CHAPTER 18 TAKE ME BY THE HAND
TAKE ME BY THE HAND
The sound that claws its way up my throat isn’t so much a scream as it is a strangled yelp. I wait for Noah to react but he just stands there staring at the hand, his eyes wide and terrified.
The man with the knife darts out the door and I hear the spinning and screeching of tires as he and his companion make their getaway.
I know I should be worried about that. They took the book but all I can think of, all I can see, is Noah.
I rush forward and grab his wrist. I squeeze it.
That’s what I’m supposed to do, right? Put pressure on the wound.
I look around for something to wrap around it.
“Mom!” I say, my voice cracking under the stress. “Mom, help me! I need something to put on it. Hurry!”
But she doesn’t hurry. She walks up to me and Noah and instead of looking at the wound she looks at me.
“Meka, baby, it’s not necessary.”
“What?” I ask in a haze of confusion. “No. Help me! Please! We gotta stop the—” I cut the sentence short. I was thinking I needed to stop the bleeding but there is no blood. “Oh,” I say with a little stab of embarrassment. “Right.”
Noah’s face is still frozen in a mask of disbelief.
“Is he in shock?” I ask. I still have a death grip on his wrist. “Noah? Noah, try to relax.”
He’s staring down at his hand. Then . . . ?he screams. The most agonizing, bloodcurdling scream I’ve ever heard.
“Noah,” my mom says firmly. “Baby, please.” She gives him a firm shake and his scream fades into a dull whimper. “It doesn’t hurt. Your mind only thinks it does because it doesn’t make sense. You’re okay.”
“What—what am I supposed to do?” he asks.
I turn to my mom. She puts her hand on Noah’s shoulder. “It’s okay. We can reattach it.”
“Huh?” Noah asks. “What do you mean? You can’t just put it back on, right? That’s not how it works . . . is it?”
“Wiggle your fingers,” Mom says to Noah.
“I—I can’t,” Noah says. “How?”
“Just try,” my mom says. “Think of your hand, then wiggle the fingers.”
Noah does as she asks. I can feel the muscles and tendons in his wrist moving under my grip. On the floor, the fingers on his hand open and close.
“We need to get out of here and figure out a plan B,” my mom says quietly. She reaches down and scoops up Noah’s hand. She tucks it under her arm and motions toward the entrance. “Let’s go.”
Outside, we trudge back down the hill and get in the car.
Noah slides into the back seat and I get in on the passenger side.
As my mom slips into the driver’s seat, she sets Noah’s hand in my lap.
It takes everything in me not to scream.
The fingers twitch and then suddenly the whole thing lurches over and gently grips my own hand.
I whip my head around to face Noah, who has a little smirk on his lips.
“Sorry,” he says. “I just wanted to hold your hand.”
“If we all weren’t in the most dangerous situation ever, that might be sweet,” my mom says. “Aren’t people always saying we’re like the Addams family? Now we have our very own Thing.”
“I actually hate that,” Noah says. “No offense, Mrs. Redwood.”
I stare at Noah’s hand. It shouldn’t make sense but it does.
If I can do the things my dad has done, the things Grandpa Redwood did, it all makes sense when it didn’t before.
The moving corpses, the quality of my cosmetology work on the dead, it all came back to this .
. . ?power. It stirs a dizzying mix of feelings—I’m scared to death but I’m also relieved.
I’m not losing my mind or hallucinating or having nightmares—I am seeing things clearly. I am remembering.
My mom steers us home and parks the car behind the house.
I gently lift Noah’s hand up and hold it like I’m carrying something made of glass.
I take Noah and his hand into the basement as my mom locks up and then joins us a few moments later in the prep room.
Noah takes off his coat and lies down on the prep table. I set his hand on his chest.
“Thanks,” he says. The fingers on his hand reach toward me.
“Can I hold your other hand?” I ask.
“No,” Noah says. “Let’s keep it weird.”
I laugh and it’s the first time I’ve laughed like this in a really long time.
Noah does too. Even my mom can’t keep a straight face as she collects the supplies needed to reattach Noah’s hand.
For one minute, I pretend things are okay.
That my dad’s at work. That Noah never died.
That my mom has no secrets. That my nightmares were just dreams and not memories.
It’s just a minute, though. Then, the weight of the entire situation falls on me like a brick.
There is no getting away from it and there is no going back to normal.
Even Miss Cliff wanted so much to go back to how things were before but it’s impossible. I look at my hands.
“I need to pack the wound with Vis-O-Guard gel,” my mom says softly. “That will control any seepage since Noah is still pretty—well—fresh.”
“I’m fresh?” Noah asks. “Like fruit?”
“Sort of,” Mom says. “You’re newly reanimated. For the first few months some residual liquid that’s still in your body might push its way out. It happened to me and let’s just say it wasn’t pleasant. The Vis-O-Guard gel will keep it from smelling and it’ll also help preserve the tissue.”
Absolutely nothing is funny anymore.
“I think you’ll be able to use the hand,” my mom says. “But you’re going to have to be very, very careful. You’ll have to detach it probably every few weeks and reapply the gel before reattaching it.”
“And I do this . . . forever?” Noah asks.
My mom looks at Noah and I can see that she pities him, but it’s more than that. She knows what life will be like for him. She knows how hard it will be.
“Yes,” my mom says solemnly. “Forever.”
The look on Noah’s face puts a knot in my throat. He’s so dejected. I can’t even imagine what he must be feeling.
“If you show me how to do it, I can help,” I say. “I’ll change it out whenever you need me to.”
Noah only looks more upset at my suggestion. “So, you’ll just stick by me forever? Patching me up when I fall apart?”
In my mind, the answer is obvious and I’m a little worried that Noah doesn’t see it. “Yeah,” I say. “That’s exactly what I’ll do.”
“Meeks,” Noah says. “That’s too much for me to ask.”
“No, it’s not,” I say. “And please stop talking to me like you’re some kind of monster who doesn’t deserve my help.
You didn’t ask for this.” For the first time in all of this, there’s a flare of anger directed right at my dad because he did this to Noah and to my mom.
But I shake it off because I know my dad.
I know he’s strange, but he’s good. There has to be something I’m missing.
“I don’t want you to have to change your whole life just to help me out,” Noah says. “That’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair that you died,” I say, fighting back a wave of angry tears. “And now you’re back and you don’t want me to help?”
“Hold on,” my mom says as she pulls up a swivel stool and gently grasps Noah’s wrist as she prepares to reattach his severed hand. “Let’s all just hit pause.”
Noah reaches for me with his intact hand and I take it.
“I need another jar of Vis-O-Guard and I’m all out down here,” my mom says.
“There’s some in the shed,” I say.
“Stay here,” my mom says. “I’ll get it.”
She steps out of the prep room and I step into the hall behind her.
“Want me to go out with her?” Noah asks from his perch on the prep table.
“No,” I say. “I think she’s good. Just stay there.”
Noah nods and as my mom goes upstairs, I go across the hall to the door that leads to the cold storage room and slip inside.
Prep room one is where the embalming happens.
It feels more sterile in here. I walk to the big metal door at the rear of the room and touch the handle.
I peer through the little window into the darkened space beyond.
I need to see something.
I pull the door open and a frigid rush of cold air hits me like a wintery wind.
My skin is raised to gooseflesh and I hold my breath for a moment.
On the double row of body-size shelves there are two bulky figures lying prone.
Two guests have yet to be embalmed and they are patiently waiting their turn.
I wave my hand in the air and the motion-activated light in the cold storage room flickers on. I stare at the bodies.
There were other corpses hidden in the walls of the tomb where Grandpa Redwood had been interred and I had heard them clattering around when I held that strange book.
I set my hand on one of the body bags. I try to think of what it felt like as that strange sensation had rushed through me, had made me feel like I’d been struck by lightning.
The blowers in the ceiling click on and push the cold air around trying to compensate for me leaving the door open, letting all the cold air out.
The bags rustle but only from the airflow, not because the people inside are waking at my touch.
My mom said I had this power and that it had come to me like a gift from my father and his father before him.
People pass down curly hair or being tall, not the ability to raise people from the dead.
I rack my brain to find a time when my dad might have laid it out for me and all I can conjure up is our conversation in the hearse the night our guest sat up and how Grandpa Redwood had been a topic of conversation more in the past few months than at any other time in my whole life.
I think he knew that something was shifting.
I think he could feel it and now, I can feel it too.
I leave the cold storage area and firmly shut the door. The light goes out once all is still inside and I sigh. What was I expecting?
“What are you doing?” my mom asks.
I flinch at the sound of her voice. She’s standing right inside the prep room door, the new jar of Vis-O-Guard in her hand.
“I didn’t see you,” I said.