Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“No,” Cayenne says. She takes her hand and holds it to her chest. “No. You can’t.”

Martin doesn’t appear to hear her.

“All right,” Turtle says.

Cayenne pushes herself back with her heels, scooting across the floorboards until she is against the wall. She holds the wounded hand to her chest. She says, “No. No. No. No. No. No. No.”

“Watch her,” he says to Turtle, and rises and walks away.

The girl is shaking all over. She says, “You’re not going to let him, are you?”

Turtle looks away, embarrassed for the girl. Then, rather than stay in the living room with her, Turtle follows Martin down the hallway to the pantry. He says, “They have some kind of surgical tool for trimming bone, I just don’t know what it is and I don’t have one. You know, I always meant to get more medical implements, but there just is never enough goddamn time or enough money, kibble, and now look at this, I’m looking at wire cutters and diagonal pliers and things.”

“Is this necessary?”

“Yes it’s necessary. I was thinking on it last night. Unless we can stitch the flaps of skin together over the end of the finger, it won’t heal. There’s a diagram in one of the books I had downstairs—it’s called a fish-mouth amputation because you trim the end of the finger like a fish mouth. You have to trim all the interior tissue, apparently, or the amputation bulges or ‘mushrooms’ at the tip. All we’ve got to do is make two deep cuts on either side of the finger and peel them open and dig the bone out, pare out the extra tissue, and stitch it closed. I have a suture set, so we can do that just fine.”

Turtle says, “Is it really going to be that easy?”

He looks at her. “Why wouldn’t it?”

“What if there’s something we don’t know about the anatomy? Or just something we’re not thinking of?”

“Look, kibble, it’s a finger. It’s not trivial, but it’s not rocket science, either.” Martin picks up a flashlight and throws open the hatch to the basement and she follows him down the spiral staircase and among the tarped-up pallets of five-gallon buckets. He opens the aluminum cabinets and stands casting the flashlight beam across the ranks of glass blister caps and prescription bottles, and takes down a glass ten-milliliter single-dose bottle of .25% lidocaine HCI, turns it over, stands looking at the expiration date. “Expired,” he says, shaking the bottle, “but we’ll see. Plain. No epinephrine, which is good. This will work.”

“What about something more general?”

“Knock her out, you mean?”

“Yeah,” Turtle says.

“She doesn’t need that. I don’t have anything like that and she doesn’t need it. We could get some veterinary ketamine, maybe, but it would take time and with a kid that size, more dangerous anyway.”

“Will this really work?”

“Yes,” he says.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” he says.

They climb up together. He goes into the bathroom and comes out with the bucket of first aid supplies. The scalpel and the sutures are in sterile packaging, but the diagonal pliers, the hemostatic forceps, the tweezers, and the surgical scissors are all loose and he drops them into the boiling tea. He opens the freezer for ice, but there is no power and the freezer does not run and he takes out the ice cube tray with its rows of water and throws it into the sink and he looks at Turtle morosely. Cayenne watches without speaking, holding her hand to her chest.

“I don’t want to,” she says.

Martin turns to a cooler on the floor, now full of stagnant water, and takes out a beer with the label soaked off, bangs it open on the countertop. He leans back against the counter and looks at the child, holding the dripping beer loosely slung between thumb and forefinger, taking drinks. The boiling implements rattle against the bottom of the pot.

“I don’t want to,” Cayenne says again. “I don’t want to.”

He empties the pot of tea into a colander. The implements are steaming. He carries the colander over to Cayenne.

“Is the colander clean?” Turtle asks.

“Sure. It’s clean.”

“Have you ever injected lidocaine?”

“Hell no,” he says.

“And is ten milliliters enough?”

“It’s a whole bottle. I’m sure it’s enough.”

“We don’t know what it does, after its expiration.”

“Kibble, you’re making her more nervous than she needs to be.”

“It’s expired?” Cayenne asks from the living room.

“No, sweetheart, it’s sort of a ‘best by’ date. It’s not really expired. That’s all just legal stuff.”

Turtle says, “I’d like to do this the right way. If we’re going to do it, we should do it right. What about veterinary ketamine?”

“Hell,” Martin says, “we will do it right. Ketamine, that shit is expensive. We don’t want to accidentally euthanize the girl and we don’t need to put her entirely under when it’s just her goddamn finger. If we had ice we could just numb it with cold, but we don’t have ice. The lidocaine is perfect. The lidocaine will be fine.”

“What’s ‘euthanize’?” Cayenne asks.

“Kibble, let’s have a towel to work on, a basin of water, and an irrigation syringe.” When Turtle has gathered the things, Martin looks over at her and says, “You know, we really could use a table right about now.” Turtle says nothing. Martin says, “Give me your hand, Cayenne.”

Cayenne holds it to her chest. “No,” she says.

Martin says, “Come on, sweetheart.”

The girl shakes her head. Martin sighs and looks at Turtle. Turtle does not know what to do.

The girl says, “I don’t want to.”

“You have to.”

“It’ll heal on its own.”

“Some things, maybe, but not this. Give it here.”

“I promise it will,” she says. “I know it will.”

“Cayenne,” he says.

“I promise promise promise,” she says.

“I’m warning you, girl.”

Turtle thinks, I’m warning you, girl. She bites her lip. The phrase goes through her and fills her guts with pleasurable anguish.

“Cayenne,” Martin says.

“No, I won’t,” she says. “You can’t do it. You can’t . No! No! No!”

“I’m going to count to three,” Martin says.

“I won’t do it,” Cayenne says. She is crying. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Marty.”

“One.”

Her eyes are crumpled shut. Her face is red. She is sobbing, shaking her head. “You’re scaring me,” she says. “You’re scaring me.”

Someday, Turtle will have to explain how she let this happen.

“Two,” Martin says.

Cayenne and Martin hesitate. Cayenne’s look is terrified. She seems to not know herself what she will do. Martin is implacable. It is like neither of them wants to find out what happens when he gets to three.

“Three,” Martin says, and Cayenne throws her hand forward. Martin grasps her by the wrist and sticks the hypodermic full of lidocaine into the webbing between index and middle fingers. Cayenne cries out and Turtle sees his hand constrict painfully around the girl’s wrist as he depresses the plunger. He withdraws the needle, sticks it into the other side of the knuckle, and depresses the plunger all the way.

“There,” he says, “that wasn’t so bad.”

There are tears in Cayenne’s eyes. She is gritting her teeth.

“Toughen up,” he says. “Look at you. Not like kibble,” Martin says.

“Not like kibble?” Cayenne says. She doesn’t understand.

“The devil took her soul,” Martin says. “And left her empty inside.”

“Shut up,” Turtle says, “you’re confusing her.”

“I’m not confused,” Cayenne says, and now she looks at Turtle as if to see if she really is empty inside. Martin begins to cut away the gauze padding. Beneath, the fingertip is a ragged stump cut short right at the edge of the nail bed. The meat is pink and ringed with blackish-red scabbing. He begins washing it, and Cayenne murmurs and complains, trying to pull away, Martin pulling her hand back. When he is done washing it, he takes the hair tie out of Cayenne’s hair and wraps it around the base of the finger for a tourniquet, turning loops of it around a pair of hemostatic forceps until the finger begins to drain white.