12. Non-Weight-Bearing
Chapter twelve
Non-Weight-Bearing
OWEN
The ceiling has too many holes in it.
I count them because counting is the only thing my brain can do. Little gray dots in white tile. Fluorescent hum. There's a bag dripping into my arm and my right leg feels like it belongs to a bigger, angrier man.
"There he is." Tater's voice, thick with sleep. "Sleeping Beauty."
I turn my head. It takes a while. He's folded sideways in the visitor chair like somebody dropped him there from a height, boots on the rail of my bed, ball cap over half his face.
"How long," I say. My mouth is sand.
"Surgery was four hours. You've been out since." He tips the cap back. "You want the good news or the hardware list?"
"Hardware."
"Rod down the tibia. Plate on the fibula. Screws." He counts on his fingers. "Doc said you set off metal detectors now. Congratulations, you're the robot leg guy."
"The good news?"
"You kept the leg." He says it easy, but his eyes aren't easy. His eyes have been in that chair all night. "Randy and Beto came by. Beto says you owe him a shirt. You bled on his good one."
"Tell Beto to bill the tree."
Tater laughs too loud for a hospital and doesn't apologize for it.
I try to sit up. The leg says no in a language my whole body understands. I lie back down and breathe through it, and that's when I see her.
Doorway. Scrubs. My flannel over them, sleeves rolled the way she rolled them that morning through the glass doors, five days and one lifetime ago. The one I left on the supply shelf. She kept it.
She's wearing yesterday's face. Hair coming loose. She's been here.
"You're awake," Nellie says.
"You're here."
"Somebody's got to keep County honest."
"Her shift at the General ended," Tater says helpfully, "yesterday."
She shoots him a look that could strip paint. He grins and studies the ceiling.
She comes in like it's rounds, checks the bag, checks the monitor, checks everything except my eyes. Then her fingers find my wrist.
The monitor's right behind her. She takes my pulse off my wrist anyway.
I keep still and let her.
"How's the pain," she says. "One to ten."
"Four."
"Firefighter four or human four?"
"Six."
"So, eight." She adjusts something on the pump. Her hand is steady now. It wasn't steady in the rain. I remember that much. I remember her voice going flat and calm while her hands shook, and I remember her jacket going red, and I remember don't leave.
Neither of us mentions the flannel she's wearing. Neither of us mentions the night. There's a lot of not-mentioning happening in this room, and Tater is watching it like a man at a tennis match.
The surgeon comes in before anybody has to break. Dr. Osei, County ortho, forearms like he does his own carpentry. He pulls up the films and talks at me in numbers.
"Rod's carrying the load, not the bone." Dr. Osei taps the film.
"Four weeks non-weight-bearing, then a boot, weight as tolerated.
Interior firefighting's a three-month conversation, not a one-month one.
" He says it to me. He watches Nellie while he says it, because she's the one nodding along in the right places.
"No stairs. No heroics. Somebody's got to keep an eye on the incision, manage meds, get him to follow-ups. He'll fight all three."
"He's right here," I say.
"He is," Osei agrees, "and he's the kind of patient who'll be up on that leg in six days telling everybody it's fine."
Nellie makes a sound that isn't a laugh but is related to one.
***
They discharge me the next afternoon, and that's when the war council convenes.
Debbie Sue has my duffel. She packed it herself out at the farmhouse, which means she's seen the dust sheets and the empty rooms, and I can tell by how gentle her voice has gone.
"So." She sets the duffel down in my hospital room like a gavel. "Where are we taking him?"
"Home," I say.
"Your home has fourteen stairs," Tater says. "I counted once. Drunk. Point stands."
"I'll sleep on the couch."
"Your couch has a sheet over it and a family of wasps in the wall behind it."
"Then the firehouse."
"Chief already said no. Something about liability and also about you being, quote, a mule with a haircut."
Debbie holds up fingers and starts folding them down. "Tater's on rotation. I've got the twins. Home health out of County is booked three weeks solid, I called twice and cried once, didn't work."
The room goes still.
Everybody looks at Nellie.
Not fast. Not obvious. Like sunflowers finding the light, one head at a time, until she's standing there in my flannel with three people staring at her and a fight breaking out on her face.
"No," she says.
Nobody argues. That's the genius of it. They wait.
"I'm a travel nurse. The whole point of me is that I don't"
"One floor," Debbie says. "The cottage. No stairs."
"I have a contract"
"Which you work three shifts a week, and I make the schedule."
"He doesn't want"
"He does," Tater says.
I open my mouth to defend myself and cannot locate one true word to do it with.
Nellie looks at me. First time she's looked straight at me since the doorway. Her jaw's set and her arms are crossed and she is losing an argument with herself right out loud where everybody can watch.
"I have the certifications," she says finally, to the room, in the voice she uses on Dwayne Pruitt. "The cottage is one floor. It's a wound-care problem, that's all it is."
"Your contract's up in eight weeks," Debbie says. Gentle. Like she's sorry to do the math out loud.
"I can count." Nellie's jaw sets harder. "I'll call the agency in the morning. Four-week extension. The floor's short and they know it. They'll approve it in a day."
Debbie's mouth falls open. She puts a hand flat on her own chest.
"Deborah Sue Monroe," she says, to nobody. "You just watched that woman renew."
"For the leg," Nellie says. "Don't make it a thing."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
I study the ceiling tiles like there's going to be a test. Because if I look at her right now, everybody in this room is going to know exactly what my face is doing, and I'm too doped to stop it.
Four weeks.
She doesn't stay. Anywhere. For anybody. She told me so with iced tea dripping off my lap.
"Stop smiling," Nellie says.
"I'm not."
I am.
Nellie points around the room. "And if any of you make one single comment—"
Debbie is already carrying my duffel to the elevator.
"One comment," Nellie says, louder, "I will let him do his own dressing changes and we'll see how that goes."
Tater has his phone out. "I'm not commenting. I'm texting."
"Tater Monroe"
"It's to my wife.”
“Who is standing right there.”
“It's efficient."
I lie in the bed with a rod in my leg and something loose behind my ribs, mortified all the way down, and underneath the mortified, so glad I could break something.
Thirteen weeks and gone. That's what she told me at the Willow Mug, like it was law. And she stood in a hospital room and rewrote it for a busted leg.
***
The cottage smells like coffee and rain got left in the walls.
Nellie sets me up in the bedroom because the couch is too low for the leg, and when I argue she says, "I sleep four hours a night in a chair anyway, sit down before you fall down," and that's the end of it.
She hangs my pill schedule on the fridge.
She puts a whiteboard on the kitchen wall and writes MEDS on it in block letters and underneath, smaller: DO NOT LET HIM NEGOTIATE.
"That's insulting," I say.
"That's triage."
She brings me water and the first round of pills and stands there until I take them, like I'm going to palm them, which I was considering.
"Anything hurts, you holler," she says. "Anything at all."
"I don't holler."
"Then anything hurts, you sit there and suffer quietly like a man, and I'll find out at two a.m. when your vitals go sideways." She flips the light. "Night, Peterson."
"Greer."
She stops in the doorway. Backlit. Still in my flannel.
I've got a sentence loaded. Thank you isn't big enough and everything bigger is too big, so what comes out is, "The whiteboard's insulting."
"Take it up with management." But she's smiling when she pulls the door to. I hear it in her voice.
The pills come on like weather. Slow, then all at once. The rain picks up again outside, soft on the roof, and I go down into the dark thinking that's a good sound, rain on a roof, nothing burning anywhere, nothing—
***
Smoke.
The tones drop and the rig is rolling and the radio is saying an address, saying it twice, and it's my address, it's my street, it's my building, and every man on the truck goes quiet and looks at me.
The third floor is orange. The stairs are gone.
Somebody's holding my coat, two men, three, and I'm screaming her name up into the smoke, I'm screaming
"Owen."
up into the black where the third floor used to be
"Owen. Hey. I've got you."
A hand. Cool, strong, wrapped around mine, and I come up out of the fire like a man breaking the surface of a lake, lungs first.
Lamplight. Rain on a roof. The cottage.
Nellie's perched on the edge of the bed in a t-shirt and sleep shorts, hair down, and her hand is in mine and my grip on it is white-knuckle hard. I make my fingers let go. They don't want to.
"You're all right," she says. Quiet. Nurse-quiet, the two a.m. voice. "You're in Willowbend. You're in my house. It's raining. That's all that's happening."
My chest is heaving like I climbed something.
The sheets are soaked through. I stare at the ceiling, this ceiling, no holes in it, and put myself back together one board at a time while she sits there and doesn't rush me, doesn't pet me, doesn't say it's okay, because she knows better than anybody that sometimes it isn't and saying so is a lie.
The rain fills up the quiet.
Then, very soft, very careful, like she's stepping onto a roof she isn't sure will hold:
"Owen. Who's Claire?"
Everything in me stops.
Because I didn't tell her that name. I have never said that name in this town.
Which means the fire didn't stay in the dream. It came up my throat while I was under, out loud, into her house, into her hands.
I've been saying it. Maybe all night.
Maybe every night.