24. Sienna
SIENNA
It was Cormac who stitched me.
I'd assumed it would be Tiernan. Tiernan was the one who fed people and fussed over people and had, in the days since I came, appointed himself the keeper of whether I slept and ate and stopped bleeding.
But Tiernan was downstairs with Ronan and the steel box and three phones going at once, running down whatever a family like this runs down after four men try to kill you in daylight and one of them succeeds at part of it.
And Cormac, it turned out, was the one who did the bodies. Living ones. The patching.
"Sit," he said, in the kitchen at two in the morning, pointing at a chair under the good light.
I sat.
He'd laid it all out already on a clean towel before I came down, because of course he had.
Saline, suture kit, the good thread, the lidocaine, scissors, gauze, everything squared off at right angles like the gun parts I'd watched him fuss over the day before.
The man organized violence and its aftermath with the same flat care.
I found I didn't hate it. After years of patching myself in gas station bathrooms with whatever I had, there was something I didn't have a word for in watching someone lay out the right tools to put me back together.
"It needs stitches," he said. "Eight, maybe ten. The lidocaine'll sting going in and then you won't feel the rest." He checked my face, flat. "Or you take nothing and you feel all of it. Some people want to feel it. I won't talk you out of either."
"Numb it," I said. "I've felt enough of my own blood for one lifetime."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth that on another man would have been the ghost of a smile and on Cormac was just a fact passing through. He nodded and got to work.
He was good. Better than good. He cleaned the cut with a thoroughness that should have hurt more than it did, and his hands were steady, certain, and completely without hesitation.
I sat in the two a.m. quiet of a strange kitchen and let a dangerous man hold my arm under a lamp, and I thought about how strange it was that this felt safer than anything had in longer than I could remember.
He didn't talk while he worked, which I'd stopped expecting him to. Cormac spent words the way he spent everything, only when the thing would fall down without them. The rest of the time he was quiet and total, taking up exactly as much room as the task in front of him needed and not an inch more.
So the quiet didn't bother me. What bothered me was the other thing.
It reached me before I had a name for it, the way the wrong street in Galway had.
His hands were clinical. Every motion was the motion the work required and not one degree more.
But somewhere around the fourth stitch, the air in the kitchen changed temperature.
It wasn't the radiator and it wasn't me.
When I let myself actually look at him, I caught it.
The thing he worked so hard to keep out of his hands had gone somewhere else instead.
It had gone into how still he'd become. Into the fact that he was breathing carefully.
Into the half second too long his fingers rested against the inside of my wrist when he turned my arm to the light, the same half second I'd felt the morning before, when he set the strap to my ribs and pretended he hadn't.
Oh, I thought. There it is again.
I should have said nothing. Fifteen years of saying nothing kept me alive. But I was wrung out and stitched up, and a man had died that afternoon with my thumb in his eye. I was tired of being the only one in every room who knew exactly what was happening and pretended she didn't.
"You can stop holding your breath," I said. "I'm not going to break."
His hands went still on my arm.
He didn't look up. He stayed exactly where he was, bent over my forearm with the thread in his fingers, and the stillness changed quality, went from the stillness of a man concentrating to the stillness of a man standing at the edge of something he'd spent his whole life not stepping off.
Then he looked up, and I wished he hadn't, because Cormac with the door open was not a thing I was ready for. His eyes were dark, so dark the lamp found no color in them at all, the kind that took everything in and handed nothing back. Up close, for once, they were handing something back anyway.
"I've done this a hundred times," he said.
Quiet. Flat. The voice he used when the words were load-bearing.
"Stitched men up. Worse than this. I've had my hands inside people, Sienna.
I've held a man's life in them, literally, and kept my pulse under sixty doing it.
" His thumb moved once against the inside of my wrist, where he could feel exactly what my pulse was doing, which was not staying under anything.
"Steady hands. It's the only thing I've ever been reliably good at.
Stillness. Not feeling the thing while I do the thing. "
"Cormac."
"Today there was a knife in your arm." He said it with no weight on it at all, which was what made it terrible, the flatness laid over the top of the thing underneath.
"And I stopped being able to think. First time in twenty years.
Ronan called the burn and I had the car moving before my brain caught up, because some part of me had already worked out that whatever happened on that street, you were coming off it alive, and everything else, the records, the plan, the three of us, was negotiable.
" He set the thread down. "Nothing's negotiable for me.
That's the whole job. That's what I am. And then there was you, and suddenly everything was. "
The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere below us a phone rang and stopped.
"That's not a thing I get to have," he said.
"Do you understand? A man who feels what I felt today gets people killed.
Gets you killed. The steadiness is the only reason any of you are still breathing, and you're the one thing in the world that takes it from me.
" He looked at my wrist, at his own thumb still resting against my pulse like he'd forgotten it was his to move. "So no. Whatever this is. I can't."
He took his hand back.
And the worst part, the part I'd think about for a long time after, was that he finished the stitches.
He picked the thread back up and his hands came back to dead steady, like he'd reached inside himself and switched something off at the wall.
He closed the last four sutures clean and even and perfect, and the only sign that any of it had happened was that he didn't look at my face again, not once, the whole rest of the time his hands were on me.
He dressed the wound. He squared the gauze. He gathered the tools back onto the towel at their right angles.
"Keep it dry two days," he said to my arm. "I'll change the dressing." He stood. "Tiernan left soup on the hob. Eat it or he'll sulk."
And then he was gone, out of the kitchen and up the back stairs, the way he came into and out of every room, like he'd never been there at all. I sat alone under the good light with ten perfect stitches in my arm and my pulse still going hard for no reason a doctor would write down.
You are the one thing in the world that takes it from me.
I pressed my good hand flat against the table the way I'd pressed it against the road map that morning.
The one ordinary thing. The anchor. I made myself go still and catalogue the room instead, the way Cormac would.
One door. One window. Ten stitches. A pulse that would slow when it was ready and not before.
It didn't work, particularly.
Because there's no un-knowing a thing once it's been shown and taken back.
I'd spent a week and more reading Cormac the way I read everyone, building the picture out of the pieces, and the picture I'd built was of a wall.
A man who'd made himself into a thing with no soft place on it, on purpose, and meant it, and I'd respected the meaning of it the way I respected a locked door.
I hadn't known there was a room behind the door.
Now I did. He'd opened it himself, for ninety seconds under a kitchen lamp, shown me the whole of what was kept in there, and shut it in my face while his hands stayed dead level on my arm.
That was the part I couldn't set down. Not that he wanted me.
I'd known that since the strap and the half second at my ribs.
It was that he could want me that much and still choose the wall, and do it without his pulse breaking sixty, and call it keeping me alive.
I had been loved carefully before, from a safe distance, by people who mistook the distance for the love.
My father, mostly. It turned out I had a whole history of being kept alive by men who would not let me close enough to be kept anything else.
And I'd made my peace with it, or believed I had, the way I'd made my peace with never being safe.
A person learns to want less. Gets good at it, even, until wanting less starts to feel like not wanting at all, which is its own kind of quiet, and I'd lived in that quiet so long I'd taken it for peace.
Cormac's ninety seconds had just shown me it wasn't peace.
It was a held breath. And I was so tired of holding it.
I'd come to this country to read a dead man's numbers and find the name of the person who burned my family, and I'd told three of the most dangerous men in Ireland not to lose their heads, and I'd meant it.
Keep it clean. Read the numbers. Don't let it eat your whole life. My father practically wrote it down.
Nobody said anything about this.
He'd built me a plan without ever knowing it was a plan, my father.
Keep it clean. Read the numbers. Trust nobody who grieves too loud.
Every rule I owned for staying alive he'd handed me before I was old enough to know I'd need them, and not one of them touched the specific problem of a house with three men in it and a want I hadn't authorized and couldn't shoot my way clear of.
My mother had touched it. That was the difference between the two of them, the one I was only starting to feel the shape of.
My father taught me how to survive a thing.
My mother built me somewhere to land after.
And the landing was the part that frightened me, because I could do the surviving in my sleep, and I had no idea in the world how to do the other.
I ate the soup. It was good. Tiernan would have been insufferable about it.
Then I went up. The house made its night sounds around me, the ones I'd learned by now, the tick of the dying heat, the sea working the rocks below the window, Ronan's tread somewhere far off, awake as he always was.
My arm throbbed on its own schedule, ten neat stitches pulling when I moved wrong, a clean pain, an honest one.
I could live with pain. Pain I understood.
What I didn't understand was the other thing, the one with no dressing to square and no numbers to read.
I sat on the edge of a bed too big for one careful woman and touched the tape he'd smoothed down flat, and I thought about the ninety seconds his hands had shaken without shaking, the tremor he'd forced somewhere other than his fingers because his fingers weren't permitted it.
I hated, with a precision that surprised me, what it must have cost him to close those last four stitches clean and even while telling me he couldn't.
And somewhere down the hall, a door I hadn't known was open closed again, soft and final. I lay awake a long time that night doing the one thing I was worst at in the entire world, which was wanting something I'd been told I couldn't have.