I am in a long room full of beds. Most of them are empty, except for a few men — one with a plastered leg up in a sling, another looking near dead against his pillow, another with a bandage round his forehead. That one whistles as Nurse Hannah walks by.
“Hush,” she says.
“But I’m in pain, Miss Hannah.”
“Don’t be a pest, Mr. Daniels.”
I don’t know how many hours and minutes pass before a tall man arrives with Hannah alongside him.
“Well, well, well. Mr. Martin. Awake for the first time.”
“I was awake before.”
“I’m sure it felt that way. Now, let’s have a look.”
The man’s hands go to my stomach, lifting the loose gown, peeling back the cloth tape. I raise my head to catch a glimpse, but Nurse Hannah sets a hand on my shoulder to hold me down. “It’s not good for you to engage those muscles, yet. You’ll be able to see it in a moment.”
I feel the air on my skin, a cool shock of pain.
“Now, this is more like it,” the doctor says. “Well done, Mr. Martin. We might actually be able to let you go someday.”
“How long have I been here?”
The doctor smiles. “About two weeks, I believe. Isn’t that right, Hannah?”
She flips a few pages on her clipboard. “Yes, Doctor, it’s been fifteen days.”
“Going into week three, then.” He turns to the nurse. “Let’s bring the man’s head up. See how he does with some elevation.”
Nurse Hannah turns a crank on the left side of my bed, and I see my wound for the first time. The stomach I see does not fit with the stomach I know to be my own. A great swollen line is down the center, midrib to pelvis, and I can’t make out the indention of the navel. It is lost in stitches and flesh. The skin seems puckered and weak, both red and yellow, something like decay, like a carcass, sour and putrid. This can’t be the look of healing.
I feel the doctor’s eyes on me. “We had to do some exploratory surgery to address the internal bleeding. And we had to open you up again when the infection got severe.”
Again?
“The blade that your assailant used wasn’t very sharp, you see. And wounds from dull instruments cause much more damage. This”—the doctor nods toward my stomach—“was more of a tear than a cut.” He seems pleased with his analysis. “It’s quite remarkable that you’ve recovered.”
“You’re very lucky,” Nurse Hannah adds, “to have such an accomplished doctor.”
I stare at the great mess my belly has become, at this mark I will surely carry forever.
“What about my leg?”
“Ah!” the doctor shouts. “The leg was nothing. It got infected, too, of course, but, hell — there’s only muscle and tendons in your thigh. Easy enough to stitch up.”
He pulls the sheets down, exposing my nakedness — the tube I haven’t felt yet that must drain my bladder — and points at a rough, thick line on my left leg. “The stitches just came out. That’ll heal nicely.”
It is a disgusting mark.
The doctor pulls the sheet back up. I wonder if he’s the same doctor who missed the ball in Jennings’s kidney.
“We’ll leave you up like this for a bit and get some real food into you. If it all holds, we’ll send you back to your cell day after tomorrow.” He turns to Hannah. “Easy foods.”
“I’ll bring some broth.”
It has been so long since I’ve eaten, even plain broth sounds delicious.
There are no voices in the room while she’s gone, the ticks and stutters of the building resounding loud and dogged, a great gray presence. Minutes pass, then my nurse returns with a steaming mug. I could weep at the sight of it, and still again at the warmth when I take it into my cupped hands.
Nurse Hannah smiles and leaves me to this joy.
I take a sip, and it is every bit as good as I want it to be. The second sip is, too, but halfway through the cup, pain starts in, red and barbed. It takes my breath, a great inward gust that must sound as though I’m drowning or suffocating. The broth wobbles in my hands, and try as I can to settle the mug, the hot liquid spills down my chest and wound. I am shouting and twisting, and I’ve pulled the needle from my arm in my panic.
“Nurse Hannah!” I scream with the last of my breath, the pain reaching its hands into my lungs. I can hear her running footsteps, and here she is — my girl. Hello, sweet thing. I see her, but everything is going gray round the edges, like the persistent sounds in the room. Her hair is gray and the skin of her face and hands; even her white uniform has dulled.
The doctor has returned, his voice mixing in. “To surgery. Get at the foot of the bed.”
There is movement and breeze, the swinging of doors.
“Prepping left arm, Doctor,” the nurse says. Something cool is at the inside of my elbow. “A poke,” she says, and I feel a new needle enter my arm, and that is all I’m left with. The voice, the cold, the needle, the gray.
CHAPTER 13
The lawyer Marie hired to represent Wilson was able to trace him to the intake facility at Kilby, but from there, he disappeared.
“Leased, you can be sure,” the lawyer said, “but to where, we just don’t know, ma’am.”
“How can they have no record of a man they convicted?”
“It’s not uncommon. I’m sorry.”
Marie believed he truly was.
Roscoe’s letters continued to arrive, as they had since he’d first left with Sheriff Eddings that evening in the midst of supper. Marie could taste the meal. She could hear the easy conversation. She could feel the closeness of him — his hand on her leg, an intimacy she’d allowed him to regain.
At first, Marie refused to read the letters, focusing instead on Wilson’s trial. But after Wilson’s conviction, she went back to the small stack in the top left drawer of her dresser, finding herself hungry for a man’s words.
She knew Roscoe had been convicted, too.
Dear Marie, he wrote. Where are you?
Even that was too much — too entitled, too expectant. She was wherever she wanted to be.
Do you know what’s happened to Wilson?
Yes. She knew.
These questions only angered her, only forced Roscoe further away. Even the voice she heard through the writing sounded whiny and pitiful and indulgent. That voice didn’t care what had happened to Wilson. It cared only about its own discomfort.
But then Roscoe described the small cell that held him in the Montgomery jail, and for possibly the first time Marie imagined him there. She saw him, Roscoe T Martin, sitting on a thin cot, the beard he’d grown in his time there, the rough shagginess of his hair. She knew he didn’t belong in this foreign place, no matter how much he deserved the punishment.
In the next letter, he described his trial. He talked about the State lawyer who’d represented him. He did a good job, Roscoe wrote, and Marie knew instinctively that the man hadn’t. He couldn’t have. He wasn’t equipped to do a good job. I’ve been convicted of manslaughter and larceny. They’re giving me twenty years, Marie. I’ll be gone a long time. Please let me hear from you.
It had already been months since he’d written those words, half a year almost.
The rest of his letters came from Kilby Prison. The same intake process that had lost Wilson had held Roscoe tight. Her anger rose again. Why did Roscoe deserve to stay? She’d read the newspaper articles about the facility when it opened — a new penitentiary designed for true rehabilitation with its own livestock and farms, shirt factory and mill. We have a library. The librarian is an interesting fellow named Ryan Rash. I’m glad for the books, but there are less than in your father’s library, and Rash doesn’t stock any Faraday.