It’s hard to figure the worst part of those moments. Maybe it was the ricochet the hatchet sent up my arms, my bones twanging like harp strings. Maybe it was the pain. That’s the obvious choice. But, no, I think what hurt the worst was knowing that the hatchet hadn’t completely severed the bone, watching it swing down again and again, bloodier each time, the expression on my father’s face increasingly frantic, like a boy who’s had to shoot his rabid dog, but the dog refusing to die.
There was an eerie, mute moment when there was no pain. It stood slightly offstage, blinded and nervous of the commotion. After a beat, I felt it. The severance. The blood falling away from my wrists with the force of geysers. Every star in the universe bursting over my vision and my jaw careening open and sucking air into my lungs in one long, lurching gasp. I learned later this sudden, explosive pain was the final cutting-through of nerves, the limp bundle of them running like a pale noodle along the length of each arm. My vision turned white. I’m sure I was screaming.
When it was done, the deacons stood and collected around the rim of the room. I lifted my arms from where they’d been pinned behind me and saw my stumps for the first time, pulsing blood with each heartbeat, almost black and shining like something lacquered. I couldn’t comprehend what was missing, only that it was something vital and natural and necessary. Something I didn’t even know could be taken from me.
The only sound I heard all those long minutes was the whomp, whomp of blood in my eardrums, blood pushing out of my body with purpose and sucked into the rough wooden floor.
The deacons flinched away from me and my wild blood, but the Prophet stood still, his eyes fascinated. He stepped forward, unconscious of the blood splashing his robes, and crouched.
“You will be my wife,” he whispered. “You will be my wife.”
I curled on my side away from him, watching my handless arms flail, the blood streaming off like ribbons. One of the Prophet’s wives stepped from the shadows and lashed twine around each stump, twisting it tight with sticks. This stemmed the blood, though I knew I had already lost buckets.
I lost consciousness a moment later, but not before catching an eyeful of them in the corner. The hands. The loose fists, curled like snails’ shells, in a pool of red.
• • •
I don’t glance at my stumps once while I tell this story. Instead, I watch Dr. Wilson, studying his face. I guess, with a story like that, I can’t help feeling I’ve earned the pinch of sympathy, the furrow that forms on people’s brows when I tell them. It’s a small kind of weapon, this story. I stab someone with it and they hurt, every time. But, the wrinkles fanning the doctor’s forehead are flat. His face doesn’t once crumple with concern. He has spent the past several minutes rolling the tip of his ballpoint pen back and forth over the red line running the length of his legal pad.
“Isn’t that a sad story?” I ask finally.
He looks up, nods. “Sad.”
“You don’t look sad.”
“Should I?” he asks.
“You just said it’s a sad story. You should look like you care.”
“I might express sadness differently than you. That doesn’t mean I don’t care.”
“I don’t buy that,” I say.
“What do you want? Tears?”
“Tears would be nice.” I nod. “Or at least a frown.”
“Like this?” He folds his face up in an exaggerated fake frown.
I grimace. “Nobody frowns like that.”
He leans back, rubs his eyes, and links his fingers at the back of his head. “Minnow, as a general rule, you shouldn’t try to control other people’s faces.”
“That’s good,” I say. “Should I add that to my affirmation wall?”
The bell sounds for afternoon rec time. He flips the rolled-up pages of his notepad back and stands.
“Until next time.”
• • •
I decide to spend my rec time in the visitors’ lounge. I never get visitors, of course, but I’ve gone there before with Angel to watch the girls with their families. They’re so different. The confident, brash ones lose all their noise when they sit beside bear-sized fathers, and the quiet, strange ones cling to their mothers’ necks like rag dolls and cry when they have to let go.
When I walk into the visitors’ lounge, a bunch of families are watching a show together on the big box TV because they can’t make conversation in this place. It’s one of those patriotic talent shows tuned about five times too loud. On-screen, a wheelchair-bound girl with a red crown of hair is going on about her father, who has bone cancer, and her mother, who died in Afghanistan, and her own extremities deformed by a childhood battle with spina bifida. She rolls onstage before the judges, and the beginning notes of “Wind Beneath My Wings” blast from her lungs.
The audience on the TV stands and cheers. In the lounge, some of the mothers cry. Even the hardened juvie girls watch with at least mild interest.
But I can’t look. I stand and ask Benny if I can go back to my cell.
“Rec time doesn’t end for another half hour.”
“I want to go to the library.”
“Once you’re locked into a room, you can’t leave until the end of rec time.”
“B-but, that’s a dumb rule,” I cry. “I can’t sit here and watch that show for a single minute more. I don’t want to be in this room anymore.”
“Why not?” she asks.
“Because—because I’m crazy!” I shout. “Velcro shoes, remember? Let me out!” I duck past her and try to lever the doorknob open, but she has me in a headlock before I can even touch metal. Her thick arm cinches around my neck, and I breathe harder and harder until darkness slams over my brain like a door in my face.
• • •
I come out of it when Benny sits me down hard in one of the office chairs in the assistant warden’s office.
“She flipped out at that American Talent show,” I hear Benny say. “Then she went limp.” I still feel slightly out-of-body, so for a moment all I can see are the decades of girls’ fingernail scratches scoring the surface of the chair arms. “Had to carry her all the way here,” Benny continues. “Not that I mind much, the girl weighs less than my gym bag, but I’ve got my back to think about.”
Mrs. New, the assistant warden, thanks Benny and closes the office door. She walks back to her desk, a small stream of air escaping her throat as she sits. Mrs. New is round and shiny, with beautiful blunt features—red lips and big apple cheeks that make me remember the story of Snow White that Bertie read from her book of fairy tales. Mrs. New always wears skirt suits that reveal her plump, flat-fronted calves and looks healthy in a way no one in the Community ever did.
“So, what happened?” she asks.
“I was in the visitors’ lounge.”
“And?” she asks. “How do you explain your behavior?”
Mrs. New’s dewy eyes sit in her face like raisins pressed into dough. She’d cry if I told her my story, I’m certain of it. She would sob and console. She would care. Unlike Dr. Wilson.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just really felt like not being in that room anymore.”
“Benny said it had something to do with the show.”
“There was this girl on it. And, okay, she was a nice singer, but God, I don’t want to hear about her dead mother. And her father who has cancer. I don’t get why that has to be my business.”
Mrs. New shifts her lips to the side, seeming to consider her next words carefully. “You know she wasn’t speaking directly to you. It’s a television program.”
“I know how TV works,” I say through gritted teeth. “I just didn’t feel like hearing all that stuff.”
“You met with Dr. Wilson today, right?” she asks, looking at a calendar that stretches over the surface of her entire desk. “Did anything happen in your session
to distress you?”
I pause. “No.”
“What did you discuss?”
“How I lost my hands.”
She looks up from the desk suddenly. “And that didn’t distress you?”
“Not really,” I say. “I’m used to it.”
“Was it your decision to tell that story?”
“Well, Dr. Wilson asked about it. But it was weird because he didn’t even react. He wanted to know, but he sat there and wrote notes and barely shrugged when I was talking about my father taking the hatchet and all, and that’s usually the thing that makes anyone cry. Even the prosecutor at my trial looked like he might throw up. But Dr. Wilson? Nothing.”
She sighs. “Well, Minnow, maybe we should consider a counselor reassignment for you.”
I lift my head. “What?”
“Dr. Wilson is not a child psychologist. He’s used to working with adult offenders. I barely understand how he was assigned as your primary mental health coordinator, but that decision was made about this high above my head.” She holds up her small arm as high as it will go. “Perhaps his manner isn’t suited for work with juveniles. I think you might be a better match for one of our in-house counselors. Ms. Gottfried works with your friend, Angel.” She leans in. “If you were to make a change request, we’d do our best to grant it.”
I don’t say anything for a moment.
I’m sure someone else would be softer. Would smile like you do at something very delicate, something that might, at any moment, break into a billion pieces. I’m sure they’d tell me how strong I am. How brave. I’m sure I wouldn’t have to talk about anything I didn’t want to talk about.
I realize something in that moment, my stumps tracing the scratches left on the chair arms. I couldn’t give a crap about that girl’s sob story on TV because I’m still too consumed with my own. All this time, I thought I was the only one with dead people tied to me like helium balloons. Now, I wonder if Dr. Wilson’s lost something, too.
“I’ll think about it,” I tell Mrs. New.
She looks disappointed. She knows I’m lying.
Chapter 26
Every day, Angel leaves for a couple of hours for school. They won’t let me return to reading class until I show “satisfactory interpersonal progress,” which Angel says usually requires a week with no reprimands, so I spend the hours staring at the snake-shaped metal supports that keep Angel’s mattress in place above me. On good days, I think about Jude, and on bad days I think about Philip Lancaster, but today I think about my hands. I hold my arms out above me and remember the way the hands used to look, the fingers stretching and waving, the way they could form fists with almost no effort. Why didn’t I use them when I could have? I punch the metal above me once, and again, and only stop when I see blood. I fall back into the mattress and a sigh gutters from my throat.
I’m not at all better. The last visit with Dr. Wilson has confirmed this. I’m starting to feel like I might never mend. Like the Prophet really ruined me. Maybe you can’t recover from that kind of injury. Even after months of healing, it doesn’t take much to make me bleed.
• • •
Right after it happened, after my father stopped swinging the hatchet, after I passed out, I woke to a quiet room. I took in my stumps. They were a perfect cross-section, the oblong of bone and the burgundy muscle and the surprising yellow circle of fat. Perfect biology. Perfect fitting-together of cells and marrow and meat. Almost like it was planned that way.
Through the fog, I sensed one of the wives slide the skin of my arms up, like the casing around sausage, and slip heavy stitches through the skin with waxed embroidery thread. The tug of each black, stitched X spelled something out in my mind: the Prophet wanted to keep me alive. The wedding would go ahead as planned.
Two of my father’s wives, Mabel and Vivienne, edged into the room sometime later, opening the door hesitantly, as though uncertain whether they’d find me alive or dead. I followed Mabel’s young face, her forehead pleated, to her hand where she held a wooden cup.
Vivienne made a choking sound and clamped her fingers over her mouth and nose. The blood covering the floor hadn’t been cleaned, though it had thickened beneath me and begun to smell like hours-old meat.
I kept my eyes lidded. I wasn’t sure I wanted them to know I was alive yet.
Mabel knelt near me, holding out the cup of green liquid, steaming in the chill air.
“The Prophet says drink this,” she whispered.
“Well, she won’t drink it now,” Vivienne chided.
“Fine. Hold her mouth open while I pour.”
At that moment, I lifted my head. They jumped back with gasps, their eyes stretched as though I was a reanimated corpse. The idea pulled a laugh from my lungs and threw the laugh into the air where it hung awkwardly, certain there had been some mistake, it couldn’t possibly belong in a place like this.
“She’s nuts,” Vivienne said.
“She’s lost so much blood,” Mabel said.
“She’s always been half-witted. Half crazy.”
“It’s in her blood.”
“Hush, Mabel! Hold her head.”
Vivienne pulled my jaws apart with rough, muscular hands. I couldn’t taste the liquid. I was too consumed with sensing that pain, that redness, that absence of fingers, that wanting to dig my fingers into a face and pull someone’s eyes out.
The liquid, whatever it was, wasn’t enough to keep me completely asleep. Again and again, I woke and passed out when the pain crashed down on top of me.
Once, I cracked open my eyes to see the outline of a woman crouching in the shadows. My mother. She wasn’t looking at me. In her hands was one of my hands, stiffening and already blue touched. Slowly, she bent the fingers back and stroked the palm, making a face like she was crying. Small noises escaped her mouth.
When I woke again, the hands were gone.
I stared at the corner where they’d been, my eyes growing blurry from tears, and it struck me as utterly pointless, the most pointless thing I’d ever do again. Cry because they were gone, wish they’d never been taken.
At that moment, waves of light spiraled around the room, so bright I had to close my eyes. When I opened them, the lights were dissolving and a boy stood over me. He was tall and wore jeans and a button-fronted shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his head tilted to the side to look at me. I remember little of his face except for two sharp, green eyes.
“Charlie?” I croaked.
Without a sound, he took a step closer. I noticed his shoes made no impression in the blood. They hovered an inch above the ground.
“L-look what they did to me,” I cried. Tears came fast down my face again. I held out my stumps. “Look!”
He kneeled near me, staring with his too-green eyes from my stumps to my face. The pupils were intelligent, but in a removed way, like camera lenses. They twitched side to side almost imperceptibly.
“Well, help me!” I shouted. “They’ll be back! Help me!”
His features didn’t change, expressionless and calm, as though he wasn’t really in the room at all, as though this was only a projection of him.
And then he moved, reaching out a hand and placing it near my forehead. From each finger shot a dozen beams of light slanting in every direction. I thought he’d touch me, and with the touch heal me. Give me back what was mine. But he only held his hand there, then stood and slid it back inside his jeans pocket. I stared at him in disbelief. On his hovering feet, he turned and began to walk away.
“Don’t go!” I cried. “Come back, please!”
But he kept walking. He opened the front door and let it fall shut behind him. The room grew dark again, and I felt every scrap of hope I had fall through my body like water out a pipe. My arms began to shake.
“I HATE YOU!” I bellowed. “I HAAAAAAATE YOU!”
I screamed my throat raw. Mabel and Vivienne hurried back into the room and shoved the liquid down my throat again. I thrashed for a moment, still trying to scream, but gave in because I knew there was no longer any reason to fight.
• • •
They took me back to my parents’ house, to the maidenhood room. All day, I stared at the simple triangle ceiling made of logs that had been dead for so long but somehow still continued to die.
Over the window, someone had nailed a piece of particleboard. You’re never escaping, the board said. I whispered back, Like I didn’t already know.
Outside, I could smell the world turning away from autumn, and I pictured the wide leaves of oaks moldering and falling from wooden limbs like hands. My only visitor in those early, blood-hot, handless days was my mother. The sound of the lock sliding on the other side of the door always made me flinch. I lay on my side, arms crisscrossed on the bare floor in front of me.
My mother lifted away the burlap wrapped around my arms. I closed my eyes against the feeling of the raw fabric rubbing raw wounds.
She spread her fingers and held them over my stumps.
“What’re you doing?” I slurred.
“Praying,” she whispered.
I let out a quiet gust of air, which was really a sob. What did she think? That her faith would grow them back? That white newborn fingers would waggle from my wrists, growing firmer and stronger until they were the toughened hands of a seventeen-year-old girl?
I kept my stumps under her hands until I could feel the warmth from her palms prickle into my open flesh and said, “Okay,” and she cleared her throat and blinked and folded her hands in her lap. She held her bottom lip in her mouth, delicately. Tears had dried to her face.
I turned away and waited for her to leave. I’d seen my mother cry too many times for this to mean anything now. I couldn’t care about her tears anymore, not when I had so many of my own.
Chapter 27
They call this time of year flu season here, though in the Community the seasons didn’t delineate themselves so cleanly, and they’ve forced all the girls to get poked with a needle to stop us from catching the sickness. The nurses were worried how I’d react but I took it like it meant nothing. I figure my arms have more perspective on pain than to hurt much from a needle.
The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly Page 11