Soul Search: A Zackie Story

by Reyna Favis

  The hand slowly reached towards Cam with the fingers extended and the palm open, offering a handshake of introduction. Eyes wide, Cam offered his own hand and accepted the gesture. Releasing Cam, it next came gradually up to my face. I automatically turned my head, flinching away with another loud expletive.

  “I think it wants to know who you are,” Cam said. “Come here and stand in front of a mirror.” Grabbing my shoulder he guided me to the half bath in the hall, flicked on the light and stood there looking over my shoulder. Facing the mirror, I saw I wore a blank look of shock as the hand rose and delicately touched the reflection of my face. As it withdrew, the ring finger and the pinky curled into the palm with the thumb, leaving the remaining fingers erect.

  I stared at the hand in the mirror and my brow wrinkled in confusion, “Two? What the hell does two mean?”

  Cam’s eyes crinkled as he said, “Not two. You’re too young to know… Peace. It’s saying peace to you.”

  My mouth became a firm, white line as my lips compressed and my eyes squinted angrily back at me. I raised my left hand with the middle finger extended. “Screw you!” I yelled. “Give me back my hand!” In response, the scolding finger returned briefly and then the hand dropped to my side. Swearing to myself, I pushed past Cam and left the tiny bathroom. I stormed to the front door and yanked it open, pulling the keys out of my pocket awkwardly with my left hand as I headed through the night to my car. Opening the trunk activated a small automatic light in the side of the cavity. I began rooting through the piles of SAR equipment until I found the gloves that I used to push through thick woods and briars. I swore triumphantly as I pulled on the right glove.

  “And what good did that do?” asked Cam from the open door.

  Blowing upwards to get the bangs out of my eyes, I said, “I don’t know.” The adrenaline from the amputation decision was dissipating and I slumped against the rear bumper, hugging myself with my left arm.

  “Fia, come back inside and let’s figure this out,” Cam called.

  I shrugged my shoulders and sat for a few minutes in the dark. Eventually, I stood and closed the trunk. He was right. There was no one else on the planet I could talk to about this and I knew I wasn’t thinking straight anymore. I felt violated and I didn’t know what to make of the hand and its offers of a peace between us. I re-entered the house and sat down on a kitchen stool, once again trusting Cam to explain how to behave in this bizarre world.

  “I don’t think this is reversible,” he began after sitting next to me.

  “You don’t know that,” I interrupted. “You said you’ve never seen anything like this before, so how would you know?” My right hand hung limply, while my left hand emphasized the words with a chopping motion.

  “You’re right. I don’t know,” he replied, his voice low and soothing. “What I do know is that this is a terrible shock to you.” He paused and I took the moment to collect myself, to stop the panic and to think about what he was saying to me. “For now,” he continued, “just consider what it would mean and how you would need to adjust if this is not reversible.”

  I closed my eyes because I didn’t really want to think about what life would be like with this dead thing attached to me. Inhaling sharply, I opened my eyes and said, “Look, I can try training myself to rely on my left hand, but this thing has a mind of its own. I can’t stand the idea of it touching my food. Even worse, what am I supposed to do about showering? I don’t want some dead thing feeling me up.” I was grimacing and starting to feel distressed again.

  “Understandable,” Cam said, his eyes widening. “Do you really think you’ll be molested? It seemed mannerly and peaceful in our interactions with it.”

  “I don’t know, but you said it yourself before – as in life, so in death. What do we know about this thing when it had life? Nothing. It could be capable of anything, including lying to us to convince us that we have nothing to be worried about.”

  Cam looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “Okay, rather than try to argue the point….I used to scuba dive in the UK when I was younger. We used these heavy, thick neoprene gloves because the water was always so cold. You can’t really feel anything through them. You could wear a right hand glove in the shower.”

  I looked at him stunned. Here we were, trying to problem-solve the minutiae while the bigger issue of owning a dead appendage remained an elephant in the room. As if he could read my mind, Cam said, “Hey, we do what we can do here. Let’s not try to boil the ocean until we have a better understanding of what we are dealing with.” He went to a closet near the front door and said, “Let me find those gloves.”

  I nodded and forced my brain into problem-solving mode. It’s impossible to feel simultaneously out-of-control terrified and to think analytically, so the more I thought about how I was going to deal with the dead hand, the calmer I felt. Focusing on what I could do made me feel more in control and I mentally blessed Cam for his genius. As Cam rummaged in the closet, I raised my voice and said, “I can’t ever let people see the hand. I’ll have to keep it covered at all times.” I thought some more and then added, “I can wear latex gloves at the restaurant. They’ll just think I’ve become some kind of hygiene freak.” I rubbed my jaw with my good hand and followed up with, “I’ll find some fashionable-looking gloves to wear otherwise. If anyone asks, I’ll say I have vitiligo.”

  “That’s good,” came his muffled response. “Ah, here they are.” Emerging from the closet, he handed me a spongy-looking black glove. It was a little big for me, but it had a Velcro wrist strap that I could cinch down. “At least this will make you stop chewing on the cuticles of your right hand,” he said as he sat down again.

  I looked at him with disgust and then, still caught up in solving the little things, I asked, “How about mortician’s makeup? Maybe I can put that on the hand and do without the gloves sometimes.” He looked more relaxed now that I was taking command and coming up with my own solutions, so I suggested that we go online and order the makeup and some gloves and have it overnight delivered. After the shopping spree, I told him I should go home to get some sleep.

  “Are you sure you’ll be okay? You can always stay here the night,” Cam offered.

  “It’s okay. This ain’t my first rodeo,” I quipped to put him at ease. The truth was, I felt uneasy about being alone with the dead hand, but there was also some truth to becoming numb to the weirdness that permeated my life. “I’ll be okay. If there is any sign of trouble, I’ll call.” Actually, if there was any sign of trouble, I had a hatchet in my trunk. If the dead hand were some kind of homicidal maniac, I did not want Cam anywhere near the danger.

  “As you wish,” he replied in an obvious effort to match my insouciance. “I have a dog with a cleaver loose in the house somewhere, so this might not be the best night for a sleepover.”

  # # #

  I made it home without the dead hand causing me to swerve off the road. It stayed quiescent and made no attempts to interfere, so I decided to push my luck and clean up a little before turning in. Putting on the neoprene glove, I took a tense and uncomfortable shower. Between the glove and the head gear to protect the stitches, I was starting to feel less and less clean after my washing off. The stitches would come out in another two days, so this discomfort was temporary. The dead hand was something I would have to get used to.

  Since it refrained from groping me, I decided to make an overture of peace. After drying off and dressing in my jammies, I stripped off the neoprene glove and washed the dead hand with some soap in the bathroom sink. I couldn’t tell if this was good, bad or indifferent to the hand, but I suffered no complaints and really, this needed to be done periodically. Touching the hand was a little creepy. I didn’t really have much sensation, so it did feel like I was washing something foreign to me. The fact was, it was cold to the touch. If it were still my hand, it should have been the same temperature as the other hand. The hand was now definitively non-self to the rest of my body. Looking at the d
ead hand dispassionately as I dried it, I decided to paint the nails of my left hand black to match it if I found that I could mask the look of decomposition with mortician’s makeup. Probably, this would be less weird than wearing gloves all the time.

  Grabbing a pad and pen on my nightstand, I started a shopping list and included black nail polish as the final item. As I was about to put the pen down, the hand quickly wrote in the margin of the paper ‘Thank you.’ The words were written in an elegant and flowing script and it contrasted sharply with the block letters of my shopping list. I stared at the writing and began rubbing my lips with my good hand. Two thoughts came to me unbidden: we were not limited to just hand gestures in order to communicate and I was starting to think using the royal ‘we.’ Feeling in no shape to pursue any of these disturbing thoughts that night, I carefully put the pen down near the pad and placed the SAR glove on the hand before turning in.

  If the dead hand did anything during the night, I had no clue. I slept deeply until the alarm sounded that it was time to deliver my newspapers. The SAR glove was still in place and I left it on. As I drove the route, my aim was as good as always and I landed the papers in the driveways with practiced ease. Once I returned home, I put the plastic bag on my head and replaced the SAR glove with its neoprene counterpart before hitting the shower. Feeling as clean as was possible under the circumstances, I got dressed in my waitress uniform, switched the gloves and then hunted through my cleaning supplies for some latex gloves. I put two pairs in my pants pocket and carried another pair with me as I left for the restaurant.

  CHAPTER 13

  “They fired you?” Cam’s eyebrows contracted and his lips pursed. We were once again sitting in his kitchen and I was telling him about my day.

  “Yeah, I took a bunch of sick days recently, but mostly they were afraid of a lawsuit.” I shifted on my stool and slumped forward with my feet on the rail and forearms across my thighs. This was a good position in case I needed to hurl. “There was an incident in another state where servers wore gloves to supposedly protect themselves from contracting HIV from customers. Some customers were offended. The restaurant owners didn’t want to stir things up.”

  “Well, the irony is that you might be able to sue the restaurant owners for unlawful termination. Maybe you have a disability.” Cam waggled his eyebrows, challenging me to do the hipster thing and contribute to the irony load in this world.

  I shook my head. “No way. If I claim I have a disability and need to wear the gloves, I’ll need a doctor’s note or I might have to show the hand to prove it in court.” I pushed the hair out of my eyes and sighed. “I can probably get another job just as menial without all the hassle.” To change the topic of conversation away from my dismal future, I brought up the hand’s ability to communicate through writing.

  “Have you queried it?” Cam leaned forward and stared intently at me. His eyes were bright with the potential for new discoveries.

  I shook my head again. “I don’t trust it to necessarily tell me the truth. How can I test its veracity? There’s nothing I could ask where I already know the answer. And how can I be sure it doesn’t tap into my thoughts?”

  Cam plucked at his chin with his good hand and sat back. “You have a point.” He was quiet for a moment while he thought. “It might still be worth asking a few questions to better understand it. What it says might be true or false, but if we ask clever questions, there may be events in the future against which we could assess the truthiness of the answers.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re going to have to be the clever one, then. The best I can come up with is, ‘Are you a good hand or an evil hand?’ And what if it just wants to chat and has nothing important to say? Honestly, I don’t want to get into this right now.”

  “How about if we just hand it a pen and paper and see what happens? No questions.” Cam raised his eyebrows expectantly and waited for my answer.

  “You don’t get it.” I hunched over more and stopped looking at him. “I don’t want to give this thing any more of a presence than it already has.” I took a deep breath and tried not to redirect my anger at Cam. All of this was my own doing, after all. “Because I have this thing attached to me now, any hope for a normal life is gone. Maybe I could fake it to some degree before. At least I looked normal to other people. For a while, I thought that if I could learn how you do it, I would find a way to live with my abilities.” Tears of self-pity were threatening to overflow and I cleared my throat angrily as I tried to explain myself. “I am cut off from the normal human experiences because of this.” I held up the gloved hand to make my point. “Forget ever having a lover. Can you imagine going to bed with this?” This conversation had my face crimson with embarrassment, but I held up the hand and pulled off the glove to really make my point sink in. Revealed in the light of day, it showed itself in all its grotesque glory.

  “I see.” Cam’s eyes were full of sympathy. I quickly looked away and pulled the glove back on. “If you were hoping to find that particular holy grail through my guidance, well, you know the William story.” He sighed softly. “Still, I don’t think it’s beyond hope. My mother found my father, after all. It’s just going to be harder in your situation.”

  I nodded and let the tears flow for a while. I didn’t believe him. It wasn’t harder in my situation, it was impossible. The only benefit was that this dead hand put another brick in the wall between Lucas and me. Eventually, I wiped my face on my sleeve and shifted in my stool to angle my body so that I was looking at the cupboard on the far wall. Clearing my throat, I made another attempt to change the topic and hoped for a better outcome this time. “It didn’t sound like your family could help with the house in Changewater.” I concentrated on making my voice light and it was almost normal.

  Cam adjusted his body to also face the cupboard. “My direct family would be of no help, but maybe Lummie’s line…” I could hear Zackie’s tail wag against the floor at the mention of the name.

  “Lummie had kids? I thought she was a sin-eater and reviled by decent folk.” I choked a little on the attempt at an Appalachian accent, but my mind was already leaping ahead. If someone had a child with Lummie, then maybe there was hope for me.

  “She had a sister who had kids. No one in that generation was a strong sibyl, so this part of the family was able to keep their abilities better hidden. The subsequent generations produced a few individuals with striking abilities.”

  As I stared at the cupboard, I thought that springing eternally with hope was really self-defeating. Living this way was just draining. I forced my train of thought back to the Changewater problem. This was something actionable and I might actually be effective in helping to solve the problem. “Would any of them be willing and able to help?”

  Cam tilted his head as he thought. “Maybe. I’d have to take a trip to North Carolina to know for sure.” I could almost hear the wheels turn as he planned the trip. “Zackie should stay with you when I go. It might be awkward if she accompanied me.”

  “Why is that?”

  “She was a bit of a stigma for the family, being associated with the sin-eater. I think they were glad to be rid of her.” Zackie sneezed mightily from her position on the floor to let us know what she thought of that. “Anyway, you should probably take her to see Hannah a few times while I’m away. I know this is uncomfortable for you, but Hannah needs Zackie.”

  Still wrung out, I really didn’t want to get into another emotional conversation, so I nodded in agreement. “Will do.”

  Cam grunted and adjusted the sling on his arm. “Driving long distance round trip is out of the question. I’ll need you to take me into Pennsylvania tomorrow to catch a bus.” He stood up and I followed as he moved to the study and sat in front of the computer. After a short search, he pointed to the screen with his chin. “There’s a Greyhound station in Bethlehem.” With a few deft clicks, he booked his trip and then settled in to write an e-mail to Lummie’s kin.

  # # #

 
I wore my new, fancy gloves when I drove Cam to the bus terminal. The FedEx package and a check from Lucas’ ghost show had been waiting for me when I finally got home the previous night. I explained to Cam that instead of practicing with the makeup, I had deposited the check and gone grocery shopping, so he wouldn’t be treated to my new Goth nails just yet. He was less interested in my nails than in catching the bus, so he mumbled something about it having to wait until he got back. He then exited the car and waved absently to Zackie and me as he headed into the bus station.

  After dropping Cam off, I drove to the hospital to first get my stitches removed and then to visit Hannah. With a few snips and a little tweezing, the stitches came right out. The cut had healed nicely and I was left with a slightly raised, pinkish scar that the doctors assured me would fade in time. As I made my way to Hannah’s room, I resolved to start looking for another job right after treating myself to a shampoo. First things first. My hair was greasy and lank and I was paranoid that it smelled bad. Still, I felt worse about the scar, so I arranged my hair to cover it and tried hard to avoid seeing the reflection of my loveliness in the dome mirrors at the hallway intersections.

  Hannah looked pleased when I walked through the door with Zackie. I’m sure it had more to do with Zackie. Lucas was sitting on the edge of her bed, but rose to greet me.

  “Excellent, your stitches are out.” He smiled happily at me and shifted my hair to get a better look. Inwardly, I cringed that he was touching my disgusting hair and looking at the unsightly scar. And what if he saw the rotting hand? The little voice in my head chose that moment to remind me of my true power to horrify.