Chapter 21
HOSPITAL
The walls were white, sterile, meaningless. A hospital room, clinical, institutional. Ronnie was too weak to ask what had happened.
The bed bent like the letter N. The head of the bed was tilted up, the middle down, her knees pointed at the ceiling. She was folded up like an inchworm, trapped with pillows, on her back.
Reg brought her water, which she sipped through a straw. She had forgotten how much waking up from anesthesia sucked.
Nausea.
At least she was high on painkillers now.
Reg stroked her forehead while a nurse fiddled with one of her IVs. “There you are, Brum, all better. We thought we lost you. You bled out for a while. They took four liters of blood from your belly. We’re lucky you’re alive.”
He appeared and disappeared when she opened and closed her eyes. She wondered who he was talking to. She was clearly still asleep. He carried on like a man talking to himself. Maybe there were other people in the room, sitting where she couldn’t see.
A nurse came by to take her temperature. Ronnie shivered uncontrollably. Her skin was bloated, her belly especially. The pain in her abdomen was unreal.
Her body had changed shape while she was asleep. She had never thrown out her back before, but if she had, she imagined it would feel like this.
The room had a window. Light changed from one shade of cream to another, then passed through yellow and orange to blue.
Sleep eluded her. Nurses kept waking her up.
“Are you comfortable?”
No, I am not comfortable. I feel like I’m in labor with a demon that’s trying to claw its way out of me. She rubbed her ribs, which didn’t help, because some of them were cracked.
They gave her pills to swallow and clear liquids through an IV.
Absolute hell.
A whiteboard on the far wall said Thursday 16 April. A familiar man leaned over her, talking to her. Reg.
No, not Reg.
Mattie.
Ronnie furrowed her brow, confused. Her older brother only visited sometimes for Christmas, never during rugby union season. The Super Rugby round robin ran every weekend for twenty-one weeks. She couldn’t remember whether his team, the Hurricanes, were playing tomorrow.
Mattie put his arm around her shoulders. She rested her head on his hand and closed her eyes. Someone made comforting noises, adjusted the blankets over her legs.
Gas bubbled in her gut, then grabbed and twisted. She blew air out in short puffs between pursed lips until the worst of it passed. She rubbed her sore ribs.
Reg came in.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Like me the morning after my birthday.”
“Did she eat anything?”
“She’s been sleeping.”
“I’m awake.” She didn’t open her eyes. Reg was there. Mattie was there.
“How was the flight?” Reg asked him.
“Average.”
“How’s Luca?” Mattie’s two-year-old son who lived in Madrid with his mother.
“Brilliant. I’ll show you videos later.”
“How’s what’s her name? Talk to them much? Have you tried to get back together with her recently? How’s that going?”
“Is this a barbie or a sausage sizzle, because you’re grilling me, old man.”
She tuned them out and slept.
Her dad and brother waited in the hall while nurses removed her catheter, got her upright on the edge of the bed, then helped her shuffle to the bathroom with a pillow pressed to her incision. Walking felt dangerous. The room spun. Blood rushed out of her head.
The hospital had put her in the Maternity Ward, which might have been upsetting but wasn’t. The staff had removed everything for newborns that wasn’t screwed to a wall.
“I didn’t want it, anyway,” she said to no one in particular.
Nurses lifted her legs and arranged them on pillows, bent her knees, helped her lean forward while one of them put a pillow behind her back.
The nurses did not appear concerned that she clung to them and squeezed their arms when they eased her down.
They fussed with the pillows. She felt old, curled inwards on herself.
She understood why grandparents sat in reclining chairs all day.
She closed her eyes and focused on breathing.
She had a faint memory of gasping for air and mewling, begging Nev to stop the ambulance or something irrational like that.
Now as long as she lay still her back was quiet, but the gas pressure in her gut only went away when nurses manhandled her into moving.
Pick one. Drugs took the edge off, dulled the corners.
“Your old lady’s back,” Reg said.
She opened her eyes. Sunset outside. Nev sat on the hideous green couch by the window, overnight bag at her cowboy boots.
Oh wow... She came. Ronnie made an inarticulate sound that might have been a laugh, but wasn’t at all like that, then sighed. Relief blurred the room. She was too tired to care, couldn’t be bothered.
Reg looked relieved. He must have asked Nev to come. “They gave her something that helped with the gas. She’s been quiet for a few hours.”
Nev turned pink, which made her eyes blue. She had bags under her eyes and looked rough, but was too polite to do anything but sit and fondle her Akubra.
Ronnie tried to lift her arm, but it was heavy, and connected to the rest of her, so she gave it up as a bad job and panted for a while.
She had forgotten how much cracked ribs sucked.
It took a while to catch her breath. This ranked up there with the time she was hit by a car and left for dead between Bulloo Downs and Cunnamulla.
When her lungs worked again, she found she could project her voice to the hideous green couch by the window.
“Come here, baby.”
Awkward silence, ambient hospital noises growing louder as Reg, Mattie and Nev looked at each other.
Reg and Mattie both pointed to Nev. Embarrassment mottled the already-pink face.
For a moment it looked like she wouldn’t answer to ‘baby,’ but then she stood, reluctantly.
Nev approached the bed, hat in her hands, and stopped beyond the arm rail like a mourner at a wake.
Ronnie wanted a hug. “You look like shit. How many fallopian tubes does a guy have to lose to get a hug around here?”
Nev snorted. Ronnie saw the problem—Nev wasn’t as tall as Reg or Mattie, so the side rail of the bed was in the way.
“There’s a button to fold that down.”
Nev lowered the siderail before leaning over her, reaching around without touching her, careful not to rest any weight on her. She smelled nice.
Ronnie pulled Nev’s head down onto her shoulder, into the empty space on the pillow next to her left ear.
Nev’s face tickled the side of her neck. The older woman began to shake.
Ronnie stroked her hair. “Shh…”
Reg and Mattie stepped out into the hallway.
“I’m alive. You did a good job. It’s over. You did so good...”
Not many people knew that the owner of Upsend Downs was deathly afraid of blood.
After that, it wasn’t hard to wheedle Nev into pulling over a chair. Nev surprised her by offering to show her pictures from her recent trip to Rwanda, which was exactly the level of distraction she needed.
She studied each image like a clue, trying to guess where her friend had been standing and how she had been feeling when she took each photo.
A fishing boat in a brown river with lush green banks.
An old tree. “What kind of tree is that?”
“Oak. In the villages people met under a tree like that to hold Gacaca courts after 2002, to try their neighbors for crimes committed in ’94. They stopped last year. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something. They had to process a hundred and thirty thousand alleged perpetrators.”
“How often did they do that?”
“Every week.”
“That must have been exhausting.” And dangerous for the victims, Ronnie knew, who were afraid of facing reprisals from their neighbors if they testified or gave evidence.
Nev nodded. “They called it Reconciliation. It hasn’t been a total failure. It let them return to village life. Society heals. It never ends. They forgave their neighbors but can’t trust them. They’ll carry that fear. The body remembers fear.”
And guilt, Ronnie thought. “Will you take me someday? I could do a soccer camp for kids.” She reached for Nev’s free arm, found it, squeezed her hand. Nev’s hand was cold.
Nev ignored the touch, but didn’t move away. “Maybe someday. I need you to watch the farm.”
Ronnie looked down at her friend’s phone again. A church. Men with shovels standing behind a rectangular hole full of half-buried bones.
“They found that one recently. It had at least four hundred and fifty people buried in it.”
Ronnie swore. One murder is a tragedy, but a hundred is a statistic...
“You must have pictures you can’t publish.” It occurred to her that the photos in frames on Nev’s wall were only a fraction of her collection. Nev must have taken thousands of pictures before the UN forcibly evacuated westerners.
Nev raised her eyebrows, looked down at her phone. That was a yes.
“What did you do with them, the graphic ones, the ones you couldn’t publish?” Ronnie imagined sinister cardboard boxes in the attic at Stone House. Photos that Rainbow must never, ever see.
“Evidence of war crimes I gave to the UN, who probably tossed them in the bin.”
Ronnie’s chest hurt. “That’s hard.” She breathed shallowly. Nev’s cold hand felt nice, so she focused on that. “Were they all adults, or…?”
Nev looked at the window. Ronnie swore in her head. Nev had seen dead kids.
“No one wants to look at pictures of dead kids.”
“You’d be surprised. The people who want to probably shouldn’t, and the people who should probably won’t.”
She had so much respect for this woman that sometimes it amazed her—amazed her that a badass like that would be friends with her. What did Nev get from the relationship? What did Ronnie do for her that she couldn’t do for herself?
“Were you shooting on film back then?” Ronnie asked. “Did you keep the film?”
“Negatives? Yeah. You’re never going to see them.”
“It must be lonely, not being able to talk about it.”
Nev shrugged. She had captured evidence to give the dead a voice, ammunition for future prosecutors. When the Rwandan government released thousands of murderers and rapists back into the community, she must have been disappointed. Crushed. Betrayed. Neutrality in war zones must blow.
She tried to picture Nev as a bright-eyed twenty-something, hopeful and idealistic, with Joni Mitchell hair that looked soft and smelled nice, a ghost partially caught in the reflection on a bulletproof truck window in a paper portrait behind glass on the wall at Stone House, so many layers removed from the person holding her hand now.
Reg and Mattie returned smelling like cigarettes. Their low voices made her sleepy.
“Rainbow wants to visit,” Reg said.
Ronnie opened her eyes. The others were looking at their phones. Her hands were too swollen and numb. She swallowed saliva and listened to nurses debate whether it was time to try walking again. In the next room, a newborn cried and adults laughed.
“Do you want Rainbow to visit?” Reg asked.
Suddenly, it felt like someone had turned a hair dryer on her face.
She leaned back into the pillow and focused on breathing.
She was having some kind of blood pressure thing.
I can’t deal with her right now. She couldn’t manage a nine-year-old’s feelings when she could barely regulate her own. “I’ll see her at the house.”
“My house?” Reg asked. His eyes flicked from her to Nev, who remained silent.
“Of course your house. Where else?”
Black windows. Nighttime. Reg and Mattie took turns bending over the bed to kiss her on the forehead. Mattie hugged Nev, shrinking her down to child-size. “I’ll be back in the morning. Text me if anything changes.”
Ronnie lay with her eyes closed, waiting for sleep to swoop in and save her, carry her away from here. Machines beeped. Nurses crept around. Her friend lay facing the window on the couch that looked hard. She hoped her friend was asleep.