Patricia waves a hand. She’d suspected as much. “I’ll leave it to you.”
The sound of—scissors? Something like them?—makes her look to the television, where those devilish twins are again offering a fidgeting couple their dream home at a hefty sum. She’s grateful for the volume now and focuses on the shiplap walls and tile floors. If she doesn’t break eye contact with the show, she can’t look down at her leg. If she’s listening to the selling and whingeing, she can’t hear the snip of her flesh being cut away and the needle popping through her skin. It’s ridiculous that she ever thought she could do this herself with Rosa’s old button needle and some cotton thread.
She was always going to lose that chunk, her pound of flesh.
Well, not a pound, but the metaphor stands.
She’s going to be…what’s the right word?
Disfigured, certainly.
She’s going to be less.
That’s the word that keeps coming to her the whole time she racks her brain for the right one.
Less.
Such a small word when she’d like a bigger, grander one. What’s the point of developing an inimitable vocabulary if she can’t even find the right word for this exact moment?
Part of her, gone forever, leaving an odd divot behind.
She’s never had something cut out before. Still has her wisdom teeth and her gallbladder and her appendix. Never even had a surgery.
And now she’s awake as the doctor drops a chunk of her body into a plastic container full of liquid with a healthy plop.
It’s probably too small to even register on her scale.
“It has to be tested,” Dr. Ellis warns her, as if she’d asked to keep it as some sort of morbid souvenir.
“Then I bid it good journey.”
Patricia refocuses on the TV as they conclude their grim work. She can feel tugging down below, but the pain is mercifully gone. At some point, one of them asks about her thigh, and she waves at them and murmurs something, and then they’re washing out that wound without the benefit of all the anesthetic. It doesn’t really hurt, though—she’s somewhere else, floating overhead beside the TV, her eyes locked on those beguiling twins with their diabolical deals.
“Ms. Lane?”
“Yes?”
She looks up, surprised to find that she’s still lying back on the bench.
“We’re all done.” Dr. Ellis holds out a hand, and Patricia takes it, unsure why until the doctor pulls her up to sitting. She looks down and finds her leg wrapped in two places with yet more gauze.
“They’ll give you instructions up front. You’ll want to keep the bandages on for forty-eight hours. Then they can come off, but you don’t want to get the stitches wet. Take your antibiotics. If you develop a fever or the wound gets red and painful, let us know. Do you have a regular doctor?”
“Yes—well, no. Not anymore.” Just saying it fills her with the oddest flush of shame, as if they know that her doctor has dropped her as a patient rather than supposing that, like anyone else, she’s left his practice for her own reasons.
“Good luck, Ms. Lane,” Dr. Ellis says as she backs out the door.
The awkward young man is still with her, though. “How’s it feel?”
“I don’t feel much of anything, I’m afraid.”
He smiles, showing uneven teeth. “That’s probably for the best. It was an impressive wound.”
“Impressive,” she echoes. “Hm.”
He holds out his hand to help her stand, and she tests her leg and finds it numb but functional.
“They’ll have your prescription at the desk. Make sure you take it every twelve hours, and you’ll want to keep up with the pain meds. They won’t let us give you the good stuff.” He frowns, like this is very bad news. “Sorry.”
“I’m sure it will be fine.”
She has an entire cabinet filled with the good stuff, thanks to Dr. Baird, and she can’t take a single pill of it, not with Brooklyn around. It makes her zone out, makes nothing matter. And now, something always matters.
He holds the door open for her as she limps out to the front desk.
“Your insurance was recently canceled, it looks like,” the receptionist says, glaring as if Patricia has lied to her.
“That can’t be right.”
“It is. I called them myself.”
They stare at each other, the receptionist annoyed and Patricia cool and untouchable. She will never break, not for this woman, and not for the next.
“So the non-insured price for your visit is one hundred and fifty dollars. We can take cash or credit.”
Patricia knows she has only one hundred dollars in cash with her, although there’s a little more at home. She didn’t bring more for this very reason—they can’t take it if she doesn’t have it. She knows that Randall has canceled all her cards because she’s tried multiple times to order groceries online for her and Brooklyn. And she knows that unless she pays right now, she can’t have her antibiotics.
“I can give you a hundred in cash,” she says pleasantly, holding out the crisp bill.
The receptionist shakes her head like she’s dealing with an idiot. “One fifty. You can split it between cash and card, if you need to.” She points to a pricing sheet on the wall, the laminated paper faded tan and crinkled up in the corners. “It’s all posted right there.”
“Well, I’m afraid this is all I have. You can take it or leave it.”
The receptionist stands. “Ma’am, you have to pay. That’s how it works. This isn’t a garage sale.” Her voice is raised, and another woman comes out from behind the prescription window, a bigger, older woman, crossing her arms over her broad chest, the enforcer.
Patricia raises her chin.
“How it works is I have this money, and I’m going to give it to you and walk out, and what you do with it after that is your own business.” Patricia places the hundred-dollar bill on the counter, nods as if to the queen, and saunters out the door. She’s halfway to her car before she hears the door fly open behind her. She doesn’t look back.
“Lady, you have to pay! You can’t just walk away!”
Patricia opens her door. “I can and am. You have my address. Bill me.”
Feet pound on the pavement behind her, and she slides into the seat, her leg groaning from the two wounds that are in the process of roaring back to life in a red-hot wash of pain and curious tingling. Before she can close her door, the receptionist catches it and wrenches it back open.
“Get out now. We’re calling the police.”
Patricia turns to look at her, and it feels like layers and layers of sediment fall off her, like she’s some vast creature rising from the seabed shedding years of sand and silt. Patty’s sneer curves her mouth, Patty’s rage fills her chest and runs down her arms and legs, and she pries the woman’s hand off her door and slaps her right across the face.
“Don’t you touch my car, you bitch!” she screeches with Patty’s old southern accent.
The receptionist stumbles back clutching her face, staring at Patricia like she’s gone insane.
She hasn’t, though. She’s just called up the part of her that’s a survivor, that’s a scrapper, that will fight tooth and nail to be free.