Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  When the nurse woke her for a phone call later that evening, Sarah assumed it was the cop with some follow-up insinuations. In no mood to field them, she put on her best I’m-drugged-and-at-death’s-door voice as she took the handset and mumbled, “Hello.”

  Kate’s voice, however tinny through this cheap phone, nevertheless gave her sleepy brain a slap. “What the hell happened? And why the hell did I hear about it from Bob in the goddamn breakroom? No, don’t even bother! You don’t call, you don’t answer my messages…apparently, you don’t think I need to know when my baby sister has to have emergency friggin’ surgery!”

  “It’s not that ba—”

  “Don’t you dare tell me it’s not that bad!” Kate shouted, loudly enough to make static pop through the earpiece. “Do you think I’m stupid enough to talk to you before talking to the goddamn nurse? I know exactly how bad this is and…and you know what? Forget it. I don’t even know why I called. I’m getting in my car—”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “—and I’m driving right the hell to Kansas and if I can find one unbruised inch on your body, I’m punching it!”

  “Kate—”

  “Why haven’t you called? Exactly how long was I supposed to wait before you got around to that? The last thing I hear is how you got knocked around and then nothing for two weeks?! What the hell is wrong with you, Sarah? Didn’t they ever ask if there was someone they should call?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what? But nothing, that’s what! But more of your stubborn bullshit! No, go ahead, but I’m warning you, this had better be the best ‘but’ I’ve ever heard in my damn life or I’m coming down there, I swear to God!”

  “I didn’t want them to know I had a sister.”

  Silence, apart from Kate’s breathing.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “I got caught up at work and then…and then this happened. I was going to call as soon as I got home, I swear.” That sounded exactly as weak as it was and all she could manage to shore it up with was, “The doctor says I’m recovering nicely.”

  The sound of Kate throwing her keys noisily onto the kitchen table jangled over the line. “You’re giving me an ulcer. I can actually feel the ulcer happening. Do you have any idea what that feels like?”

  Sarah opened her mouth to say no, but that she had whole new levels of understanding on what a ruptured liver felt like…and wisely shut it again.

  “So.” More rustling and thumping on Kate’s end. “Any idea when you’re getting out?”

  “They haven’t said. A couple more weeks, I guess.”

  “Are you going home?”

  “Yes,” said Sarah, and only after her sister’s sharp sigh of relief and whispered, “Thank God!” did she realize that Kate hadn’t said, ‘Are you going home?’ but ‘Are you coming home?’ And that was very different. “To my home,” she amended timidly. “In Cottonwood.”

  Another silence, longer this time.

  “What’s it going to take?” Kate asked finally. “How bad does it have to get before you walk away?”

  “They need me.”

  “Godammit, I need you! We’re family, Sarah! I don’t care what you think you’re doing out there, you’re all I’ve got! Doesn’t that mean anything to you anymore?”

  The same argument, virtually word for word, that she’d used when Sarah was loading up the van to leave home, only now she didn’t have to add, “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re going to get hurt,” because she was already hurt.

  “The nurse is coming back,” Sarah said, even though the nurse was nowhere in sight. “I have to go.”

  “Fine. Call me when you get out. Oh, and I left, like, a hundred messages on your paz for when you get home. Just ignore them,” Kate added with one last twist of the familiar knife. “You will anyway.”

  Click. Dead air.

  Sarah hung up and put the phone on the rolling stand for the nurse to take away the next time she came through on her rounds. She turned off her light, but even with the help of the drugs in her IV line, she didn’t go to sleep for a long, long time.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The first day back at work felt like it was coming a month too soon, which was probably not too far from the truth. During her stay in the hospital, Sarah had found it weirdly comforting to think of her pain like a pregnancy—a solid, heavy, separate thing she carried in her belly, something she presently nurtured but which would not last forever—but it was no longer the worst pain. Now that she was on her feet and walking, the worst pain came just from breathing. The doctors had pulled her ribs into alignment with compression tape, but then they’d taken it off, saying they’d heal just fine on their own in six weeks or so, which fortuitously enough was the same deadline they’d given for her internal injuries to either start healing or get grossly infected. So here she was. After almost four weeks in the hospital, they gave her a box of bandages, some bottles of pills, a pat on the head and they sent her home.

  She had to call IBI for transportation. She waited in front of Sacred Heart’s modestly inspiring and not at all racist statue of an Indian brave kneeling in prayer before a vision of the Virgin Mary, resigned to the surety that it would be Piotr Lantz who came to pick her up, but no. It was just some guy in a white car with IBI painted on the side and, after asking how she felt and assuring her that “we’ve all been pulling for you,” he let her alone.

  She couldn’t go straight home. Having lost her security card on the night of her attack, she had to go immediately to the office and register for a new one. What had been at most a twenty-minute process the day of her orientation became, in her pain-hazed mind, hours of friendly hell.

  Everyone she knew (and a lot of people she didn’t) found an excuse to ‘just happen by’ while she sat in agony in the tiny room outside Human Resources waiting for them to find the guy who took pictures. They told her welcome back, which was nice of them. They told her she looked great, which was a bald-faced lie. Several people dropped hints that there would be a surprise party the following morning when she arrived for work. She appreciated the warning. Finally, the picture guy showed up and made her a new security card so she could go.

  She went home to the house that IBI had given her. There was a mess in the kitchen. She cleaned it up, washed out her fridge, shut the door. She found her briefcase where it had been kicked in the struggle and put it on the table, took her paz out and put it in the charging port. Its screen lit up right away, informing her that she had one hundred thirty-seven messages waiting, but they could wait a little longer. She got a garbage bag from under the sink and put Fagin in it. After so many days, the bugs and birds hadn’t left much. Just his collar, some fur, bones. She buried him in the corner of her yard with his favorite red rubber ball and cried.

  The following morning, she went to work, just like it was all over, like every step wasn’t killing her, like it wasn’t agony just to breathe. She called a driver to take her to the office where she was dutifully surprised and genuinely touched by the small party they threw to celebrate the fact that she’d survived Piotr Lantz’s attempt to murder her. There was a banner and balloons and cake and everything. Van Meyer stopped by in person to offer his grandfatherly concern for her good health and a swift recovery. She let him pet her hair and kissed his leathery cheek when he bent down in his stiff, courtly manner to offer it, and she smiled at Piotr when he offered her a slice of cake even though he dragged his finger through the frosting first, and when she threw up in the ladies room a few minutes later, she was pretty sure it was just the pain.

  After her party, over the shocked clucking of her coworkers, Sarah packed her briefcase and headed for Cottonwood. They told her she was being silly to push herself so hard so soon and they were probably right. She said she was fine and to prove it, she walked—sitting by herself on the monorail while people stared and whispered, then heaving her way up the stairs to the checkpoint, and finally enduring in strained good humor the feig
ned horror of the jackass guard.

  Through the checkpoint and down the road, Sarah walked with one hand pressed over her belly in a vain effort to keep the shock of her footsteps from jiggling anything tender. The alien hew and cry went out, warning everyone the enemy was here, but she didn’t bother looking for them as they ran along the rooftops and alleyways. She looked at nothing but her shoes, eating up one step at a time so she couldn’t see the whole length of the causeway stretching out like ten thousand miles of rust-colored torture. She thought only of the green vinyl chair at the end of the road and how good it would feel just to sit. She thought—

  A hard hand closed around her arm. She was roughly turned until she found herself staring up into Samaritan’s face. He did not stare back at her. That is, his eyes were squinted and crawling over her body, but they did not bother to meet her own eyes. His palps ground and snapped in ugly little spurts on each wet exhale.

  “I can’t take this from you today,” Sarah said dully. “Please just leave me alone, just once.”

  He straightened up, his hand dropping to her wrist and clamping tight as shackles. “My place,” he said curtly and spat black chaw into the street. “Right now.”

  “I said please!” Hopeless tears stung at her eyes and she knuckled them away, digging in her heels to keep from being dragged along behind him. “What do you want from me, damn it? What do you want?”

  “I want you to pick up your feet and walk, caseworker, or I’ll carry you. Either way, you’re mine and you’re coming with me.”

  He was serious.

  Yanking at him wasn’t working. Sarah fumbled out her paz, but before she could even threaten to call security, he took it away from her and stuffed it into his own skirt. She opened her mouth to scream. He grabbed her.

  Not around the waist, which would have been unimaginable agony, but by the only place worse: He grabbed her by the crotch, lifting her entirely off the ground and against his thorny side with her shoulder pressed in the crook of his arm and his free hand over her mouth, carrying her like a light-weight but especially awkward piece of luggage swiftly down the road to his trailer. She shrieked into his palm, kicking and beating at him with her case; he completely ignored her, marching her up onto his porch and inside, kicking the door shut behind him. Sweeping the table clean with one dexterous foot, he put her on it with a jarring thud.

  “Lie down,” he said, reaching out to snap on the lights. “This is going to hurt. Relax, do what I say and it’ll be over faster.”

  Cupping her aching stomach in both hands, Sarah brought up both legs and kicked him as hard as she could. He staggered, but didn’t fall and he was right back on her in the next second, pushing her flat before she could even sit up all the way. He ignored her struggles and her pleas, caught her thighs, and pulled her right to the edge of the table, then grabbed her collar and ripped her blouse open.

  Buttons popped and merrily rolled, and there she sat, naked to the waist. She hadn’t even worn a bra today. It hurt too much on her ribs. She yanked her arms up to cover herself and screamed.

  “Jesus Christ,” Samaritan said, staring at her. He put three clicks in ‘Christ’. Slowly, his antennae laid down flat along the top of his head. He began to breathe very hard. “All right, woman. All right. No more fucking around. Lie down.”

  She tried to dive off the table. He snatched her back and struggled with her, muffling her cries under one hand while fishing through the trailer’s shelves and cupboards with the other. Spitting and swearing, he knocked an old G.I. Joe lunchbox open and pulled out something long, shiny and smooth. “Relax!” he bellowed, forcing her inexorably down as he loomed over her. He raised the shiny cylinder in his hand and thumbed a button. It began to hum.

  The door exploded inward, two slats of plastiwood on either side of Sanford’s foot. He came in, shrilling furiously and then pulled up fast and said, “Jesus Christ!” He also put three clicks in ‘Christ,’ but he wasn’t staring at her. He was staring at the device in Samaritan’s hand.

  “I’ve been saving it,” Samaritan said brusquely. “If not for this, then what the fuck for?” And he yanked back the hanging flap of Sarah’s blouse, exposing her.

  Now Sanford looked at her, at the huge purple-and-green bruise that mottled her entire belly and chest, the swollen scars over her stomach now bleeding around her stitches, the ruined symmetry of her ribs. All the fight went out of him at once. He raised his hands; they hovered there. For a second, she thought he was going to wring them, just like T’aki.

  “And you owe me a new door, asshole,” Samaritan added, glaring at him. “Get over here and hold her down.”

  Sanford came to the table, his eyes moving over and around her until they finally came up to pierce hers. His hands slipped around her shoulders. She clutched his wrists, shaking her head in pleading disbelief, but let him lower her flat on Samaritan’s table.

  “See how easy that is when you’re not fighting? Now hold still.” Samaritan unfastened her loose cotton pants and pulled them down perhaps three inches. He intercepted the swift, upwards jerk of her legs with the hard bar of his arm, moved them firmly back down and peeled her panties away just enough to expose the rest of the damage. “Okay,” he said, after a moment. He said it very quietly. “Who did it?”

  “Piotr Lantz,” she said. “The guy I had my little talk with at the block party. The one who punched the ice.” She sucked a breath as Samaritan carefully and ruthlessly peeled back the medical tape and removed her bandages, completely missing Sanford’s low, furious hiss. “He was waiting for me after work.”

  “What did he use?”

  “His boot. Just his boot.”

  “It was enough, wasn’t it?” Samaritan ground his palps together, snapped them once, then moved up to feel along the cracked lie of her ribs. “Tell me something. These doctors who took care of you, did they do anything but put stickers and thread on you? At least tell me they chant and wave their hands at the sun, because superstitious stupidity I handle a whole lot better than sheer incompetence. What is this hole they cut in you?”

  “It’s where they fixed my liver. Please don’t touch it, it hurts so much!”

  “Oh yeah?” He went right back to her stomach, his fingers like a light breeze of pure death on her swollen skin. “I thought you said they fixed it. What’d they do?”

  “He…he stomped on me until…please, stop!…until my liver split and they…ungh, God, stop!…they had to cut the broken piece off—oh Sanford, make him stop!”

  “Make me stop, Sanford,” Samaritan said mildly, still probing.

  Sanford bent over her, filling her world with just his face, his eyes. “Hush, Sarah. Lie still. Let him work.”

  “So your liver split and their answer was to cut more of it off. That’s not fixing, woman, that’s vivisection! I can’t believe we let you people push us around!” He took a few breaths, then stroked gently around the sides of her belly, and finally came to where she could see him. He glared down at her, rubbing at his own throat, and finally said, “I’m going to give you something to fix you up. Problem is, I’ve got to put it in your belly and in your bones where they’re broken. It’s going to hurt a lot. I think we’re close enough to the gate that if you scream too much, someone might actually hear you, so hold still and keep quiet.” He looked at Sanford. “Hold her still and keep her quiet.”

  Sanford clicked, still looking into her eyes.

  Samaritan made an adjustment to his humming cylinder. The top shifted, became a long, thin probe or a needle. He put his hand on her side, pressing on her ribs to crack them a little further apart. That pain was bad. The pain of metal scraping into her bones as he inserted the tip of his device was worse. The pain as he dumped whatever was in the cylinder into her body was pure Hell.

  Sarah slapped both hands over her mouth and screamed. She wanted to think of it as burning inside, because burning had always been the worst pain she could ever imagine, but it wasn’t. It was beetles chewing her open
and lemon juice soaking into the wound. It was salt-encrusted picks stabbing into her, twisting, prying her insides out into open air. It was a welder’s torch drilling the blue tip of its flame into her, exposing and cauterizing in a never-ending crater that she could feel opening up inside her. There was no lying still for it, there was no being quiet. She shrieked into her palms and kicked in mad oblivion, bucking and thrashing as tears poured unnoticed from her eyes, unable to believe there could be so much pain in the whole world, right up until Samaritan leaned onto her kicking legs and shot the rest of the cylinder into her belly.

  Sarah threw herself violently forward, would have perhaps jackknifed straight up on the table, but Sanford’s hands stayed on her shoulders. He eased her down again as she struggled, pressed the cool plates of his head to her brow and chirred. She heard that, couldn’t believe she could hear it, couldn’t believe she could hear anything through this almighty infernal pain.

  “I hate to do this without gqu’nu,” she heard Samaritan say and thought she felt his hands on her thighs, pinning her down, maybe even petting her. “But even if I had some, who the hell knows what it would do to her?”

  “You can’t give her anything?”

  “I’ve got some heroin in the back.” Samaritan snorted. “No, I can’t. She’ll just have to wait it out.”

  Wait it out. Sarah groped up through the haze of her personal nightmare and found Sanford’s shoulders to clutch. He chirred at her, stroking her while the knives of her ribs twisted in deeper and deeper until suddenly they weren’t there anymore. It wasn’t gradual at all, but it wasn’t relief either, because as soon as that pain was gone, every nerve was ready to focus on her guts. She began to thrash again and both yang’ti leaned on her heavily, pinning her to the creaking table, while her stomach—for the past week swollen with a pain so great, she’d forgotten what it felt like not to hurt—became so wracked by it, she thought it would split…hoped it would, even, anything if only it would stop!