The door opened behind her, and there was Tucker, in sunglasses with a silk scarf tied around his neck and pulled up over half of his face. He was holding a solitary cupcake. “From Pearl,” he said, his voice muffled. He set the cupcake down on the desk. Cooper glanced over at it. It was absurdly baroque, way out of proportion to its surroundings. The frosting had been colored pink with valuable food coloring, and a tiny purple violet had been piped upon it. A marzipan bumblebee, with two sliced almonds for wings, perched atop.
Tucker removed Cooper’s paints and brushes from her stool and sat down.
“When do I rejoin the gen-pop?” Cooper asked. Tucker didn’t immediately reply.
“Or am I being sent home?”
“I am not currently in the loop on that discussion,” Tucker finally said.
“Does this mean my quarantine is over at least? Since you’re talking to me. Even Floyd talked to me on the way here.”
“You know that wasn’t my decision. The NSF wants you ensconced here, hermit-like, so the media can’t find you, so you can’t get online and tell the world what happened. The place is leaking like any number of doomed ships in history.”
She rolled up her drawing paper. “Tell the world what happened? I don’t even know what happened.”
“This whole business is my fault. I shouldn’t have let you go to the Divide. I rarely make mistakes, but when I do—”
“This isn’t your mistake.”
Cooper walked over to the corner of the studio, where she kept the canvases: the beginnings, the orphans. “I want to show you something,” she said. She found the portrait of Tucker. She pulled it out and shoved it at him without meeting his eyes.
“What’s this?”
“You. That night. The Halloween party. Remember?”
Tucker looked at the painting—an eye regarding itself in a shard of mirror that was cupped in a brown-skinned hand. In the background of the reflection were the dirty tiles of a subway bathroom.
“I remember,” he said quietly. He cleared his throat. “However, for true verisimilitude, I’m afraid you’ll have to revise.” He carefully removed his sunglasses and handed them to Cooper. Then he unwrapped the scarf, and Cooper saw that the left side of his face now seemed to hang slightly below the right. The left corner of his mouth fell slack and the corner of his left eye looked as if it were being pulled downward by an invisible thread. The unnatural smoothness of his chemically sanded face had given way to dark sprouts of wiry hair. He seemed half sad; and the look of half-sadness struck Cooper as far worse than a look of complete sorrow.
Cooper started to say something, but Tucker put his hand up.
“Self-pity is vain,” Tucker said. “Don’t encourage it, and don’t engage in it.” He stood up. “Eat the cupcake. Act normal. Act like you want to be here, like you’re strong enough to be here. And start painting. As soon as possible. If you don’t start immediately after the blow, you won’t ever start again. I speak from experience.” He cleared his throat and lightly stroked his cheek. “And now you have a whole new face to inspire you.”
After Tucker left, Cooper felt a wave of despair wash over her. Her wound pulsed with heat as the dull ache gave way to scorching pain. She pulled out the pills Doc Carla had given her and tapped one out onto her palm. She took it dry, then sat down, trying to get a handle on the pain. She examined her bandaged hand. It didn’t make sense to wait for Doc Carla in order to assess her disfigurement, to quantify what she’d lost. She had to see her hand now. But first she needed fortification. She pulled Pavano’s Scotch from her pocket. It took two minutes, and the assistance of her teeth, but she was able to twist the top open. The first mouthful was medicinal. It burned, the way a wound burns the first time you run it under cold water. The second drink was smoother—still astringent, but warm. The warmth filled Cooper’s chest, and it, along with the sublime cooling effect of the painkiller, took just enough of the edge off to give her the courage to assess her injury.
First, she released the insect-like jaws of the metal clamp biting the elastic bandage and began unwinding it. Her arm grew tired—the bandage seemed endless. Eventually, she reached the sterile gauze wrapping her hand in layers as thin as phyllo. After three circumnavigations, Cooper began to see the bloodstains and the thin slice of plywood that supported her hand.
She removed the final layer of gauze, tugging a bit to release it from the scabs, and there it was, a bloom of pith and dried blood. The other fingers, the thumb, the middle, the ring, the pinkie, were white and shriveled, glistening with moisture, and Cooper was overcome by revulsion. The pain came roaring back, crashing through the narcotic. It was as if the wound had sprung to life, as if it had a heartbeat of its own, and was determined to make itself known. Cooper wiped sweat off her forehead and tried to steady herself by taking another mouthful of Scotch. The pain didn’t subside, and although somewhere in the far reaches of her brain she knew all she had to do was wait—just wait—she shook out the two remaining pills from the bottle. Cherry waited, and no one came. Cooper had waited, too, and David hadn’t come. She was done waiting. She swallowed the pills with a double swallow of Scotch, and as the burn in her chest subsided, Cooper remembered that David’s ashes were in her parka pocket. She jammed her uninjured hand into its depths and withdrew the vial. She sat down at the desk and set it next to the empty bottle of painkillers, and laid her head down next to them. As she stared at both bottles, they seemed to merge until it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.
Eventually, her thoughts returned to the igloo that Cherry, Wilson, and Birdie Bowers had made at Cape Crozier, the endpoint of the “Worst Journey in the World,” just as they had in the weeks after David went missing. As the police searched, as Billie turned cold and Dasha and Bill turned on each other, Cooper thought endlessly of Cherry, Wilson, and Birdie huddled together in their igloo, waiting out a blizzard in complete darkness, save for the flickering glow of the camp stove. For twenty-four hours we waited, Cherry wrote. Things were so bad now that we dared not unlash the door.