Mary turned to me. “Did you put your hands over Uncle Cyrus’s eyes?”
“I did not.”
She turned to him. “See?”
“Seeing is the point,” he said.
“Mary,” I said firmly. “No science on the way home.”
“As you wish, Aunt Jessica.” The polite promise did not erase her delinquent grin.
Sebastian took a step inside the room, his eyes never leaving mine. Perhaps he would ask about the staples in my head, my broken nose, or the state of my brain.
Mary, bouncing on my bed, spoke first. “What does this thing do?”
“That’s an IV,” Sebastian told her. “It dribbles medicine into your blood.”
“Or water.” I held up my left arm, where the cannula had left its dragonfly shadow. “When you’re knocked out for a long time, you can’t drink.”
“They cut awater holein you?”
“I had plenty of holes when I got here. They closed them with staples.”
Mary jumped down for a closer look at my scalp, ecstatic. “If I had a magnet, could I catch you with it?”
“You might make my head hurt. But I’d still escape.”
“I’d bring one of those junkyard magnets—the kind that picks up cars!”
For moment, I was speechless, but Sebastian rescued me.
“Medical staples aren’t magnetic. If they were, an MRI would rip them out.”
Mary pulled her backpack off and dumped it on the bed. “You hear that, Trotsky? What if you accidentally ate some thumbtacks on your big day, and we put you in an MRI? Zzzzap! Splootch!”
The backpack, wisely, made no answer.
Sebastian was looking at the machines around my bed. Like he was imagining me broken, unconscious.
I wondered again if he would ask how I was doing. If I was having trouble recognizing my own family. If I’d noticed that the two of us—unlike Mary—were connected by invisible strings.
But he only picked up my duffel bag and asked, “Is this everything?”
Orrin had sentthem in the Volvo 240, mid-seventies, brilliant red. Affectionately known as “the Brick,” it was the first car everyone in the family was allowed to drive.
I remembered at age fourteen, me and Sebastian taking our first offensive driving lesson. We’d already practiced three-point turns, parallel parking, and the bootlegger’s reverse, but now we were tasked with running Uncle Orrin off the road.
We practiced on the old carriage path that led through the archery field, level and treeless. Both cars were fitted with fat wooden bumpers, like chariots in the Circus Maximus.
I took the wheel first, and aimed the Brick at Orrin’s rear left fender, as per the lesson plan: jolt the driver, push the target into a spin.
But Orrin, who did not believe in coddling, accelerated at the last second. We missed completely, and I overcorrected, sending the Volvo into its own dirt-spraying pirouette. A brick, indeed.
“My turn!” Sebastian shouted before we even stopped spinning.
We both had on motorcycle helmets, and bumped heads as we switched places.
A year later, the Brick was retired from crash duty. Grandmother had decreed that our depleted generation would practice vehicular attacks in new cars with airbags and crumple zones. At this, Orrin had only shaken his head.
