“Well, look at that,” Hurd said. “It’s beginning to hail.”
Clare hadn’t even noticed. He’d been thinking about his father at the station and not hugging him, about him going away to their house, and to where Aldine was, too. Clare would later try to remember the sequence of events as they then occurred but all he could remember was squinting through the windshield imagining Aldine holding on to his father in the barn when, at a turn in the road, he felt the metal cab sliding slantwise as he pulled the wheel gently and then too hard to the right, and felt in the great mass in which they were riding the strange uncorrectable momentum and, for a shorter moment than it would later seem, glided ahead in the sensation of detachment, and then hearing the slow crack, which was softer in his memory than he thought it must have been, given that the tree sank so deeply into the truck. And then? And then he didn’t know. He’d gone somewhere else.
77
Ellie knew the plan but couldn’t bear to picture it. Dr. Quigley intended to nail Clare’s leg back together as if he were a wooden marionette. Nurse Roover would hold the leg steady and Dr. Quigley would introduce the nail—that’s how he’d put it—and she would sit in the next room where she couldn’t hold Clare’s hand or see Clare’s face or, really, be Clare’s mother, which was what at this moment she wanted most to be.
“We’ll give him nitrous oxide first,” Dr. Quigley had told her. “Then we’ll introduce the nail.”
It had to be nailed because the neck of the femur was lacerated (at first Ellie thought he was saying Clare’s neck was broken, but he said no, he meant the neck of the femur, the slender curve of the thighbone) and they would need to secure it with something called a transfixion nail, a piece of metal three-sixteenths of an inch wide. He used his fingers to show how narrow that was, how minuscule, really, but she registered the fact that he didn’t show her the actual nail. He said he had used the method several times, that it was very effective, very safe, the only way to make sure that the edges of the bone stayed together. That was important, Dr. Quigley said, in order to avoid deformity. So that’s what we’re doing, she thought. Avoiding deformity.
A calendar hung on the wall before her, a hunting calendar featuring a wet spaniel mouthing a limp duck. Ellie studied the spaniel and the duck and the grid of days that represented the month of November. Hurd sat nearby, staring at the floor, his clothes dirty and wet, his fingers crusty with blood. He’d sat with Clare’s head in his lap in the backseat of a car driven by a stranger.
“My fault,” he said now to Ellie without looking up. “Not the boy’s, not anybody’s, just me.”
“No,” she said.
Hurd stood and walked heavily down the hall. Toward the bathroom, she supposed.
A woman’s voice from the inner room seemed to say, Oh good Lord.
Would a nurse say that? Say, Oh good Lord?
Dr. Quigley had thrown Miss Roover a look when she exclaimed at the damage. He’d flexed the knee, swabbed it with iodine, then drawn the skin upward. It was more than Roover normally saw, but the woman was a nurse for crying out loud, and the boy’s mother was just on the other side of the door. He made a short vertical incision, less than an inch but bisecting the greater trochanter and external condyle. He pushed the nail to the bone while Roover held the boy’s leg. “Steady,” he whispered and when he glanced up, he saw she had her eyes squeezed shut. He tapped the nail with his bone mallet until he felt it transfix the bone. There the skin had to be drawn upward—he had to cut it so the nail could pass through without piercing the skin. Piercing the skin would cause acute pain, he knew, the kind of pain Ellie would imagine in any case when she saw the nail projecting an inch on either side of Clare’s leg. That was the hard part, the mental acceptance of a nail driven through flesh and bone, making visible the grisly stuff you could normally hide beneath layers of plaster.
It mattered to him what she thought. He wanted to make sure she didn’t see the nail right away. He watched as Nurse Roover covered the wounds with dressing soaked in a solution of iodine and sterile saline. He’d asked her to prepare a dram of iodine, a pint of sterile saline. After the wet dressing, he fastened the spreader to the ends of the nail and showed the nurse how to wrap it with dry gauze and cotton, firmly but not so firmly that Clare couldn’t flex his knee. Ellie would have to do this after the first forty-eight hours—it was clear the Prices couldn’t afford to keep the boy in the hospital for six weeks of bed rest. Six weeks, at least. And every other day Ellie would have to change the dressings. But he could come by to help a bit with that.
Hurd dozed in his chair. Ellie studied the spaniel. She studied the duck. Through the door she heard tapping sounds, squeaks, metallic clicks, Dr. Quigley’s muffled voice. Each noise pricked at her mind, and she smelled what she thought was blood. Bits of debris and muddy footprints had dried on the waiting room floor, and the dirt made what was going on in the next room feel uncontrolled.
Finally the sounds from inside the room ceased, and a short while later Dr. Quigley came out. It went well, he said, looking from her to Hurd, who was straightening in his chair. Nurse Roover hurried past them, her wrinkled face pale, her hands wrapped in a towel, and went into the kitchen. Water ran. The hospital was really just a made-over house. Where they sat now, she guessed, had been a living room, the operating room was once a bedroom, and Nurse Roover was using the kitchen to wash the blood off.
“You should go home and come back in the morning,” Dr. Quigley said. He wore a pale pink shirt under his white coat, and his shoes were Mercurochrome brown. There were spatters of blood on the white coat. She appreciated his slightly mournful expression. He was not brusque the way Neva’s doctor in Kansas had been, and he’d been among the very first to patronize the café, and he loved her pie.
“I’d rather stay,” she said. “I won’t be able to sleep at home.”