by Laura Ruby
“Shut up,” Finn said.
He picked up the pace. He wished Miguel hadn’t seen so many horror movies. He wished Miguel didn’t talk about the movies so much. He wished—
A white ball of feathers exploded from the weeds and hit him right in the stomach. He lurched sideways, almost crushing the dazed chicken flapping at his feet.
Dumbass. On cue.
He scooped up the chicken with his free arm. Runaround Sue coming full circle, he guessed. Charlie would be happy to see her, anyway.
He started walking again, the paper bag in one arm and the chicken in the other. He thought the chicken would calm as he carried her—Charlie carried all his chickens around—but her frantic clucks added to the chorus of crickets and the crescendo of the owls: Who? Who? WHO?
He slowed when he finally got to Charlie Valentine’s house, but the lights were out; maybe Charlie was off on yet another “date.” He circled around to the back of the house. If the door was unlocked, he could tuck the chicken inside. But the chicken flapped her wings, erupted from Finn’s grasp, and half ran, half flew across the yard.
“Great,” said Finn. “That’s just great.”
A voice like the echo in a sewer said, “I see that you found a chick of your own.”
Finn’s skin went cold and pebbled all over.
Slowly, he turned. A tall man stood in front of him, taller than Finn, taller than Sean, a total stranger yet so familiar at the same time.
Finn asked the owl’s question. “Who are you?”
The man held up both palms and tipped his stone head. And then Finn knew. He knew.
Finn could hardly breathe, could hardly believe he would get this chance, but he once again dropped the bag he was carrying, forced the words out: “Where’s Roza?”
“How is your young lady?”
“What?” Finn said, as he tried to match that icy stare, memorize features as bland as a scarecrow’s. “You’ve been following me.”
“I was . . . curious. She’s quite striking, though I imagine not everyone agrees.”
“How do you know who I visit? If you go near her, I’ll—”
“Please,” said the man, cutting him off. “I’m interested in only one woman. Unlike some people.” He pointed at Charlie Valentine’s house.
So the freak had been following Charlie, too. Finn planted his feet more firmly. “Where’s Roza?”
“Think of Priscilla now. Think of what everyone else will think.”
All the wrong questions exploded from him. “Think about what? What do you mean?”
“Strange boy, ugly girl, maybe he’s taking advantage of her, maybe she’ll do anything to—”
“Shut up!”
“He’s so strange, that boy. Too strange. Maybe he had something to do with what happened to that other girl . . . you never know. Even your own brother believes this.”
“Where’s Roza, you creepy piece of shit!”
“She’ll love me yet,” the man said. He twitched like a cornstalk in the wind and slipped right through Finn’s furious, outstretched hands, as if he’d never been there at all. Finn heard a car engine and raced to catch the plate, but the black SUV was halfway down the road before he got to the end of Charlie’s lane.
Like a brainless terrier, Finn chased the car down the road until it vanished in the darkness. He bent under the disappointed moon, hands braced on his knees, panting into the warm summery air, wanting to give himself a beating for letting the man get away. But he took off again, this time in the other direction, not stopping until he reached Jonas Apple’s house more than a mile away. He pounded on the door, begging for Jonas to open it, until Jonas did, his hair standing on end like the comb of a rooster. Jonas listened to Finn’s story, nodding and sighing.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, what did Charlie have to say about it?”
Finn stopped talking. “I don’t think he was home.”
“You didn’t check?”
Finn closed his eyes. “No, I ran right here.”
Jonas smoothed his hair, which promptly sprang up again. “Listen, son, have you been sniffing something?”
“No!”
“Don’t be afraid to admit you have a problem. Sean would help you. I would help you. All of Bone Gap would help you.”
“I’m not sniffing anything!”
“Jeez Louise, it’s not meth, is it? That stuff will eat holes in your brains.”
“I don’t have holes in my brains!” But he sounded as if he did, and Jonas was eyeing him as if he did, even as he pulled on some shoes to go with Finn back to Charlie’s. It didn’t help that Charlie was home, that apparently, he’d been there the whole evening.
“Nope,” said Charlie, “didn’t hear anything. Wasn’t expecting any guests either. Especially no one who twitched like a wheat stalk.”
“A cornstalk,” said Finn.
“Listen, kid, you’re obsessed. You have to let it go,” said Charlie.
“I can’t! He was here! He was spying on you, too! He was spying on me! He knows me. He knows Sean. He . . . he knows things he can’t know.”
Both Jonas and Charlie stared at Finn as if he weren’t just high, he was completely barking mad, and any minute he’d take to sleeping in the middle of the lane, and Finn thought maybe that was an excellent idea, because then a car might hit him, and the people of Bone Gap could tell one another that they’d always known he’d come to such an end. Poor Sidetrack, poor Spaceman, poor motherless boy.
“I’m sorry,” Finn mumbled, a global apology for everything he was, and everything he was not, and all the ways he couldn’t let it go. Instead, they let him go, watching as he gathered up his paper bag full of honey and stumbled like a drunk toward home, to the brother he hoped might believe him.
Sean
GOOD FOR YOU
SEAN SAT IN THE DIM LIGHT OF THE KITCHEN, A SKETCH smoothed out on the surface of the table. He was five when he learned he could draw. Really draw. His horses looked like horses, his cows like cows, his cats like cats. But people were his best subjects, looking like people and not stick figures or scarecrows. When he brought a drawing home from preschool, the paper decorated with gold stars and happy faces, his mother, Didi, would take the drawing and exclaim, “A star! Good for you!” She would gather him up and squeeze him tight, enveloping him in a cloud of perfume and cigarette smoke, and tell him what a wonderful boy he was, and how he’d be a great artist one day, and how she was so proud. Sean was her big boy, and he would grow up to be a great man.
The drawings papered the front of the refrigerator, waiting for the next time his father would come home. Hugh O’Sullivan drove a truck and had only a few weekends a month to spend with his wife and his son. But the first thing he did when he limped into the house—the army had left him with a bum leg, trucking had given him a bad back—was stand in front of that refrigerator, examining all the drawings Sean had made since the last time his father was home. Hugh would put one large hand on the top of Sean’s head and cup his own chin with the other, scratching at the growth of dark beard. After a good five minutes had passed, he would choose his favorite. It was almost always a picture of Sean’s mother. Sean drew his mother a lot because, well, she was his mother, because she was prettier than anyone in Bone Gap, and because his father loved those drawings best and would fold them up and put them in his wallet, already fat with pictures.
Sean’s father would then pour a glass of water from the tap, drink the whole thing down, and do it twice more. He would set the glass next to the sink and call for his wife. Didi would come running the way she always did, leaping into his arms like a child. Hugh would catch her—no matter how sore his leg, no matter how sore his back—and he would call her his Dark Horse, his lovely Dark Horse, and wouldn’t ask her what she’d been doing while he was away.
Sean was six when Finn was born. If Sean was his mother’s big boy, Finn was his mother’s beautiful boy. Both had inherited their father’s thick black hair and espresso eyes
, but Finn also inherited his mother’s delicate features, her dreamy distractibility. You couldn’t leave Finn alone in the yard lest he follow a parade of ants right into the road. He would disappear into the cornfields for hours, because he claimed the corn was whispering to him. He had whole conversations with birds and fireflies, goats and horses. When people spoke to him, however, Finn focused on their mouths, or their hair, or their eyebrows, or their shoes, and forgot to focus on their words. “What?” Finn asked, over and over and over. “What?”
Which was exactly what he said when Didi told her boys that their father had died in a trucking accident on I-80 in Ohio. The ambulance had taken him to the hospital but hadn’t gotten there fast enough. Twelve-year-old Sean had held his mother while she sobbed, and Finn had said, “What? What?”
Didi was young, and so pretty that the people of Bone Gap assumed that, after a time, a new man would step in, and that it would be good for everyone. Didi was the kind of woman who needed a man, they said, and all young boys need a dad. But Hugh O’Sullivan had been the only man who had ever held Didi’s attention for longer than a few months, and even he had never held it completely; none of the new ones were up to the task. Didi grew dreamier and more distracted, and found other things to smoke besides cigarettes. Sean bought the groceries and made sure his brother had clean clothes and notebooks for school. Finn talked to squirrels and mooned out the window.
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 f
orceps, 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.”