“You gonna go back to therapy?” I ask. It’s a risky question, but it just popped into my head, and I’m too tired to care.
To my surprise, Susannah hmms again.
“Is that a maybe?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe. Yes.”
Wilson whimpers in his sleep.
“I gotta go to bed,” I say again, without moving.
Susannah says, “Do you ever think about that night?”
I hold in my words along with my breath. There is only one night she could be talking about. I try not to think about the shoe on the walkway, or Susannah’s bedroom light, the one she turned on, a beacon in the dark to the growling car. “No,” I manage.
“I do,” she says. “All the time.” And then she says nothing else as I sit there in the dark next to her. From the street, a passing car’s headlights sweep across the window, glinting off the beer bottles on the coffee table, and then they slide away, leaving both of us stranded in the shadows.
CHAPTER TWO
The night my parents died I was taken to the hospital, where, at some point, bathed in a twilight haze of painkillers, I realized that a man wearing a flat tweed cap was sitting in a chair across from me, reading a newspaper. He glanced up as if he knew I was awake, and his eyes were black as tar. “You look like you’re trying to give me a Nazi salute,” he said.
Slowly, I turned my head to look at my right arm, frozen in a full cast up to my armpit and raised up on a stack of pillows. “Sieg Heil,” I murmured. My lips were dry, and my tongue pushed out between them, fat and rubbery, unable to wet them enough.
The man put his newspaper aside, stood up, and walked over to me. The first thing I noticed was that he was short. The second was that he held a blue plastic cup in his hand. He shook the cup and it rattled. “Here,” he said. “They said you could have this.” He held the cup to my mouth, and I managed to open my lips. A few crushed pieces of ice slipped into my mouth.
“Not too many,” he said. His voice was odd, a thin southern accent overlaying something hard in the vowels.
I sucked on the pieces of ice as if they were peppermints. “Where are my parents?” I managed. “My sister?”
“The doctor’s coming,” he said. “You hold on.”
“You’re from Ireland,” I said. That was what I’d heard in his voice. The dohkter’s comin’. It was a version of my mother’s accent. A memory surfaced: I was in a hospital room with Mom and Dad, meeting Susannah just after she was born, and a man appeared in the doorway, holding a wrapped present. Dad wouldn’t let him in. He was shorter than Dad and wore a flat cap and coat—Susannah was born in February—and he looked at me over Dad’s shoulder with a pair of deep, dark eyes. The same eyes that were looking at me now.
“Are you my uncle?” I asked him.
He nodded, once, then turned his head to the door. “Need a doctor in here,” he said, not shouting but something close to a bark.
“That’s the first thing … you say to me?” I asked. He turned back to me, and I continued, “I look like a Nazi?” It was stupid—hysterical, even. Heil Hitler. I started to chuckle, and even though I could see the alarm in his face and felt tears on my cheeks, I didn’t want to stop laughing, because if I did I’d have to acknowledge that this was my uncle Gavin, my mother’s brother, and if he was here that could mean only one thing. But then a nurse swept in and leaned over me—broad face, professional concern in her gaze, her voice kind and soothing—and everything was sucked down a gray whirlpool that went black.
When I next woke up, sunlight streamed through the thin curtains shrouding the single window. Uncle Gavin was sitting in the same chair, leafing through a magazine. He’d taken his cap off, and his hair was a tangle of black with a touch of gray at the temples. I managed to clear my throat, and he looked up. No gray in those eyes—just deep, deep black. “Ethan,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Never better,” I croaked.
He glanced at my arm in its cast. “The doctor says you’ll be in the cast for a few weeks,” he said. “Then rehab. But there shouldn’t be any permanent damage.”
I took a breath, released it. “I was shot,” I said.
He gave me a careful look of appraisal. “It was clean,” he said. “The wound. Bullet went right through. Broke the bone in your upper arm, two inches below your shoulder. You’ll have some nice scars to show off.”
“I got shot in my humerus?” I said. “Hilarious.” I took another breath, aware of a distant pain in my upper arm if I breathed too deeply. “Susannah?”
His face closed up, though his eyes were the same liquid black they had been. “Hanging in there,” he said. “Touch and go for a while, but the doctor says she’ll make it.”
“My parents are dead, aren’t they,” I said.
Another appraising look, as if he were calculating how much grief I could manage. “Yes,” he said.
I closed my eyes and nodded, then leaned my head back against my pillow. Once, I’d helped my mother make spaghetti squash, scraping the steamed squash out of the gourd with a fork. I felt like that squash, scraped and set aside on the counter.
“There … was a girl,” I said. “She lost her shoe.” There was more, I knew, just around the slippery corner of my memory, but the shoe was the important point. That and the fact that my parents’ deaths were my fault.
Mine and Susannah’s, a voice said in the back
