Chapter 3 #2
I watched Jacobson’s hands as he continued, telling Jules exactly what he was doing.
They were steady and precise as he flushed out the dirt and debris with methodical care, working from the edges in, not rushing.
He disinfected the tweezers, then used them to pick some leftover debris from the wound, flushing it again.
These were the same hands from the grocery store, but they were different here, operating in their truest capacity.
This was what those hands were for. Not handshakes. Not touches. This.
“Hand me the gauze?” Jacobson asked me, and I passed it over.
Our fingers didn’t touch, but the space between them was small enough to feel warm.
He dabbed the wound dry, Jules making little whimpers. The boy took it like a trooper.
“Ointment?”
I’d handed it before Jacobson had even finished saying the word.
Kace had gone quiet. He’d moved from the doorway to his brother, and the manic energy had drained out of him like someone had pulled a plug.
What was left was a boy who looked younger than fourteen.
His eyes were fixed on Jules’s face, not the wound, and his hand had found Jules’s shoulder. Kace looked paler than Jules.
“Hey,” I said. My voice came out rough, so I cleared my throat. “He’s gonna be fine. Your dad knows what he’s doing.”
Kace looked at me. Dark eyes, wide, searching. Then he nodded. His shoulders dropped half an inch.
I hadn’t planned to say it. Hadn’t planned to say anything. But the boy was scared, and I’d spent years talking soldiers through worse. The words had come from a place I thought I’d sealed shut.
Jacobson’s hands paused for a fraction of a second. He didn’t look up, but his jaw shifted—a swallow, maybe, or something else—and then he went back to work.
He closed the wound with butterfly strips. Neat, even, precise. He applied more antibiotic ointment, then dressed it with clean gauze and wrapped it with the ACE bandage from my kit, tight enough to hold but not restrict circulation. Textbook wound care.
“No weight on it today,” Jacobson told Jules. “We’ll get X-rays tomorrow to rule out any bone involvement, but I’m fairly confident it’s just soft tissue. You’re going to have an impressive scar.”
“Cool,” Jules said weakly. “Always wanted one.”
“You’re so brave,” Kace said, deadpan. “A true warrior. I’ll write ballads.”
“Please don’t.”
“Epic ballads. With a lute.”
“You don’t own a lute.”
“I’ll learn. For you.”
Jules closed his eyes. But the corner of his mouth twitched and some of the gray left his face.
Jacobson sat back on his heels and rolled his shoulders. “There, all done.”
He rose and took off the gloves, throwing them in the trash can. “Do I need to…?” He pointed at the gauze he’d used to clean and dry the wound.
I shook my head. “I’ll take care of it.”
And for the first time since he’d come through my door, he looked around.
I watched him take in the hand-hewn beams I’d sistered alongside the originals, the kitchen cabinets I’d built from reclaimed cedar, the windows I’d reframed to let in the view of the valley.
The military-precise organization. The single coffee mug on the counter, washed and upside down on the drying rack.
The single chair at the table. The single hook by the door with a single jacket.
Everything for one.
His eyes came back to me, green and steady.
And there it was again, the thing I’d felt at Collins, the sensation of being read.
People usually looked at me with wariness or careful avoidance.
Jacobson looked at me the way I imagined he looked at an X-ray, searching for the fracture, the hidden damage, the thing that explained the pain.
But he didn’t ask. “Thank you, Macallister.”
“You’re welcome.” I hesitated, then added, “And it’s Mac.”
“Mac. I’ll replace what we used from your kit.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I will though.”
Something in the way he said it—matter-of-fact, not arguing, just informing me of how things were going to be—almost made me want to argue back. Almost.
I didn’t.
I helped Jules up instead. The boy was steadier now, the color coming back, but he couldn’t put weight on the leg without wincing.
I let him lean on me—his arm across my shoulders, his weight shifting against my side—and helped him out to the car while Jacobson walked ahead with the backpacks, unlocking the car and opening the door.
Jules was lighter than I expected. All bones and angles, none of the puppy roundness Boden had when he’d been ten. The last time I’d carried him, hoisting him onto my shoulders at a Fourth of July fair, his hands in my hair, his laugh so big it shook both of us.
I didn’t know what Boden weighed now. Didn’t know if he’d filled out, if he was tall, if he still laughed with his whole body.
I set Jules down in the back seat as carefully as I could manage with hands that were starting to shake for reasons that had nothing to do with exertion.
“Thanks,” Jules said to me, looking up from the back seat with those dark, watchful eyes. “Sorry for the mess. Hope I didn’t leave blood anywhere.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“The chair is probably dirty.”
“It’ll come off. No big deal.”
He nodded, then said, “Your place is really cool. The cabins and everything. You’re doing all that by yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s impressive.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, with a fourteen-year-old calling my work impressive.
A boy who was hurt, who’d just gotten his leg patched together with butterfly bandages.
A boy I’d known for twenty minutes, yet he was paying me a compliment with the guileless sincerity of someone who hadn’t learned to have an agenda yet.
So I nodded and stepped back to close the door.
Jacobson had loaded the backpacks. He came around to the driver’s side and stopped. The sun was behind him, lighting up his hair like a halo, which was a stupid thing to notice.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. I could see the words queuing—the questions, the offers, the instinct to reach out that burned on his lips. But he held it and only gave me a nod that managed to contain everything he wasn’t saying.
“Thank you, Mr. Heald,” Kace said, surprising me yet again by offering me his hand. “For your help.”
They were good kids, raised well. I shook his hand. “You’re welcome.”
Then Kace and his father got in the car and, with a last wave, drove away.
I stood at the edge of the campground until the sound of the engine dissolved into the trees. The gravel lot was empty again. The mountain was mine again. The silence resettled like dust after a disruption.
I went back inside. The house smelled different, like a tang of blood with a sharper sting of antiseptic, but also odors from bodies other than mine. Shampoo, a faint clean soap-smell that I was fairly certain belonged to Jacobson.
The chair had a little blood and some dirt on it.
It wasn’t much, and I cleaned it with a few sprays of the disinfecting kitchen cleaner and some paper towels, then did the same to the table and the kitchen counter.
I repacked the first-aid kit, mentally noting what would need to be replaced, and put it back in its place.
Then I stood in my kitchen with my hands jammed into the pockets of my cargo pants and no task left to perform. The silence that had been so comforting and steady now pressed on me.
In my head, I heard Kace. I’ll write ballads.
With a lute. The way they went at each other was relentless and merciless, but also underlaid with such obvious love.
The way Kace’s hand had found Jules’s shoulder without either of them looking.
The way Jules endured Kace’s jokes like one might the weather—with occasional complaints and zero expectation for it to actually stop.
I wondered if Boden had anyone like that. A friend, a brother, someone who’d sit next to him when he was hurting and make stupid jokes until the gray left his face. I hoped he did. I hoped Fay had given him the thing I couldn’t—the steady, daily, unglamorous presence of someone who showed up.
I sat down at the table, on the single chair.
My hands lay flat on the surface. They were shaking, and I let them because there was no one here to see it and no mission to steady them for.
Just me and the smell of other people fading from a room that wasn’t built for one, but had become that anyway.
Outside, a jay screamed. The creek ran. The silence came back, the way it always came back, filling the space like water filling a hole.
But it didn’t fit the same way. There were gaps now, places where the noise had been, where a boy’s weight had leaned against my shoulder, where two brothers had loved each other at full volume in my living room, where a father had been a dad and a doctor at the same time.
The silence poured in, but it couldn’t quite reach those places.
Like something had shifted in the foundation, a fraction of an inch, just enough that the walls didn’t meet the floor the way they used to.
For the first time in eighteen months, the silence wasn’t enough.
And I didn’t know what to do with that.