Dettie’s operation had not gone as well as Sam’s, and she told him so. The next day, as he lay still limp in bed, his head cloudy, a peculiar gnawing pain in his jaw radiating through the medication, Aunt Dettie sat on the edge of his mattress, one hand cupping his knee, while she told him the whole of her story. Or at least, everything she remembered. She spoke slowly, her voice warm and measured, as if reading a fairytale. From the first pinch in her chest, to the searing down her arm; from the thunder and sway of the ambulance; through the stench of ammonia in the operating room; until she woke on the other side of the anaesthesia, bruised and sliced and nauseous, a burning sensation still eating down into her heart. Sam remained pinned in place, trying to nod when it seemed like Dettie wanted him to, thinking he saw the faintest smile creep into the corner of her mouth.
She’d been lucky, she said. Blessed. She’d fought her way through. All the way back through the haze to that cold operating room slab. And so had he. And together, she said, they would both be stronger than they had been before. ‘See, people break sometimes, Sammy,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘Like a toy, or a car, or a bone. Things come apart. But that’s not the end of them. They can be put back together. Fixed up. And you know what? Afterwards, those things are stronger, always, in the broken places.’
Perhaps she was right, he thought. Perhaps he would heal stronger. But he certainly didn’t feel stronger yet. What he felt instead was the tape tugging on the skin of his throat. He felt stitches underneath gauze pulling at his flesh. A hot, itchy throbbing. He could feel the other stitches that were still inside him, the ones that the doctor said would disappear over time. He already had the strange chalky taste of them dissolving at the back of his throat. That, and the taste of blood. And beneath all of it, beneath everything else, was a hollow he had never known before. The cold, empty ache of a place where his voice had once been.
Dettie told him her story again. And again. And once more. It became a ritual. Once every day for a week. She would stride through the doorway, kissing him the same way once when she arrived and again when she left. A loose wet smack on each side of his face, fingers sprawled behind his neck, her thumbs burrowing into his temples. In her handbag she would always have a new piece of cotton square to give him, cross-stitched, pulled tight and embedded with the scent of her tobacco. She had made them herself—rustic scenes, with Sam himself stitched into every square. A tiny rendition with overly-long arms and feet, stomping in bright country landscapes and yelling from the hills. Each time she pressed one into his hands she would tell him about the quilt she was going to sew them all into when he got home. In one design he was surrounded by birds and flying through the air, over clouds that Dettie had shaped to spell out his name.
But it was when his mother left them alone that she would inch closer, slightly hunched, stiff, clutching her handbag, to start telling her tale again. She would always begin with some new complaint about one of the other patients. Someone she felt wasn’t handling things the way she and Sam had done.
‘There’s a teenager in the next room,’ she whispered once. ‘Just had his appendix out. But the way he’s rolling around, making a fuss, you’d think he was shot through with a harpoon.’
Dettie seemed to regard Sam’s silence not as a disability over which he had no choice, but rather a sign of stoic resolve. She could not abide fuss—or ‘carry-on’, as she called it. And there seemed to be a lot of it being indulged by the nurses as far as she was concerned. She’d huff and wave the thought away.
‘Not like us,’ she’d say, and start in again. With the spasm. With the stopped heart. With the complications that arose even once she’d made it to the ‘safety’ of hospital. Her nodding solemnly at every detail, Sam peering out into the hallway, unable to make a fuss even if he’d wanted to, wondering where in that cavernous building his own operation had occurred.
‘And I didn’t see any lights, or any tunnels leading off into the whatever,’ she would say, shuffling even closer, petting his arm. ‘There were no angel’s choirs, or the face of Jesus staring out at me from an armchair. None of the things you’re told to expect. All those things they tell you to believe in. That’s not what’s waiting.’ She always paused. ‘Instead, there’s just the quiet. That’s what I felt.’ Her fingers would lace together, clenched tight. ‘Can you imagine what that’s like, Sammy? The quiet? The silence? When that rhythm thumping away at the back of your ears just stops? And you’re cold. Set adrift.’
Seven minutes later she lived again, two cracked ribs and a rope-shaped scar denting her chest where the doctors had massaged her back to life.
‘You see, it’s peaceful. Once you wander past all that fear and doubt and sadness. But that’s why you have to fight against it, Sammy.’ She would take his hand. ‘If ever you feel like slipping away, you have to hold on. Have to cling to the noise and the feeling. Because God’s out there, Sammy. He’s waiting to scoop you up. But not until you give in to him.’
Dettie was God-fearing. That was the term she used. She talked about a creator who had forgiveness and grace, but her eyes flashed with excitement at his wrathful, old-testament ways. The God who punished to purify. Who lumped suffering on people to prove they were strong enough to survive. She never seemed to quote anything, though. Not like the school scripture teachers did. For Dettie it was all just a truth that you felt in your spirit, one that kept you prepared.
Whenever she left, Sam would sink down into his pillow, feeling the tape around the bandages tugging at his throat. The sutures in his skin and the unseen deeper stitches pulled tight in his flesh, and he was unable to imagine getting stronger when he felt held together with string.