The Fourth Hand

Patrick did his best to forget the details of that house—all the pictures of Otto senior, for example. It was no surprise to see photographic evidence that Otto senior and Doris had been sweethearts—she’d already told Wallingford about that—but the photos of the Clausens’ marriage were more than Patrick could bear. There was in their photographs not only their obvious pleasure, which was always of the moment, but also their anticipated happiness—their unwavering expectations of a future together, and of a baby in that future. And what was the setting of the pictures that so seized Wallingford’s attention? It was neither Appleton nor Green Bay. It was the cottage on the lake, of course! The weathered dock; the lonely, dark water; the dark, abiding pines. There was also a photo of the boathouse apartment under construction, and there were Otto’s and Doris’s wet bathing suits, drying in the sunlight on the dock. Surely the water had lapped against the rocking boats, and—especially before a storm —it must have slapped against the dock. Patrick had heard it many times. Wallingford recognized in the photographs the source of the recurrent dream that wasn’t quite his. And always underlying that dream was the other one, the one the prescience pill had inspired—that wettest of all wet dreams brought on by the unnamed Indian painkiller, now banned.

Looking at the photographs, Wallingford began to realize that it was not the

“unmanly” loss of his hand that had conclusively turned his ex-wife against him; instead, in refusing to have children, he’d already lost her. Patrick could see how the paternity suit, even though it proved to be false, had been the bitterest pill for Marilyn to swallow. She’d wanted children. How had he underestimated the urgency of that?

Now, as he held Otto junior, Wallingford wondered how he could not have wanted one of these. His own baby in his arms!

He cried. Doris and her mother cried with him. Then they shut off the tears because the twenty-four-hour international news team was there. Although he was not the reporter assigned to this story, Wallingford could have predicted all the shots.

“Get a close-up of the hand, maybe the baby with the hand,” Patrick heard one of his colleagues say. “Get the mother and the hand and the baby together.” And later, in a sharply spoken aside to the cameraman: “I don’t care if Pat’s head is in the frame, just so his hand is there!”

On the plane back to Boston, Wallingford remembered how happy Doris had looked; although he rarely prayed, he prayed for the health of Otto junior. He hadn’t realized that a hand transplant would make him so emotional, but he knew it wasn’t just the hand.

Dr. Zajac had warned him that any decline in his slowly acquired dexterity could be a sign of a rejection reaction. Also, rejection reactions could occur in the skin. Patrick had been surprised to hear this. He’d always known that his own immune system could destroy the new hand, but why skin ? There seemed to be so many more important, internal functions that could go wrong. “Skin is a bugger,” Dr. Zajac had said.

No doubt “bugger” was an Irma-ism. She and Zajac, whom she called Nicky, were in the habit of renting videos and watching them in bed at night. But being in bed led to other things—Irma was pregnant, for example— and in the last video they’d watched, many of the characters had called one another buggers. That skin could be a bugger would be imparted to Patrick soon enough. On the first Monday in January, the day after the Packers dropped that wild-card game in San Francisco, Wallingford flew to Green Bay. The town was in mourning; the lobby of his hotel was like a funeral home. He checked into his room, he showered, he shaved. When he called Doris, her mother answered the phone. Both the baby and Doris were napping; she’d have Doris call him at his hotel when she woke up. Patrick was considerate enough to ask her to pass along his condolences to Doris’s father. “About the 49ers, I mean.”

Wallingford was still napping—dreaming of the cottage on the lake—when Mrs. Clausen came to his hotel room. She hadn’t called first. Her mother was watching the baby. She’d brought the car and would drive Patrick to her house to see Otto junior a little later.

Wallingford didn’t know what this meant. Was she seeking a moment to be alone with him? Did she want some contact, if only with the hand, that she didn’t want her mother to see? But when Patrick touched her face with the palm of his hand—being careful to touch her with his left hand, of course—Mrs. Clausen abruptly turned her face away. And when he thought about touching her breasts, he could see that she’d read his mind and was repulsed.

Doris didn’t even take off her coat. She’d had no ulterior motive for coming to his hotel. She must have felt like taking a drive—that was all. This time, when Wallingford saw the baby, little Otto appeared to recognize him. This was highly unlikely; nevertheless, it further broke Patrick’s heart. He got back on the plane to Boston with a disturbing premonition. Not only had Doris permitted no contact with the hand—she’d barely looked at it! Had Otto junior stolen all her affection and attention?

Wallingford had a bad week or more in Boston, pondering the signals Mrs. Clausen might be sending him. She’d said something about how, when little Otto was older, he might like seeing and holding his father’s hand from time to time. What did she mean by “older”—how much older? What had she meant, “from time to time”? Was Doris trying to tell Patrick that she intended to see him less ? Her recent coldness to the hand caused Wallingford his worst insomnia since the pain immediately following his surgery. Something was wrong. Now when Wallingford dreamed of the lake, he felt cold—a wet-bathing-suit-afterthe-sun-has-gone-down kind of cold. While this had been one of several sensations he’d experienced in the Indian painkiller dream, in this new version his wet bathing suit never led to sex. It led nowhere. All Patrick felt was cold, a kind of upnorth cold. Then, not long after his Green Bay visit, he woke up unusually early one morning with a fever—he thought it was the flu. He had a good look at his left hand in the bathroom mirror. (He’d been training the hand to brush his teeth; it was an excellent exercise, his physical therapist had told him.) The hand was green. The new color began about two inches above his wrist and darkened at his fingertips and the tip of his thumb. It was the mossy-green color of a well-shaded lake under a cloudy sky. It was the color of firs from a distance, or in the mist; it was the blackening dark green of pine trees reflected in water. Wallingford’s temperature was 104.

He thought of calling Mrs. Clausen before he called Dr. Zajac, but there was an hour’s time difference between Boston and Green Bay and he didn’t want to wake up the new mother or her baby. When he phoned Zajac, the doctor said he’d meet him at the hospital—adding, “I told you skin was a bugger.”

“But it’s been a year !” Wallingford cried. “I can tie my shoes! I can drive! I can almost pick up a quarter. I’ve come close to picking up a dime !”

“You’re in uncharted water,” Zajac replied. The doctor and Irma had seen a video with that lamentable title, Uncharted Water, the night before. “All we know is, you’re still in the fifty-percent- probability range.”

“Fifty percent probability of what ?” Patrick asked.

“Of rejection or acceptance, pal,” Zajac said. “Pal” was Irma’s new name for Medea.

They had to remove the hand before Mrs. Clausen could get to Boston, bringing her baby and her mother with her. There would be no last looks, Dr. Zajac had to tell Mrs. Clausen—the hand was too ugly.

Wallingford was resting fairly comfortably when Doris came to his bedside in the hospital. He was in some pain, but there was nothing comparable to what he’d felt after the attachment. Nor was Wallingford mourning the loss of his hand, again—it was losing Mrs. Clausen that he feared.

“But you can still come see me, and little Otto,” Doris assured him. “We’d enjoy a visit, from time to time. You tried to give Otto’s hand a life!” she cried. “You did your best. I’m proud of you, Patrick.”

This time, she paid no attention to the whopping bandage, which was so big that it looked as if there might still be a hand under it. While it pleased Wallingford that Mrs. Clausen took his right hand and held it to her heart, albeit briefly, he was suffering from the near-certain foreknowledge that she might not clutch this remaining hand to her bosom ever again.

“I’m proud of you… of what you’ve done,” Wallingford told her; he began to cry.

“With your help,” she whispered, blushing. She let his hand go.

“I love you, Doris,” Patrick said.

“But you can’t,” she replied, not unkindly. “You just can’t.”