I spent four hours fighting to save my biker husband's life after he was shot, only for him to wake up and call out another woman's name. "Prez is awake." I turned back to Colter. His eyelids were moving. His fingers twitched in mine. "Colter," I said. "Honey. It's me. You're okay. You're at the chapel. You're okay." His eyes opened. They passed over my face. They didn't stop. They found the doorway. His hand came out of mine. He lifted it, slow and shaking, toward the door, past my shoulder, past my face, reaching. And he said it. "Kaylee." The whole room tilted. I could feel it, a dozen people holding their breath at once. Kaylee. The girl I pulled out of a wreck. The girl I stitched back together. The girl I gave a job behind my husband's bar. The girl who recently wore the same perfume as my husband. For an instant, everything made sense. ———————— Word travels in a club the way water travels through a cracked basement. You don't see it moving. You just look down one morning and your feet are wet. By six-thirty, the chapel was full. I heard them before I saw them. Boots on the old plank floor, a cooler being set down, somebody shushing somebody else. Gage Langley came in still in his trucker's jacket, straight off a run from Atlanta. Renee Hargrove came in with a box of Hardee's biscuits and her eyes already red. Brothers I hadn't seen in months, guys who'd moved to Knoxville or Asheville, guys who only came around for funerals and the Fourth of July. Twenty, then thirty. They filled the pews the club had built back after the fire, and they sat there in the dawn light like it was Sunday, waiting for news. Breaker went out and told them. I heard his voice through the door, rough and tired. "She got him. He's gonna make it. Doc got him." And then a sound I'd never heard in that building, not even when my daddy preached: thirty bikers clapping in a church. I didn't go out. I stayed by the table. I wasn't going to leave him until he woke up and I could look in his eyes and see that he was home in there. One by one, they started drifting back to the vestry door to look. Tank. Breaker. Gage. Renee, who came all the way in and put her hand flat on my back and left it there a minute without saying a word. Kip, who'd finally stopped crying and was now just pale and hollow-eyed, sitting on an overturned bucket in the corner like a little boy at a hospital. By a quarter to seven, there were maybe a dozen people in that little stone room or crowded in the doorway, and the rest packed in behind them in the chapel, craning to see. That's how many witnesses there were. I've thought about that a lot. If he'd done it at three in the morning, with nobody there but me, I could have told myself it was the pain medicine. I could have folded it up and put it in a drawer and never taken it out again. I'm good at that. I'd been doing it all month. But God, or whoever runs things, decided I needed an audience. I heard the door at the far end of the chapel open and close. A little later, the crowd at the vestry door shifted, and somebody stepped aside for somebody, and I looked up. Kaylee was standing in the doorway. She had on a gray hooded sweatshirt and pajama pants with clouds on them, and sneakers with no socks. Her hair was in a knot on top of her head. Her face was blotchy from crying, and the scar on her left cheek stood out pink and clean against the red, my little row of stitches, healed so neat you'd have to stand close to see. I found out later that Kip had texted the bar's group chat at two in the morning. Torch is shot. Pray. That's how she knew. At the time, I just thought: well, of course she came. Everybody came. He's the Prez. She works for him. She didn't come in. She stood in the doorway with both hands pressed over her mouth. I turned back to Colter. His eyelids were moving. His fingers twitched in mine. "There he is," Tank said softly. "There he is." The whole room leaned in. I could feel it, a dozen people holding their breath at once. I leaned over him. I put my hand on his cheek, the way I've put it on his cheek for twenty-four years of marriage, on bad mornings and hangover mornings and the morning Hannah was born. "Colter," I said. "Honey. It's me. You're okay. You're at the chapel. You're okay." His eyes opened. They were cloudy at first, the way they always are coming up out of pain medicine. They wandered across the ceiling, the lamps, the IV bag. They passed over my face. They passed over my face. I want to be clear about that. They didn't stop. They went right past me like I was one more lamp in the room. They found the doorway. His hand came out of mine. I felt it go, the way you feel a fish slip off a hook. He lifted it, slow and shaking, toward the door, past my shoulder, past my face, reaching. And he said it. Not loud. Not slurred, either. Clear as a church bell, if the church still had a bell. "Kaylee." There's a kind of quiet that happens in a room when everybody in it understands something at the same time. I'd heard it before, twice. Once in the Knoxville ER, when a doctor came out to a waiting room full of family and didn't have to say a word. Once in that same chapel, the night it burned, when the roof came down and the whole crowd in the parking lot stopped screaming all at once. This was that quiet. Nobody moved. Breaker shut his eyes. Renee's hand came off my back. Gage looked at the floor. Somebody out in the pews, who couldn't see what had happened, whispered, "What'd he say?" and somebody else whispered, "Hush." In the doorway, Kaylee made a small sound, like she'd been punched in the stomach. Her face crumpled. She didn't run to him. She didn't run away. She just stood there in her cloud pajamas, crying, with my stitches on her face. And Colter, God help him, kept reaching for her. You'd think, in a moment like that, a woman would scream. Or faint. Or slap somebody. I've seen all three on television. I'll tell you what I did, because I've had a long time to be ashamed of it and a long time to be proud of it, and I still can't decide which. I finished the dressing. The tape on his side had come loose when he moved. I pressed it back down. I smoothed the gauze. I checked the drain to make sure it hadn't kinked. I checked the IV site. I looked at the bag and counted the drips and adjusted the little roller clamp a quarter turn. Because the patient comes first. The patient always comes first. That's the first thing they teach you and the last thing you forget. And while I was doing all that, my hands perfectly steady, my mind was doing something else. It was picking up every single thing I'd dropped in the wind that month and putting them back together, one at a time, like bone chips in a metal cup. The cologne. The face-down phone. The new code. The forty-dollar haircut. The private little smile at the dinner table. The long pale hair caught in the stitching of the patch on his back. Tink. Tink. Tink. I wrote his vitals on the chart. Pressure one-ten over seventy. Pulse ninety-two. My handwriting looked exactly like it always does. Then I straightened up and turned around to face the room. Twelve people stared at me, and thirty more behind them, and a girl in a doorway with my work on her face. "He needs rest," I said. My voice sounded like somebody else's. Calm. Nice. A nurse's voice. "Everybody out, please. Y'all go on home. He's going to be fine." They went. They went fast. Nobody looked at me as they passed. Kaylee was gone from the doorway before I'd even finished talking. When the room was empty, I stood by the table and looked down at my husband, who was asleep again, his hand still lying open on the sheet, palm up, toward the door. I'd held him together with my own two hands for four hours. And the first thing he did with his life when I gave it back to him was reach for her. ... The second time I woke up, it was full daylight, and Breaker Hargrove was sitting in my wife's chair. That was the first wrong thing. I knew it before I knew anything else. Before I knew where I was or why my whole right side felt like it had been packed with hot gravel. That chair was Jenna's. Every man in the club knew it. You don't sit in Doc's chair by the table. It's like sitting in the Prez's seat at church. "Where's Doc?" I said. My mouth was so dry it came out "Wurr's Dah." Breaker didn't answer right away. He held a cup of water with a straw to my mouth and let me sip. Then he set it down on the instrument tray, very careful, like it was made of glass. "Out in the chapel," he said. "Doing what?" "Sitting." I tried to turn my head to see the door and the whole room tilted. Breaker put a hand on my chest and pushed me back down. Not rough. But not gentle, either. "Don't," he said. "You'll pull something. She put a lot of work into you." Then it came back. Not all at once. In pieces, the way the yard had come back in pieces in the truck. The orange lights at Stroud's. The crack. Tank's hands. The table, and Jenna's face over me under the lamp, and her voice saying hold still, honey, hold still. And then nothing, a long warm nothing, and then light again, a lot of people, a door, and a girl in the door in a gray sweatshirt. And my own voice. I lay there and looked at the ceiling of my father-in-law's church and felt my heart start to go faster than it should have. I could see it on the little clip on my finger. The number kept climbing. Ninety-eight. A hundred and four. A hundred and ten. Breaker saw it too. He didn't say anything. "How bad," I said. "How bad what." "Don't, Brody." He rubbed his face with both hands. He looked about a hundred years old. He'd been up all night holding a lamp over my guts, and he still had my blood dried in the creases of his knuckles. "Everybody heard," he said. "Everybody in the room. And everybody who wasn't in the room heard by eight o'clock. It's Saint Ember, Colter. My mama in Florida probably knows by now." "I was on morphine." "Uh huh." "I was. I was out of my head. I don't even know what I said." "You said her name," Breaker said. "You said it clear as day. You reached right past your wife's face, the woman who'd had her hands in your belly for four hours, and you said that little bartender's name." He stopped. "I don't know why I'm telling you. You were there." I closed my eyes. This is what I told myself, lying on that table. I'm telling you because I want you to see how a man like me thinks when he's caught. Not because it's any good. I told myself it was the drugs. Morphine does strange things. Everybody knows that. People say all kinds of crazy stuff coming out of surgery. I'd heard a story once about a guy in Kingsport who woke up from a knee operation calling his wife by his ex-wife's name, and everybody laughed about it at the barbecue that summer, and it was fine. I told myself Jenna was the most reasonable woman in the world. She'd seen men say worse on her table. She'd understand. She'd be mad, sure, she'd make me sleep in the den for a week, but she'd understand, because she always understood. That was her whole thing. That's what she was for. I told myself I'd end it with Kaylee. Today. As soon as I could stand up. I'd go over to the laundromat and tell her it was over, and I'd give her some money to get started somewhere, maybe the ocean, she'd always wanted the ocean. And I'd come home and it would all heal over like a cut. I told myself all that in about a minute and a half. It's amazing how fast you can build a house out of lies when you're scared enough. You don't even need nails. The vestry door creaked. I opened my eyes. It was Tank. He filled up the whole doorway, the way he does, still in his cut, still with my blood on his jeans. When he saw my eyes were open, his face did something. It started to light up, the way it does, and then it stopped, like somebody'd pulled a plug. "Lonnie," I said. He looked at me a long while. Then he turned around and walked out without a word. Tank Morrow has known me since we were fourteen. He's taken a beating for me in a bar in Johnson City and two weeks in county lockup for me in 2009 and never once complained. He's godfather to my daughter. And he walked out of that room like I was a stranger who'd parked in his spot. That's when I knew it was bad. Not when Breaker told me. When Tank said nothing. A few minutes later Jenna came in. She'd changed out of her bloody scrubs into clean ones, the light blue ones with the little teddy bears on the pocket that the kids at the elementary school always liked when she did flu shots. Her hair was washed and pulled back tight. Her face was perfectly calm. "How's your pain?" she said. "One to ten." "Doc." "One to ten, Colter." "Seven." She nodded and wrote it down. She checked the drain. She looked at the dressing and pressed gently around the edges with two fingers, watching my face for a flinch. She listened to my chest. She checked the IV and changed the bag. She did all of it the way she'd done it for a thousand men on that table. Fast and kind and perfect. She didn't touch my face. That was the other wrong thing. Every time I'd ever been hurt, every busted lip, every stitched-up knuckle, she'd finish with her palm on my cheek for a second. Like a signature. Like she was saying, done, you're mine, go on. She didn't do it. "Doc," I said. "About this morning. I was out of my head. It was the morphine talking." She looked at me then. Just for a second. Her eyes were very clear and very dry, and I didn't see anything in them I recognized. "I know exactly how much morphine I gave you," she said. "I wrote it down." Then she turned to Breaker and gave him a list, like a nurse giving discharge orders. Keep him on his back. Pain pills every six hours, not five, not four. Watch the drain, and if it turns bright red, call the ambulance and don't argue with him about it. No beer. No bike for six weeks. "Where are you going?" I said. She was already at the door. She stopped with her hand on the frame. She didn't turn around. "I have a patient to check on," she said. "Twenty-two stitches. Eight months ago. It's been a while since I looked at them." Then she was gone, and I heard her truck start in the gravel, and I lay there with my heart going a hundred and twenty on the little screen, while Breaker Hargrove sat in my wife's chair and didn't say one word.
Not enough history yet to show a trend.