He is hideous.
The left side of his face seems still to be on fire with its skin resembling a gruesome picture in a medical textbook. His ear is gone, his scalp raw, and his left eye appears to have melted. His right eye and his mouth are mostly normal, though the left corner of his lip is indistinct. He wears a silk scarf around his neck, and she realizes that the arm of his tattered coat is empty. She can’t imagine what the skin on his torso looks like.
“Are you in pain?” she asks, her first words to her husband.
“Yes.”
“What can I do for you?”
He tries to shake his good arm out of his coat, and she understands: he wants his coat off. Without looking at his face, she begins to lower the empty sleeve from his shoulder. He yelps—she must have touched him too hard. She lets the coat fall to the ground, then picks it up and drapes it over the back of a chair.
“Sit,” she gestures, staring at the pinned sleeve.
“Can’t sit.”
“Can you lie down?” she asks.
He nods. “I need water.”
She pours a glass of water at the sink and hands it to him. He raises it to his mouth and at least half of it dribbles down the left side of his face and falls onto his shirt, made of an unusually thin material.
“Come with me,” she says.
The irony of Grace leading her husband to another room in his boyhood house is not lost on her. And can’t be on him.
Her hands shaking, she checks her watch. An hour before she is to collect Dr. Lighthart, which will not happen now. She doesn’t know the telephone number at the farm, and she isn’t sure she ever gave him the number of Merle’s house. How long will he wait before he realizes she’s not coming? Would he then dare to drive to her house? She prays that he won’t.
She points to the sofa. In what looks to be a torturous set of moves, Gene manages to lie on his right side. She finds a pillow and puts it under his head. As she backs away from him, the entire construct of her life collapses. She will live in this house with this injured man on the couch until one of them dies. She will never again go to a job. She will never make love again. She will not have friends. Slowly, she sinks into the armchair under the tremendous weight of her future.
Gene
“I have to go to Claire and Tom,” Grace says to Gene. He barely moves his head. He has an inner look she’s familiar with from the clinic—the anticipation of pain.
She finds her family upstairs in her bedroom. Grace walks first to Claire and holds her in a tight embrace. “You were scared, weren’t you?” she asks her daughter, whose clothes have been changed.
Claire, sucking her thumb, nods.
“Do you remember Daddy?”
Claire gives a more exaggerated nod.
“Well, Daddy went to help others on the night of the fire, and he got burned. What you just saw was Daddy with some burns on him.”
Claire drops the thumb and opens her eyes as wide as they will go. She stares into the middle distance, caught halfway between fear and incomprehension.
“He was a hero, your daddy. And sometimes heroes come back with cuts and bumps on them. That’s what happened to him.” She sets Claire on her lap so that she can see her daughter more easily. “Would you like to go out and see him? He’s lying down.”
“Nooooo,” Claire keens as she whips her head from side to side.
Tom, crawling on the bedspread, stops to listen to his sister.
“That’s all right,” says Grace, holding her daughter close and rubbing her back. Grace catches her mother’s eye, in which she reads an agitated mix of fear, despair, and stoicism.
“We need to make some decisions,” Grace says.
“Is he staying?”
“We’ll have to put him in the library. I’m not sure he can make it upstairs.”
“The police said he’d been in a coma. Came to a week ago in a New Hampshire hospital, but couldn’t remember his name until yesterday.”
“How is Claire?” Gene asks from the couch as Grace sits across from him.
“She’s fine,” says Grace. “She just needs a little time is all.”
“My own children didn’t recognize me.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be. It’s reality.” He swivels his good eye, taking in the room. “I was never allowed in here. My bedroom and the kitchen were my playrooms. I was brought in here only to meet company and then disappear.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that. What are you doing here?”
Grace crosses her arms in front of her chest. “Here? In this house? Our own house burned down.”
“So I’m told. But my mother’s house?”
“Your children were homeless. My mother, too. I didn’t have a choice.” She pauses. “Were you in a coma?”
“I didn’t know who I was until a week after I woke up. For that week, I didn’t want to be alive.”
She waits.
“The arm, but mostly the pain.”
“Why did they take your arm?” she asks, unable to look away from the pinned sleeve.
“Gangrene.”
“Oh, Gene. Tell me what I need to know in order to take care of you.”
He closes his eye. “You won’t want to do it. I’m going to need some things.”
“Such as.”
“Gauze, Vaseline, iodine, a bedpan.” He studies her. “Lots of towels. The sheets will need to be cleaned every day. A rubber sheet.”
Grace takes in a sharp breath.
“I told you you wouldn’t like it.”
“We’ll do whatever has to be done.”
“And aspirins. I get terrible headaches. Where are you sleeping?”
“On the second floor.”
“In my mother’s bed?”
Grace nods.
He glances at Grace’s skirt. “And if I’m not mistaken, you’re wearing her clothes.”
“We had nothing when we got here.”
Fluid leaks from inside Gene’s shirt. She leaves the room, finds a clean towel, returns, and lays it with care over his left side. “I’m sorry if I’m hurting you,” she says.
“Please don’t pity me.”
“I don’t.” But she does.
“You lost the baby,” he says.
“I did.”
“Was it bad?”
“It happened the night of the fire.”
He rolls his head to the side. For a moment Grace wonders if he will cry. But, no, he’s angry. “If only they’d let us go home, I’d have got you out of there!”
“Can you lie here for half an hour?” she asks.
“You’re leaving me?”
“Just to get a doctor.”
“Old Man Franklin?”
“He’s gone. His house burned down, so he retired. We have a new one now. His name is Dr. Lighthart.”
For a few seconds Gene is silent. Then he snaps his fingers. “Injun!” he says.
“What?”
“Injun. You can always tell from the name. Two names put together. Whiteman. Yellowhair. Manygoats. Watchman. I knew some of them in the war and later working on the Pike.”
The prominent cheekbones. The high color of his skin. The straight black hair. Indian and something else. Maybe a lot of something else. What difference does it make?
“He’s a good doctor,” Grace says.
Grace’s hands shake so much she can barely shift the gears. Backing down the hill, she veers into snow-covered bushes at the end. I’ll kill myself this way, she thinks.
When she turns onto the rural street on which the farmhouse is located and pulls to the top of the drive, John Lighthart is pacing. She’s a half hour late for their appointment.
“Hello,” he says with a grin as he swings open the passenger door and gets in.
Grace turns to him and holds up a hand. “John.” She pauses, gathers herself. “My husband, Gene, came back this morning. He’s badly burned and not yet healed. He can’t sit. If you’re willing, I need you to come to the house and examine him and tell me what to do.”
The doctor searches her eyes. “Are you all right? Your face is white.”
“It’s just the shock.”
“You shouldn’t be driving, but I’d better take my car. You go on, and I’ll catch up. I have to put a few things in my bag.”
“Thank you,” says Grace. “Please don’t mention that I work for you. I haven’t told him yet, and…I’m not sure I’ll be able to continue at the clinic.”
“That would be a shame.”
“He’s crude. He’s not himself.”
“You go back to him. I’ll be right behind you.”