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“James? Are you awake?”
Accompanied by a soft knock, Tristan’s voice came through the shared wall of their adjoined rooms in a stage whisper. Since it was a Saturday and James had no alarm and nothing to see to, he seriously considered burrowing back beneath the covers and pretending not to have heard the man, but then Tristan peeked his head through the doorway and glimpsed James propped up and reading, and James was forced to concede defeat.
“Yes,” he said, setting aside the book when he noticed an uncharacteristic hesitation pull at Tristan’s expression.
“Can I ask you something?”
“What is it?” James slipped on a pair of socks and got to his feet. When he continued to be met with naught but silence, he glanced up at Tristan. “Well, are you asking?”
Tristan swallowed heavily, and produced his hand from behind his back. “Does this look infected to you?”
At the sight of the man’s thumb with a cut so puff-red and leaking it looked as though he was growing the nub of a sixth finger, James was in Tristan’s room, at the man’s side in an instant. He took the man’s wrist to inspect the cut, so shocked as to be entirely heedless of Tristan’s wince at the movement.
“Jesus Christ!” James cried. “Yes, Tristan! Yes, it looks infected!”
“Ok, shhh, shh, shh!” Tristan pressed a non-injured finger to his lips. “See, now, I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Of course I was going to say that!” James hissed as Tristan retracted his hand with a yelp. “It looks like you’ve grown a bloody radish on your hand. What did you expect me to say, ‘No, Tristan, that is a perfectly normal way for a hand to look, no cause for concern here’? What the hell happened?”
Tristan’s eyes cut away towards the floor, and he palmed the hair at the top of his head with his good hand. “It’s a bit of a story.”
“Well, I think you should start telling it.”
Tristan sighed. “Alright, so remember how you left me in charge of the clinic while you and Siegfried went to go help out the Mucklowe’s with their problem calf?”
“I do.”
“While you were gone, the clinic was full of dogs who needed things dug out of their paws. I mean, it was a real epidemic of canines who stepped on things they shouldn’t have. One after the other after the other.”
James rolled his eyes in irritation. “Go on.”
“And I was really busy, you know. Hardly had time to think! But I was doing really well. Splinter out from one paw— Bam !—piece of glass out from another. Like a well-oiled machine, I was.”
“Tristan.”
“But maybe a bit too well oiled, if you know what I mean.” James fixed him with a look that conveyed the fact that no, he most certainly did not know what Tristan meant. The young man elaborated, turning a bit sheepish. “By the time Mrs. Williams brought Duchess in—you know, little black sausage dog with the chestnut eyebrows?”
He smoothed his fingers over his own eyebrows to mime the dog’s coloring, and James rolled his eyes again.
“Tristan, I helped Duchess give birth by Cesarean section.”
“Right, yeah, of course,” Tristan stammered. “So you’re familiar. Anyway, by the time Mrs. Williams brought her in, I was—er—momentarily unsure of whether I disinfected the scalpel after the last patient?” He spoke the last words in a rush, like the burst of air as a tire deflates, and his voice ended shakily and on a precariously high pitch.
James almost yelled. “You were what?! ”
“I said I was momentarily unsure !” Tristan said in a loud whisper, eyes darting from side to side as though his brother might suddenly climb out of the walls. “Siegfried’s got that new stuff that takes forever to dry, and I was standing there with the scalpel hovering near the dog’s paw and wouldn’t it look damn unprofessional if I say ‘Oh, hold on dearie, forgot to clean this?’”
“ Look unprofessional? ” James repeated, feeling his own breath begin to speed up. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“I was panicking, alright? I had a lot on my mind!”
“I don’t care if you had the entire world on your mind! If you aren’t sure whether your equipment is clean, clean it again!”
“Well, the story has a happy ending,” Tristan said, a bit sourly. “Duchess pulled away before I could make an incision, and I ended up cutting myself instead of her, so I had to disinfect the scalpel again anyway.” He brandished his wound again at James, who looked away. “Good thing, too,” Tristan mused, “because it looks like the answer to my earlier question of ‘did I sterilize that’ was ‘no’.”
James’s mind was reeling and his legs urged to pace, but there was not enough space in Tristan’s little room to do so. He tugged at his hair. “Jesus Christ.”
“So the way I see it, this is actually a good thing, because it could be a mangled dog paw you’re looking at right now,” Tristan said, and the forced brightness in his voice made James want to throttle him. “But it’s not. It’s just my hand.”
Having wholly had enough of this, James grabbed Tristan by the shoulder and all but shoved him into the hallway. “We’re telling Siegfried, and we are going to ask him what we should do next.”
“Whoa,” Tristan cried frantically, twisting and pulling to try to get out of James’s grasp. James just held on tighter. “I told you this in confidence!”
“This isn’t confession!” In all this foolishness, James honestly felt as though he were losing his mind. He gestured forcefully at Tristan’s raw, red wound. “And what do you think, he won’t notice your hand looking like it’s been through the wrong end of a washing board?”
“I could wear gloves?” Tristan suggested meekly.
James dragged him by the collar. “Come on.”