Chapter 5
Rue
I am falling for the undertaker, and I am keeping a list.
The list is in my notebook, on the page after Edwin's death note, written in the small neat handwriting I learned in nursing school and have never managed to outgrow.
The list is titled, in a moment of black humor I am not proud of, Reasons This Is A Bad Idea.
It contains, as of a Wednesday morning in the second week of November, the following items:
One. He is forty-six. I am twenty-eight. The math is the math.
Two. He has been a widower for fourteen years. He has not, by his own admission, wanted anyone in fourteen years. I am not a project. I do not want to be a project.
Three. I am human. He is not.
Four. I have known him for six weeks.
Five. He builds coffins for a living. He is going to build mine eventually.
The fifth item is the one I keep crossing out and then writing back in.
Crossing it out, because it is not actually a reason.
The dying need an undertaker. We will all, eventually, need one.
The fact that this particular undertaker is the man whose hand I want to hold is not, when I think about it clearly, an argument against him.
It is, if anything, an argument for him.
Writing it back in, because clear thinking has very little to do with the thing happening in my chest when I climb the upper path in the mornings.
The wood samples are still on my desk in the cottage.
He brought me the cherry medallion three days ago—a small, perfect thing the size of my palm, with the silhouette of a porch swing carved on its face and a thin loop of leather threaded through a hole at the top.
To wear, he said, in his careful unfussy way. Or to keep. Whichever you like.
I have been wearing it.
It sits against my breastbone, warm from my skin, and I have not taken it off in three days.
I am at the clinic when Wyatt's crisis comes.
It comes at three in the morning. Jo has been at the prospect's bedside since midnight—the fever has been climbing since yesterday afternoon, and the antibiotic she switched him to four days ago is not, after a brief promising window, working anymore.
The infection has gone deep. Jo is talking, in the low controlled voice she uses when she is making decisions she does not want to make, about amputation.
The amputation will not save him.
We both know this. Jo knows it. The infection is past the joint already. Taking the leg will buy him a day, maybe two. But Jo is a doctor, and Jo is going to do what doctors do, which is fight until there is nothing left to fight with.
Wyatt is unconscious.
I am holding his hand.
His hand is too hot. The wolf-heat has gone past warmth into fever, and his skin is dry the way it gets when a body has burned through its reserves of sweat.
His breathing is shallow. His pulse is fast and thready.
I am running cool cloths over his face and neck, and I am keeping his lips moist with a little water on a swab, and I am telling him very softly that he is doing fine, that we have him, that he is not alone.
He hears me. I do not know how I know this. I just know.
Jo comes back in at three-twenty.
"I am going to take the leg," she says.
I look at her.
She is exhausted. She has been working on Wyatt for three weeks. Her braids are coming loose. Her glasses are smudged. Her hands, when she sets them on the rail of the bed, have a small tremor I have never seen in her before.
"Jo."
"I know what you are going to say."
"Then I will not say it."
She looks at me.
"Is it going to save him, Rue?"
I do not lie to her. I have never lied to her, and I am not going to start tonight.
"No," I say. "But it might let him wake up. It might let him have a clear hour. The toxins from the leg are part of what is keeping him under."
She nods.
"Then I will take it."
She prepares. I prepare. We move Wyatt into the small surgical suite.
I scrub. I assist. Jo is good with a scalpel; she is faster and cleaner than the trauma surgeons I trained under, and I do not, after the first incision, have time to think about whether I should be present, because the work asks all of me.
I retract. I irrigate. I suction. I hand instruments. The surgery takes ninety minutes.
When we are done, Wyatt is alive.
He is also, I see immediately, dying.
The blood pressure tells me. The respiration tells me. The color in his face, which is not the right color and is not going to become the right color, tells me. Jo has done the work. The work is not going to be enough. The infection has been in his blood for two days, and we are losing him.
Jo knows it too. I see it on her face. But she does not say it, because the family is in the waiting area, and the family does not yet know.
I clean Wyatt. I move him to the recovery bay. I sit beside him for the first hour after the surgery, holding his hand, monitoring everything that can be monitored. Jo goes out to talk to the family. When she comes back, her eyes are red.
"His mother wants you," she says.
I get up.
Wyatt's mother is a small fierce woman named Beth.
Wyatt is her only son. She has been at the clinic in shifts for three weeks, and she has held herself together with the kind of discipline that only the mothers of the chronically ill have.
She is sitting in a chair in the waiting room with her hands knotted in her lap and her eyes dry, and when I come out she stands up and looks at me and says, "How long? "
I take her hands.
"Hours, Beth. Maybe twelve. Probably less."
She nods. She does not crumple. She closes her eyes for a moment, takes one long breath, and opens them again.
"Can he hear me?"
"I think so. I cannot promise. But I will tell you everything I know about him as we go, and we will treat him as if he can hear."
She nods.
I bring her back. She sits beside her son and she takes his hand.
She begins to speak to him very softly in a language I do not understand—the old language, the pack language, the one Gallows used at Edwin's burial—and her voice is calm and her hand is steady and she is, I see, telling him that it is all right to go.
I leave them.
I leave the clinic.
I do not, exactly, know where I am going.
My feet take me. I am not crying yet. I am not, exactly, anything yet.
I am in the strange flat state I get into in the worst hours of this work, the state I will pay for later in three days of being unable to feel anything at all, the state that I have learned to manage by not making any decisions in it.
I am making a decision now.
I am walking up the hill.
The workshop window is dark. It is four-fifteen in the morning.
Thaddeus is asleep in his cabin, or so I assume—until I round the curve and see that the workshop is not dark, that there is a thin line of lamp light under the door, that he has been up all night doing what he does when something is coming.
I push the door open.
He is at the bench. He has a piece of pine across the sawhorses. He has just started—the first rough cuts, the dimensioning, the work that precedes the joinery.
He looks up.
He looks at me, and his face changes.
"Rue."
"He is dying. They are still pretending he might make it, but he is dying. Jo took the leg. It is not going to be enough. Beth is with him."
He sets down the chisel. He crosses the workshop. He takes my hands.
"How long?"
"Hours."
"What do you need?"
"I do not know."
He looks at me. The amber-dark eyes. The patience. The small still face that has held two hundred and thirty-eight deathwatches and has not, in any of them, gone cold.
"Sit down," he says.
I sit. He pours me water from a tin cup. I drink it. He goes to the small stove and puts the kettle on. I watch him do these small actions—measure the leaves, set the cup, wait for the kettle to come to a soft whistle, pour, stir—and I find that I can breathe again.
He brings me the tea. He sits across from me.
"Tell me about him," he says.
So I tell him about Wyatt. About the nineteen-year-old boy from a coal-camp town in West Virginia who came to the pack a year ago looking for a family, who liked country music and pulp novels and had a tattoo of his grandmother's name on his forearm and was, by everyone's account, a good kid who was going to be a good wolf.
I tell him about Beth, who I have been sitting with off and on for three weeks.
I tell him about the moment of decision in the surgical suite.
I tell him about the language Beth is speaking to her son now, the old language, the words that I do not need to understand to recognize as a mother letting her boy go.
Thaddeus listens.
When I am done, he says, "Has he been told?"
"He is unconscious."
"That is not what I asked."
I look at him.
"I do not think anyone has told him," I say. "I think we have all been pretending. The fight, the surgery, the antibiotic switch. We have all been pretending it could go a different way. He has not, since the accident, been told that he might not survive."
Thaddeus nods.
"Some of them need to be told," he says. "Some of them are waiting to be told. Once they hear it, they can let go. They are not given permission to let go."
"You have seen that."
"Many times."
I am quiet for a moment.
"I am going back," I say.
"I know."
"Will you—will you come?"
He looks at me.
He has never, to my knowledge, attended a deathbed before the death. He attends after. He prepares. He builds. He carries. He buries. The deathbed is mine and Jo's. The body is his.
But he says, without hesitation, "Yes."
We walk down the hill together in the dark. The stars are still out. The east is starting to gray. Bone Hollow is quiet around us in the way it is only quiet at this hour—the wolves not yet up, the children not yet stirring, the smoke from the night-banked fires the only motion in the air.
The clinic is bright.