The lips—shiny with petroleum jelly—pull back to show the black holes of missing teeth.
With the curtain open, there's the smell of it all, the alcohol swabs, the urine, the bedsores and sweet skin cream. The smell of warm plastic. The hot smell of bleach and the powdery smell of latex gloves.
The diary of you.
The respirator's ribbed blue plastic tube hooks into a hole halfway down the throat. Strips of white surgical tape hold the eyes shut. The head is shaved for the brain pressure monitor, but black scruffy hair bristles on the ribs and in the hammock of loose skin between the hipbones.
The same as Tabbi's black hair.
Your black hair.
Holding the curtain back, Misty says, “As you can see, my husband doesn't get out much.”
Everything you do shows your hand.
Detective Stilton swallows, hard. The levator labii superioris pulls his top lip up to his nostrils, and his face goes down into his notebook. His pen gets busy writing.
In the little cabinet next to the bed, Misty finds the alcohol swabs and rips the plastic cover off one. Coma patients are graded according to what's called the Glasgow Coma Scale, she tells the detective. The scale runs from fully awake to unconscious and unresponsive. You give the patient verbal commands and see if he can respond by moving. Or by speaking. Or by blinking his eyes.
Detective Stilton says, “What can you tell me about Peter's father?”
“Well,” Misty says, “he's a drinking fountain.”
The detective gives her a look. Both eyebrows squeezed together. The corrugator muscles doing their job.
Grace Wilmot dropped a wad of money on a fancy brass drinking fountain in Harrow's memory. It's on Alder Street where it meets Division Avenue, near the hotel, Misty tells him. Harrow's ashes, she scattered them in a ceremony out on Waytansea Point.
Detective Stilton is scribbling all this in his notebook.
With the alcohol swab, Misty wipes the skin clean around Peter's nipple.
Misty lifts the earphones off his head and takes the face in both her hands, settling it in the pillow so he looks up at the ceiling. Misty unhooks the yellow pinwheel brooch from her coat.
The lowest score you can get on the Glasgow Coma Scale is a three. This means you never move, you never speak, you never blink. No matter what people say or do to you. You don't react.
The brooch opens into a steel pin as long as her little finger, and Misty polishes the pin with the alcohol swab.
Detective Stilton's pen stops, still on the page of his notebook, and he says, “Does your daughter ever visit?”
And Misty shakes her head.
“Does his mother?”
And Misty says, “My daughter spends most of her time with her grandmother.” Misty looks at the pin, polished silver and clean. “They go to tag sales,” Misty says. “My mother-in-law works for a service that finds pieces of china for people in discontinued patterns.”
Misty peels the tape off Peter's eyes.
Off your eyes.
Misty holds his eyes open with her thumbs and leans close to his face, shouting, “Peter!”
Misty shouts, “How did your father really die?”
Her spit dotting his eyes, his pupils two different sizes, Misty shouts, “Are you part of some neo-Nazi ecoterrorist gang?”
Turning to look at Detective Stilton, Misty shouts, “Are you sneaking out every night to burn down houses?”
Misty shouts, “Are you an oaf?”
The Ocean Alliance for Freedom.
Stilton folds his arms and drops his chin to his chest, watching her out of the tops of his eyes. The orbicularis oris muscles around his lips clamp his mouth into a thin straight line. The frontalis muscle lifts his eyebrows so his forehead folds into three wrinkles from temple to temple. Wrinkles that weren't there before now.
With one hand, Misty pinches Peter's nipple and pulls it up, stretching it out to a long point.
With the other hand, Misty drives the pin through. Then she pulls the pin out.
The heart monitor blips every moment, not one beat more fast or slow.
Misty says, “Peter darling? Can you feel this?” And again Misty drives the pin through.
So you can feel fresh pain every time. The Stanislavski Method.
Just so you know, there's so much scar tissue this is tough as pushing a pin through a tractor tire. The nipple skin stretches forever before the pin pops out the other side.
Misty shouts, “Why did you kill yourself?”
Peter's pupils stare up at the ceiling, one wide open and the other a pinhole.
Then two arms come around her from behind. Detective Stilton. They pull her away. Her shouting, “Why the fuck did you bring me here?”
Stilton pulls her away until the pin Misty's holding pulls out, little by little, until it pulls free. Her shouting, “Why the fuck did you get me pregnant?”
July 28—
The New Moon
MISTY'S FIRST BATCH of birth control pills, Peter monkeyed with. He replaced them with little cinnamon candies. The next batch he just flushed down the toilet.
You flushed down the toilet. By accident, you said.
After that, student health services wouldn't refill her prescription for another thirty days. They got her fitted for a diaphragm, and a week later Misty found a little hole poked through the center of it. She held it up to the window to show Peter, and he said, “Those things don't last forever.”
Misty said she just got it.
“They wear out,” he said.
Misty said his penis wasn't so big it hit her cervix and punched a hole in her diaphragm.
Your penis isn't that big.
After that, Misty kept running out of spermicidal foam. This was costing her a fortune. Each can, Misty used maybe one time and then she'd find it empty. After a few cans, Misty came out of the
