* * * *
“Your grandmother tells me you were once hospitalized for cellulitis?” the doctor says. He keeps asking the same questions: “How did you get the sore?” “How long have you had it?” and “Does it ever scab over?”
He wears latex gloves the same powder blue as Sara’s hands. After having to wear white gloves for charm school and to hide my wrist, I feel claustrophobic when I look at his gloved hands. I wonder if he wants to crawl out of his skin the way I do.
He is rough with the sore.
He presses down on the flesh all around it, asking if it hurts. He palpates, and then he presses down into the center of my rose. “What about this?” he asks. “Does it hurt when I do this?”
Each time, I shake my head. I shake my head to say no.
I know better than to tell him the truth. I do my best not to talk at all. He sits on a stainless-steel stool that has wheels.
He peels his gloves off and tosses them into a trash can that is also made from stainless steel. The can is overflowing with other discarded powder blue latex gloves. The exam room needs to be cleaned. There is blood splattered on the ceiling. DR. HENRY BURNS has been embroidered onto the left breast of his white jacket.
“That’s what I thought,” he says. But he doesn’t actually say what he thinks. Instead, he pulls a prescription pad from his pocket, and this is what the other doctors are always doing when they talk to my mother. His pen makes a scratching noise as he writes. He has gray-blue eyes and white bushy eyebrows, while the rest of his hair is black and cut short.
He holds the prescription in the air, and when I reach for it he draws back the way a bully would. “That sore,” he says, “is infected.” Then he pauses, looking at me the way people like him do—everyone is always trying to figure me out, even when they don’t like me.
Finally, he hands me the prescription.
“This is an antibiotic ointment,” he says. “You can only get this strength from a doctor, so once this sore has healed, the ointment is not to be used again. In fact, you should throw it away.” I have always hated the word “ointment.”
“Wash the wound with soap and water, then apply the ointment and a bandage,” he says. “Once in the morning and again at night before you go to bed.”
He narrows his eyes, trying to stare into my soul, and then he says, “The rest of time, the sore must be left alone.” And everything in my life is an echo.
* * * *
The ointment makes the sore vanish—almost overnight. Like magic, half a year of picking is gone, and there is no scar in its wake. Like it never even was.
I touch the spot where there is no scar. I use the pads of my fingers. When I rub, I think of Gran, who doesn’t tell anyone about my expulsion from charm school, the sore, the ointment, or the doctor. I’ve seen my grandmother rub the ground where my grandfather is buried. When she touched the grave, it reminded me of how I now touch the skin where once I was hurt. First she pats the grass, but soon she forgets herself. Her hand begins to circle like she’s going to conjure his spirit from the dirt. She rubs the earth this way because she misses him, and I touch my wrist because I miss the girl who arrives whenever I am picking.
Gran comes for me at 4:15 every Thursday. We don’t return to the doctor. I sit in the back of the long Buick and she drives. For three hours, my grandmother drives. Never too close to the farm. Gran follows other desolate back roads, and I memorize the Douglas County countryside—all the houses, and all the different routes. She pulls over whenever a car comes from the other direction. She is trying to keep the Buick clean. More often than not, we still get splattered by the exhaust-stained slush. And I watch the sun dip into the white horizon of winter.
The falling sun turns the snow into a wash of pastels and the initial pink and orange fade into lavender and lavender into gray, and gray into night. As soon as the numbers on the dashboard clock turn to 7:00, Gran makes an abrupt turn and heads back to the farm. We fishtail on black ice, but she never once loses control. Uncle Billy’s right. It is a miracle. A matter of divine intervention.
The digital numbers of the car clock glow blue and so does Gran. She looks like a ghost. Like she’s barely even there. She hunches so far forward, it is hard to see her head from the backseat, and this is from the osteoporosis. We never talk, and when Gran drops me back at home we don’t say good-bye. I just climb out and watch her drive away. I watch the trail of exhaust follow her—alchemized by the winter air, the hot turns to cold.
Gran comes even after 1989 turns into 1990, and winter turns into spring and spring into summer and summer into fall. She comes for me and we drive. The routine is soothing, and I leave my sores alone. I am alchemized by the ointment; I think I’m healed.
Gran continues to pick me up every single Thursday even though charm school officially ended back in April, and then my freshmen year in June. Forever punctual—she is never late. We loop through country roads, driving around and around, and everything loops, including me.
Gran gives me the pearl rosary, which I wear around my neck. And I am another link on a chain of Fionas. When Daddy sees the rosary, Gran explains. “Fiona is a woman now.” Her words echo, and later I have to look at myself in the mirror. I am trying to see what she sees, but all I see is the little girl I’ve always seen staring back at me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EMERGENCE
loop: n. 1. A length of line, ribbon, or other thin material doubled over and joined at the ends 2. Something having a shape, order, or path of motion that is circular or curved over on itself 3. (Comp. Sci.) A sequence of instructions that repeats either a specified number of times or until a particular condition prevails.
loophole: n. 1. A means of evasion.
loopy: adj. 1. Off beat; crazy.
October 18, 1991
Gran and I are in the Buick, circling around the lake, when she doubles over and vomits everywhere.
I break free of my safety belt, scramble over the seat, and grab the wheel. Even though I don’t know how to drive—even though both Daddy and Uncle Billy are always pressuring me to learn—I manage to steer the long car around the curve of Mirror Lake before I can get my foot on the brake, and I stop the vehicle.
I shift the Buick into park. My grandmother is drooping. She leans against the window—her eyes half-closed and fluttering. Her face twists and I read the language of her body. She’s in pain. I switch the ignition off and take the keys.
Wearing the inside of my grandmother, I run and walk a quarter-mile to Wilma’s, where Uncle Billy hasn’t lived forever, and I use the pay phone bolted to the cinder-block wall to call 911. I tell a woman’s voice where the paramedics will find us. And then I rush back to the Buick, where my grandmother is sound asleep in a bad way. I wrap the rosary around her hand and my hand, and I wait for help.
* * * *
The paramedics ask me to climb into the ambulance, and I can’t move. I stand in the dust kicked up by the speed of the emergency vehicle. Everything is fast. Too fast. And Gran is already strapped to a gurney, and I am scared. She mumbles, falling in and out of consciousness, and when I hear her say, “I need my granddaughter,” I end up running. I run for the woods, where I hide.
My heart tries to break me open. It is a bomb inside my chest exploding as I watch the paramedics trying to figure out what to do. They keep looking at the woods, at the place where I disappeared and the shadows I let swallow me. I think of Snow White and the woodsman hired to cut out her heart, but no one comes after me. The paramedics practice triage; as always, the matriarch is the priority. They are not the seven dwarves. They are medical professionals, and they do not care about me.
Clutching the crucifix, I watch the red and blue lights circle on the cold surface of the lake until they vanish. The ambulance goes racing away toward the finish line, and the sirens scream, Emergency! Emergency! Emergency! and I can’t believe I just abandoned my grandmother. There is nothing left to do but run.
I run throug
h the maze of trees until they give way to a field of cut corn. I zigzag through the toppled blond stalks as the sun heads for retreat in the world beyond the western horizon. I jog along the McAlister side of the Silver River and up onto the highway. I run across the steel bridge through a wave of vertigo as the gray sky pulls back and the wide ribbon of water below rushes on, and the world reels and I keep running.
I run until the railing ends and I’m on the other side. I stop long enough to vomit. I turn inside out like my grandmother just did, and then I run again. I run along the Silver River once more, but this time I run after the running water. The bank is littered with wet pebbles, and they reflect the fire of the setting sun. The air stuck inside my body slices into my lungs and organs; it tries to dissect me, and when the river begins to crash over rocks and into the falls, I cut away and run north again.
My shadow chases me as I cross the ditch; she stalks me as I tunnel through the twisted corridor of trees in the orchard. And I am running the same path now I ran with Mama all those years ago, but this time I don’t trip once or fall. The miasma of the putrid apples in the grass is intoxicating, and I am drunk by the time I pass through the ring of cottonwoods, and the house is there to welcome me. Daddy’s truck is nowhere to be seen, which means he’s not here. I cross the threshold called home, and my shadow is close behind.
* * * *
I find the X-acto knife in Mama’s art supplies, and the razor blades are in the bathroom cabinet where they’ve been waiting—waiting behind the looking glass just for me, always and forever. And all I had to do was open this small door above the sink.
I’m all alone with my shadow. Everyone else is in one hospital or another, and when I climb into the claw-foot, I am trying to be seven years old again.
I’m wearing one of Mama’s old nightgowns and there is no water. Just the cold white enamel and the same plug and chain that can’t be lost—and yet everything has changed. Nearly sixteen, I fill the tub, and around my neck a virgin now hangs. Three more years to go until nineteen, and the daddy longlegs who lived in the drain died years ago and left behind a legless corpse long since turned to dust. And there is no mother at the end of the hall, resting in her room—there is nothing but an empty chamber full of echoes.
I pull up my sleeves and tuck the long white nightgown around my privates like a diaper. And I take all the scars from the boy at Saint Joseph’s and transfer them to myself. Pay attention, he says. And I do. I pay attention. I pay one toll after another. I rub my fingers across my skin and I can feel the tiny ridges—the texture of his flesh on me—and the texture provides a grip, something to hold on to, something to keep me from slipping all the way away.
I have my own scars, but they are different. My open sores bloom into rotting roses and leave scars like shooting stars: dreams that never do come true. These scars are not the perfect lines that made the body of the boy at the hospital. Mine are messy, and I want what he has: I want self-control. I take the safety cap off the X-acto blade and compare this sharp edge with the razor blade. One is a triangle and the other is rectangular. Basic geometry: perfect shapes, straight lines, angles, and precise points—this is something even Miss Pratt and Miss Avery could appreciate.
Clean and sharp, these blades will be tidy when they open me. Clean and sharp, they will work as God did when he carved Eve from Adam. I, too, will give birth to a girl who will fall for me, and she will handle everything I cannot. The shine of the blade is dangerous. And I think, maybe this is what it feels like when people try drugs for the first time—a certain dread, and a lovely anticipation.
I try each blade to compare the danger. I turn their potential into a race. This is biology, basic anatomy—science. And in science, the setting must be controlled, and my hand doesn’t once waver. The X-acto knife is exact. Easy to control, the handle is also crosshatched to provide the grip I am seeking. I draw a long red line across the white canvas of my thigh. In the gallery of the tub, my shadow does the same. She draws a shadow line across her shadow thigh.
While the X-acto knife is exact, the razor blade is more than just an instrument for cutting; it is a tiny mirror, another reflection in which to find myself. I see everything I’m about to do, and then I see what I just did, and I am learning. It doesn’t take long to turn right now into gone.
Both blades help me breathe again. They open so much faster than fingernails ever did or could; like magic, they part my skin, and in the blood the red sea divides and I am warm and tingling—from pain. I am overwhelmed by the pleasure of another girl. Just as the doctors once cut me from Mama, I cut this girl from myself and she steps out of me to run her blade along the inside of my arms just as Sissy and Tanya did to Candace with their fingertips.
She waits for me to shiver, and smiles to see me smiling.
She switches back and forth—from one blade to the other, from one limb to another. She opens me. She builds a bridge between our bodies, and we are symbiotic; the blade serves as a prosthetic in which to bind and connect. I belong to her just as much as she belongs to me. The blood is hot and leaves me cold as I turn blue into red.
The blades part the skin, and the red sea rises. I chase the purple in the split second between blue and red, and in this borderland my chest can expand; my lungs open and close like the wings of a butterfly, and I am ventilated—I am cutting away the cocoon, and I am opening. I am changing.
But blood mimics skin. It reacts to air, turning colors. The chemistry continues: The blood begins to die, and the thin ribbons of liquid all turn hard. Each cut seals itself. It turns into a crust of rust: a call and response, my blood answering my body by not being blood anymore. It changes just like that. No attachments to what it was. It turns into a scab, and this scab saves my life—a life I am not trying to take, but to prove. I think of Alexis Romanov, whose blood refused to coagulate.
Heir to the Russian throne, he inherited an X chromosome from his mother, and this X carried a copy of the mutant gene for hemophilia. If Alexis did as I do now, or even as I have done before, his crimson tide would have washed away the world.
I’m not afraid of growing old, but I am afraid of growing up. I think of the song forever looping on the radio. The song the popular girls listen to as they sprawl across the lawn during lunch or after school. Serenaded by their ghetto blasters, the lyrics to this song also loop as the singer sings: “You will remain forever young.” But I don’t want to be forever young. I just don’t want to turn nineteen. Like Alexis, I, too, have a copy of my mother in my genes. Three more years to go. And the blue turns red and the blood is hot and it leaves me cold.
* * * *
Uncle Billy’s eyes are full of tears, and when I look at him he blinks, and the tears spill down his face. Salt and water, they are the substance of the sea, and they are meant for me.
The bathroom window frames a night sky, and this perfect square of sky frames a full moon surrounded by an aura of silver rainbows. I want to go outside—to lie in the cold grass covered only by the vast dome of stars above—of universe; I want to feel small like that instead of the kind of small I feel right now. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in heaven.
And I am also crying. My tears are hot, but they don’t leave me cold—they leave me warm—and Uncle Billy is surrounding me with mother arms, and mother arms are always warm and they are always strong. He helps me stand, and then he guides me to the toilet, where I sit. I watch everything he does. Every cut he cleans. My uncle washes me. He washes away the hurt and the smallness I am feeling. He baptizes me with hydrogen peroxide, and when he’s done I glisten: Made from love and a generous application of Neosporin, I’ve been dressed with a new skin.
My uncle turns away so I can undress. And I will not be bleaching red and brown back to white this time, because Uncle Billy doesn’t hesitate to throw away my mother’s nightgown; he stuffs it into an empty carton of Epsom salts that he tosses back into the trash, and I come to understand that he won’t be telling anyone about
tonight, not even Daddy. Billy is still turned the other way as I step into a pair of clean pajama bottoms and button up the flannel top.
“You can’t pick on yourself like this,” he says. “Not anymore.” And this is how I come to know what he knows. What he sees. And what he understands. Someone has been paying attention. “And you certainly can’t do this,” he says, turning now to look at me. With my finger, I draw an X across my heart. I promise him.
Bandaged, I go to bed, and Billy stays the entire night in my window seat. He doesn’t want to talk about Gran. “Tonight is about you,” he says, although he does assure me that she will be okay. He sits in the window with a quilt wrapped around his shoulders, and with the lights turned off the moon turns his silhouette into a soft grandmother wearing a shawl.
Billy stays like this all night, and in the morning, when I awake, he is still there.
* * * *
Billy and I drive to the hospital in Lawrence, and Daddy explains what happened to Gran.
“She’s all hollowed out inside,” he says, and then he lists off all the operations she’s undergone, and every organ removed from her body: minus one uterus, one gall bladder, and one spleen, my grandmother is a lesson in subtraction. With all that extra room inside, her intestines tied themselves into a knot. In my head, I see them trying to form the loop for infinity.
“She’s under observation for now,” Daddy says—which is exactly what Uncle Billy said to me this morning before we left the house. Only I’m the one under his observation.
While the doctors decide what to do with Gran, my uncle is also working on a treatment plan just for me. I look at Gran asleep in her hospital bed full of needles, tubes, and morphine, and I hold my breath and cross my fingers: I want her to feel as safe as I do now.
All I ever needed was for someone—anyone—not just to notice but to see, and to ask me to stop, and Billy is the one who stepped up. It’s a relief to be held accountable. Knowing that my uncle knows—knowing that he will be keeping tabs on me—feels like picking felt, only better; because he knows, and because he will not stand for it, everything has opened and it is easier to breathe again.
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