“It’s healing. It’s better. There’s still so much swelling, I can’t tell how it’s really going to look.”
For a long moment after she turns to look in the glass, she is motionless. Her hands are slack in her lap. If she feels any impulse to touch the wound, she resists it.
He applies antibiotic ointment with the tip of a finger, as lightly as possible, and she manages to hold steady. Her right eye focuses on him and she rests the right side of her face against him.
“Gotta shave my head,” she announces.
“You can’t see out your left eye. You’ll take an ear off.”
“I’m a mess,” she says with a shrug, “what difference could it make? Help me do it.”
“If you’re such a mess then you don’t need to shave your head,” he argues, but her mouth is already set.
First she wraps her head in a hot wet towel. When he squirts the shaving foam into his hands and lathers it over the moist warm furriness of her head, it triggers an unexpected nostalgia. He finds himself telling her about the toothpaste and shaving cream wars of his childhood. She hoots at the image of Reuben with toothpaste in his hair and Sam riding his back trying to smear it into his father’s mouth. He has to reprimand her to stop giggling and stay still so he doesn’t cut her.
Drawing his razor through white foam over the curve of her skull becomes another intimacy, the stroke of the razor another variety of caress. The scalp exposed before the straightedge is palely nude. A clean, fragile sculptural shape, the curve of bone, suture lines of the segments and beneath the opalescent skin, the pale iris veins—her head rests against his diaphragm as he shaves it, reminding him of other moments he has held it. At the hairline of her left temple, and also below her left ear, he exposes the dark invasion of scallops of bruise. It must hurt her but she does no more than close her eyes briefly. By the time he wipes the last curds of foam from her head, he is sweating heavily.
He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Unshaven, dogtags and chains around his neck, in ragged sweats, he has a piratical air. Buccaneer Sam: yo ho ho. Hastily he lathers his face and scrapes it clean. Almost. The hard-used blade bites him several times. He blots his face with a warm washrag, uses the styptic pencil and makes a mental note to score some new blades after school.
Morning gym is intense and focused, all business. Everyone, he notes with a tinge of bitterness, seems to have forgotten that Deanie Gauthier ever existed. It’s as if she died in some awkward way—suicide or maybe taken out by the cops while sniping station wagons from an interstate overpass. Without her, though, the girls are a lesser team—still basically sound on their fundamentals, a good depth of talent, but lacking the explosive drive she fuels when she is on the floor. She’s a playmaker, an igniter. One of these days, they’re going to regret her absence.
Through the day, Sam has opportunities to spend quality time with Pete Fosse, and then Fosse and Chapin simultaneously lifting weights. He deliberately seeks eye contact with each, trying to read their expressions, their body language, some signal as to which one of them left him the blotter square. But each shows him only a familiar blankness, intense with effort at their reps, in which there is no visible grudge, no anger, nor the slightest hint of triumph. Neither of them speaks to him but then they hardly ever do anyway.
It isn’t until ‘god comes looming in, looking concerned, that the Mutant realizes she has been waiting for him—wishing for him—to get home. The tightening knot under her wishbone dissolves and somehow the letting go causes a sudden leakage in her tear ducts that she blots hastily under the guise of untangling herself from the quilts.
He brings her into the kitchen, where their presence congests the normal routine. As ‘god sets the table and his stepmother bustles, they bump into each other. They turn a few laughing dance steps to recover. Stepmom relates amusing tales of her day at the diner, ‘god’s old man arrives, picks up the baby and sits down at the table, next to her. Up close, it’s even more striking how much father and son resemble each other. It’s as if ‘god had no mother at all. From gesture to walk to the sound of their voices, they are eerily alike, only their years dividing one man from the other.
The older man’s eyes follow Stepmom with an intensity that makes the Mutant want to giggle; it is the first time she has seen someone literally unable to take his eyes off someone else. And Stepmom knows it—she looks at her husband like a cat over its shoulder, oiling its slinky way under someone’s palm.
The kitchen conversation goes back and forth and ‘god interprets for the Mutant—but it stops with her. It hurts to talk, of course, and she finds herself shying. They are strangers to her and their very warmth and openness are disconcerting. She isn’t sure how she is supposed to respond. In fact, she is terrified of offending them. In the shape she’s in, where else can she go? Who else will take her in? It is all she can do not to bolt for the safety of the sunporch. She shrinks into Sam’s shadow.
“Maybe snow tonight, tomorrow morning,” his father says. “How does a snow day sound to you, Sammy?”
“Like a trip to Hawaii.” ‘god grins.
The Mutant breathes in the reassuring
