Bone Gap (24 page)

“What are these?” he said.

“Just take a look.”

“Okay,” he said, flipping through the pictures. He had no idea what he was looking at, or who he was looking at, or why he was looking at pictures when the taste of her was still on his lips, when she had just wept like someone had died.

She tapped a particular picture. “What do you think of this one?”

It was a dark-haired kid in a grade-school graduation cap and gown. It meant nothing to him. “It's okay.”

“I think Sean looks cute.” She seemed to be watching him intently, her body—all softness just moments before—coiled and tense.

“Okay,” he said again. Where had she gotten an old picture of Sean? Since when was Sean
cute
?

“Don't you think so?”

“Think what?”

“That Sean looks nice in that picture?”

“I don't know. I guess.”

She sprang forward and ripped the stack from his hands, her expression so triumphant that not even Finn could mistake it. “This isn't Sean.”

He stared at her. “Well, who is it, then?”

“What?”

“If it's not Sean, who is it?”

Her breath burst from her in a huff, as if someone had wrapped his arms around her and performed the Heimlich.
“Who . . . ?” she began. “It's James Pullman. From school.”

Finn held out his hand, and she placed the photograph back into it. “It's hard to tell. It's dark out here. It's an old picture. And because of the cap and gown. You can't see his ears. Sean's ears stick out a little.”

“But I knew it was James,” she said.

“Petey, why did you bring these pictures out here? Why are you showing them to me?”

“Do you have problems with your eyes? Maybe you can see things better when they're far away?”

“Huh?”

“Can you see me right now?”

“What are you talking about? Why wouldn't I be able to see you?”

“Right,” she said, mostly to herself. “Right. You could pick out the queen bee. So you can see just fine. But . . .” She shook her head and flipped through the stack of photos. “Who's this?”

“Enough with the pictures already,” he said. “Tell me what's wrong.”

She thrust the photo at him. “Who is it?”

He sighed and glanced at the photo. “Miguel.”

“How do you know this is Miguel?”

“What?”

“Just humor me for a second. How do you know it's Miguel?”

“Well, he's brown. And the biceps.”

“And that's it?”

“Huh?”

“You just look for the arms, and you know it's Miguel?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, the hair helps, too. It's really dark. But mostly, I look for the arms. Don't you do that?”

“What if you met someone else with the same brown skin who also had big arms? Would you be able to tell that it
wasn't
Miguel?”

“I . . .” Finn's mind raced. Then he said, “Would you?”

“Yes. I'd be able to tell.”

“You're better at faces, then. Lots of people are.” He thought of Roza, of her kidnapper, and bitterness sanded his tongue. “Believe me, I know I'm not so good at faces.”

“I don't think that's all of it,” said Petey. She flipped through the pictures again. “What about this one?”

“He looks familiar,” Finn began.

Petey nodded.

He brushed a finger over the image as if that could provide more information. “He's wearing a cap, too.”

Petey nodded again.

“But you think I should be able to tell who it is anyway?”

“Yes,” Petey said.

“Why? Why do you think that?” He reached for her hand, but she pulled away. “Petey?”

She took a deep breath. “Finn,” she said. “It's a picture of
you
.”

He watched her carefully. She seemed to think this was a
very important thing to say, but he didn't understand her, he didn't understand any of this. “And you think I should have been able to see that right away. Even though he's—I've—got that cap on, I should have been able to see?”

She rocked backward as if assaulted by a strange wind. “Yes.”

“Just by the face alone?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And that's . . .” He paused, his mind churning, stumbling onto it, feeling for it, the thing that made him odd, the thing that made him different. “That's how everyone else does it? They see someone's face and they just
know
who it is? Without having to see their hair or their clothes or the way they move or anything?”

“Yes!” she said, almost shouting. Then she softened her voice. “Finn, I think you're face blind.”

“I'm . . .
what
?”

“It's a condition.” She dug around in the bag, pulled out papers, printouts from the computer, articles, a library book with the name Sacks on the cover. “You can see as well as anyone else, but you can't recognize faces the way other people can.”

He sat very still on the blanket, his wounded leg suddenly stiff and itchy. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You can't process the image of a face, you can't store the image so that you can remember it later. Some face-blind people learn to recognize themselves and close family members, but some can't even pick their own children from a crowd. And
some will never recognize a face, even their own.”

Before, he'd wished she would just say something, and now he wished she would stop talking. But she didn't.

“It's why so many people look the same to you. It's why you don't look people in the eye. Why you couldn't describe the man who took Roza.”

He felt as if he were unraveling like a ball of yarn. “I
did
describe the man who took Roza.”

“Not like someone else would. You couldn't see his features. You couldn't put them together. You talked about how he moved, which is the way some face-blind people recognize others. They use other cues like facial hair or body type. Here. I found lots of stuff about it.” She thrust the papers at him.

He didn't want the papers. He didn't want any of this. It had never occurred to him to ask anyone how he or she recognized another person. And why would he? It would be like asking people how they knew that the smell of coffee was the smell of coffee. A stupid question. Everyone knew what coffee smelled like. Everyone.

“But . . . ,” he said. “I can see you. I always know it's you.”

One side of her mouth curved up into a smile, no kind of smile at all. “Yeah. Because I'm ugly.”

“Stop it,” he said.

“It's true. Face-blind people can sometimes recognize really unusual-looking people, and they're attracted to them.” She pawed through the damned papers. “This article is about a
teenage girl with prosopagnosia—that's the technical name for face blindness—who ran away with a middle-aged circus clown. But she was attracted to him because she could see him, recognize him in a crowd.”

Again, she thrust this article at him. He pushed it away. He didn't want the stupid article. “You're not a circus clown.”

“No, not a clown. But I'm hideous. Everyone thinks so.”

“I don't think so,” Finn said, angry now. He had some sort of crazy disease and Petey was talking about being ugly after he'd been coming for her every night, because he couldn't stand to be away from her, and she was throwing papers and books at him as if it proved something about
her
, and not about him.

“It's true,” she said. “I look like a giant bee. And that's why you can tell it's me. And that's why you're here.” She shrugged, but the tears came again, wet tracks down her cheeks.

“That's not why,” he said.

She said nothing.

He said, “I love you.”

She shook her head. “You can see me, that's all.”

But wasn't that love? Seeing what no one else could? And yet if it wasn't enough for her that she was beautiful to him, if she couldn't believe him . . .

And who would? If what she said was true, and he had this thing, who would believe anything he said about anyone, ever?

He clutched at the horseshoe branding his heart as if he could will away the terrible ache that threatened to crush him,
the terrible knowledge that told him that the people of Bone Gap had been right all along.
They
had recognized him for what he was. Spaceman. Sidetrack. Moonface. Not like other people. Not like them.

“Petey,” he said, but she held the box up to him. “Petey.” Her head dropped, and the tears spilled onto her knees, droplets soaking into the fabric of her jeans, and she would not look at him, would not speak. He took the book and the papers and his mother's box and got to his feet. He stumbled to the mare. He had no idea how he had the strength to haul himself onto her back, how he got home, how long he sifted through the articles, how he got into his bed, how Calamity sensed the calamity. Cat and Kittens surrounded him, buried him, and their thick and rumbling purrs reminded him of the hum of the bees, and the taste of honey. He wrapped himself in the sound and drowned in the warmth. He plummeted into sleep, the only place he could pretend he wasn't blind, the only place he could pretend he still had everything he'd lost.

WITHOUT PLANNING IT, ROZA SETTLED INTO A ROUTINE
, awaking each morning in her simple bedroom, greeting the iron-haired lady in the kitchen, eating the nutty toast hot from the oven, walking through town toward the hills, splashing through the streams, decorating Rus with flowers until he looked ridiculous. In the afternoons, the man would visit, and he would bring a lamb, and she would hold it, and kiss its soft woolly head, and smell the wool on her hands the rest of the day, the smell like a promise. He did not touch her, did not approach her. And the question he asked her when she was holding the lamb was not the same question. Now he asked her other things:
her favorite food (jam-filled cookies), her favorite color (brown), her favorite game as a child (hide-and-seek). He even asked her if she wanted to play it, and she snorted despite herself, imagining this tall, strange man with ice-chip eyes crouching in the boxwoods.

So she asked
him
a question: Could she have a garden? The next morning, she awoke, ate her toast, walked into the field, and found a patchwork of the greenest, healthiest vegetable plants she had ever seen, beds of flowers so carefully arranged they could have been in the courtyard of an English manor. The sight of these things disappointed her so greatly that even the lamb couldn't cheer her, so the man asked her what was wrong.

“I wanted to grow the plants myself,” she said.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, and nodded, and the next day, the vegetables and the flowers were gone, and in their place was a bare expanse of rich dark earth, sacks of seeds and tiny pots of seedlings, a shovel and spade, a watering can.

Roza had her garden. And if the earth smelled a little too rich, and the plants grew a little too easily and looked a little too vibrant, the worms in the soil too fat and happy, the praying mantises too pious and too plentiful, she told herself that she was surely dying in a hospital somewhere, and that the garden was a gift from her own wasting mind, a last vision of happiness, and there was nothing to fear anymore, as this was her last adventure.

But she could not help—as she dug in the dirt, and sang
to the worms, and prayed with the mantises—comparing this garden, this field, with her other gardens, with Sean's garden. For a farm boy, he was not a very good gardener. But he did everything that she told him to do and seemed just as happy as she when the tomatoes finally turned fat and red. Sean helped her hill the potato plants so that they didn't get sunburned and helped her dig up the tubers once the vines died. When the fall came, and the garden didn't need them so much anymore, she taught him how to make pierogi, to fill the purses of dough with potato and onion and pinch them closed.

“Must be tight or will leak in pan,” she said, demonstrating. “Now you.”

“Like this?” he said. But he was not looking at the purse of dough in his own hands, he was staring at
her
hands. Of all the things to stare at. Her hands were rough skinned, broken nailed, small but strong. Her hands had rolled dough and chopped potatoes and milked cows and prepared slides and made things grow. She'd even sewn stitches in his finger when he'd cut himself with a kitchen knife.

She liked that he stared at them. She liked him for staring.

She tucked a stray curl behind an ear, and his eyes followed the motion.

Soon, she was sneaking glances, too. At the pink scar on his finger. The curls on the nape of his neck. The furrow between his brows. The veins in his forearms. And the more she looked, the more she wanted to see. On a warm day in the late fall, they
were adding compost to the garden to prepare it for the next spring, and he stopped to rest. He used the bottom of his T-shirt to mop the sweat from his face. The pale exposed flesh of his belly froze her. He dropped the edge of the shirt and there she was—gaping, humiliated—but unable to tear her eyes away in case he decided to do it again.

The next time he rushed into the kitchen, late for work, fumbling with the buttons on his uniform shirt, and found her leaning against the sink, coffee cup hovering an inch from her lips, he stopped buttoning, stood stock-still, let her look.

When she reached out with her rough-skinned hand and touched the dark hair that dusted his chest, he let her touch.

And when she stepped up on a chair and leaned down to kiss him, he let her do that, too.

And when she stepped down, stepped back, chewing hard on the inside of her cheek, terrified and overwhelmed by all that looking and touching and kissing, he buttoned up the shirt and tucked the chair under the table. As if he understood. As if, maybe, maybe, he was just as terrified and overwhelmed as she was.