Maggie came in then and placed the pie she’d made in front of Jamie.
“Would you like to cut it?” Maggie held the knife toward him. Jamie looked at the handle of the knife for a long moment and then shook his head.
“You do it,” he said. “I’d just make a mess of it.”
I saw then, as clear as crystal, that Jamie still had his arms and legs, still had his sight and hearing, but he’d been gravely wounded somehow, and the wound must have been so deep inside him, none of us could see where to press a hand and stop the bleeding.
And then with equal clarity, I realized that all of us in that room were like that, in one way or another. All of us. Me. My sisters. Papa. Little Alex. Roland and Dora. And Jamie. We were all wounded inside where no one could see. None of us had survived the last year unscathed.
We had all been dealt crippling, devastating blows that had crushed us to the core. Jamie was the only one of us brave enough to admit that we’d all been transformed.
The world was different after the flu and the war. And so were we.
