Chapter 8: Stitches

Wyatt's POV

By three in the morning the yard was full of strangers.

Signe had sent most of the Cliff Avenue cars to farms she named off the top of her head.

She gave the roads and the mailbox numbers, and the owners' first names, and the wells that ran deep.

Eleven cars had come to Tor's.

Tor had stood at the gate with his shotgun in the crook of his arm, counting masks and saying "Welcome" in the voice of a man giving a warning.

Now they slept on the floor of the Quonset shed, and I sat on a kitchen chair with my hand in a dish towel.

The towel had gone red.

"Open it," Signe said.

She stood over me with Tor's field medical bag, a blue one stenciled with ANG, and a lamp pulled close.

I unwrapped the towel, and we both looked.

The cut ran from the web of my thumb to the heel of my hand, clean and deep and wet.

"That's a mess," she said.

"I've had worse off a gate."

"You've had worse off a cow," she said.

"Same thing."

She pulled on gloves from the bag and washed the cut out with saline, and I watched her do it.

Her hands were quick and certain.

She had a small mole at the base of her left thumb, and there was a freckle on her wrist that I wanted to put my mouth on.

I didn't know where that thought had come from.

I looked at the kitchen calendar instead.

"Where'd you learn to do this?" I said.

"Eight years of talking people through it on the phone. You hold the edges, you pinch, you pray."

"You've done it for real?"

"Once," she said. "Not on you."

"Not on me," I said.

"Hold still, Brekke."

She threaded a curved needle, and her knee touched mine under the table.

Neither of us moved it.

The first stitch pulled, and the skin of my palm cupped up around the thread, and I felt it down to the root of my back teeth.

"Breathe," she said.

"I am."

"Not like that. Like a person."

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