’t answer.

He sighed and held up my finger, turning it to inspect the bandage. “You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”

“They’d just do the same thing you’re doing, only they’d charge a few hundred for it.”

He sighed. “He’s not your equal.”

“I know.”

“So why marry him?”

“Who says people marry for love?” I thought of Jack Stewart’s words:
You’re young, you’re attractive
…

Timothy still wouldn’t look at me. A ball of twine was lodged under my ribs in place of a heart; a single strand of twine connected it to a ball lodged under his ribs. Now, as he pulled away from me, the string sung with tension. It strangled the ball in my ribs, pulling it hard and tight as a fist.

If I completed the lie, I would live with that rock of broken string within. It would be the ultimate freedom. I need never feel guilty for not coming straight home from work to see him or make dinner, or for staying in a cramped apartment while I frittered away money on horses. There was power trading a heart for a fist of string.

But when Timothy turned, his eyes were no longer cool water. “You don’t feel that way. You can’t. I’ve seen you speak of horses. You couldn’t submit to a man like that. You can’t tell me you’ll be reined and harnessed. I don’t buy it.”

“Timothy,” I said, but nothing followed. I was empty of language.

“Joan.” He pulled a chair in front of mine and held my hand in his, examining the fresh bandage. “I have no right to say this, but you owe it to yourself not to marry that guy.”

“To myself?” He needed to give me more than that. “I owe myself a horse and a shot to ride against the best.”

His eyes flashed like light on steel. “You’re not one for the easy path.”

“No,” I said quietly. When it came down to it, we were, both of us, punks. That was fundamental, and what was fundamental about us understood what our surface refused.

“I can’t sit by and watch you do this and say nothing.” His wing of hair folded over his eyes, but still I could see them blaze. “It’s like watching a piece of myself be bought and sold.”

A piece of himself. He’d finally spoken words that mattered. “Where are you going?”

He said nothing but grabbed the doorknob. My finger throbbed with a thickening pulse, but I laid that hand on his arm. “I’m not the one who should be here,” he said.

“If not you, then who?”

He was silent and unmoving as stone.

“Do you really still believe there’s someone else? It was a lie built up with stupid rumors. I don’t know why I let you believe it. Maybe because I couldn’t believe you actually would.” The words rang with reprimand. No one else had ever looked at me and seen a love of horses and knew what that love meant. If he could read me so well, how dare he think I’d stoop to Dave?

And then, I remembered. “You didn’t, in fact. You told me so when you first saw Dave. Until then, you had never believed I had a boyfriend. You’d seen the lie for what it was, and you saw me.” He’d known me better than I’d known myself.

Timothy’s eyes were still clouded with doubt.

I softened, feeling the tears at the corners of my eyes and refusing to let them fall. “I protected myself with that lie, and I protected you. I’m always going to put horses first; I don’t want to put you second. You deserve better than that, better than me.”

“You let me decide what I deserve.” He swallowed and turned his fierce gaze on me. The fish on his neck seemed to move as if slipping a net. His face held incredible resolution, incredible strength, but in that moment it struck me that it was not a strength that would be used to trap me. He was an outlaw. He was a cutter of nets.

Wreck

C
ar wreck: five people from a head-on on 95, just north of town. The truck had jack-knifed and its driver was bloodied but was able to drive away. The four family members in the passenger car that hit him weren’t so lucky.

The father and toddler were on the right side of the vehicle and fared best. Her booster seat had held up well, and though she had minor abrasions and her neck had already began to tighten from whiplash, she would be O.K. Her healthy screams echoed off the walls of the ER. The father, too, had whiplash and lacerations, and had broken his wrists bracing against the dash. The mother looked battered and broken everywhere. Their six-year-old’s seat belt, not fitted to his small body, had failed him. His arm was severed at the shoulder where he’d wrapped the seatbelt under his armpit to keep it from rubbing on his neck, and he’d been tossed around the car as it ricocheted off the truck and swerved over the road. The EMTs clamped the axillary artery, but that only slowed the flow of blood and he’d lost so much. A steady drip puddled on the gurney sheet next to his body where his arm should have been.

He was my charge. I lifted him, gently pulling the sodden bed-sheet up to slide x-ray plates under his body. He felt invertebrate, a jellyfish. His face was swollen and full and dangerously pale from lost blood. My cut finger pounded under his weight, though his body felt bird-light. I lowered him onto the plate, careful to move around the arm he no longer had, as if touching its absence could cause him more pain.

Our senior year, Mouse was wheeled into this very ER to breathe her last breaths. Her casket had been closed. Some long-gone tech had lifted her body, some since-retired doctor had tried to close her wounds, but the floor on which his blood puddled was the same. She would have been heavier than this boy. She had longer to grow.

I blinked away the thought and asked the nurse to dim the room lights so I could better see the positioning light and maneuver the portable unit quickly in the race against his fading pulse while they prepared another transfusion. The glass imbedded in his skin and blood-stiffened hair made him shimmer. His hair could have been any color: white blonde, red, black. The darkened blood removed even that small marker of his individuality. He was anybody’s child. This wasn’t Room One. There were no individuals here, only bodies to treat. That’s how we made the ER bearable.

I adjusted the machine. Had Mouse’s hair been as stiff and unreadable? Clavicles, sternum, ribs, face, spine: We would focus my machine first on the core, locating lung-puncturing bone shrapnel, giving the doctors in OR a map of his internal terrain so they could plot their course. I took my pictures and jumped out of the way to allow the doctors and nurses to go to work, but not before seeing that the boy had began to cry blood. The red hemorrhaged from his tear ducts over his eerie, still face. I hoped he was not inside that shattered vessel, feeling this pain. I wished his soul reprieve from its body.

Timothy would be in class now. P chem. What knowledge was there to cope with this?

The sister’s wails rung against the walls. She formed her sobs around calls for her mommy, her daddy, her brother. The cries went straight to my bones, ringing them so that I felt like shattering as well, collapsing internally, like a glass in response to that perfect, terrifying note.

Dr. Rivers leaned over the boy. He paled at the sight of his patient, and his face set with resolve. His hair, stiff with gel, gave him uncompromised vision. Stony-eyed and unflinching, he looked more like an automaton than a feeling human being; he worked with inhuman precision and speed.

Primeval groans from the boy’s father echoed off the walls behind the curtains that hid his son from him.
He can feel the loss of him. He can feel him dying
. It was not a medical thought, not a professional thought. “You need anything else?” I asked.

Dr. Rivers gave a curt shake of the head. They would send the father up once they’d given him painkillers and cut off his shirt.

Mouse’s grandparents hadn’t arrived at the hospital until her pulse had stopped. We got there right after them, but no one would let me see her. It made me crazy to be forbidden. I had cursed them all—my parents, her grandparents, the doctors and nurses—but I couldn’t make them let me through.

I walked out of the ER, concentrating on my sneakered feet not running as the weight rolled through them with each step, crossing the waxed floors silently. My nails, raggedly short as they were, bit into my palms. I focused on inhaling steady lungfuls of antiseptic air.
Relax
, I told myself,
relax
, but all I could see was the glass-glimmered child who would not make it: the softness of him where bones should make him hard, the bruises purpling, blooming larger with transfused blood. The mortician fixes what the hospital can’t repair, but Mouse’s casket had been closed.

I dashed to the bathroom and vomited the toast and milk that had been my breakfast, fighting to remember that the boy might not die and that Dr. Rivers, for all his personality glitches, was a damned good doctor. If anyone could save him, he would. Where there was life, there was hope. All the clichés.

I rejected this softness in myself. I cupped my hands under the faucet to rinse my mouth and realized that I still had my gloves on. I stared. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten them—I should have torn them off when I was done with my patient. It was so old a habit, I usually did it by rote. It wasn’t like I’d never seen an accident victim before.

Anger began to flow, building low in my knees and washing upward, hot as blood: anger at the kid for being in the wrong place, anger at his parents for not making sure he wore his seatbelt properly, anger at the mother for forgetting her car was a lethal weapon, for letting it drift. For God’s sake, a twenty dollar booster seat might have saved him! It was stupid fucking waste, that was all. Just like Mouse. Their lives were blank: the outlines of promise that would never be realized. My mother would have pointed out the joy they brought, the way their love affected the world, but I couldn’t make the equation of love and loss balance. It would have been better if they had never been born to the world at all. The love they created only made the pain more searing for those who lost them.

I stared at the wall, and willed myself to be as hard and blank and impermeable. Anger was better than sadness. Angry, I could work. I set my jaw and wiped my eyes to prepare myself for Room One and its everyday miseries, its stream of complaining patients unconcerned with the fact that I was trying to help.

I tore the purple gloves from my hands. The boy’s blood had stained my bandaged finger through a pin-sized hole in the glove. It wasn’t much—barely enough to notice. I squeezed my hand into a fist. I would carry those cells, that microscopic part of that boy, with me.

I glared at my image in the mirror, tucked a stray hair back, and returned to work. Anger hardened around my eyes into a decent mask.

Patients crowded the waiting room, grumbling over their wait. Cheryl sat at her desk examining her nails. My jaw clenched, and I pulled on a fresh pair of gloves. What a waste of space that woman was! “Sounds like a bad one in ER,” she said.

“Yes.”

“We won’t be seeing Dr. Rivers today then.” She sighed audibly. “Too bad—you’ll miss him.”

I knew I shouldn’t bother, especially in front of patients, but I turned on my heel and walked back to her, leaning so that my face was inches from hers. “Would you care to explain what you meant by that?”

She didn’t look at me. She just patted the back of her lacquered curls. “Nothing. Just, you two seem awfully close.”

“I just came from a room where a family is fighting for their lives.” My voice was a whisper, my face inches from hers, trying to retain the last shreds of my professionalism. “If you want to sit here and make idle speculations about some perceived attraction between me and another employee of this hospital, then that’s your deal, but I am not in the mood, so keep your comments to yourself.”

Cheryl turned to Doreen. “I must have been awfully near the mark to get that reaction,” she said, tittering like an over-aged girl to show there were no hard feelings.

“Just send back a patient,” I said, turning away. I would have slammed the door to Room One if it could be slammed. Instead, it heaved a heavy sigh behind me as air left the tube that slowed its shutting. I rubbed my forehead, feeling where my mask had cracked, where emotion had spilled out in spite of my resolve. My finger stung under the pressure.

My namesake was a warrior, a sword in her hand, shining plate armor. I wished I could channel her courage and will. Doreen opened the door and a boy hobbled in, clumsy on hand-me-down crutches. He moved tentatively, hopping forward rather than trusting the crutches with his weight. I looked at his chart: possible fracture of the ankle. If it was broken, he’d soon be used to his crutches. Follow-up patients swung their bodies in graceful arcs, pendulums to their own personal clocks.