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After Mercy told him everything she’d found when she’d gotten there and what she’d learned from the doctor, he sat down on one of the chairs in the room. Mercy also told Joel that he might lose not just his leg, but a part of his foot on the other leg as well.
“I hadn’t any idea that it had gotten that bad, did you?” She shook her head and sat down next to him. “When Allen told me earlier that he thought Saul might be getting better, I didn’t even think to come and check on him. And had you not been going for pizzas for us, he might well have died out there.”
“You can’t blame yourself for this, Joel. He had plenty of opportunities to get himself help. Even Allen said he told him that he was a diabetic. Saul was stubborn, and this is all on him.” She thought about the things that Saul had said in the ambulance drive over, and nearly didn’t tell Joel. But they were not going to keep secrets from each other, they had promised that. “He said that they’d better not take off his legs. He said that he was going to need them to kill our daughter. Something about it bringing you to heel. Again. He said that he’d have to kill her to bring you to heel again. What happened?”
“We had a dog. Or I had a dog. His name was Snow. He was white, too, all over his body, except for the very tip of his tail. Mom suggested that I call him Tippy, but that just seemed so obvious. So, he was Snow.” When he leaned back, taking her hand to his heart, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear anymore. Saul was a bastard, and there was no telling what sort of evil things he’d done to that poor dog. “One afternoon, just after my birthday, the mail ran. I got a card from my grandma with two ten-dollar bills in it—a fortune to a ten-year-old. I gave Mom one of them, so she could buy the stuff to make me a cake, and she said that there would be money left over—what else did I want? I told her to get a box of chocolates, big enough to share with the entire family. That was a treat that we all enjoyed, especially my father.”
The nursing staff was quiet on this floor, and they were moving back and forth between rooms helping the patients. Once a light went on for a room, they wasted no time in going there and figuring out what was wrong. Mercy had been a doctor once, not long ago, and she had treated her nursing staff with courtesy, as well as humor. They would get very little of that from anyone else they worked with, she had noticed. Joel started talking again, and she turned her attention back to him.
“Snow would meet me at the bus every day. The other kids were excited to see her as much as I was. She’d try to get on the bus with me too, I guess to help me off faster, and that would delight them as well. But of course, Saul hated her. Mom was going to pick up something for Snow to celebrate my birthday with me.” She held his hand tighter when he seemed to be upset a little. “Mom left me there with Saul. And the entire time she was gone, he wanted me to give him the other ten. I was going to take us to the movies, just he and I, but he wanted it all. Anyway, while our parents were gone, he and I got into a fist fight. Well, he beat the crap out of me, and I laid there and took it. Usually I just passed out from it, and this time was no different. Not a long time, but enough that he’d get bored waiting on me to wake up and would leave me alone.”
“I bet he was a bully at school too, wasn’t he?” Joel told her that he was at home, suspended, more than he was attending class. “Yes, I can see that about him. He just gives off an aura of meanness.”
“As soon as Mom pulled our Chevy Rambler into the driveway, I knew that something had happened. She stood out by the car for so long that I didn’t want to go out. But she looked at me while I watched her and started crying.” Joel told her that he’d been hiding behind the couch, waiting on their mom to come home and save him. “I finally went out. I told myself I was ten and there wasn’t anything to be afraid of anymore. But I saw Snow as soon as I got to Mom.”
Tears fell down Joel’s cheeks. She didn’t want him to remember any more, but she knew that it would be next to impossible for him not to finish the story. He needed to tell her more than she needed to hear it.
“He’d taken a knife to her. Cut her head off and left it there so they’d know what they were looking at. But that wasn’t enough for Saul. It was never enough if he could do more. He’d taken the lawn mower and had run over Snow’s little body over and over until there was nothing left of her but scraps of fur and blood.” Joel held her to his chest as he continued. “If that wasn’t bad enough, he knocked the chocolate cake that my mom had gotten on clearance, because it was more festive than she could have made, to the ground. Smashing it with his bare feet, he made sure that there wasn’t a bit of it left for anyone to eat.
“He taunted me later, as he was stood in the corner after Dad had beaten his ass. Saul told me whenever we were alone in the kitchen that the next time he told me to do something, I’d better do it. Laughingly, he also told me how he’d found the money that I’d hidden away and had burned it. I believed him. There were remnants of it still in the kitchen near the stove.” Joel looked exhausted after that, but he told her the rest. “After that, I would just simply give the money to my mom when I had any. Stashing it away never did me any good with Saul around. Then when he was fifteen, he hit my mom and they sent him away for five years. That was the first stint of prison for Saul. But far from the last.”
They sat there in silence for the most part, only talking when people came by to see how they were doing. The man who ran the deli in the hospital, a person that one of her sisters had helped out, brought them thick sandwiches. While she told Joel she wasn’t hungry either, he reminded her that she was going to have a baby and needed to eat. They both ate half of one of the big subs before they’d had more than enough.
The nurse came out to give them updates every hour or so. It was going on five hours now since Saul had entered surgery, and it looked like it might be a few more before they were finished. The other birds came to sit with them. and someone had even brought Miley.
“This is a hell of a wedding night.” She laughed with Joel. “I’ll make it up to you soon. After all this is over. Right now, I want to just make sure that Saul isn’t going to be any trouble and that he’s all right. I don’t know why I care, but I do.”
“Because he wouldn’t.” She looked hard at Esme when she spoke. “Don’t give me that look. You know as well as we all do that had that been Joel on the side of the road, he could have more than likely laughed at him as he laid there dying. Not lifting a finger to help at all.”
“You’re right. He is a bastard.” Joel stood up with the rest of them when the doctor came down the hall. He was still in scrubs and his face looked exhausted, but he smiled when he told them all to have a seat. “What did you have to do, Doctor?”
Doctor Brian Wayne had been a friend of theirs for some time now, since Remi had recruited him to come to their little town and work there. Since then he’d set up a practice with his wife, become the go to man at the hospital, as well as become a member of the school board with Joel. He was a good man.
“I have to tell you, it was touch and go there for a while. He’s lost a great deal of weight, and it’s taken its toll on his heart and other organs. We did have to remove his left leg to the thigh. He’d let it go too long. And since he wasn’t eating right nor taking any care of the wound, the blood poison ran throughout his system quickly. I’m sorry, but we may yet have to remove this right foot too.” Mercy asked about his hands—they were bad when she’d seen them. “Yes, they were. After cleaning the gravel and other dirt out, it was determined that we’d leave them for now. He was in the worst shape that I’ve seen for a while. And Mr. Oliver, he’s been a type two diabetic for what I would say is most of his life. He was just lucky, until the end here, that it didn’t get the better of him sooner.”
“Should I be tested for it as well? And I have a daughter too. Should we be worried?” The doctor explained that if they hadn’t had trouble with it before now, they were probably fine. But to keep an eye on it, and that testing wasn’t a bad idea. “Yes, we will.”
The doctor explained that they’d have to be gowned up to go and see Saul for the next several days. If there was a chance of infection or if they had anything like a cold, then he’d prefer that they didn’t visit.
“He’s going to need long-term care after this. I’m not sure what his situation is, but he isn’t going to be able to be left on his own for a while. If ever. He’s going to be confined to a wheelchair for sure, and unless he comes to terms with what’s happened to him and what he needs to do to be healthy, then I’m afraid the prognosis isn’t going to be good for him.” No one said that they’d make sure he did. The doctor noticed it too. “I’m assuming that he’s not on the best of terms with any of you. He gave my people a hard time, mentioning that he needed a gun to kill someone named Miley.”
“That would be our daughter.” Joel looked at his daughter, then back at the doctor. “No, we’re not on the best of terms with him, but we’ll make sure that he has care. My wife and I will talk it over, and we’ll get back with you on what we can do.”
“Whatever it takes.” Joel kissed her when she chimed in. “We will do whatever it takes to make him comfortable and safe. But we can’t let him in our home. Not ever. He’s been trying to kill Miley since he showed up at our door, almost as soon as he was in town.”
“I understand. I’ve heard about him, living out there in the hotel all alone. I have to tell you, I thought that perhaps it was something like that. I know you well enough, Mercy, that I know that you’d not deliberately leave someone to die like that.” She thanked him. “No need for that. But I will warn you, he’ll need care, a great deal of it, as I said. If you’d like, I can make arrangements to have him set up in a long-term care nursing home that will help him cope. I think, knowing him as I have the last few hours, he’d need that so that he’ll follow the rules in keeping him on a diet plan.”
“Yes, all right. You set that up and we?
?ll make arrangements to pay the bills too.” Brian nodded at Mercy, then left them there to see that things were set up immediately. Joel looked at her when the doctor left them. “Are you all right with this? I mean, he’ll be close, but I’m thinking he won’t be coming to the house anytime soon.”
“Yes, I’m very all right with what you’ve done for him. All I’ve ever wanted to do since we were children is shove him in a hole someplace and forget him. But since meeting you, I’ve come to the decision that no matter what he tries to do to us, he’s still family.” Mercy said that was correct. “Thank you. Thank you all for standing with me on this. I just don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t a part of my life.”
Dinner was a pizza. The subs that they’d had earlier hadn’t hit the spot, and now they were all starving. It wasn’t as if the subs weren’t good—they were very good. But they had been stressed out, and now they needed to celebrate. Not because Saul was still ill, but because for now anyway, he was going to be all right. And safe. Mercy was glad for that. She wasn’t sure that Joel could have stood for his brother dying the way he might have out there alone.
~*~
Joel sat near the bed that Saul was lying in. He was still in the hospital after ten days, and Joel had come by a couple of times a day to check up on him. The second surgery had really ended all chances of Saul living a normal life. His right foot had had to be removed the second time in the operating room, as well as part of one of his fingers on his right hand. The dirt in a hangnail had gotten so infected that they feared for his life.
