We pause beside a big plastic-paned window, my breath heavy and my arms shaking. Outside in the distance, ash hovers in the air like a dirty cloud. It looks like a heaven nobody’d ever want to go to.
“That’s all that’s left of the Community now,” Juanita says. “They put the fire out, but the air is so stagnant in winter, the smoke is still locked overhead. It burned everything for miles. They say it’ll take a month for the smoke to completely clear.”
“Did—did you hear if anybody died?” I ask.
She turns toward me. “They found two bodies so far, but everything’s snowed in. They’re still looking.”
“Let’s go,” I say. I shuffle away from the window, though my lungs still burn.
? ? ?
The nurses give me morphine and the days start to bleed together. I glimpse the shadow of a policeman standing guard outside my room. He’s almost comforting, the bulk of him, and when pictures of the Prophet enter my head, and the hatchet, and the fists of those men, all I have to do is stare at the blue shoulder of the policeman to calm down.
I know he’s meant to keep me in, but I figure he’d also keep anybody else out.
Every other day, a physical therapist visits to teach me about living without hands.
“It will be difficult at first,” she says, and I nod as if the thought hadn’t occurred to me. “You may need to rely on others until you can get routines down yourself.”
She places a pair of sweatpants on the floor and teaches me how to slowly inch the waist up my legs with my stumps. My stumps are round with Ace bandages and every movement shoots an ache through the bone, but eventually I pull the waistband over my angled hips.
She tells me once my stumps are healed, the muscle will thin and they will taper to points, smaller than wrists. They will work like large fingers. I will hardly miss my hands at all.
Chapter 5
Juanita comes to my room just as I’m finishing breakfast, a mush of porridge and some slivered strawberries. She tells me it’s been three weeks since my arrest, and it’s time to start getting serious. I ask her what she means when she upturns a sack stuffed with formal clothes onto the bed. They are machine-made, dyed colors that shouldn’t exist. I shake my head no.
“You have to let someone wash that. You’ve been wearing the same thing since you arrived,” she says, pointing to my shirt. It’s Jude’s. He gave it to me when I stayed at his cabin, right after I lost my hands. It smells, I know, but I won’t let them take it away. It’s the only thing I have left of him.
I wrap my arms around my middle and poke a toe at the pile of clothes. “What for?”
“Court.”
There are a couple of well-worn suits, the seams all limp from multiple uses, and several lank dresses, some ivory, some gray, all dead-looking. She pulls out each dress and presses the hanger into my collarbone, watching the way it falls over my front.
“I don’t want to wear a dress,” I say.
“That’s what everyone says.”
All the dresses are too big. Juanita settles on a blouse opaque enough for me to wear Jude’s shirt beneath, along with a knee-length skirt. She cinches it with a belt above my belly button.
? ? ?
On the day of my trial, the outside air is bright and dry, and I get a nosebleed as we pull out of the parking lot. The blood tumbles over my chin before I can call out. Juanita clamps a napkin over my face. I don’t know why, but I’m crying. Warm, slow tears that get absorbed by the napkin and hardly make any noise. That’s how I always cried in the Community, never loud enough for anybody to notice.
The prosecutor uses phrases like “brutal beating” and “left for dead” and “no remorse.” He gestures wildly at the evidence tacked on a corkboard, X-rays illuminating the hairline fracture running along the boy’s mandible, the splash of navy where his spleen ripped open like a broken tangerine.
I glance over my shoulder to where Philip Lancaster sits with his father in a suit too big at the shoulders. His eyes are clear today, lacking the frenzied, shifting look they had that night near the bridge, though I can hear the squeak of his rubber shoes as he jiggles his knees and drums against his legs with flattened palms.
“Members of the jury,” Juanita says when it’s her turn to speak, “the facts of this case are undeniable. A mentally disturbed young man made threats to a girl who had, within the previous twelve hours, survived the destruction of her home. This is a girl who endured years of traumatizing fear. My client’s actions were entirely in self-defense, and the testimony and evidence you hear during this trial will prove her innocence.”
When I look behind me at the watchers gathered on the polished wooden benches, I see Philip resting his fingers inside the opening of his jacket, over the place where I kicked enough times to burst organs. His front teeth bow outward where his mouth was wired shut.