Page 67 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“Okay.” I’m doing my best to stay calm, even though my brain is buzzing, and my tongue is thick in my mouth. I can’t pass out now, I tell myself. Where is my maternal fortitude? Isn’t it meant to kick in, in moments like these, a mother’s instinct for survival, for herchild’ssurvival?
Mattie comes back with the scarf, an old woolen one that my mother made, in bright green cable knit.
Kerry takes it and makes the tourniquet on Ruby’s upper arm, pulling it tightly and then bending her arm and bringing it close to her chest. Mattie has found an old sheet and is wrapping it around her arm to staunch the blood. I’m simply holding my daughter, willing her not to bleed out. We are all silent, unbearably tense, as the minutes tick by and Ruby bleeds bright red through the sheet.
“I think…I think it’s slowing down,” Mattie says in a low, trembling voice. Ruby lolls lifelessly, her face deathly pale, her eyes not even fluttering, but at least she’s breathing. She’s alive.
“Let’s carry her inside,” Kerry says. “Get her warmed up.”
Gently, as if we are holding a priceless treasure—and weare—we carry her into the cottage and lay her on the sofa. Kyle comes in from his room, clearly oblivious, then does a double take when he sees Ruby lying there, so pale and still.
“What…what happened?” he asks, looking almost as if he might cry.
“She fell into the greenhouse window,” I tell him. My lips feel numb, and my brain is still buzzing. The bleeding has slowed down, at least, but I have no idea what to do next, and there are no first aid books that I can find; this is where our sustainableliving bible lets us down. It doesn’t tell us what to do when things go so very wrong.
“She’ll need to be stitched,” Kerry states matter-of-factly. She looks at me as she says it.
“I…” If I couldn’t cut up a beaver, I certainly can’t stitch the gaping wound in my daughter’s arm. And yet who else is going to do it? I can’t let myself fail her. I won’t.
“I’ll help,” Kerry tells me, a promise. Her voice is steady and strong. “We’ll need needle and thread. We can sterilize the needle in white spirit, if we have any left.”
I think of the bottle we took from Kerry’s uncle’s garage, what feels like a lifetime ago. I didn’t know what it was used for. I could have never imagined this.
“I’ll get it,” Mattie says, and hurries off, while Kyle gazes down at Ruby, his face crumpled with worry.
“Is she going to be okay?”
“Yes, but we’ll need some more bandages,” Kerry tells him. “Can you cut a sheet into strips, Kyle?” He nods, and she turns back to me. “You can do this,” she says quietly. “I know you can.”
I nod mechanically. There’s no Trapper Kevin for this. “Okay,” I say. “Yes.” I can do this. I have to do this. Iwilldo it.
The next few minutes, or maybe even hours, pass in a dazed blur. Ruby stirs, moaning, and Kerry gives her a sip of brandy—also from her uncle’s house—in the hopes it will calm her, but she sputters and chokes.
Kyle ends up having to hold her shoulders down to keep her still while she passes in and out of consciousness, and Mattie hands me the sterilized needle and thread. I take it with numb fingers; my whole body feels both wired and weird. There is a distinct possibility I might pass out or throw up or even both.
“You know how to sew, right?” Kerry asks, and a wobbly sound escapes me.
“Sort of.” I’ve never been the craftiest of people; I think the last time I sewed a button was in seventh grade HomeEc.
Piercing my daughter’s flesh with a needle, I discover, is far worse than cutting open a beaver with a knife. The sight of her jagged wound, the oozing blood, the striated layers of muscles that are visible, is so much worse than the beaver’s body being cut into steak-sized pieces. I feel as if I’m hurting her, but even worse than that is the fear I won’t be able to save her. What if she loses too much blood? There are no transfusions out here. No antibiotics, no IV drips, no X-rays or doctors to tell me what to do.
Yet somehow, I do it. I feel disembodied, as if I’m watching myself from afar. The first time the needle goes through, Ruby moans and starts to writhe, and I falter.
“Keep going,” Kerry instructs me, holding my daughter’s shoulders still.
“You can do it, Mom,” Mattie whispers. Her face is almost as pale as Ruby’s.
And so, somehow, I do. The stitches are lumpy and uneven, probably just about the worst patch-up job that’s ever been done in the history of medicine, but they’re close enough that the whole thing holds together, just. I tie it off with a shaky bow—thirty-two lumpen stitches—as my breath escapes me in a shaky rush. Kerry wraps Ruby’s arm in the strips of sheet while I collapse back into a chair, my whole body shaking in the aftermath, fear coursing through me. Mattie gives me a quick, tight hug.
“Is she going to be okay?” she asks, her voice a desperate murmur against my shoulder.
“Yes, she’s going to be fine,” I tell my daughter. I know no such thing.
Kerry and I take turns staying up with Ruby all that night. Mostly she sleeps, and we’ve bandaged her arm in a makeshift sling to keep her from moving it too much and opening the wound.
Several hours before dawn, when the world is quiet and unrelentingly dark, the despair creeps in.
“I always knew something like this would happen,” I tell Kerry in a low voice. Ruby is sleeping on the sofa, and I’m sitting on the other one, aching with tiredness yet utterly awake. “It just takes one thing, one little thing, to send us all plunging off the cliff.”
