Chapter 41
I woke to painful brightness, to brilliant sheet lightning stretched across the sky, turning liquid, filling every crack and corner, leaking beneath my eyelids.
I tried to move my head. Sharp, angry edges cut my brain.
“Jessica?” a voice asked.
“Jessica Morton,” I said. The name was an anchor. It was mine.
“Excellent,” the voice said. “Do you know what year it is?”
“Fuck.” This was a bad question to be asked—a worse one to have trouble answering.
Long seconds later, the year came to me, and who the president was, and counting backward from twenty was easy enough, except for eleven, which sounded wrong. It felt as if the conversation had happened before.
“Are you in pain?”
“Yes.”
“Let me give you something.”
I shook my head—I knew how to deal with pain. Uncle Cyrus had started my training when I was five. We had a song about his classes.
Butterfly clips on your fingertips. Cayenne water in the eyes.
The sparking lamp, forty milliamps—it clarifies.
Turn it off like a faucet, push it under your feet.
YOU’RE JUST MEAT.
“There’s no need to suffer,” the voice said.
I tried to switch the pain off, to push it down, but it was too bright.
Uncle Cyrus’s tricks hadn’t always worked.
“Sure,” I said.
My arm felt a twinge, and I opened one eye against the shredding light.
A blue plastic gadget was staked to my forearm, a white bandage holding it in place. A transparent tube led from it into the bright, unbearable sky.
Fingers turned a valve on the gadget, this new aperture between me and the excruciating world. Then a syringe went in, and soon the pain edged away.
My brain started to reassemble itself. There was something people were supposed to ask in situations like this.
“What happened?”
“You were in a car accident. Your uncle is okay.”
Which uncle?
“You’ve suffered a concussion. Possibly a seizure.”
“And something else,” I said. Something missing, sliced away clean, its absence thrumming. A hand? A leg? A kidney?
“A broken nose,” the voice said. “A few bruised ribs.”
“No.” It had to be more.
All my childhood injuries spun through me—falls while climbing or playing Bunny Hunt, sprains from kabaddi with the Seth kids. Nothing had ever sent me to a hospital.
“Why am I here?”
A pat on my arm. “So we can take care of you.”
“For bruised ribs and a broken nose?”
The voice came in a whisper, closer. “To keep your brain from swelling.”
Snick and click, the rasp of metal on metal.
At first I thought the sound was a machine, bellows and clockwork to keep me breathing. It was too rhythmic to be human.
Then recognition fell.
“Grandmother,” I croaked.
The snicking stopped.
My eyes opened a little—the world was still too bright. Elizabeth sat in the corner, her eyes as sharp as her needles. She wore an oxblood cardigan in the air-conditioning. An expanse of scarlet spilled from her hands.
“I’m knitting you a sweater,” she said. “For when you’re well.”
“Thank you,” I said, but the words felt wrong.
It hurt to move, to breathe, to think. Looking at Grandmother hurt worst of all—her shadow was made from ashes, her skin was someone else’s. Her eyes were upside down in their sockets.
Abused as a child, and you don’t even know it.
She gazed back at me, dissecting the confusion in my face. Then the metal shafts began to click again, like insects in the walls.
At my bedside was a vase full of flowers. I knew their scents from Grandpa Dwight’s lessons—monkshood, foxglove, wolfsbane, azaleas, lily of the valley. Death flowers, breathed in through my swollen nose.
Was I dead?
“You did well, Jessica. Planning is a virtue, but improvisation is divine.”
New memories fell from the sky. My assignment in New York had come to a head. But not in the city—in some dark forest. In some small room.
“How much do you remember?” Grandmother asked.
My mouth full of dirt and blood. An endless climb.
A butterfly knife.
“Not much.”
“You will,” she said, and things turned slantways again. “Mortons always heal.”
My mother hadn’t. Yvonne, Tobias, Zachary, Tillie, Ramsey, Katie, and Olive hadn’t.
Peter hadn’t.
“True Mortons, anyway,” Grandmother added, as if she’d heard my thoughts. Her words had fingernails. I felt her needles when I breathed. “There’s no need to talk about it until you feel ready. For now, all that matters is getting better.”
“Thank you,” I said.
All I wanted was to sleep, to shut out the snick-snick, the painful light crowding the room. But something worse waited outside—the missing piece of me. If I closed my eyes, it might come in.
“Did I succeed?” I asked.
Elizabeth stared at the red yarn in her hands, wearing an alligator smile.
“Beyond expectations,” she said.
The next time I woke up Grandmother was gone, replaced by a small girl.
The girl stood at the end of my bed, leaning on a frame with two wheels. Her legs looked too thin to support her weight. In every way, not a Morton.
“Are you lost?” I asked.
“I’m learning walking,” she said, breathing hard. “Re-learning. I’ve got rods and pins in me.”
“That sounds painful,” I said, wondering why this child was in my room.
“It hurts less than yesterday. I’m Bellamy. What happened to you?”
“Car wreck,” I said.
“Cancer,” she said. “Did your hair burn up?”
I lifted an arm—my ribs crackling with pain—and gently touched my head. My hair was cropped close, a few bare patches ridged with staples.
“Maybe I went through a windshield.”
Bellamy was aghast. “Weren’t you wearing a seat belt?”
“I don’t remember. Probably because I had a seizure later.”
“Your nose is funny too.”
“Broken,” I said, aware of the obstruction at the bottom of my visual field.
“Did you know that octopuses don’t have bones?”
I considered this. “Except their beaks.”
“That’s chitin,” she whispered, as if the word had dangerous properties.
“Sounds like you know a lot about them.”
“I love octopuses. No matter what happens, they’ll never break a bone—and they can squish through tiny holes.”
“If the beak fits,” I said.
“The eyeball has to fit too,” she said. “Octopuses can’t squish those.”
“Isn’t it octopi?”
Bellamy shook her head vigorously. “Octopi is Latin, and octopuses are Greek. Pus means foot.”
“Like Oedipus,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“A man with a bad foot,” I said. “Who killed his dad.”
“Oh,” was all she said.
In this short expanse of silence, it occurred to me that the pain had lessened a little. Shallow breaths didn’t hurt anymore. I could keep my eyes open despite the shrieking light from the windows.
But there was still something wrong. Something big, waiting in the corners of the room. Looming half seen, like my swollen nose.
A memory flitted past, maybe of a dream: Sebastian sitting next to Grandmother in the visiting chairs, knitting either end of the same scarf. Listening as I snuffled in my sleep. Judging me.
They leave us with broken parts.
Suddenly, I didn’t want Bellamy to leave me here alone.
“What are you afraid of?” I asked.
“Quicksand,” she began. “Spontaneous combustion. Those toilets at the airport that flush before you stand up. Pants walking around with no one in them. Being picked last. And slongers.”
“What are slongers?” I asked.
“The people in our basement. They cry at night, because they don’t like being dead.”
“They aren’t real,” I said.
She giggled a little. “But walking pants are?”
“Quicksand isn’t as bad as you think.”
At one of the Seths’ kabaddi tournaments, they’d dumped a thousand pounds of corn starch into a swimming pool for us kids to play in. The resulting fluid was weird, devious, and grasping if you moved too quickly. But no one had drowned.
Divya Seth had been disappointed.
“Maybe if they were robot pants,” Bellamy mused. “I’m not supposed to stand still this long.”
Her fingers gripped the handles of the walking frame, and she pushed herself into motion. Her legs were wobbly, her arms straining. Every movement put a grimace on her face. The frame squeaked with the rhythm of her steps.
As I watched, something strange began to happen—my body twinged in time with her slow, careful movements. As if a hundred tiny strings connected us. My muscles to hers, her nerves to mine.
Somehow it was hurting me, watching Bellamy walk.
Finally she came to a halt, close enough to sniff the flowers by my bed.
“These are nice. But the vases here are the color of lungs.”
She was right—hospital pink. “My grandpa sent them.”
“What are you afraid of?” Bellamy asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
She shook her head. “No one’s that brave.”
I thought about the missing piece that waited for me. “If I told you, you’d be scared too.”
Bellamy grinned. “Sometimes I like being scared.”
Her invitation was an honest one, but the missing thing was too big to talk about.
Something else fell into place.
“I’m afraid of my grandmother.”
“Is she mean to you?”
“No,” I said. “She loves me most of all.”