"Okay," I say to myself. "Okay. We can work with this."
I cut his shirt off with the shears from the kit because pulling it over his head is not happening. The wound is low on his left side, an ugly puckered mouth gone crusty with dried blood. The skin around it is smeared dark to his hip. My T-shirt is soaked through and useless now.
"Turn," he says. "Check my back."
I get a shoulder under him and roll him enough to see, and there it is, a second wound just above his hip, wider, messier.
"There's another one," I say, and my voice comes out very calm, the way it does when the situation absolutely does not deserve calm.
"Good."
"I'm sorry. Good?"
"It went through." His eyes close briefly. "No bullet inside. Means you don't have to go looking for it."
"I was not going to go looking for it, Yakob. There are limits to what I picked up watching my brothers bleed on the kitchen table, and mining is one of them."
The corner of his mouth twitches. On a healthy man it might have grown up to be a smile. "Irrigate both sides. Saline, then the iodine. Then the granules from the silver packet, in the wound, both sides. Stitch it. Cover it."
"Cover it." I repeat it because saying it makes it real, and it needs to be real, because I'm the one who has to do it.
"It'll hurt me," he says. "You'll want to stop. Don't."
"I know."
"Iris."
I look up from the packet in my hands. His eyes are open and fixed on me, black in the shadows, and there's something in them I haven't seen before. Not pain. He wears pain like other men wear watches, barely aware it's there. This is the other thing. The thing underneath. He is about to be helpless in front of another human being, entirely, completely helpless, and he would rather be back in that courtyard taking another bullet.
"I've got you," I tell him. "Everything’s going to be fine. Like it never even happened."
He holds my eyes for one more second. Then he reaches for the gauze in my hand, some last reflex, the drowning man trying one last time to swim to shore, and I watch his fingers shake against the packet.
"Look at your hand," I say quietly. "Now look at mine."
Mine are steady. I don't know when that happened. Somewhere between the cell and this room, some switch got thrown in me, and the girl who cried over sad movies and needed hugs after someone had been away longer than three days has steady hands.
He lets go of the gauze.
That’s the moment. Not the wound or the boat or the hand-holding. This. A man who has probably never once put his life in someone else's hands, opening his fingers and letting it happen.
Then I stop thinking about anything at all, because the work starts, and the work takes everything.
I won't keep the details. I already know my memory is going to fold this part up small and put it somewhere I don't go. What I keep is fragments. The hiss of saline. The iodine running off him in rust-colored ribbons and dripping onto the grey stone. The sound he makes through his teeth when the needle goes in,and the way his fist closes on the empty packet instead of on me, deliberately, even now, even half gone, careful of me. Me talking the whole time in a voice I've never used before, low and even, half instructions to myself and half nonsense, the verbal equivalent of a hand resting on the back of his neck.
"Almost. Almost. You're doing so well. I know. I know. I’m so sorry."
Aidan taught me the apology comes after the bleeding stops. Nobody taught me that the after is when your own body sends you the bill. When the last strip of tape goes down over the dressing and I finally sit back on my heels, my arms start shaking so hard I have to press my palms flat on the floor and just breathe.
Yakob's eyes are closed. His chest is moving. The dressing is white and staying white.
"Antibiotics," he murmurs, without opening his eyes. "Bottle marked A. Two now."
I get two down him with water from the kitchen sink, silently thanking the mysteriousS, and lift his head with my hand cupped around the back of his skull like Ma does with the babies. He swallows and drifts, and I sit there at his side wondering if it’s safe to leave him but not wanting to anyway.
An hour goes by. My legs are cramping. But I don’t move until his eyes flicker open again.
“It’s okay,” he says. His voice is rough like badly sawn wood. “You don’t have to sit with me.”
