She sleeps alone in their bed while Tom sits up at night, struggling to pen a follow up to The Way. They became strangers to one another as Tom ascended into his new role and Vanessa descended into hers. When the people on Revelation Ranch have a problem to be solved, they don’t go to Tom; they go to Vanessa. She’s unafraid to do what must be done. She’s unafraid to get her hands dirty. Unlike her husband.
Vanessa uses what’s at her disposal. Some basic first aid items—antiseptic, bandages, sutures, and the like—and combines that with her more recently gained knowledge of herbal remedies. From the basket she pulls a mortar and pestle, along with a clove of garlic, a jar of honey, and some ginger.
She grinds the two dry ingredients together and mixes the honey in slowly. When the substances congeal into a thick paste, she scrapes it out of the bottom of her primitive mixing bowl with a spoon. She needs Birdie to eat the remedy.
A week before, they used the last of the antibiotics for an infected cat bite perpetrated by none other than Tom’s favorite feline on the ranch, Peanut. Vanessa has hated the cat from the minute he situated himself at the foot of her bed for the first time. Now, she avoids him, feeling that when he looks at her, he sees beyond the surface.
With the paste on her spoon, she moves towards the bed. Birdie’s eyelids flutter in cadence with her dreams. Vanessa lightly touches her arm and Birdie gasps awake. She immediately groans, brought back to the pain of her injury. Her eyes yawn wide and roll around in their sockets, roving the room and searching for something to lock on to. They find Vanessa.
“Here,” Vanessa says. She puts the spoon to Birdie’s mouth.
Birdie looks from the spoon to her healer suspiciously.
“Don’t worry; it’s not poison,” Vanessa smirks.
Birdie reluctantly eats the paste. She makes a face.
To have Birdie at her mercy is something Vanessa doesn’t deny she’s fantasized about many times in the last few years. The girl has a spell cast over Tom. If Vanessa didn’t know better, she would say that Birdie had bewitched him long ago. So, to see her scared and helpless awakens something inside Vanessa’s soul that she imagines to be kin to the first predatory instincts that pulled us out of the ooze millions of years ago. She imagines that it’s the same instinct that allows a shark to interpret the stimuli of an animal struggling in the waves. Whatever it is, it keeps the smile as a shadow on her lips.
“Don’t worry,” Vanessa tells the girl. “My instructions are to make sure that you and the baby are just fine.” She sits on the edge of the bed.
Birdie is silent. Normally outspoken, the gunshot seems to have robbed her of her voice. Something that Vanessa wouldn’t be sorry to see go.
“I need to change the bandage. How does it feel?” she asks.
“Hot,” Birdie replies.
The first indication of growing infection. Vanessa knows this doesn’t bode well. Hopefully she can have the baby before the infection reaches the point of no return. If Tom loses Birdie, he’ll mourn her; if he loses the child, he’ll kill both of them.
Vanessa scoots closer and begins unraveling the first dressing that the wound received. Like uncovering a mummy, she doesn’t know what waits for her beyond the gauze wrappings. A small dark punctuation sized dot of blood grows with each layer that’s removed until the gauze is a brownish-red and Vanessa can smell the iron keeping the girl alive.
Finally, the wound reveals itself. A yawning hole in her shoulder, it appears that the bullet shattered the bone. Birdie’s arm lies limp at the mercy of her injured collarbone. The tiny spiderwebs Vanessa feared she might see aren’t there. She feels some relief. There is a redness around the wound. It was probed for material the night of the shooting, but nothing was found. Vanessa wonders if she digs her bare finger into the hole if she would find the shard of metal causing the angriness of the wound.
She reaches a hand towards Birdie’s shoulder and the girl shrinks away. She immediately groans, seeming to regret the sudden and instinctual movement of her body.
“Be still,” Vanessa commands.
Birdie grits her teeth as Vanessa brings her hand to the wound. She looks at Birdie’s belly. The baby will come any day. She wonders if the trauma of digging around for a piece of a bullet that might not even be there is worth it. She imagines the prospect of causing Birdie to lose the baby.
She’ll wait for now.
Vanessa senses something. Like a wolf catching the scent of prey, she stiffens at the back. She removes her hand from Birdie’s shoulder and places it on her belly. She waits for a moment but feels nothing. The feeling of something returns to her. Sometimes, she feels that she’s able to pull back the curtain that hangs between this world and the next and see with the second sight.
Now, she feels a shadowy presence. She struggles to name it. It moves in her mind, familiar and yet strange, hugging the coiling matter of her brain. A darkness. A growing darkness that surrounds the baby. She removes her hand from Birdie’s belly. The girl’s eyes, wide and startled, follow Vanessa’s hand as she places it back in her lap and stands from the bed.
She prepares the necessary materials for the bandage and dresses the wound. The stark white of the gauze stands out against Birdie’s skin, tanned by the sun. Vanessa knows that the landscape out here has been hard on both of them. They’ve both aged. Tom must have, too. But Vanessa wants to embrace the things that are coming to her with the passage of time. One of those things is
