The only even remotely plausible explanation I could conjure up involved my brothers. Today they’re both respectably married pillars of the country-club set. Six kids between them, plus mortgages and stock portfolios and regular tee times—all the trappings of middle-class middle age. But as boys, they had been wild. To this day, our across-the-street neighbor won’t speak to them; she has nursed a grudge for thirty-five years. That’s how long it’s been since they shot out her bedroom window. I was a toddler at the time, so I have no memory of the episode. But as my brothers tell it, one of our uncles had unwisely given them BB guns for Christmas. They were both rotten shots, and they had been trying to improve through target practice on a squirrel living in the magnolia tree outside their window. (According to the version of the story that has descended through family lore, their aim got better, they eventually shot the squirrel, and left it—supposedly as a token of -contrition—-on our neighbor’s front-door mat. Perhaps she was shrewd to have stayed out of their way all these years.) But—to return to the question at hand—was it possible that they had shot me, too? Back when I was too small to remember?
Unlikely. If they hadn’t gotten away with shooting out a neighbor’s window, they would never have gotten away with shooting their sister. It would have become family legend, the kind of story that gets retold and embellished upon at wedding-rehearsal dinners and fortieth--birthday parties. There’s no way I wouldn’t have known. And then there was the bullet itself. I probably knew even less than Dr. Zartman about guns and ammo, but the slug in my neck looked a lot bigger and more lethal than what you would load into a child’s gun.
Driving toward Cleveland Park, I kept stopping to look at it. The radiologist had e-mailed a JPEG version of my X-ray. At every traffic light, I braked the car and stared at my phone. You could zoom in until the bullet filled the entire screen. Then zoom back out, until it was just a tiny white light nestled between slivers of gray vertebrae.
It was late afternoon when I pulled into the driveway. Daylight was fading. I locked the car and entered my parents’ home in my usual way: a perfunctory knock, even as I turned my key in the door.
My father was sitting at the kitchen table, bent over a crossword puzzle. His beagle, Hunt, ignored me as usual. But Dad’s face brightened. “Caroline! I was hoping you would swing by. What’s a seven-letter synonym for—”
“Dad.” My voice caught. I didn’t know how to ask him. Instead I held out my phone, let him glimpse the e-mailed image of the X-ray.
His eyes told me what I needed to know. “Oh, sweet Jesus. Darling girl. We didn’t know it was still there.”
Four
* * *
You’re thinking that I don’t seem appropriately distressed, aren’t you? That a woman who has just learned she is walking around with a bullet in her neck, that she has perhaps been shot, would be a bit more hysterical.
Well, here you go.
Standing there in the kitchen, my father fussing over me (“Darling, please sit down. Let me make tea—”), I lost it.
“What do you mean, you didn’t know it was still there?” I screeched. “What did you know? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We didn’t—we just—we assumed that they removed it. We never thought to ask.”
“Never thought to ask who? What are you talking about?” I half picked up one of the chairs and slammed it down hard against the table. “Dad? What are you saying?”
I am not prone to outbursts, not a volatile person. But my father’s evasiveness felt more alarming than the images from the X-ray and the MRI. They had seemed unreal, like props in a strange dream from which I was surely about to wake. Whereas my father . . . I had come here expecting him to dismiss the whole situation as risible. I had expected to share a good laugh, then have him solve the mystery of how my X-ray had gotten mixed up with someone else’s, some poor soul walking around with (cue laugh track!) a bullet in her neck.
Instead he was fumbling with his phone keypad, mumbling about calling my mother.
“Dad—”
He held his finger up, signaling me to wait. “Frannie, Caroline’s here. Come home, please. . . . Mm-hmm. Yes.” He hung up. “She’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
“Dad, whatever it is, please just tell me.”
“You know what? To hell with tea.” He pulled two glasses from a cabinet and a bottle of Scotch from beside the fridge.
“I don’t want whisky!” I swatted the bottle away. “I want you to tell me what’s going on. How could you have known—”
“Drink,” he ordered, and wrapped my fingers back around the glass. His hand shook as he poured. “It’ll calm you down. I’m sorry this has come as such a shock. As soon as Mom gets here . . . I suppose we should call your brothers, too.”
“Why? Was it them?”
“Was it who?”
“Martin and Tony. Is that who shot me?”
He looked confused.
“With their old BB guns. Like the squirrel?”
A surprised smile passed over his face. “No. It wasn’t your brothers. Though Lord help us, they probably tried.” The smile faded and his eyes turned serious again. “You really don’t remember? Not anything?”
“What should I remember?”
“From when you were little.”
I shook my head, waited.
“We always wondered. Never wanted to ask. They told us to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Dad. You’re scaring me.”
“Please don’t judge us too harshly, Caroline. We love you. We always will. No matter what, you are our daughter.”
I stared at him. Those were the most frightening words I’d heard yet.
? ? ?
AN HOUR LATER, my family was assembled in the living room.
Allow me to make the introductions:
You’ve already met my mother, Frannie Cashion. Attractive, lively. Busy with the Flower Guild at church, and with bossing around her daughters-in-law and their ever-expanding broods of children.
My father, Thomas Cashion. He’s retired from practicing law, but he still consults occasionally and has developed a new, rather tiresome addiction to crosswords. He also runs three miles daily, which he claims is the best defense against my mother’s onslaught of casseroles.