Page 138 of Bone Year

“He told me what he thought had happened to him on the inside. He said the forceps had probably gone through the peritoneum and either nicked the liver or one of the vessels around it. He said the most likely source of the bleeding was a branch of the hepatic artery or one of the portal vessels feeding into it. He told me the procedure I was going to need to do, and he made me say it back to him before I started.”

I drink.

“He told me to extend the incision around the entry point so I could see what the forceps were touching. I had to follow the tract of the forceps with my eyes and not my hand, because my hand would go where my eyes told it to. He picked up the scalpel and put it in my hand and folded my fingers around it himself, because I was already shaking too hard to hold it on my own.

“I tried to extend the incision but couldn’t. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I cut once badly, and the wound bled harder than it had been before, and he told me to stop and breathe. He told me I had to do this for him. He told me I knew how. He told me he’d taught me how. He kept saying my name over and over.”

I have to wait before I can keep going.

“I cut again, and that time I did it right. I don’t know how I did it, but I did. I opened the wound and could see the forceps inside him. It was up against something pulsing that I couldn’t name in the moment. He told me to identify it before I clamped, and I tried to look closer, and his voice was getting quieter, and I was trying to find the clamp on the tray and his voice was getting quieter, and I told him I had it. He didn’t answer me, and I looked up at him and saw his eyes were heavy and distant.”

I wipe the back of my hand over my cheek where a stray tear had fallen.

“His pulse was still there when I checked it. Fast and weak. I told myself he’d passed out from the pain and the blood loss and kept going. I clamped what I thought was the source. I think I did it correctly. The bleeding slowed. I withdrew the forceps the way he’d told me to, slowly, and the bleeding came back, and I tried to find what I’d clamped in the field but couldn’t see anymore because there was too much blood. I packed the wound, held pressure, and kept telling him I was almost done.”

I take another drink.

“His pulse stopped while I was holding pressure on his abdomen. I climbed onto the table. I’d seen him do compressions before on an old woman who’d collapsed at the market when I was younger, and I knew the rhythm of it and the depth. I started compressions on his chest. I gave him breaths. I checked his pulse between rounds. I kept going for I don’t know how long. My arms were shaking, and I kept going. I was still doing compressions when my mother and sister came in through the front of the clinic.”

Draven’s hand had found mine across the blanket. I don’t know when it happened.

“They’d been at my aunt’s house across the village. They walked back together. The clinic door was unlocked because we hadn’t closed up yet. My mother came in first and saw him on the table and saw me on top of him. The sound she made will live in me for the rest of my life, the most blood curdling scream. She came across the room and pulled me off him. My little sister stood in the doorway and didn’t move.”

I rub the tears out of my eyes.

“My mother kept asking me what I’d done. Her hands were on my shoulders and she was shaking me. I tried to tell her about the forceps and about him slipping on the floor I’d mopped and about him telling me what to do. I don’t think she heard any of it.”

I take a long breath.

“She hasn’t asked me what happened. I think she can’t bear to hear it. I think if she let me tell her, she’d have to forgive me, and she doesn’t know how. Most days, she can barely look at me.

“And every time I pick up a scalpel, I’m back on that table. His voice is in my ear telling me to find what’s bleeding, and I can’t make my hands do what he’s telling them to do, not when it’s a person on the table and there’s blood in the field and someone’s talking me through it.”

It’s quite for a long minute.

“Until today.”

I look at him.

“Until you.”

He studies my face, and I have to look away.

I keep my eyes on the wall. The crack in the plaster runs from the windowsill all the way up into the corner where the ceiling meets, and I follow it with my eyes and wait.

His thumb shifts once across the back of my hand in a soothing circle.

“He told you to find what was bleeding, and you did, Rose.”

He shifts next to me.

“You just couldn’t stop it in time. That’s not the same thing.”

I close my eyes. The tears come faster. They’ve been coming the whole time but now they’re coming the way they should have been coming for a year. I don’t try to stop them, because there’s no one in this room who’s going to look at me wrong for it.

“Come here.”

His voice is rough. He shifts on the bed, slow and careful with the wing behind him, and his arm comes around my shoulders and pulls me into his chest. His hand finds the back of my head and stays there. His other arm settles across my back.