“And something else,” I said. Something missing, sliced away clean, its absence thrumming. A hand? A leg? A kidney?
“A broken nose,” the voice said. “A few bruised ribs.”
“No.” It had to be more.
All my childhood injuries spun through me—falls while climbing or playing Bunny Hunt, sprains from kabaddi with the Seth kids. Nothing had ever sent me to a hospital.
“Why am I here?”
A pat on my arm. “So we can take care of you.”
“For bruised ribs and a broken nose?”
The voice came in a whisper, closer. “To keep your brain from swelling.”
Snick and click, the rasp of metal on metal.
At first I thought the sound was a machine, bellows and clockwork to keep me breathing. It was too rhythmic to be human.
Then recognition fell.
“Grandmother,” I croaked.
The snicking stopped.
My eyes opened a little—the world was still too bright. Elizabeth sat in the corner, her eyes as sharp as her needles. She wore an oxblood cardigan in the air-conditioning. An expanse of scarlet spilled from her hands.
“I’m knitting you a sweater,” she said. “For when you’re well.”
“Thank you,” I said, but the words felt wrong.
It hurt to move, to breathe, to think. Looking at Grandmother hurt worst of all—her shadow was made from ashes, her skin was someone else’s. Her eyes were upside down in their sockets.
Abused as a child, and you don’t even know it.
She gazed back at me, dissecting the confusion in my face. Then the metal shafts began to click again, like insects in the walls.
At my bedside was a vase full of flowers. I knew their scents from Grandpa Dwight’s lessons—monkshood, foxglove, wolfsbane, azaleas, lily of the valley. Death flowers, breathed in through my swollen nose.
Was I dead?
“You did well, Jessica. Planning is a virtue, but improvisation is divine.”
New memories fell from the sky. My assignment in New York had come to a head. But not in the city—in some dark forest. In some small room.
“How much do you remember?” Grandmother asked.
My mouth full of dirt and blood. An endless climb.
A butterfly knife.
“Not much.”
“You will,” she said, and things turned slantways again. “Mortons always heal.”
My mother hadn’t. Yvonne, Tobias, Zachary, Tillie, Ramsey, Katie, and Olive hadn’t.
Peter hadn’t.
