Nurses lifted her legs and arranged them on pillows, bent her knees, helped her lean forward while one of them put a pillowbehind her back. The nurses did not appear concerned that she clung to them and squeezed their arms when they eased her down. They fussed with the pillows. She felt old, curled inwards on herself. She understood why grandparents sat in reclining chairs all day. She closed her eyes and focused on breathing.
She had a faint memory of gasping for air and mewling, begging Nev to stop the ambulance or something irrational like that. Now as long as she lay still her back was quiet, but the gas pressure in her gut only went away when nurses manhandled her into moving. Pick one. Drugs took the edge off, dulled the corners.
“Your old lady’s back,” Reg said.
She opened her eyes. Sunset outside. Nev sat on the hideous green couch by the window, overnight bag at her cowboy boots.
Oh wow... She came.Ronnie made an inarticulate sound that might have been a laugh, but wasn’t at all like that, then sighed. Relief blurred the room. She was too tired to care, couldn’t be bothered.
Reg looked relieved. He must have asked Nev to come. “They gave her something that helped with the gas. She’s been quiet for a few hours.”
Nev turned pink, which made her eyes blue. She had bags under her eyes and looked rough, but was too polite to do anything but sit and fondle her Akubra.
Ronnie tried to lift her arm, but it was heavy, and connected to the rest of her, so she gave it up as a bad job and panted for a while. She had forgotten how much cracked ribs sucked. It took a while to catch her breath. This ranked up there with the time she was hit by a car and left for dead between Bulloo Downs and Cunnamulla. When her lungs worked again, she found she could project her voice to the hideous green couch by the window.
“Come here, baby.”
Awkward silence, ambient hospital noises growing louder as Reg, Mattie and Nev looked at each other. Reg and Mattie both pointed to Nev. Embarrassment mottled the already-pink face. For a moment it looked like she wouldn’t answer to ‘baby,’ but then she stood, reluctantly. Nev approached the bed, hat in her hands, and stopped beyond the arm rail like a mourner at a wake.
Ronnie wanted a hug. “You look like shit. How many fallopian tubes does a guy have to lose to get a hug around here?”
Nev snorted. Ronnie saw the problem—Nev wasn’t as tall as Reg or Mattie, so the side rail of the bed was in the way.
“There’s a button to fold that down.”
Nev lowered the siderail before leaning over her, reaching around without touching her, careful not to rest any weight on her. She smelled nice.
Ronnie pulled Nev’s head down onto her shoulder, into the empty space on the pillow next to her left ear.
Nev’s face tickled the side of her neck. The older woman began to shake.
Ronnie stroked her hair. “Shh…”
Reg and Mattie stepped out into the hallway.
“I’m alive. You did a good job. It’s over. You did so good...”
Not many people knew that the owner of Upsend Downs was deathly afraid of blood.
After that, it wasn’t hard to wheedle Nev into pulling over a chair. Nev surprised her by offering to show her pictures from her recent trip to Rwanda, which was exactly the level of distraction she needed.
She studied each image like a clue, trying to guess where her friend had been standing and how she had been feeling when she took each photo.
A fishing boat in a brown river with lush green banks.
An old tree. “What kind of tree is that?”
“Oak. In the villages people met under a tree like that to hold Gacaca courts after 2002, to try their neighbors for crimes committed in ’94. They stopped last year. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something. They had to process a hundred and thirty thousand alleged perpetrators.”
“How often did they do that?”
“Every week.”
“That must have been exhausting.” And dangerous for the victims, Ronnie knew, who were afraid of facing reprisals from their neighbors if they testified or gave evidence.
Nev nodded. “They called it Reconciliation. It hasn’t been a total failure. It let them return to village life. Society heals. It never ends. They forgave their neighbors but can’t trust them. They’ll carry that fear. The body remembers fear.”
And guilt,Ronnie thought. “Will you take me someday? I could do a soccer camp for kids.” She reached for Nev’s free arm, found it, squeezed her hand. Nev’s hand was cold.
