Chapter 44
The day I left the hospital, there wasn’t much to pack.
Pajamas, dressing gown, toothbrush. My knitting gear and a half-finished scarf, the best my hands could manage. My Econometrics textbook (the crash had erased instrumental variables from my brain) and a bottle of anti-seizure pills.
I was ready to go, but my ride was late.
From the window at the end of the hall, I couldn’t see any of the family cars in the parking lot. In this rain, Orrin would deploy something sturdy, a Volvo or a Saab. The Cadillac had been formidable but, like most vintage cars, not terribly safe.
I wondered how the oak tree was doing.
“Someone said you’re leaving,” came an accusation from the doorway.
It was Bellamy. Her metal walking frame shone in the gray light from the window. She looked paler today, thinner, her arms shivering as they held her up.
“I’m fixed.”
“Not fair,” she said. “You’ve only been here a week.”
“Car wrecks and cancer are different things.”
“Wish I’d been in a car wreck.”
“That wouldn’t cure your cancer.”
“I meant instead, duh.” Bellamy narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure your brain’s all better?”
I shrugged. My family still looked strange to me, and the nagging sense of incompleteness remained. Either I was missing something, or the world itself had dropped a stitch.
“You aren’t sure,” she said.
“Maybe not. But home is the best place to heal.”
“Home.” She said the word sadly. “I miss my house, even the slongers. Give me a hug.”
When I hesitated, Bellamy pulled herself into motion, covering the floor between us with a few heaves of the walker.
She fell into my arms.
I felt it again—how tenuous, how brittle she was. How easy to snap her, along with those strings connecting us. Her heartbeat, racing from those few steps across the room, was a butterfly in my hands.
“Write me,” she said. “Real letters on paper.”
“Sure,” I said, wondering what I would write about.
“Just send it to the hospital, with ‘Bellamy’ on it. That’s the awesome thing about a weirdo name. The nurses all know me.”
“They’d know you anyway.” I gently unwrapped myself, placing her hands back on the walking frame. “Even if you had a boring old-lady name—like Jessica.”
She giggled. “You should change your name to Blessica, so you’ll always remember me.”
“I’ll remember all this. I don’t go to hospitals much.”
She took a backward step, looking me up and down, as if judging how likely I was to break again.
The strings between us were humming now, power lines in the wind. It felt as though leaving Bellamy would pull them tighter and tighter, until they yanked my bones out.
“Let’s not say goodbye,” I said.
“Except you just said it.”
I held up my hands in surrender. Bellamy always won this game.
“We can come up with something better,” she said, a graceful victor. “Like: Don’t forget your seat belt!”
An hour later, one of my little cousins bounced into the room, wearing a backpack that squirmed and clucked.
“Trotsky, hush!” she hissed over her shoulder. “You aren’t allowed in here.”
“Good morning, Mary,” I said, rubbing the cuticle on my ring finger, which had grown sharp again.
“Aunt Jessica! We’re here to take you home.”
Relief swept through me. To be out of this place, with its lung-colored vases, fluorescent lights, and security cameras. The children that came with strings.
Mary had no strings. She drifted alone in space, orbiting the star of her own impulses. She shook rainwater from her clothes onto the tiled floor.
I stood up from my visitor’s chair. “You were supposed to be here at ten.”
“Sebastian kept stopping the car, because he was annoyed with me.”
“Sebastian…” I sat down again.
A flash of giggles. “Did you think I drove myself?”
And there he was in the doorway, wearing one of the white linen shirts he kept in his closet at home, safe from the ravages of campus parties.
But his hair was rumpled, his eyes tired, his shoes wet.
I could see it in a glance—he’d taken a dawn train from Albany to the estate, then driven here in the rain.
He’d come home for me.
Still looking at him, I asked Mary, “How were you annoying?”
“With science!”
“You put your hands over my eyes,” he said, still looking at me. “On the highway.”
“It was an experiment!”
“It’s the sort of thing that makes cars crash.”
Mary turned to me. “Did you put your hands over Uncle Cyrus’s eyes?”
“I did not.”
She turned to him. “See?”
“Seeing is the point,” he said.
“Mary,” I said firmly. “No science on the way home.”
“As you wish, Aunt Jessica.” The polite promise did not erase her delinquent grin.
Sebastian took a step inside the room, his eyes never leaving mine. Perhaps he would ask about the staples in my head, my broken nose, or the state of my brain.
Mary, bouncing on my bed, spoke first. “What does this thing do?”
“That’s an IV,” Sebastian told her. “It dribbles medicine into your blood.”
“Or water.” I held up my left arm, where the cannula had left its dragonfly shadow. “When you’re knocked out for a long time, you can’t drink.”
“They cut a water hole in you?”
“I had plenty of holes when I got here. They closed them with staples.”
Mary jumped down for a closer look at my scalp, ecstatic. “If I had a magnet, could I catch you with it?”
“You might make my head hurt. But I’d still escape.”
“I’d bring one of those junkyard magnets—the kind that picks up cars!”
For moment, I was speechless, but Sebastian rescued me.
“Medical staples aren’t magnetic. If they were, an MRI would rip them out.”
Mary pulled her backpack off and dumped it on the bed. “You hear that, Trotsky? What if you accidentally ate some thumbtacks on your big day, and we put you in an MRI? Zzzzap! Splootch!”
The backpack, wisely, made no answer.
Sebastian was looking at the machines around my bed. Like he was imagining me broken, unconscious.
I wondered again if he would ask how I was doing. If I was having trouble recognizing my own family. If I’d noticed that the two of us—unlike Mary—were connected by invisible strings.
But he only picked up my duffel bag and asked, “Is this everything?”
Orrin had sent them in the Volvo 240, mid-seventies, brilliant red. Affectionately known as “the Brick,” it was the first car everyone in the family was allowed to drive.
I remembered at age fourteen, me and Sebastian taking our first offensive driving lesson. We’d already practiced three-point turns, parallel parking, and the bootlegger’s reverse, but now we were tasked with running Uncle Orrin off the road.
We practiced on the old carriage path that led through the archery field, level and treeless. Both cars were fitted with fat wooden bumpers, like chariots in the Circus Maximus.
I took the wheel first, and aimed the Brick at Orrin’s rear left fender, as per the lesson plan: jolt the driver, push the target into a spin.
But Orrin, who did not believe in coddling, accelerated at the last second. We missed completely, and I overcorrected, sending the Volvo into its own dirt-spraying pirouette. A brick, indeed.
“My turn!” Sebastian shouted before we even stopped spinning.
We both had on motorcycle helmets, and bumped heads as we switched places.
A year later, the Brick was retired from crash duty. Grandmother had decreed that our depleted generation would practice vehicular attacks in new cars with airbags and crumple zones. At this, Orrin had only shaken his head.
I slung my duffel bag into the back seat. “Can’t believe this thing is still running.”
Sebastian stood next to me, his umbrella over my head. “Do you want to drive?”
“Not allowed,” I said. “My brain pills say so on the bottle.”
“Brain pills.” He opened the passenger door for me. “Is that the technical term?”
I gave him a shrug. “No science on the way home, remember?”
Sebastian and I didn’t talk much as we drove—not to each other, anyway. But I felt him next to me, his hand almost brushing my knee when he changed gears.
“When they cut your brain up, were you asleep?” Mary asked from the back seat.
“They didn’t cut me up. The car crash did that.”
“But they had to fix stuff in your head. Uncle Cyrus said you had a fit—arms and legs going in all directions, and your eyes almost exploded!”
I watched Mary demonstrating in the rearview mirror.
“Yes, I had a seizure. But they used drugs to treat it, not scalpels. I take pills to keep my brain from swelling again.”
“Would you get smarter if your brain got bigger?”
“I think you’d die. Is your seat belt on?”
“Yes,” she said, and I heard the click.
“Skulls are crowded,” Sebastian said, looking at Mary in the rearview mirror. “If your brain gets too big, it squishes out. A herniated brain is not ideal.”
I thought about the crow skull he’d given me, now gray ashes in Garrett’s furnace. The brain case had been tiny—birds’ skulls, even the clever corvids’, were mostly full of eyes.
“Are there poisons that make brains swell up?” Mary asked, lifting one of Trotsky’s floppy ears, peering inside the rabbit’s head.
“Bongkrekic acid,” Sebastian said.
Mary laughed. “That sounds made up.”
He only shrugged. Had he been reading about brain injuries? Or was this knowledge from those long hours in Grandpa Dwight’s library?
He’d also known about my nonmagnetic staples.
The strings that connected us had pulled him here through the rain, all the way from Albany. I could see them in the car between us, bright enough to touch.
“Can brain trauma make you hallucinate?” I asked Sebastian.
“In every way. Visions, delusions, weird smells.”
I breathed in. He smelled like camphor and granite.
“Does that happen to bunnies too?” Mary asked.
“We don’t know,” Sebastian said. “Rabbits can’t tell us what they see.”
“They’re so dumb,” she said with a giggle.
I looked over my shoulder—Mary was staring into Trotsky’s pink-lined eyes. The rabbit gazed back at her in silence. Long months of Mary’s companionship had left it imperturbable, perhaps fatalistic.
“What about emotions?” I asked.
There was a moment of silence, broken by the squeak of windshield wipers.
“Can brain trauma cause mood swings?” I clarified, but mood also sounded unMorton.
“Are you feeling okay?” Sebastian asked.
“Yes.” It didn’t sound convincing, so I added, “Just some funny dreams.”
“Probably your pills. Did the doctors say anything about side effects?
I shrugged. The doctors hadn’t said much to me at all. They’d talked in the hall with Veronica, then she’d come in to tell me the news.
Maybe my visions meant nothing—a side effect of injury or medication. What mattered was that Sebastian was here, beside me in this car. His presence meant I’d been forgiven.
“Thanks for coming to get me,” I said.
The car went quiet again.
And I remembered—I was Aunt Jessica now. It was unnecessary to thank the unblooded.
I would wear red at funerals, for all to see. On my hands. On my face. On my knife. On the walls. That small room, soaked with the smell of rust.
The rain grew stronger, erasing the world outside the car between sweeps of windshield blades. Sebastian leaned forward, both hands on the wheel, peering ahead.
“My curae’s almost done,” Mary said out of nowhere. “Now that you’re an aunt, you can mentor me on Trotsky’s big day.”
A hint of carsickness. “Don’t you want someone older?”
“No, I want you. And Sebastian has to be there too!”
He smiled into the rearview. “I’d be honored, Mary.”
“You hear that, Trotsky?” She held the rabbit tight. “Everyone’s coming!”
I looked past her—in the rear windshield, nothing was visible except a blur of rain, stirred by the tendrils of the wind. If something was following us, I couldn’t see it.