The Invasion of the Tearling

Just pick and go, dammit.

Lily grabbed a set of pine-green towels she’d always hated, a wedding gift from Greg’s aunt. When she returned, she found that Jonathan and the doctor had moved the sofa into the direct sunlight beneath the windowsill. The doctor had removed the woman’s oversize sweater to reveal a discolored man’s undershirt beneath, and now he was cutting the undershirt off with some scissors he’d produced from his little bag. Lily bent down to deposit the towels beside him.

“That’ll do, miss.”

“Lily.”

“No names.”

That phrase again. Feeling rebuked, Lily turned to Jonathan and found that he’d taken out his gun, a gleaming black thing that never failed to make Lily uneasy, and was fiddling with it, taking out the bullets and putting them in again.

“I need you to hold her down,” the doctor said. Lily didn’t know who he was talking to, but both of them moved forward, Lily toward the woman’s arms and Jonathan, tucking the gun away, toward her feet. Looking down, Lily saw a glint of panic in the woman’s eyes, and she placed a hand on her forehead, feeling like the world’s biggest fraud as she murmured, “It’ll be all right.”

The next half hour would stay with Lily in clear, sickening detail for the rest of her life. The doctor had a laser probe, at least, but when he began to poke around with it, the woman’s arms strained until Lily’s face and neck were slicked with sweat in the effort to hold her down. Every few minutes the doctor would mutter, “Buried deep, little bastard,” and these mutterings were Lily’s only way to mark the passage of time.

She spent much of the operation staring at Jonathan, trying to puzzle him out. He was a good bodyguard and a gifted driver, but he was also a former Marine and—Lily had always thought—a loyalist. How on earth did he know an off-the-grid doctor? How would either of them be able to keep this from Greg?

The doctor finally found the bullet, then began to work a small set of tongs into the hole. The woman passed out again somewhere in the middle of this process, her arms going mercifully slack against Lily’s hands. The temperature in the nursery felt as though it had climbed sharply, though the wall panel only read 74 degrees. Lily was dizzy, as though she’d lost all the blood in her head. Jonathan, no surprise, was steady as ever, his face immobile as he watched the doctor work. He’d probably killed men in Saudi Arabia with the same stone face.

At last the doctor held up the tongs to display a deformed piece of scarlet-dripping plastic. Jonathan held out a towel and the doctor dropped the bullet into it, making the cotton bloom red, then began to seal the wound.

“Was she successful?” the doctor asked.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan replied.

“One of us should let him know she’s here.”

“I’ll do it. How long will she have to stay?”

“Ideally, she needs a few days’ rest. She’s lost a lot of blood. There’s no way to get her out anyway, not until she can walk; I would think there are roadblocks up by now.” The doctor gave Lily a doubtful look. “But can she stay here?”

“Yes, she can,” Lily replied, trying to sound firm. But the rest of the conversation had mystified her. What kind of doctor patched wounds and asked no questions? The doctor wiped his hands on one of Lily’s bath sheets, then threw it on her armchair. “She’ll need fairly constant care.”

“I’ll do it,” Lily volunteered. “During the day, I can be in here all the time. At night, maybe every few hours.”

“What does a woman like you want with something like this?”

Lily flushed at the judgment she saw in his eyes. Her nursery was bigger than most people’s homes. She wished she could tell this neat little man about Maddy, but she didn’t know where to begin. “I just do. She’ll be safe here.”

The doctor considered her for another moment, then opened his bag and dumped a pile of medical paraphernalia onto the sofa: bandages, syringes, pill bottles. “You need to change the bandage at least once a day. If she becomes feverish, give her this. Have you ever given someone an injection?”

“Yes.” Lily nodded vigorously, feeling more confident now. The new syringes had guides to pinpoint veins, but even if the doctor’s syringes were the older kind, Maddy had been a diabetic. Lily knew how to give a shot.

The doctor held up a green-wrapped syringe. “Antibiotics. Give her an injection every evening at the same time. The vein in her forearm.”

He turned back to Jonathan. “She can stay here for a few days, but she could easily develop infection. The sooner he gets her out, the better.”

He who? Lily wondered now. The doctor’s voice was so reverent that for a moment Lily thought he was talking about God.

“I need to take the doctor back, Mrs. M., then run some errands. I might be gone until late.”