“Use this,” Birdie said, and passed her a thimble.
“Oh, is that what that’s for?” Lucia smiled at her.
Trying to remember her mother, Lucia bent over the cloth. Her mother had always tried to get her to learn, but she had been dismissive. She was going to be a lawyer. Yes, her mother said, yes, good, but even lawyers lose buttons. “Mother,” she had groaned. “Don’t be so old fashioned.” She always talked to her mother in English when she wanted to make that point.
“No,” Birdie said, watching her. “Smaller stitches. It’ll cinch up if you do it like that.”
Lucia nodded her head and began again. It would be one thing to sew this cloth, another to pierce living skin. For an instant, her breath caught inside her, and she felt on the verge of screaming. But she caught herself by focusing on Birdie. She pushed the needle through the cloth and pulled the thread all the way through.
Sergio was dead.
The thought came to her like that. Sometimes there was no reason to it, just a flash of horrible knowledge, trailing misery and grief like a comet’s tail. There had been no chance to sew his wound. Just a single gunshot had done it. He had bled to death within minutes. No last words, no chance to tell him it was okay, to tell him she loved him. He just died. He was just gone.
Her hands shook.
There was not even time to grieve.
Lucia turned away from the cloth and taking the needle and thread in her hand, she began searching Eric’s back. There wasn’t time to practice long. The wounds glistened with blood. She felt sick for a second and had a moment of severe, crippling doubt. She could not do this. She couldn’t even sew a button. Then she felt Birdie’s hand on her shoulder, and Lucia took a deep breath.
She must do this.
“All right,” she said. “All right.”
She chose the most serious wound, a great ugly canyon that cut from his shoulder blade down to the middle of his back. Starting at the end nearest the shoulder blade, she took his skin between her fingers and pressed it together. Blood and clear liquid oozed up between the skin. Eric’s breathing was uneven, but otherwise, he did not move or make a sound. Lucia took the bright needle in her hand. Eric’s flesh was soft and warm between her fingers. Closing her eyes, she muttered a quick prayer to Mother Mary, and then, in one movement, stuck the needle through the flesh. Eric groaned but did not awaken. Pulling the dark thread through, Lucia turned the needle back and stuck it through Eric’s flesh again. This time his back twitched and his left arm rose a little.
“Hold him down,” Lucia ordered Birdie.
With only a whimper of protest, Birdie moved to Eric’s left side and pressed down on his arm.
“Try not to let him move, Birdie,” Lucia said to her. “He could hurt himself.”
Birdie nodded and pressed down harder.
Lucia focused on the wound. She tried not to notice the blood on her fingers.
One stitch down.
About fifty more to go.
The first night at the farmhouse Lucia could not sleep. Despite cleaning and bandaging his wounds as best she could, Eric was restless with fever. She didn’t know what she could do, but stay by him and cool his forehead with a damp cloth. She had to make sure he didn’t roll over in his misery and rip open the wounds she had so carefully cleaned and sewn. In the end, she lost count of the stitches. There were many. The canyons on his back was replaced with the railroad tracks of stitches, as if his skin were a frontier being developed.
Birdie slept on the couch next to him. She had wanted to curl up next to him on the mattress, but Lucia thought it might aggravate his wounds. Even in the moments when Eric calmed and all was quiet, Lucia did not dare to shut her eyes.
She knew Sergio was waiting for her in her dreams.
Inevitably, however, deep in the night, only a few hours from dawn, as the sky outside turned dark blue, Sergio came and sat next to her. Lucia was dreaming.
“I was always the middle one,” Sergio said. His voice, however, had lost all his former fear. He sounded like their father. “No one paid attention to me. You were older, Diego was younger. You don’t even have time for me when I’m dead.”
“That’s not true, Sergio,” Lucia said.
“I know,” he said. “These are your worries, not mine. Do you think I care about any of this? Do you want to know what I thought about, sister? Just before I died?”
“Yes.”
“Gloria,” her brother answered. “We kissed behind the church. She said she’d never felt so much for another person. She said she didn’t understand it. She wanted me to stay with her. Gloria was her name, did I tell you that?”
“Yes,” Lucia said.
“I thought about her in the end,” Sergio said. “I belong with her. Not with you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t mean you should forget me, Lucia,” he said. Sergio was angry with her. “Don’t you dare forget me.”
“I’m sorry, Sergio.”
“Don’t forget me like you do everyone else!”
Lucia jerked awake, crying out. Outside, the sun was rising, brilliant and bright. Eric’s breathing was calm and measured. Lucia wept at the sound.
She knew then Eric was going to live.
They stayed at the farmhouse for three days, letting Eric’s tender wounds heal. Birdie never left his side, and, usually so quiet, she now talked to Eric so much, it was as if all of the things she had never said to him had broken free. Eric listened through a haze of intense pain he tried to hide.
Lucia spent her days foraging in the local farmhouses for food. There was not much left, but, in a trailer in the woods, she found a stash of canned food and bottled water. Sitting on a chair outside the trailer was a Zombie. He had long ago shrunk down so much that, nearly skeletal and lacking eyes, he could not move. On the ground next to him was a shotgun. He had died guarding his food. When Lucia approached the gun, the Zombie opened and shut its mouth, making a creaking sound like an old wooden door.
Now they had a shotgun.
On the third evening, Lucia sat on the porch, watching the fireflies. Their green lights flashed in the evening. She thought about Sergio. Life happened so quickly. Lights in the darkness, winking to brilliant existence and then descending into shadow. She looked up with a start when the porch door slammed.
Eric stood on the porch, one hand on Birdie’s shoulder, who looked up at him with pride.
“You shouldn’t be up, Eric,” Lucia said, standing. “You need to rest.”
“Yes,” Eric agreed, “but not here.” He hobbled forward, unable to keep the pain from his face. He sat down next to her, hissing in air between his teeth.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t find any pain medication,” Lucia said.
Eric ignored the comment. “It’s too dangerous to stay here. Carl Doyle is looking for us.” Lucia had told him everything about Doyle’s assault on Daniel Sullivan, how they had escaped, and how she had seen Doyle crash into a pharmacy window. “We have to keep moving.”
“You’re not well, Eric,” she said. “You have to rest.”
“I’m well enough.” Eric stood up, grimacing. “You know it’s true, Lucia,” he told her. “The longer we stay here, the more chance that Doyle will find us. Or someone else.” He looked out over the fireflies flashing in the field. “We have to leave tomorrow.”
Lucia said nothing, but watched him walk slowly back into the house.
Now that the night was her last at the farmhouse, it was far more pretty, far more peaceful. For a long time then, finally, she cried, at first quietly and then in heaving sobs. When she was done, she was so exhausted, she lay out on the bench on the porch and fell into an empty, deep sleep of the kind that she hadn’t known in weeks.