Page 53 of Queenslander
She lay on her side, knees bent.
Nearby in the clearing a radio played. The generator still roared.
“Help?”
Her hands and feet tingled. She would pass out soon.
Pressing her chest, she felt her heart drumming beneath her palm. Oxygen-starved lungs sucked air in and out.
Why can’t anything be easy?
Then it was dark and Nev was repeating that word like a mantra.
The generator had burned through its fuel and died. Sleep was close, a magnolia at night. She recognized it by the smell. It smelled like lanolin, the oil sheep secreted under their fleece.
She had the shakes, like after giving birth to Rainbow.
When she exhaled she bled sound, white noise. It felt good to vocalize, to push back against the darkness.
20
MATILDA-JANE
CAIRNS HOSPITAL
Morning in the trauma hospital in Cairns smelled like coffee, bleach, and formaldehyde. The last one was strange. Slouched in the stuffed chair, Nev ruminated on it over a paper cup of piss-weak coffee. Her underwear felt stiff, stuck to her legs and faded jeans. A burgundy stain like a cow’s kidney covered her lap from pocket to pocket.
She would have bet her last dime it was a ruptured spleen, but no. Reg had guessed appendix. They had both been wrong. An ectopic pregnancy lodged in a fallopian tube had burst like a frangible bullet. Last night the emergency laparotomy, open abdominal surgery, had taken over two hours. The surgeon said the salpingectomy, removal of the fallopian tube, had been “complicated” and “a success.”
Reg hadn’t met Nev’s eyes since nurses wheeled Ron away at sunrise for X-rays and an MRI of her spinal cord. Nev was less concerned on that front since she had felt Ron writhe around before the ambulance arrived, something quadriplegics generally don’t do. Nev was, however, worried she might havecracked some of Ron’s ribs doing chest compressions after Ron stopped breathing.
Nev was still shocked that it had worked.
After morning rounds, nurses moved Ron from the windowless post-surgical intensive care unit to a recovery room with a window. Ron lay drugged in the bed, tubes in and out, hooked up to machines, going nowhere fast. Pale and still, blue fingers and mouth, looked dead, but the dead don’t shiver.
Ron had a line between her brows in the middle of her forehead. Was that new? Nev couldn’t remember. She had a headache, needed a drink.
When Ron appeared to be snoring, Reg stepped out to make a call. That was when Nev oozed into the bedside chair like a guilty ghost, filling the void he had left.
She was careful not to disturb the other patients. She had been awake all night and was running on fumes. Adrenaline long gone. Stale sweat button-down shirt and dried blood jeans. That was the kind of person she was, she reckoned—she saved people by soaking up their blood like a sponge—that was her super power.
Of course, that was nonsense. That was the exhaustion talking. Ron’s wound had been on the inside. Nev couldn’t have stopped it. The blood on Nev’s jeans was period blood, miscarriage blood.
Nev wondered where the blood on the inside had gone. When the surgeon had vacuumed it out of Ron’s abdominal cavity, where had it gone? Was there a blood vacuum somewhere in the hospital with a blood vacuum bag in a closet somewhere? Did it clot, once exposed to air? Did it stink? Was that the sour formaldehyde scent she was smelling? The coagulating blood of all of these patients combined together?
Reg returned looking broken. His clothes were still immaculate. Green polo shirt and beige cargo shorts. Rolex watch and leather thongs. He sniffed. “Tilda-Jane is in the hall.”
“You call her?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have the heart to run her off.”
“I can,” Nev said, impulsively. It would be easy. If she could do what she did last night, she could do anything. God loved her.
Reg perked up. “Would you really?”
Nev nodded, stood. Reg squeezed her shoulder in thanks.
She opened the door.
