Bone Gap (15 page)

When Sean brought home a test with a perfect score, a paper with an A-plus, a new drawing, his mother still said, “Good for you,” but she didn't look at him, or hug him, or tell him she was proud. The people of Bone Gap said Sean looked so much like his father—tall and broad and so strong he could throw a car across a yard—that Didi couldn't bear it. Sean couldn't bear it either. He didn't stop getting perfect test scores or A-pluses, but he stopped bringing home the evidence.

He also stopped drawing.

He poured his energies into becoming a doctor, the kind of doctor who would be able to save anyone who needed saving. And Sean was almost there, too, close enough to feel the scalpel in his hand. Didi was flighty and flirty and half-baked on one thing or another, but she liked that her younger son was almost as nice-looking as she was, and Sean thought Finn would be all right. And though Finn occasionally got the crap kicked out of him for being moony and strange and too pretty for his own good, he was also growing tall and strong and didn't want Sean to protect him anymore. He would do it himself, or he wouldn't. Either way, Finn told him, it wasn't Sean's problem.

So Sean filled out his applications and lined up his financial aid and packed his bags, and Didi said, “I met an orthodontist on the internet, and I'm moving to Oregon,” and Finn said, “What?”

Sean unpacked his bags.

As much as he tried, Sean couldn't hate his mother. First, because he wasn't the type, and second, because he finally understood how fragile she was, how unmoored and untethered, like a shiny balloon floating through the air, no hand to steady her. And he couldn't hate Finn either, because Finn was so strange, and because who hates a fifteen-year-old kid who has lost both parents and can't look anyone in the eye and says “What?” when he means “How?” or “Why?” or “No!” or “It's not fair”?

And Sean didn't hate his work, either, because he got to drive an ambulance as fast as he wanted and he still got to save people who needed saving, and that was something he could be proud of. He dated sturdy nurses, exhausted interns, and fearless phlebotomists. He avoided anyone too pretty.

And then Roza showed up in the barn.

He had met battered women before. He had seen them huddled on porch steps, eyes blackened, teeth wadded up in bloody tissues. Roza couldn't have been more than twenty to Sean's twenty-three, but she had the same sorts of bruises as those other women, the sprained wrist, cracked ribs and broken toes, the wariness of a wounded bird. Sean half expected some enraged lunatic of an ex to come storming his front door, which didn't concern him too much, as he could knock almost anyone on his ass, and because he was friends with every police officer in a hundred-mile radius. But he was worried when she refused to
go to the hospital, worried when she would allow only Finn to touch her. And he worried about Finn, too, how easily a teenage boy could fall for a wounded bird, an
absurdly beautiful
wounded bird who didn't speak much English. He didn't want to come home one day to find Finn and this girl licking each other like cats. He figured he'd let her stay a few days, then call up one of the social workers at the hospital, find a shelter.

And it might have gone that way, if Sean hadn't needed the hospital himself.

Roza had just raided the fridge and pantry, setting out ingredients for another of her Polish dishes—flour, potatoes, onions, butter. He hadn't expected all this cooking and wanted to help. Or at least communicate that this wasn't her job and that he wasn't such a useless idiot he couldn't chop some potatoes like a normal person. He made the first cut and almost chopped off his finger. He couldn't help the hiss that escaped his lips, and the blood that poured all over the counter and floor. He knew without examining the wound that it would need stitches.

Immediately, Roza wrapped his finger in a dish towel and elevated his arm. “Doctor,” she said. “We go.”

“No,” he said. “I'm fine. I just need my bag.”

“Doctor,” she said, louder.

“No, it will be okay. My bag is in my room.”

A hiss escaped
her
lips, and she let loose a stream of Polish that he didn't understand. At last, she muttered something that sounded like “Golobki.” He was wondering if she'd just called
him a meatball when she ran out of the kitchen. She returned with his bag, dropped it on the table.

He kept his one arm elevated and fumbled with the clasp. She pushed his hand away and opened the bag. First, he grabbed Betadine to clean the wound. At his awkward attempts to dampen some gauze with the solution, Roza clucked her tongue and did it for him. He unwrapped his hand and wiped down the finger, gritting his teeth against the sting. After that, anesthetic. An injection would be fastest, but he couldn't manage a bottle and needle with his wounded hand. So he found a topical anesthetic. Again, Roza took the bottle from him, dampened the gauze with solution. Sean placed the gauze on the wound. The cut was deep, and the anesthetic would take a while. Without him having to ask or gesture, Roza found a clean towel and rewrapped his hand with the gauze underneath. She spread another towel on the table.

While he was waiting for the anesthetic to numb his finger, he did more digging and found a sterile package with a curved needle and thread, a needle holder, and forceps. Though he wasn't supposed to suture anyone, he'd practiced stitching on pigs' feet till his hands ached, till each stitch was tight and A-plus perfect. But he needed more than one hand to open the package with the needle. He was about to ask her to do it when she spoke again.

“Doctor,” she said.

“No, I can do it, I just—”

Again, the musical stream of Polish spoken in her
disconcerting alto. She was too delicate for that strong, scratchy voice, as if her birdlike outside was just a pretty little tale she liked to tell, and the true story was something she kept deep down inside. He searched her face—her skin rich and deep, her eyes clear and bright—and tried to find something to hold on to in the stream of sounds. She shook her head, opened the package to free the curved needle and silk thread. She set these on the towel. She ran her hands over the other things he had laid out: scissors, antibiotic ointment, bandages. She didn't seem to be upset by the sight of these things, or by the blood that had soaked through the towel or dripped onto the table and floor, and she did not seem to be afraid. Which was interesting.

More interesting was when he finally removed the towel and gauze and attempted the first stitch. He was able to pull the needle through his flesh, but he couldn't tie off the thread. He explained how to wrap the thread around the needle holder and use the forceps to make a knot. She took the needle holder and forceps, watching his face carefully to make sure the knot was both tight enough and not too tight. He did the second suture; she tied it off and cut the thread. When he was about to do the third stitch, he hesitated, held out the needle holder to her. She took it and deftly did the last stitch, the punch of the needle through his skin almost pleasant. She daubed the ointment onto the wound, picked up his hand, and examined the spidery black knots as if they were a work of art—a painting, a sculpture.

Her face burst into a grin, and it was like watching the sun rise. “Frankenhand.”

“Excuse me?”

She gently tapped his hand. He tore his eyes away from her, looked down at the black stitches. He nodded. “Frankenhand.”

She laughed, reached up, and—to his surprise—patted him on the top of his head. “Good for you!” she said. She packed up his bag and returned it to his room. He put on rubber gloves to protect the stitches. Together, they wiped down the counters and floor and made potato dumplings sautéed in butter and onions, as if there was nothing in this house that could wound, and no blood had ever been spilled here.

Later that night, he'd rummaged in his closet, found an old sketchbook, some pencils. He drew a picture, the first he'd drawn in years.

A sketch of his Frankenhand in hers.

Sean heard the footsteps outside, refolded the drawing, and stuffed it back into his wallet. His tea was cold, but he sipped it anyway as Finn burst into the kitchen.

Finn dumped a grass-stained paper bag on the table. “I saw him. He was at Charlie Valentine's.”

Sean felt as if he was stealing Finn's line when he said, “What?”

“Him!” said Finn. “The man! The one who took Roza! He was at Charlie Valentine's house. At his back door. He knew me.
I mean, he recognized me. But then, he . . . he . . . I went to see Jonas, I went to tell him. But he didn't believe me.”

“I wonder why,” said Sean.

“He was following me. He was spying on Charlie.”

“Which is it?”

“Sean,” Finn said. “I saw him.”

“Yeah, you said that. Where have you been anyway? Where do you go?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” said Finn.

“You go out every night. You think I don't know that?”

“I saw the guy who took Roza. He was at Charlie Valentine's.”

“Where else would he be?”

“Sean!”

“What's in the bag?”

“Are you even listening to me?” Finn said. “Are you hearing what I'm telling you?”

Sean reached out, grabbed the bag, and yanked it toward him. He pulled out the large jar of Hippie Queen Honey, the cookie tin. He opened the tin. Something in his chest hitched, broke, as the warm scent wafted up toward him, honey and nuts and vanilla. And he knew where Finn had been going every night, night after night, and he knew why. He had tried so hard not to despise everyone—his father for dying on him, his mother for drifting from him, his brother for lying to him, Roza for leaving him—but he didn't think he could stop himself anymore. He didn't have the heart.

“Priscilla Willis, huh?”

Finn didn't answer. He didn't have to. Sean's whole life was in the toilet, and his brother was making time with the sad girl who'd go down on any guy who would tell her she wasn't ugly.

Sean unscrewed the jar of honey, dipped a finger, tasted. “Good for you, brother,” he said, voice a rusty blade. “Good for you.”

HE WAS LATE.

With the crickets chirping through the open window, Priscilla “Petey” Willis sat cross-legged on her bed in the dark of her room, waiting for Finn to appear like some sort of magic trick.

This was unusual. Petey Willis wasn't the sort to wait for anyone. And if she was forced to wait, she wasn't so damned happy about it. Normally, Petey was too mad about too many things to list: her given name, her own face, that one horrible party, to name just a few.

She should have gotten over her name by now, and maybe she would have, if the people of Bone Gap remembered to call
her Petey. But they didn't. They wouldn't. And her mother outright refused. Priscilla, her mother said, was too much fun to say, tripping off the tongue like a favorite song. Pris-cil-la. “And you are my all-time favorite song,” her mother told her.

And as much as the people of Bone Gap forgot her name, they wouldn't stop reminding her of her face. Oh, most of them weren't mean about it, at least not outright. But she could see them looking at her when they thought she wasn't, saw how their eyes flicked from her mom to Petey back to her mom, and she knew what they were thinking: How did bright and sunny Mel Willis with her sweet smile and brown-sugar freckles produce such an unlovely daughter, more vinegar than honey? As a child, Petey would catch a glimpse of herself in a mirror or a window or the surface of a still pond and find her own outsize features interesting and unusual—unforgettable even. And how would that ever be a bad thing?

While she was growing up, Petey's mother, frank as she was, would talk to Petey about falling in love and falling in lust and everything in between, because surely someone would one day notice Petey. Petey was as curious as anyone, but her mother's explanations too often veered from the scientific to the nostalgic as she remembered what it was like to be eleven and having your first crush and thirteen and getting your first period and fifteen when Tommy Murphy tried to jam his hand down your jeans during the movie previews and actually got stuck.

Tommy Murphy was the last straw. Petey had snatched up
the nearest utensil. “If you do not stop talking, I will find a way to off myself with this teaspoon.” Later, her mom simply had to appear as if she might start waxing poetic about making out with this boy or that one and Petey would say,
“Teaspoon!”
and her mother would laugh and change the subject.

But Mel did not give up. When Petey was in the seventh grade, her mother gave her a book called
Get Real
. It had a hot-pink cover, strangely fascinating and explicit cartoons, and all sorts of information for girls who liked boys and girls who liked girls and girls who liked everybody and people who didn't believe in gender binaries and about birth control methods and how to prevent STDs and fun things to do with showerheads and why it's not such a good idea to text a picture of your boobs to that guy you just met at the mall.

And then her body popped like a kernel of corn, and with that came the boys who followed her down the street, making comments about it and discussing which piece of it they preferred most and what they wanted to stick where, but when she turned around, they told her she was wrecking the view.

The nice girls suggested different makeup and hairstyles. The mean ones suggested hockey masks or dog bones. And all the while, Mel told her that though most people were threatened by those who were different, not everyone was so shortsighted.

Petey believed that, too. Needed to believe it. And her need to believe it led to that one stupid thing, the thing that everyone in Bone Gap used to define her, even when they got the story all
wrong, and from all the wrong people.