Dark Water - Laura McNeal [35]
They nodded, and as I walked away, I could hear them laughing and saying, “¡Dale un machete! ¡No, DOS machetes!” I knew what a machete was. I had grown up seeing workers cut branches with them like they were cutting butter, but I thought Amiel could juggle anything, so I didn’t even look back.
Twenty-two
It was my mother who came to tell me one of the workers had cut his hand on a machete, who first saw Amiel holding his bloody hand on the driveway, and who remembered a doctor in town who did urgent care. While she was wrapping his hand with a towel that I brought, my aunt Agnès came out of her house and called my uncle, who didn’t answer his phone. Despite the blood and glaring sunlight and confusion, I wondered where my uncle was and if he was with Mary Beth.
My aunt decided she would be the one to take Amiel to the doctor since she could speak Spanish as well as French and Italian, and when she opened the door of her immaculate Audi and told Amiel to sit on the leather seats that smelled of Agnès’s musky vanilla Frenchwoman’s perfume, she told me, “You come, too, Pearl. You can help me to find the address.”
My mother couldn’t very well say I was grounded, so I sat down in the front seat and watched the workers who had sat on boxes during Amiel’s juggling show, and who had evidently brought Amiel to the driveway, hang back with their arms folded. I wondered if they had goaded him into it or if he had wanted to impress them.
All the while the blood was soaking through the towel, and as my aunt was closing Amiel’s door, she gestured for him to hold up his arm and said, “Arriba del corazón.” “Above the heart.”
I remember, along with my fear and dread, my determination not to say that he’d been juggling and thereby prove my loyalty to Amiel. We reached at last the plain stucco building, the tinted glass door, the receptionist’s pot of fake flower pens, the smell of cooked onions left over from someone’s lunch, and the tall, skinny doctor taking Amiel right back. Agnès told me to go with Amiel while she arranged things in the front office. Her self-possession, her clothes, and her coldness were all working for us now. Whenever Agnès wanted to say that something was “impressive,” she always said it was “impressing.” That’s what my aunt was, too. Very impressing.
When Amiel reached the white-papered bed in the white-shiny room, he started to faint. I was too far back to help, but the doctor must have thought that could happen because he caught Amiel in both arms. He asked me to help Amiel sit down, and when Amiel opened his eyes and stirred his legs, the doctor was unwinding the towel. Amiel’s right index finger swelled on either side of a deep burgundy gash.
“How’d you do it?” the doctor asked him. He spoke through a wispy brown mustache and studied Amiel through glasses that emphasized his baldness and fine, wrinkly skin. His voice was quiet and he wore a plaid shirt under his white coat.
I was going to say he was working in an avocado grove when Amiel said, in a low, raspy voice, “Machete.”
“I’m going to have to see how deep it is,” the doctor said. The gash was making me dizzy, and I would have liked to sit down on the floor.
“Why don’t you hold on to his other hand,” the doctor told me, so I took Amiel’s left hand while Amiel looked away and, flinching, unwillingly tightened his grip. I looked away, too, once I saw the raw bone.
“It’s not cut, the bone isn’t,” Dr. Woolcott said. “Still, you messed yourself up pretty good. Are you left-handed?”
Amiel looked confused.
“Do you understand English?”
Amiel nodded.
“I just wondered why you cut the right hand.”
“He’s got an injury to the throat,” I said. “He doesn’t talk much.”
Dr. Woolcott accepted this and went to unwrap a hypodermic needle.
I’ve had stitches before, and I’ve had needles of thick numbing liquid eased into my gums like fiery arrows, but I’ve never had anything done to me like what I saw that