was facing his direction; the stranger must have her back to the door. It would be safe to look, he thought, unless Mimi saw him and the woman noticed. But if she did-if she turned-maybe Mimi could hit her or something. No, it was too dangerous. And then suddenly nothing was as dangerous as what the woman was saying.
“Do what?”
“It. You. Shoot you.”
Jay hurled himself into the room just as the trapdoor flew open, and Cramer exploded up out of the hole like a jack-in-the-box. The woman crashed to the floor. Her hand flew out as she fell and hit Mimi’s hand, sending her mace canister flying.
“Run!” shouted Cramer.
“Mimi!” shouted Jay.
And then everything was happening too fast.
Jay dragged Mimi out of the room and there was a gunshot and Cramer howled with pain and the woman screamed.
“He’s hit!” cried Mimi, and Jay clamped her hard around the waist to stop her from going back in there.
Then the gun went off again, and Mimi didn’t need any urging to leave. They skittered through the kitchen and out the door into the shed.
“I called 911 fifteen minutes ago,” he yelled into her ear. “The cops are on their way.”
“He’s hit!” yelled Mimi. “She killed him.”
“They’re sending an ambulance, too. Come on. There’s nothing we can do!”
She was sobbing. She turned to him, looking lost and small, and he threw his arm around her, glancing over her shoulder, nervously, at the kitchen door, expecting to see the madwoman any minute. “Come,” he said. “Quick.”
They ran, hand in hand, down through the sopping grass toward the snye and were halfway there when they heard the third shot. They were far enough away now to stop and look back through the drifting veils of rain at the little house. And then they heard the sirens.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The gunshots of that night would stay with Mimi for a long time. It was as if the bullets had exploded inside her head and her bloodstream had carried the fragments to every cell in her body. She imagined minuscule shards of metal lodged in the mitochondria, or whatever subcellular organism it was that stored foreign bodies. So deep was the sense of those gunshots, Mimi wondered were she ever to have children whether the shots would be part of their memories, too.
The first bullet had ricocheted off the open trapdoor and smashed downward through Cramer’s cheek, fracturing his upper jaw and jawbone and lodging in the anterior skull base. In an emergency craniotomy, his contused brain was cleared of damaged flesh and metal splinters, the fractured bone plugged with bone wax and mashed muscle taken from the fascia lata of Cramer’s thigh. There were tubes to help him breathe and to keep down the orofacial swelling. There were cerebral decongestants being dripped into his head and antibiotics to fend off meningitis. There were anticonvulsants.
There were so many things that still might happen. Time would tell if there had been traumatic brain injury.
Mavis Lee was dead. That was the third shot. And Mimi found herself trying to imagine the madwoman’s last few minutes. What happened between shooting her son and shooting herself? Did she look down into the hole where Cramer lay, half his face shattered, and realize who he was? Because Mimi was pretty sure it wasn’t Cramer that Mavis thought she was firing at. “You,” she said. “You!” There was so much in those words. Surprise mixed with some kind of weird delight in the first “you” and then utter, soul-wrenching fury in the second. Did she think it was Marc? Was it Marc’s blue eyes she saw peering up at her from that face emerging as if from the grave? Is that who she intended to kill? And when she was alone, did she come to her senses long enough to realize that she had it all wrong?
The police dug the second bullet out of the wall above the desk in the front room. It was lodged in the plaster not a foot from where Mavis’s initials and phone number were framed in pencil-crayon splendor. The irony was incidental and unintended. Mavis had been shooting at someone in the doorway-two someones-who were there one moment but gone by the time the gun went off. Jay had saved Mimi’s life. And Cramer had saved her life, too, and might still lose his own.
He had been airlifted from Ladybank to the city, where he underwent a series of operations. Even when they moved him from intensive care, his head wrapped up like a mummy and with only his left eye and ear exposed, he was still unconscious. His one visible eye was closed, but Mimi watched it twitch, imagining he was trying to say something and trying to decipher this inarticulate language. She spoke to him, to his one open ear, imagining he could hear her-needing for him to hear her.
“We found the bag you left,” she said softly, “with the picture in it and the stone.” His eye twitched and she looked, hopefully, at Jay, who was sitting silently on a chair on the other side of the bed. He didn’t believe the twitches were communication at all, but he was being indulgent about it. “Thank you, Cramer,” she said. “It means a lot to us that you returned the things you took.”
Mimi came often to the hospital. She had found a brother and then a second brother. It was the summer of discovering brothers, and she was going to do everything in her power not to lose either of them. All she could do right now, however, was be there, bear witness. At first, even the thought of Cramer’s broken face made her feel sick. But she found herself drawn into his medical care, wanting to know about it in every detail. It became less gory the more she learned. The injury, the materials and methods required to reconstruct his face: she found that her repulsion eased as her interest grew. She asked questions-too many questions, Jay thought. She demanded to know how words were spelled so she could ask Dr. Lou what they meant or Google them herself. So “proptosis” was the displacement of the eyeball, and “pneumocephalus” was the presence of air in the brain cavity, and “hematoma” was the mass of clotted blood that formed in the tissues and body space as a result of broken blood vessels, and “debridement” meant the surgical removal of lacerated and contaminated tissue. She wrote these things down and wrestled them into the form of a report. In her clinical account of Cramer’s suffering, she felt as if she was writing something that mattered. She had played at writing that summer. Writing fanciful scenes loosely based on her life. But this-this was hard and important. It was training, she thought, good training, she wasn’t sure for what.
What she did know was that she was writing it for a very particular audience. She had told her father next to nothing so far about the extraordinary events of that summer. So she was going to write an account of meeting Jackson and Cramer and of what had happened in the end. The account, especially the last bit, would be in painful detail. Excruciating detail. Through the police, she was able to get a copy of the autopsy report of Mavis Lee. She was part of the story. Mimi would lay all this at her father’s feet. She wanted him to know in a very itemized way what he had done when he promised Mavis Lee that he would marry her, what happened when you walk out on people.
“Isn’t that a bit simplistic?” Jay asked. She nodded. She knew it was. “I mean, that’s what Marc’s going to say.”
“I know,” said Mimi. “He can say what he wants, he can deny what he wants, but he’s going to hear about this.”
“Do you think it will make any difference?”
She shook her head. “I doubt it.”
“Maybe he never made such a promise to Mavis,” said Dr. Lou. “This poor woman was clearly unstable. Maybe she built it up in her mind.”
Mimi thought about that seriously, but it didn’t change her mind. She had known Mavis Lee for something like half an hour-the longest half hour of her whole life-and she was clearly nuts. But as far as Mimi could tell, Marc had pledged something to that woman when he got her pregnant, whatever he might think, whatever he might say to the contrary.
“How do we know Cramer is really Marc’s son?” said Jo.
