14
In her dark bedroom, Darina Flores drifted in and out of consciousness. The painkillers disagreed with her, causing tremors in her legs that tore her from sleep. They also provoked peculiar dreams. She couldn’t have called them night terrors, for she was herself virtually without fear, but she experienced sensations of descent, of falling into a great emptiness, and she felt the absence of grace with a pain that was unfamiliar to her. The god she served was a pitiless one, and there was no consolation from him in times of distress. He was the god of mirrors, the god of form without substance, the god of blood and tears. Trapped in her misery, she understood why so many chose to believe in the Other God, to follow Him even though she saw in Him only a being as heedless of suffering as her own. Perhaps the only true difference was that her god took pleasure in agony and grief; at least, one might argue, he had a sense of involvement.
She had always considered herself to have a high tolerance for pain, but she had a fear of burns, and a reaction to them that was disproportionate to the severity of the injury. Even a minor burn – the careless brushing of a candle flame, a match held for too long – caused blistering to her skin, and a fierce throbbing that found an echo deep inside her. A psychiatrist might have speculated on childhood trauma, an accident of youth, but she had never talked with a psychiatrist, and any mental health specialist would have been forced to travel further back than distant memories of her childhood to find the source of her terror of burning.
Because her dreams were real: she had fallen, and she had burned, and somewhere inside she was still burning. The Other God had made it so, and she hated Him for it. Now her inner pain had its most ferocious external manifestation yet, the extent of it hidden from her by dressings and the refusal to allow her a mirror.
Barbara Kelly had surprised her in the end. Who could have guessed that she would prove to be so weak and yet so strong, that she would seek to save herself at the last by turning to the Other God, and in doing so would inflict such damage on the woman sent to punish her? My beauty, she thought, now gone; temporarily blind in one eye, with the possibility of lasting damage to her vision caused by the old grounds in the coffee pot sticking to her pupil. She wanted to shed her body like a snake slews off its skin, or a spider leaves its old carapace to wither. She did not want to be trapped in a disfigured shell. In the darkness of her agonies, she feared that it was because she did not wish to see the corruption of her spirit reflected in her outer form.
Each time she woke the boy was there waiting, his ancient eyes like polluted pools against the pallor of his skin. He still had not uttered a word. As an infant he had rarely cried, and as a boy he had never spoken. The doctors who examined him, chosen for their trustworthiness, their commitment to the cause, could find no physical defect to explain the boy’s silence, and his mental functions were adjudged to be well above average for his age. As for the goiter upon his neck, that troubled them, and there had been discussions about removing it. She had demurred. It was part of him. After all, that was how she had known it was him. She had thought that it was possible when she felt him kicking in her womb. A sense of his presence had suffused her as though she were enveloped in his embrace, as though he were inside her more as a lover than a developing child, and it had grown in intensity throughout her second and third trimesters so that it became almost oppressive to her, like a cancerous growth in her belly. Expelling him from herself had come as a relief. Then she had looked upon him as he was placed in her arms, and her fingers had traced his lips, and his ears, and the delicacy of his hands, and had paused at the swelling upon his throat. She had gazed into his eyes, and from the blackness of them he had looked back at her, an old being resurrected in a new body.
And now he was beside her, stroking her hand as she moaned upon the sweat-dampened sheets. While they were finishing with Barbara Kelly, Darina had summoned help, but their nearest tame physician was in New York and it took time for him to reach her. Strangely, there was not as much pain as she might have anticipated, not at first. She attributed it to her rage at the bitch who had turned upon her, but as Kelly’s life slowly seeped from her beneath blades and fingers, so too the torment in Darina’s face seemed to increase, and when Kelly at last died it screamed into red life with her passing.
Deep second-degree burns: that was how they described them. Any more severe and there would have been serious nerve damage, which would at least have numbed the pain, she thought. There was still the possibility that grafts might be necessary, but the doctor had decided to hold off on that decision until a degree of healing had occurred. Some scarring was inevitable, he said, particularly around her injured eye, and there would be significant contracture of the eyelid as the scarring proceeded. The eye hurt more than anything else: it felt like needles were being pushed through it and into her brain.
The eye was patched, and would remain so even after the other dressings were removed. Already her skin was blistering badly. She had been given lubricant for the eye, as well as antibiotic drops. The boy took care of them all and salved her blistered face, and the physician visited each day and commended him on his efforts, even as he kept his distance from him, his nose wrinkling at the faint odor that seemed to rise from the boy regardless of how many showers he took or how clean his clothes were. His breath was the worst: it stank of decay. Darina had grown used to it from long exposure, but it was still unpleasant, even to her.
But then he was an unusual boy, mostly because he wasn’t really a boy at all.
‘Hurts,’ she said. She still had trouble speaking. If she moved her mouth more than a fraction, her lips bled.
The boy who was more than a boy put some gel on his fingers and gently applied it to her lips. He took a plastic bottle with a fixed straw in its cover, slipped the straw into the undamaged side of her mouth, and squeezed some water through. She nodded when she was done.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He stroked her hair. A tear rolled from her uninjured eye. Her face felt as though it were aflame.
‘The bitch,’ she said. ‘Look what the bitch did to me.’
And: ‘I’m burned, but she is burning too, and her pain will be greater and longer than mine. The bitch, the burning bitch.’
She was not due another painkiller for a couple of hours, so he turned on the TV as a distraction. Together they watched some cartoons, and a comedy show, and a dumb action movie upon which she wouldn’t ordinarily have wasted her time but that now acted as a soporific. The night drew on, and the sun rose. She watched the light change through the crack in the drapes. The boy gave her another pill, then changed into his pajamas and curled up on the floor next to her bed as he saw her falling asleep, his head on a pillow and a comforter covering his body only from the waist down. She felt her eyes begin to close, and prepared to exchange real pain for the memory of pain.
From the floor the boy watched her, unfathomable in his strangeness.
Messages accumulated. Most were inconsequential. Still, the boy made a careful note of each one, and handed it to her when she was sufficiently alert to understand what she was being shown. Minor tasks were postponed for a time, major ones diverted elsewhere. She willed herself to recover. There was too much that needed to be done.
But for all of the boy’s solicitude, and all of the care he took with her phone, some contacts went unexamined for a time. The boy did not have access to the old Darina Flores answering service: it had come into existence before he was born, and there had been no reason to acquaint him with it. Anyway, it had been many years since contact had been made through that number.
And so it was that a message inquiring if she was still interested in news of an airplane that might have crashed in the Great North Woods remained unlistened to for days, and a little time was bought.
But only a little.