I had so much as an expectation; I don’t think I had any conscious thoughts. . . .”
“No?” He matched my edge with his own. “Blind drunk, were ye?”
“Yes, I bloody was, and so was he.” I knew what he was thinking; he wasn’t making any effort to hide it, and I had a sudden, vivid recollection of sitting with him in the corner of a tavern in Cross Creek, his taking my face suddenly between his hands and kissing me, and the warm sweetness of wine passing from his mouth to mine. I sprang to my feet and slapped my hand on the bench.
“Yes, I bloody was!” I said again, furious. “I was drunk every damned day since I heard you were dead.”
He drew a deep, deep breath, and I saw his eyes fix on his hands, clenched on his knees. He let it out very slowly.
“And what did he give ye, then?”
“Something to hit,” I said. “At least to begin with.”
He looked up at me, startled.
“Ye hit him?”
“No, I hit you,” I snapped. My fist had curled, without my realization, clenched against my thigh. I remembered that first blow, a blind, frenzied punch into unwary flesh, all the force of my grief behind it. The flex of recoil that took away the sensation of warmth for an instant, brought it back with a smash that flung me onto the dressing table, borne down by a man’s weight, his grip tight on my wrists, and me screaming in fury. I didn’t remember the specifics of what came next—or, rather, I recalled certain things very vividly but had no idea of the order in which they happened.
“It was a blur,” people say. What they really mean is the impossibility of anyone truly entering such an experience from outside, the futility of explanation.
“Mary MacNab,” I said abruptly. “She gave you . . . tenderness, you said. There should be a word for what this was, what John gave me, but I haven’t thought of it yet.” I needed a word that might convey, encapsulate.
“Violence,” I said. “That was part of it.” Jamie stiffened and gave me a narrow look. I knew what he was thinking and shook my head. “Not that. I was numb—deliberately numb, because I couldn’t bear to feel. He could; he had more courage than I did. And he made me feel it, too. That’s why I hit him.”
I’d been numb, and John had ripped off the dressing of denial, the wrappings of the small daily necessities that kept me upright and functioning; his physical presence had torn away the bandages of grief and showed what lay below: myself, bloody and unhealed.
I felt the air thick in my throat, damp and hot and itching on my skin. And finally I found the word.
“Triage,” I said abruptly. “Under the numbness, I was . . . raw. Bloody. Skinned. You do triage, you . . . stop the bleeding first. You stop it. You stop it, or the patient dies. He stopped it.”
He’d stopped it by slapping his own grief, his own fury, over the welling blood of mine. Two wounds, pressed together, blood still flowing freely—but no longer lost and draining, flowing instead into another body, and the other’s blood into mine, hot, searing, not welcome—but life.
Jamie said something under his breath in Gaelic. I didn’t catch most of the words. He sat with his head bent, elbows on his knees and head in his hands, and breathed audibly.
After a moment, I sat back down beside him and breathed, too. The cicadas grew louder, an urgent buzz that drowned out the rush of water and the rustling of leaves, humming in my bones.
“Damn him,” Jamie muttered at last, and sat up. He looked disturbed, angry—but not angry at me.
“John, um, is all right, isn’t he?” I asked hesitantly. To my surprise—and my slight unease—Jamie’s lips twisted a little.
“Aye. Well. I’m sure he is,” he said, in a tone admitting of a certain doubt, which I found alarming.
“What the bloody hell did you do to him?” I said, sitting up straight.
His lips compressed for an instant.
“I hit him,” he said. “Twice,” he added, glancing away.
“Twice?” I echoed, in some shock. “Did he fight you?”
“No,” he said shortly.
“Really.” I rocked back a bit, looking him over. Now that I had calmed down enough to take notice, I thought he was displaying . . . what? Concern? Guilt?
“Why did you hit him?” I asked, striving for a tone of mild curiosity, rather