They let us see Grampy’s body. He looked surprisingly young, no wrinkles, just a big, white, inflated face. Someone’d tucked a pistachio-colored blanket up under his chin so all you could see was his head. I wanted to reach out my fingers and touch his cheek, but my mother smacked my hand away when I tried.
I don’t remember her ever moving that quickly again. She operated in slow motion so much of the time. I think, had she been caught on film, you might’ve seen the wind ruffle her dress slower than everyone else’s, her footsteps always taking an eternity to strike the ground.
Chapter 33
It’s claustrophobic here, but not like Jude always said cities would feel. What did he know anyway? He’d never been to one. He insisted the concrete and metal would crush a person, block out the light. But what’s suffocating are the people. This feeling that too many sets of lungs are breathing right next to you. Like it’s a finite resource, air. It can run out, and we’re all breathing a little less well because we choose to live side by side with others. Some days I can barely catch my breath at all.
I haven’t seen the sky, the real sky, not the muted one that shines through the milk-colored skylight, since I arrived in juvie. For the first couple of days after they found me, covered in Philip’s blood, they had me so full of morphine in that hospital bed that all I could do was stare out the window and try to block out the yellow-tasting chemical smell that never went away. The bed was too soft. Somehow, it made everything ache worse.
A detective visited after I was coming out of the anesthetic fog of my second surgery. I had tolerated the surgeries numbly, let them move me and poke me and cut me. Before the plastic surgeon had his way with my arms, they spread my legs and stuck a needle in my femoral artery and injected dye to color my blood. On a screen, I watched the veins in my arms flash with yellow as the blood pumped, so much like branches of a tree, but all around the rim of my wrists, the screen was black. Dead.
In surgery, they did something to my stumps, undid the embroidery floss stitches and shaved off some bone and tried to sort out the broken nest of nerves and tendons. The surgeons patched a chunk of muscle and skin from my inner thighs onto each stump with a lacework of fine black sutures.
I woke up feeling unmoored and sick, ceiling lights battering my bruised eyelids. I could still smell smoke in my hair but couldn’t remember where it had come from, and I couldn’t piece together where Jude was. When the detective came in, I asked him over and over, but he only frowned as though he had no idea who Jude was, and looking back I guess he didn’t.
“The place you called the Community has been destroyed,” he said. “We believe someone started a fire.”
My head snapped back against the pillows and in that second, all I could see was the Prophet’s dying eyes, the heat from the fire pushing redness into his cheeks.
“Is there anybody who’d want your home destroyed?” he asked.
Me, I thought, and shut my eyes hard again.
“What about your mother?” he asked. “Your father? Any of your siblings?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!” I repeated, more and more loudly each time.
“Do you have any idea how the fire started?” the detective asked.
All at once, the encompassing smell of smoke was too much. I leaned forward and vomited a pile of foamy yellow on the thready hospital blanket. And still the detective kept pushing with his questions, wanting more. Demanding more.
“Every morning, every evening, ain’t we got fun?” I heard someone sing. The detective grew silent. The voice was high-pitched and broken with tears, like a sad angel. But I didn’t believe in angels anymore.
“Not much money, oh but honey, ain’t we got fun?” the voice continued. The detective’s face screwed up in confusion. He heard the voice, too.
“The rent’s unpaid dear, we haven’t a bus, but smiles are made dear, for people like us.” My split lip shivered in pain, and I realized I was the one singing. I thought I might lose it right there because the world went white and depthless, like someone had suddenly packed my brain in cotton. They had to sedate me. I decided I didn’t want it, so I struggled, and I pissed myself, and they called a big male nurse to come in and press hard on my shoulders till another nurse could stick the needle in the crook of my elbow.
I woke up after hours had passed, late in the evening. They’d changed my hospital gown. The detective was gone.
The male nurse entered my room at the end of his shift. I watched him as he leaned over and plugged something into the wall outlet.
“It’s a night-light,” he said. “It’ll help keep the darkness away.”