“I don’t know.”
“Maybe around here?” His fingers inched higher, kneading the base of my scalp.
“I said, I don’t know. I didn’t know it was there in the first place.”
“So you don’t know how long it’s been in there?”
“No idea. I have no idea. I don’t know what to say.”
His eyes narrowed. “It’s awfully . . . unusual. Getting shot would seem to be a memorable event. Getting shot in the neck, especially so.”
“I agree. What’s your point?”
“Just that—forgive me, how to put this?—I’m finding it hard to believe you really had no idea you’ve been walking around with a bullet in your neck.”
I glared at him. “Well, that makes two of us then. Two of us who think that this”—I rapped my fingers against the flatscreen—“that this here makes absolutely no sense.”
? ? ?
“WELL, I DON’T know a damn thing about guns. Or ammunition. But that’s sure as hell no surgical clip that got dropped.”
Will Zartman and I were sitting side by side in his office, our eyes glued to the image of my neck on his desktop computer screen. He was youngish for a doctor, not much older than me. I didn’t know him well. But I felt comforted by his reaction. He seemed as bewildered as I was, unsure whether the appropriate response was to panic and race to the emergency room, or to giggle at the absurdity of the situation.
“You’re saying you really didn’t know it was there?”
I was getting the feeling that I would be hearing this question a lot. “No, I really didn’t.”
“And you’ve never felt any pain? Any stiffness turning your neck, any tingling?”
“Well . . .” I lifted my right hand and gingerly flexed it up and down. “You know about the wrist. I don’t know if it’s related.”
“No, me neither.” He turned back to the screen. “I suppose the question is going to be, do we try to remove the bullet? I can think of all sorts of risks involved with that. On the other hand, I can think of all sorts of risks involved with leaving it in there. Lead poisoning, for one.” He scribbled something on a notepad. “I think the next step is for you to see a neurosurgeon. Meanwhile, let me take a look.”
He brushed the dark waves of hair off my neck and leaned close. “There’s no scar.”
“I know.”
“And I know I already asked, but you’ve never had surgery? Anywhere above the waist?”
“No. I’ve never had any surgery, period. Not that I can think of. And I’ll answer what’s probably your next question: no, I’ve never been shot, either. As your radiologist friend was kind enough to point out, that would tend to be a memorable event in one’s life.”
Dr. Zartman took a deep breath and sat back. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, bullets don’t appear out of thin air. Somehow this one found its way to the middle of your neck. You really don’t know how?”
“You can keep asking. The answer’s still no.”
“What do your parents say?”
“They—” I hesitated. “They don’t seem to know.”
He must have heard something in my voice because he looked up. “What do you mean, they ‘don’t seem’ to know?”
“Well, I did mention it to them last night. That the MRI had picked up something that looked like a bullet. It seemed so ludicrous. Their reaction was—I guess it was a little strange.”
“How so?”
I thought for a moment, trying to capture the right word. “Uneasy. They seemed uneasy. But that’s normal, right?” I felt suddenly protective. “It would be normal for parents to feel uneasy when their daughter is in pain and is forced to undergo medical tests, and then tells them she got weird results. I mean, how would your mom and dad react if you told them you might have a bullet in your neck?”
He nodded. “Point taken. Still. Someone has to know what happened. You should talk to them again.”
? ? ?
I drove to my parents’ house filled with trepidation.
The conversation I was about to have with them could go either of two ways, as I saw it. It was possible—probable, surely—that they knew nothing. But this was small comfort. After all, there was a bullet in my neck. If my parents didn’t know how it got there, who would?
The even more disturbing possibility was that they did know something. I remembered how my dad’s hand had trembled at dinner. How my mother had chased peas around her plate, refusing to meet my eyes. There could be no good-news story, no happy version of how a bullet had wedged itself inside my neck. But how terrible could it be? Whatever had happened, I appeared to have suffered no lasting harm. So why would they not have dared to tell me?