Free Deathwatch - Final by Lisa Mannetti Page A

my throat were all for the summer night gone sour and her twin.
    Shortly after that, Regina came among us.

    - 16 -
     
     
     

    " I could send you to New York, Ruth. There's good surgeons there," I said. It was just past lunch and we were sitting side by side in the library; on the low table in front of us was a half empty coffee pot, the crusts from two sandwiches, an open surgical text. The photographs were obscure and cloudy, but the illustrations were crystal clear.
    "Will the New York specialists fix me up so that people will look me face on?" She stared at me, and I caught the wet glimmer of her good eye under her veil.
    "No," I shook my head. "But they can contour the shape of your jaw...." There was no real cosmetic skin repair in those days; we just grafted what we could from healthy tissue to cover injuries and wounds. "Give you areas of scar-free flesh...."
    "So, instead of looking like the rusty broken-through bottom of a blackened skillet--"
    "Ruth!" She was right, but it didn't stop my shock.
    "I'll be like something the tinker left too long on the fire and then tried to mend. Lots of copper-red seams and lumps."
    "They have more experience with this kind of thing than Andrew--"
    One of her hands had contracted, and she laid its shrunken monkey foot shape on my arm. "I don't want Andrew to do it--I want you to." She paused. "You say the infection's not healing the way it ought, that taking good skin," she touched her left buttock briefly, "will stop the endless oozing and weeping and dressings with picric acid."  Her lips stretched in a grimace I knew was a grin. "Stuart," she leaned in confidentially patting my knee, "you can't make me look any worse."
    She was wrong of course; and we both knew it. But I thought it brave of her to say so.

     
    ***

    It was while Ruth was under the anesthesia--the first time for skin graft, the second to remove the mortified flesh from the failed surgery--that Regina appeared.
    It was seven o'clock in the morning, and I'd just excised the first of the long rectangular strips I planned to use to cover Ruth's seared face and throat with healthy tissue. Andrew was working with me--I understood she wanted me to do the surgery--but I needed assistance.
    "I keep hearing the word flay banging away inside my head," he said, looking at me over the brim of his mask. His hands were unsteady, he looked hungover, but I thought he was sober.
    "Yes, it's like that," I sighed looking at the bloody furrow I'd just carved in Ruth's buttocks. I lifted the skin strip with the point of my surgical knife, and Andrew laid it onto a shallow metal tray filled with saline solution. I started cutting the next section, my mind focused on the details of the delicate operation; Andrew hissed, and I looked up, squinting into the comparative shadows of the room. Regina stood just inside the threshold, the door flapping wide behind her.
    "Here! What are you doing!" Andrew shouted.
    I'd stopped, the scalpel hung in mid-air, a rill of unchecked blood welled up in the pit of the wound then spilled over the white slope of Ruth's left hip.
    Was he seeing her? Shouting at me?
    "Doing here," I echoed in a strangled voice.
    "Taking care of unfinished business--same as you," Regina said.
    I felt my heart clench in a painful spasm, the blood ringing in my ears.
    "By the way, Andrew doesn't see me. I won't let him--not yet, anyway," she said. She moved towards the table, hands gripping the padded edge, peering down. "He's only reminded of me--a fleeting thought, a psychic whiff of....violets...."
    She trailed off, but I thought she might be about to say which one of the girls she was manipulating.
    "Ruth," she tsked under her breath. "Such an ugly state to be in." Her index finger rode the ruined mound of flesh, and she sucked at the reddened tip.
    "Stuart, she's bleeding!" Andrew shrieked at me.
    I started working fast, but my fingers were slipping in the gore. Nerve, keep your nerve, I shouted at myself inwardly,