The heavy metal door slams shut. The heat of the flames is gone. In its place are stairs, the simplest of escape routes. For those with feet. Crawling, tumbling, falling, down the stairs until exhausted; unable to perform a simple feat from last week. Last week. The final week of living. Now there is only living hell.
“Carry me.” Arms outstretched, beseeching.
“Carry you?” Mother mocks. “First scramble me an egg,” she taunts.
“Carry you?” Caleb mocks. “First cut me a line of coke.”
“Carry you?” Father asks. “Get your lazy ass off the floor!”
Orchid turns her face away, as if disgusted by the flailing legs of a beetle unable to right itself. She lifts me, navigating the hard-won steps I spent forty minutes tumbling down. She opens the fire door. The flames are gone. Everything is sterile. The hallway is empty. She pushes through the door to my room and, like an offering, places me on the bed. She wipes clean her clothes as if contaminated.
In the bright white of the light, I see what shocks her. The bandages covering my stumps are gone, discarded in the struggle. My wounds lie bare and ugly. Bloody lines wind around blunt, severed limbs like moss creeping up a tree. I scream. Orchid appears, grimacing.
“What do you need, love?” She turns her back on my disfigurement. At least she called me “love.” But then, what’s wrong?
“Why are you crying, Orchid?”
“I’m about to be sick.”
“Are you ill?”
“Only when I’m here. What do you need?”
“My limbs . . . my leg and hand. Please.”
“Okay, love.” She departs the room.
“No!” he shouts. “Don’t leave, please don’t leave.”
Real hands comfort him. His mom’s voice soothes. “Shh.” She wraps one arm around his chest. “It’s okay,” she says over and over like a mantra. “You’re okay now.”
In the cruel darkness of that first night, ideas form, amorphous but deep-seated, never to allow what’s missing to make him dependent on another. Nor to shackle anyone else to his half-state.
CHAPTER 9
WEEP THEMSELVES TO SLEEP
Phoenix
The morning was rough. Every nerve, physical and emotional, felt raw. His mom didn’t want to leave, refusing even the bathroom until Caleb arrived.
“Hey, how you doing?”
Caleb seemed careful to avoid the tubes and tender spots that had pained his brother the day before. Phoenix pressed the button releasing morphine into his veins. Relief snaked its way through his bloodstream, easing the sharpness in his body and letting him care a little less.
Phoenix stared at his brother from his propped position against a pile of pillows. He could offer nothing. Everything he thought was too awful to say, and his mind was a jumble of drugs and pain. He closed his eyes to the sight of Caleb’s worried expression. A weird jealousy arose over what previously seemed to be givens—the ability to walk, to care for oneself. Phoenix was always the more capable brother.This can’t be.
The sound of air compressing from the vinyl chair at his bedside accompanied the pinging of the machines keeping track of his broken body.Caleb must’ve eased his mass into the guest seat.
His mom’s heels tapped towards his bed.
“Is he okay?” Caleb asked their mom, knowing the answer.
“He had a bad dream,” she explained. “He’s going to be okay.”
What do they know about being okay? And dream? That was no dream.
No, that nightmare was Phoenix’s subconscious screaming in no uncertain terms that he was never going to be the same again. That he’d lost as much as he thought and more. That there was no point to his denial.
