The doctor turns toward the cabinets and opens a drawer, telling me how to care for my wounds until they’re fully healed. She turns back toward me and holds up a hand mirror directly in front of my face.
It’s me and it’s not me staring back. It’s never just me. I thrust the mirror away, but the doctor wasn’t expecting my reaction, and it clatters to the floor, fracturing into angular pieces. Dozens of different-size eyes stare up at me.
“Ryan, please stay calm.” My mother wraps her arms around me. “It will heal. You’re going to be okay.”
The doctor tries to reassure me, telling me that it’s always hard for people to adjust to facial scars but that it will heal and be much less noticeable over time. I hear only half her words before running out of the room, crushing eyes under my heels as I go.
Fifteen
THERE’S NO WAY they can catch me. It’s painful for my dad to run due to his war injuries, and my mother has nothing on my long-legged speed. I had to get out of there, out of the confining antiseptic of the medical building and into the open air. It’s exhilarating to run full-out like this, the exquisite tension and release of every muscle doing its job. Every breath is life itself inflating my lungs, coursing oxygen through my blood. No matter my confusion, uncertainty, and fears, I’m lucky to feel all of it. I’m lucky to feel at all.
My heart pounds a cadence: I’m alive. I’m alive. Even she is quiet right now beneath the thrum of it.
I zigzag through side streets and alleyways until my body is running on fumes, the cut on my cheek throbs with my pulse, and I come to a gasping halt on a street corner. I need to call Joe. He’ll come for me, sit with me, let me cry without explanation. He will look at me tenderly. He’s the only person in this world who doesn’t want anything from me right now that I can’t give.
There are already three messages on my cell from my parents asking where I am, begging me to stay calm and let them come get me. Thankfully, Joe answers my call right away. I try to direct him to wherever I am. “I wasn’t exactly looking where I was going,” I say, giving him the street names of the intersection in the quiet neighborhood where I finally stopped.
There’s something about the names that runs tickling fingers up my back. This neighborhood conjures an intense feeling of déjà vu. A knowing without knowing why. I venture a few feet down one beckoning street in particular, thinking I shouldn’t go anywhere, but I can’t seem to stop. The gentle dips and sways of the aging picket fences pull me along like the handrail of a bridge toward a mysterious destination. I glance back, looking for Joe, but I have to keep going; I have to know where the feeling leads.
Death is still quiet in my head, as if she’s as curious as I.
All I can do is follow my feet, which plod a deliberate path to a vague end. With each step, my agitation builds. I’m simultaneously compelled to search and yet terrified of what I’ll find. I don’t understand this. As if I’ve reached a cliff, my feet scuffle to a halt. Rocks tumble over the edge of my mind as I stop and stare.
In front of me is a house. A modest, blah house on a modest, blah street. It’s dilapidated and looks abandoned. But I can tell it was beautiful once. The grass is dead and sparse like residual hairs on a skeleton. Stapled to the door, the corner flap of an aged notice rustles in the hot afternoon air.
There is no life in this house. It’s a shell of what it once was.
The memory of a death rises up. I recall thinking how a body looks so much smaller when there is no soul to fill the spaces: like a balloon, wrinkled, puckered, half-deflated on the hard, cracked ground. I find it alarming that I can’t recall right now whose dead body I viewed. Do I know anyone who has died? My father has never let me see the bodies of the skydivers who bounced. Have I ever attended a funeral?
Tears drop onto my neck, surprising me, like a chaste peck of rain on the forehead. This house makes me inexplicably sad. I can’t make sense of it.
A blaring honk startles me. I swing around. Joe leaves the car running as he steps out. His face shines with sweat and a frantic expression. “What are you doing over here? Why didn’t you stay on the corner where you told me to go? I’ve been looking all over for you.” He clutches my upper arms, leans forward to kiss my cheek, pauses, and switches to the uninjured cheek. I’m directed to the passenger side of the car, where he opens the door, sits me down, and buckles me in like I’m two years old.
“I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say. I wasn’t thinking, just following an indistinct trail, mindless, like a hound with the barest whiff of something it wants. A terrified thought rushes in: maybe she led me there, somewhere random and empty where people wouldn’t be able to get to me until it was too late. Fear wraps its fingers around my heart and squeezes. That’s why she was so quiet.