Free Deathwatch - Final by Lisa Mannetti Page B

forcing the hemostat against the spurting vein. Acrid yellow sweat dripped from my temples, stung my eyes.
    "Clamp it, Andrew! Clamp it, I can't see!" I turned away from the table, quickly mopping my brow with a sterile swab.
    "How much did you drink last night?" she asked, coming close and sniffing the air around me. "Your eyes are bloodshot. You're not more than a binge away from becoming Andrew," she said, grinning up at me.
    "I won't let you destroy me," I hissed under my breath.
    "I won't have to," she said. "It's inside you, you'll do it to yourself." She laughed lightly, then turned shimmying toward the hallway, beige high heeled boots clicking on the bare floor, a tuft of frilled petticoat bubbling from the olive line of her hem like white froth foaming on the sea. She turned, and I was suddenly aware of her pale arms, the swell of her breasts at the wide neckline.
    I shut her out of my mind, went back to the table; Andrew had already staunched the bleeding and turned my patient over. The red swamp of Ruth's face lay under my shaking hands.  I was trying to force myself to concentrate, to think.
    "Ruth can hear me. Deep inside herself," Regina whispered from the doorway.
    I glanced up.
    "She's crying with it," Regina made a fist and struck her chest. "But her tears aren't enough." Regina shook her head. "She was a worm using my shame against me to burrow inside my daughters, to usurp my place, make them her own. What if I did hate the sight of them? Freaks squeezed from my body. ‘Poor Regina,’ they said. ‘Look what she gave birth to.’ Ask yourself how many mothers can look on monsters with love? Oh but Ruth loved them, did she? She is suffering, and I will make her suffer more." Her smile was a shark's grin. "I will see her dead, Doctor."
    Was it Abby or Ellie? I peered harder looking for a clue--the now-familiar habit Abby had of pushing her hair back from her damp forehead with the inside of her wrist; a slight sway in the walk, the psychic residue of Ellie's amputated limb.
    But she was already gone, the door vibrating in her wake, shutting her from my sight--but not my thudding heart.
    Andrew had prepared the graft site, and we laid the first strip, fat-side down along the length of Ruth's sunken cheek and jaw. My hands still trembling, my mind seething, I stitched as neatly as I could.
    It was long and messy and, with a sinking heart I knew-- less than half way through--it was a botched, miserable job.

    - 17 -
     
     
     

    S eptember first, a week after her surgery, the large black mortified patches on Ruth's cheeks, forehead and throat told the tale. The newly grafted skin was dying, it had to come off.
    "Now what?" she asked, lying groggily against the pillows. The faint odor of decay overlaid with bactericide clung to her.
    "Debridement--"
    "Meaning--"
    "Meaning, I have to scrape the rotting tissue, or there'll be an infection and it will kill you."
    "No anesthesia," she said wearily, her good eye hunting mine.
    "No," I said, getting up to pace the length of her bedside. "No. The pain--it's impossible." I paused looking at her directly. "It wouldn't be surgery, Ruth, it would be torture--"
    "Listen to me, Doctor Granville," she interrupted. "Every time she comes out, Regina gets stronger. We both know I can't hold her back if I'm unconscious. You shoot me full of morphine, or whatever drug will deaden the pain, and then you give me a local--or whatever you call it, and you operate."
    "Very few people can stand being awake and cut with the scalpel in such a personal delicate area," I said quietly. "It's the intimacy, our faces are us."
    "And what is my face now?"
    I couldn't answer that.
    "Regina can't have it all, Stuart," she said. "She can't keep winning. You shilly-shallied around and look, here it is September, and I'd hoped the girls would be off somewhere at school." Her voice trailed away.
    "I was taking care of you," I put in.
    She made a snorting noise. "You're like the Dutchboy runnin’