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Then I put my fingers inside him.

I do it the way he showed me at the gauge house this morning, packing the gauze, only this time I'm feeling for the source. It's hot in there. Everything is slick and I can't see anything but red, and I'm trying to remember the diagrams from the anatomy class I took at the community college in Baton Rouge, the one I dropped halfway through, and none of them will come.

So I talk to him. It's the only thing that keeps my hands moving.

"Delilah used to do my hair," I tell him, working. "Every morning before school. She'd sit me at the kitchen table and French braid it, two braids, and pull so hard my eyes watered, and when I cried she'd tell me beauty is pain, Evie Jean. She was eleven. She'd heard somebody say it on TV."

My fingers find something. A pulsing. Deep along the back wall of the wound, under the muscle, a thin hard cord that jumps against my fingertip every time his heart beats, and at the end of it, a warm steady spill. I've found it. Oh God, I've found it.

"She wanted to be a nurse," I go on. I pick up a hemostat with my other hand. "Can you believe that? Delilah. She fainted when I cut my knee. But she wanted it anyway. She said she wanted to be the person in the room who knew what to do."

I slide the hemostat down along my finger into the wound. I can't see the tip. I feel for the pulse with the steel, blind, and when I think I've got it, I close the handles. They click and lock.

The bleeding slows.

I hold my breath and watch. It doesn't stop entirely. Oozing still seeps from the torn muscle and the edges of the skin. But the steady run off the edge of the table dwindles to a drip, and then to nothing.

I start to cry. I don't stop working.

I tie it off. It takes four tries with the suture and my clumsy blue fingers. I drop the needle twice and have to tear open a new pack, but I get a knot on the vessel behind the clamp. Then a second one, and I ease the hemostat off, and it holds. I flush the wound again. I pack it with fresh gauze, not deep, only enough to fill the space, and I close the skin over it loosely with seven wide stitches, crooked and ugly, and tape a pad over the top.

The bag is a third empty. I find the vial of horse antibiotic, read the label three times, and work out the dose for a man instead of a horse, twice, and inject it into the port on the IV line. I hang a second bag of fluid on the hook beside the first and open that one too.

The alarm has stopped shrieking. I don't know when.

I stand beside the table in my wet white dress with my gloves covered to the wrist in him, and I study him under the lamp.

He's still gray. But his lips aren't so blue. When I put my fingers on the side of his throat, his pulse is there. Fast, thin, a bird's pulse. But there.

I pull a rolling stool over from the corner and sit down beside the table. I take his hand, and I keep talking.

I tell him about Baton Rouge. The one-room apartment over a laundromat on Government Street, and the job at the frame shop, and the way I'd stay late cutting mats for other people's paintings and never once pick up a brush myself. I tell him about the art teacher at Harlowe High who said I had a real eye, who sent my drawings to a summer program in New Orleans that I got into and never attended because Charlotte said we couldn't spare the money. I tell him I used to paint every day. I tell him I haven't painted since the church basement, that the Jordan is still on that basement wall, half finished, the water wrong.

His hand doesn't move in mine.

Sometime near four, I find a pad of paper by the phone on the counter, a prescription pad with BOEUF RIVER VETERINARY CLINIC across the top and a ballpoint pen beside it on a chain.

I don't decide to do it. I just pick it up.

I draw the chapel from memory, the way it looked from the ridge while it burned. The steeple throwing sparks into the dark. The bowl of black water below it with the masks floating. I draw fast, in hard dark lines, the pen pressing through to the next page, and my hand is perfectly steady.

When I'm done I look at it. It's rough. It's ugly. It's the first thing I've made in six years.

I tear it off the pad and tuck it under the edge of the tin frame on the instrument tray, beside the girl in front of the strawberry field.

The window over the counter has begun to go gray. A rooster starts up somewhere across the hayfield. It's Sunday, the first of November.

I peel off the gloves. I dig Charlotte's phone out of the pocket of the canvas jacket where I left it on the counter and scroll to the number I've been texting since Friday.

We're alive, I type to Nellie. Stay where you are. Don't come out. I'll come for you.

I send it. I have no idea whether it will reach her, whether there's a signal out on that concrete pad, whether her stepdaddy's old phone still has a charge, or whether she and Lacey have already started up the planking in the dark toward a road.

Thirty seconds later the phone buzzes in my hand.

Ok. Lacey is asleep. Is he ok?

I look at him on the steel table under the light, the IV dripping into his arm, and his mother's picture standing on the tray beside his head.