Joe Dillard - 03 - Injustice for All by Scott Pratt

Caroline and I find ourselves alone.
    “Something’s bothering you,” Caroline says.
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Because I know you.”
    So much for the mystery in our relationship. When I was younger, there were things I didn’t tell her. I’d rationalize by telling myself she didn’t need to know, probably didn’t want to know; that she was somehow better off staying clear of the deepest recesses of my mind. But she’d broken through a few years earlier, and now, at only forty-three years old, I feel almost naked in her presence, as though she can see everything. I believe she only makes inquiries to test my honesty.
    “It keeps running through my mind,” I say.
    “What? Ray?”
    “It was surreal. It happened so fast. I keep thinking I should have gotten to him quicker, but after he fired the first shot, I froze for a split second.”
    “There you go again,” Caroline says, “blaming yourself for something you couldn’t have changed.”
    “I keep seeing the back of his head explode.”
    The image of Ray’s suicide has now been added to the long list of digital clips in my subconscious mind. I’ve rerun the scene a hundred times in the past few days.
    Caroline stands and walks around the table. She puts her arms around me and pulls me close.
    “I thought about you today at the funeral,” I whisper. “About the cancer, about what it would have been like if you hadn’t—”
    “Shhh,” Caroline says, putting a finger to my lips. “I told you when I was diagnosed that I wasn’t going to leave you. I meant it.”
    The touch of her finger is soothing, and I close my eyes and kiss her hand.
    “We need to clean it,” she says.
    “Okay.”
    A few minutes later, I’m sitting on the edge of our bed. Caroline is on her back. She’s removed her shirt to reveal the mangled mess that was once a breast. The surgeon who attempted to reconstruct the breast originally transplanted a flap of skin and fat from Caroline’s abdomen. She was in surgery for twelve hours. It seemed to work, but as soon as she began her radiation treatments, the flap began to develop large, open wounds. They leaked constantly and gradually enlarged. Then the flap began to shrink.
    The surgeon explained that the radiation was destroying the tissue in the flap. Fat necrosis, he called it. Three months later, he took her back into surgery, this time removing a large portion of muscle from her back and moving it to the breast site. The result of that surgery was a staph infection that nearly killed her. When she finally recovered from the staph, a large blister began to rise on the edge of the new flap. It, too, developed into a large, open wound.
    The responsibility for cleaning the wound has fallen to me. Caroline lies back and closes her eyes while I pull on a pair of latex gloves. I remove the bandage and reach into the wound carefully—it’s about the circumference of a quarter on the surface—and begin to pull out a long, thin strip of medicated gauze tape that I’d packed into the wound earlier in the day. The tape is slimy, covered with a mixture of blood and dead fat that smells like rotten eggs. I place it in a small trash bag that I’ll carry outside when we’re finished.
    Each time we do this I ask her whether she’s okay, and each time her answer is running down her cheeks. I reach over and pull a tissue out of a box on the mini- trauma center I’ve set up next to the bed and wipe the tears away.
    “Just a few more minutes, baby.”
    I irrigate the wound with sterile sodium chloride and then unwrap a long, cotton-tipped applicator and dip it into a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water. I insert the applicator into the wound and begin to swab. The applicator reaches a full four inches beneath the skin.
    “It’s getting smaller, Caroline. It really is.”
    At its worst, the hole beneath the skin was as large as my fist. It’s healing now, but the progress is painfully slow. I finish swabbing, pack it with fresh