? ? ?
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.
Angel told me how paranoid they are about disease in jails, about incidents in history when illnesses wiped out entire prison populations in a matter of days, how there’s no getting away from it in a place where our bodies are so close together.
People died fairly often in the Community. Wives died in childbirth, and men got small injuries on their hands that could become black and gelatinous in days, and then we always knew what would follow. We were to scrub all cuts in lye and not eat mushy vegetables and be careful around kitchen utensils. Anybody with something worse than a cough was locked in their house or quarantined to the barns on the edge of the woods until they got better or until the smell told us they’d no longer be a problem.
The Prophet, whatever the cost, would not have allowed our spiritual mission to die off from something as insignificant as an outbreak of flu.
? ? ?
Dr. Wilson visits today, the first time I’ve seen him since I told him how I lost my hands. I’m still a little bruised by the memory. He sits on his stool and opens his yellow notepad.
“The snow is melting in the mountains,” he says.
I look up. “And?”
“The crime scene investigators are finally able to collect evidence. Things may start moving more quickly now.”
“What do you mean?”
He opens a file folder and scans a typed piece of paper. “Jude’s mother died at home, is that correct?”
“Yes,” I say, unable to prevent a wariness from creeping into my voice. “Before I knew Jude.”
“What killed her?”
“Stomach cancer, I think.”
“What’d she do for the pain? Drink?”
“No. Jude said she never touched a drop of alcohol. She just put up with it.”
“That must have been excruciating. Stomach cancer is one of the most painful. Almost too difficult to bear, some say.”
“What are you saying?”
He levels his eyes at me. “I don’t think Loretta Leland died of stomach cancer.”
“How could you know that?”
“Take a look.” He opens a packet and pulls out a photo. It shows a burned-out shell of a house, the glass from one window melted and weeping down the logs.
“Recognize the place?” he asks.
“Jude’s cabin,” I say. “The fire spread that far?”
He nods. “The investigators found the body of a woman, aged between thirty-five and forty, near the Leland family property. She’d been dead for approximately six years. The medical examiner analyzed the remaining tissue and determined that the woman had advanced breast cancer which had metastasized in her stomach. But this woman didn’t die of cancer. Do you know what killed her, Minnow?”