The Death of Jane Lawrence(7)

Beneath it, she saw gleaming multihued ropes. Ropes, like sausage casings. Bile rose in her throat.

She hadn’t known what a man looked like on the inside, before. He looked like meat. Brutal, horrible meat.

“He’s cut all the way through.” Dr. Lawrence did not curse, and did not stop with horror. He spoke with what could have been cold detachment in another man, but in him it was an attentive declaration, a statement of truth that helped orient and ground Jane in the moment.

He could fix this.

He had to fix this.

The doctor left her side, moving to the patient’s head and pressing a cloth soaked with ether to his nose and mouth, the fumes burning her nostrils even where she stood. The thrashing lessened, and the howls that had become an unending, unchanging background noise turned to low, vague moans. Dr. Lawrence lifted the cloth and looked directly at her.

He is going to ask if I can handle this, Jane thought. Please, do not ask that of me. If he did, the answer would be no. As long as he kept silent, as long as he presumed she was capable, she would follow where he led.

He gave her a little nod, then returned to her side.

“Mr. Lowell, retractors,” Dr. Lawrence said, his voice quiet, but the room was quiet now, too, all their breaths held. Mr. Lowell passed him two gleaming pieces of metal bent back upon themselves at one end. The doctor slid them each under the skin Jane clung to, then eased her fingers over them instead. Her hands slipped at first, and the metal was shockingly cold after the burning heat of the patient’s flesh, but not feeling fresh blood on her hands was a relief. She held them firm and at the doctor’s direction, spread the wound open a little further.

“What in the world—?” he murmured.

Jane, despite herself, leaned in.

His way cleared, Dr. Lawrence reached inside the man’s belly, gently pushing the pearlescent ropes of the man’s bowels aside. He eased forward a thicker section, tangled up in much same way as everything else around it. No—no, she was mistaken. It looked as convoluted, but where it folded back onto itself, it seemed to go inside itself, though there was no perforation she could see. The flesh simply melded together, and a faint shape moved beneath the surface, a form beneath a shroud. She could not keep it oriented in her mind’s eye; it seemed to slide and twist.

“What did you do to yourself?” Dr. Lawrence whispered.

For the first time, she heard uncertainty.

But his hands did not falter as he grimly set about cutting the mess of twisted flesh away from the surrounding tissues, exposing more of the larger organ until it ran even and smooth. “It’s a miracle, perhaps, that he was driven to cut himself open—had this gone unnoticed, he would have died of septicemia within the week.” He lifted the tangled mass from the patient and set it aside carefully, almost tenderly. Jane stared at it as Dr. Lawrence took up needle and thread. It still looked vital. Alive. Blood coated it, and she thought she saw it move.

“Miss Shoringfield, please keep tension on the retractors,” Dr. Lawrence said.

She forced herself to look down again, to watch as he stitched up a lower reach of disrupted gut, then fed the freshly cut section of bowel through the gash the patient had carved in himself. She removed the retractors when he indicated and watched, transfixed, as Dr. Lawrence miraculously closed membranes up, and then the man’s skin, his stitches precise. He worked like a master craftsman, like an artist, and the confidence in every line of him bewitched her.

The patient moaned and the spell was broken. Her body threatened revolt.

“Grab a cloth and soak it in antiseptic, then wipe down his skin. Get him as clean as you can. It will speed recovery,” the doctor said, calmly redirecting her.

Tasks. Tasks helped. She got her cloth and began with the bottom of the man’s rib cage, then gently blotted the margins of the wound. When it was clean, she moved to the man’s hands, pulling the scraps of fiber from under his blunted nails. He was sleeping now, face drawn from pain and exhaustion, but otherwise peaceful.

Wiping a bit of grime from his brow, she looked up at the doctor. He was bent over the man’s torso, quickly cleaning and stitching up other small lacerations. He spared one glance up at her, as if he could feel her eyes on him.

“We have done good work here,” he said, smiling. “You have helped save his life.”

Golden warmth bloomed in her chest, and she realized she’d begun to shake, for the first time since he’d placed her hands on the man’s bleeding gut. “Oh,” she said.

Dr. Lawrence soaked a sponge in fresh antiseptic, then set it over the opening still left in the man’s stomach, where the hole of the bowel protruded. A few more minutes, and he was done, stepping away from the table and going to the sink. She trailed after him, unsure of what else to do.

“You did well,” he said, turning on the faucet with an elbow and rinsing blood from his hands in the sputter of water. “Come here, clean yourself up. I should have told you to don a gown, but I suppose I didn’t think you’d—well. Many wouldn’t have been able to stay standing the whole time. It’s a grisly business, as I warned you.”

Jane glanced back at the table. The patient looked whole and slumbering, as if Dr. Lawrence’s surgery had been some form of magic.

“That was incredible,” she said, then looked at him, at the lines of his face, his steady hands. “I didn’t know such surgery was possible.”