Chapter 8
Savannah
Ihear them before I see them.
The bikes pull up across the road and the sound of them fills the street.
I go to the window without thinking about it.
There's some kind of commotion at the diner, people moving fast, customers clustering near the building.
I can see four or five bikes pulled up on the curb and a group of men in cuts standing together with the particular stillness of people who are managing a situation.
I watch for a second longer than I should and then I step back from the window.
"Millie," I keep my voice even. "Can you make sure I'm not disturbed for half an hour? I need to finish the notes from this morning."
"Of course." Millie looks up from the reception desk. She's been with me since the second week and she is worth three of anyone else I could have hired. She’s quick and calm, constitutionally incapable of being flustered. "Anything else?"
"No, that's fine. Thank you."
I go into my office and close the door with a soft click. I lean against it and breathe through the emotions warring inside of me.
Three weeks I've been back. Three weeks of routes that avoid the garage, of clocking the bikes before they clock me, of managing the geometry of a small town.
All so that I won't turn a corner and walk straight into the one person I'm not ready to walk into.
I knew, eventually, it was going to stop working.
I just didn't want eventually to be today, in my own surgery, with my white coat on and Millie twelve feet away with nowhere to go.
I breathe in for four counts. Out for four counts. I'm a doctor. I've dealt with worse than this.
The front door opens with a bang.
"Where's the doctor? I need the doctor, now."
My whole body goes still.
I would know that voice anywhere. Ten years and it's still the same, the particular low register of it, the way it carries without him having to raise it. Except, right now, he has raised it and underneath the volume is something I've never once heard in Austin's voice before.
Fear.
"She's busy right now," Millie says, calm as anything.
"My boy’s been shot." Four words. That's all I hear.
I have my office door open before I've decided to open it.
"Down here," I call, and I'm already moving toward the treatment room, because there’s a child hurt and everything else is completely irrelevant.
Austin comes down the corridor with a boy in his arms, the boy's side dark with blood through a torn shirt. Austin sees me at the same moment I see him and his face does something I wasn't ready for. Not just recognition. There’s something cracked open and raw underneath it.
"Shit, Sav." His voice breaks slightly on my name. "Please. Save EJ. Please save my boy."
"In here." I hold the treatment room door, and he brings EJ in and lay him on the table and step back. I go straight to the boy. "Did you call the paramedics?"
"Of course I called the fucking paramedics, what do you take me for?"
"Austin." I don't look up from EJ. "If you want to stay in this room while I work, you stop shouting and you stop swearing. Those are the rules. You break them and you wait outside. Understood?"
A beat. "Understood."
I turn to the boy. He's maybe eight, nine, dark hair that's gone damp at his temples and eyes that are wide and frightened but steady. Trying to be brave. I know that look from a decade in the ER, kids deciding how scared they're allowed to be based on the adults around them.
"Hey," I say. "I'm Dr. Savannah. I'm just going to have a look at where you're hurt. Is that okay?"
He nods.
"Good man." I reach for the scissors. "I'm going to cut your top off so I can see properly. Your dad can buy you a new one."
The ghost of something moves across his face. Not quite a smile but the precursor to one. "He's going to be annoyed," he says.
"Tell him it was my fault." I cut the shirt away efficiently and get my first proper look at the wound.
Graze, left side, ribs. Bleeding steadily but not arterial, not deep.
He was lucky and I mean genuinely lucky, a few centimeters in any direction and this conversation goes differently.
I take an antiseptic wipe and start cleaning.
"This is going to sting. I'm not going to lie to you about that. "
"Okay," he says tightly.
"On a scale of one to ten, what's your pain right now?"
He thinks about this with the seriousness of someone who wants to give an accurate answer. "Six. Maybe seven when you touch it."
"That's a good assessment. You're doing well."
"What's that stuff you're putting on?"
"Antiseptic. It kills the bacteria in the wound, so you don't get an infection."
"What's bacteria?"
"Tiny organisms. Too small to see. They live everywhere, including on skin, and they can get into a wound and cause problems if you don't clean it properly."
He absorbs this. "So, like invisible enemies."
"Exactly like that."
"And the antiseptic kills them."
"Every single one."
He nods, satisfied. He watches everything I do with the focused attention of a child who wants to understand the process, not just survive it. When I reach for the local anesthetic he eyes the needle with the respect due to it, but he doesn't look away from it.
"I'm going to inject some numbing medication around the wound," I tell him. "It’ll sting for a second and then the area will go numb, and you won't feel the stitches going in."
"How many stitches?"
"Four. Maybe five."
He nods again. "Dad." His voice drops to something quieter. "I want to be tough, but I can't."
"You can hold my hand," Austin says, and he's at EJ's side before I can nod at him, one hand wrapped around his son's and the other brushing his hair back from his forehead with a gentleness I wasn't prepared for from those hands.
I give the injection. EJ's grip on Austin's hand tightens and he makes a sound through his nose that he clearly doesn't want to make, and then the medication takes hold and his whole body softens slightly with the absence of pain.
"Better?"
"Yeah." He exhales. "Yeah, that's better."
"Good. A few minutes and then I'll start the stitches. You won't feel them at all."
I keep my hands moving, preparing the suture kit, and I don't look at Austin. I'm aware of him the way you're aware of something warm in a cold room. This particular peripheral heat that I've been successfully not thinking about for ten years and which is now approximately three feet away from me.
I know without looking that he's watching me work. I know by the quality of the silence he's making.
"Are you going to be a doctor?" EJ asks me, out of nowhere.
I pause. "I already am one."
"I mean when you grow up." He looks at me with complete seriousness. "When you're older."
I hear Austin make a sound that he converts into a cough.
"This is my grown-up job," I tell EJ. "I went to school for a very long time to learn how to do it."
He thinks about this. "How long?"
"Six years of pre-med, then I went to medical school. And a few years of residency and working at a hospital after that."
His eyes go wide. "That's longer than I've been alive."
"It is."
"Did you like school?"
"Most of it. The parts where I got to learn things I didn't know yet. Does that make sense?"
"Yeah." He considers. "I like math. Dad says I'm good at it, but I think he just says that because he's my dad."
"Dads do that," I agree. "But sometimes they're also right."
I start the stitches. EJ watches my hands with the same focused attention, asking questions between each one.
What's the thread made of? Does it dissolve or do I have to take it out?
Is there a special needle for skin or just a normal one?
I answer all of them straight, no simplifying, no talking down to him, just the actual answers.
And he takes each one in and files it away with the diligence of a person who is storing information for later use.
"Do you like being a doctor?" he asks, while I'm on the third stitch.
"Yes."
"Even the bad parts?"
I think about that. "Not the bad parts themselves. But yes to what the bad parts teach you."
He thinks about this for a moment. "Dad says that about the club. That the hard parts make you better."
"Your dad is right about that."
I feel rather than see Austin's reaction to this. A slight shift. I don't look up.
"What made you want to be a doctor?" EJ asks.
"I watched someone do it when I was about your age and I thought, I want to be that person. Someone who helps."
"That's what the club does," he says simply. "Helps people."
I tie off the fourth stitch and reach for the fifth. "Yes," I say. "It is."
He's extraordinary. I notice this the way I notice things I didn't expect, involuntarily and with a kind of internal adjustment.
I glance up once and I see Austin looking at me.
Not at EJ. At me. His face is doing something complicated and careful, something that's been building quietly since he walked in the door. I look away before I can identify what it is because identifying it isn’t something I can afford to do in this room right now.
"All done," I say, tying off the last stitch. "You were excellent."
"Yeah?"
"Completely. Most adults are worse."
He looks at Austin with the expression of a child who has just been given information he intends to deploy. "Dad is bad at needles," he tells me.
"I'm going to need that information kept confidential," Austin says.
"It's in his notes now," I say, writing nothing. "Can't help you."
EJ almost smiles. His color is better and his breathing is steady. He's going to be completely fine and the relief of that lands in my chest as it always does when a patient comes back from the edge of something worse.
Austin's Prez comes through the door as I'm applying the dressing, along with Brick and two others I don't recognize.
"Is he okay, Sprog?"
"He's good," Austin says. "Thanks to the doctor," he says it with a tone in his voice I don't examine. "Sav, this is Razor. Our Prez."