In the beginning, I wasn’t sure who I was protecting, myself or Waylon. It’s still foggy who did the killing that day. But a couple things have parted that fog. One of them is the return of something I lost long ago—not the hands, but what they meant. A kind of power I never knew I had while they were attached to me. The power to do what I know is right. The power to free myself, finally.
An hour before my parole meeting, Dr. Wilson comes in like he always does, unannounced, except this time he doesn’t ask me how I am, or what’s happening, or what motivates someone to kill. He doesn’t say a word. He just looks at my face as if to say, What else is there to talk about? And I understand. There’s nothing else to say. Nothing but the final thing.
I look down to where the silver hands rest in their box beside me on the bed.
“I wanted to thank you for . . . what you did,” I say.
He nods.
“You could get in big trouble for this, couldn’t you?”
He shrugs. “What are you going to do with them?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“People who get limbs amputated sometimes bury them, have them cremated.”
I shake my head. “The Prophet had them on his mantelpiece. Like a trophy,” I say. “I don’t want to hide them away. I want to see them every day, like he did. They’re my trophy now.”
He nods wordlessly.
“Are you going to be at my hearing?” I ask to break the silence.
“Remind me of our deal again.”
“I help you find the killer, you recommend my release.”
“That was it.”
“So?” I ask, undeterred. “Are you gonna be there?”
He smiles. And waits. He waits and waits and waits.
In the beginning, I didn’t trust him. But he’s proven good on his very first promise, to help me. And he’s proven something else. They’re not all the same. They don’t all want to hurt. They don’t all want to lie. So maybe he deserves a little trust. A little truth.
I lay the pieces out one by one, the inhalers, the Prophet’s lungs straining in the smoke-strewn air, the moonshine bottles and the blue flame they made, the way the hollow houses fell easy, like nothing was really holding them up.
? ? ?
Waylon stood at the edge of where Jude had lain, and at his feet was a wooden box filled with bottles of moonshine. He stuffed a cloth down the neck of a bottle, lit the cloth with fire, and threw it to the roof of a house where it exploded in a sheet of sharp-tongued flames. From his throat came rusty noises, like a truck engine refusing to start.
“Get out of here,” I shouted. “They’ll see you.”
Waylon fell to his knees beside the puddle of blood, taking in the empty space that Jude had occupied before someone had dragged him away. His eyes squeezed shut in a sob. “He’s d-dead?” he asked, even though the answer was, even as we spoke, soaking into the knees of his trousers. “He’s dead?”
“You need to leave,” I croaked. “They’ll kill you, too.”
He stared at me for a long moment, blankly, as though looking at a wall, or the sky.
“Waylon?” I asked.
“Look at what we are,” he said, his voice raw. “We ran away to the wilderness ’cause we thought the outside weren’t civilized. But the wild don’t change who we really are. It makes it worse.”
In his lap, his hands tore at each other, gripping the rolled sleeves of his shirt.
“Look what it turned us into. Savages.” He was yelling over the roar of the flames. Flakes of ash drifted through the air.
“You need to leave. Now!” I shouted.
He shook his head, eyes mad with tears.
The noise of the fire vibrated my eardrums. “If you want to live, Waylon, get out of here! For Jude. Make this worth something.”
Without a word, he started nodding, mouth stretched in a deep frown, then stood and shuffled toward the woods, arms wrapped around his moonshine box.
I ran to the tree line and crouched in the dark of the forest, watching my home smolder. At first I thought everyone would burn in their sleep because none of them had emerged from their houses, until I heard a shout, then screams. Slowly, white shapes streamed from the houses, first only a handful, then a flood of men and women in long nightgowns and little nightcaps, children dragged along like lost white flags in a windstorm.
I braced an arm against a tree and watched my family pour from the front door of our house, littlest children in the arms of their mothers—their real mothers. Constance still hadn’t stumbled out with the rest of them, stuck up there in that attic room, the door likely latched. A moment later, my father reeled out of the front door, his face shell-shocked and covered in soot, with Constance behind him. She coughed into the crook of her handless arm.