penciled eyebrows.

I shrug. I get out to liberate my love cargo.

Even with the trunk open, Manus doesn’t move. His knees are against his elbows, his hands clasped in his face, his feet tucked back under his butt; Manus could be a fetus in army fatigues. All around him, I hadn’t noticed. I’ve been under a lot of stress tonight, so forgive me if I didn’t notice back at Evie’s house, but all around Manus flash pieces of silverware. Pirate treasure in the trunk of his Fiat, and other things.

Relics.

A long white candle, there’s a candle.

Brandy slams out of her seat and comes to look, too.

“Oh, my shit,” Brandy says and rolls her eyes. “Oh, my shit.

There’s an ashtray, no, it’s a plaster cast of a little hand, right next to Manus’s unconscious butt. It’s the kind of cast you make in grade school when you press your hand into a pie tin of wet plaster for a Mother’s Day gift.

Brandy brushes a little hair off Manus’s forehead. “He’s really, really cute,” she says, “but I think this one’s going to be brain-damaged.”

It’s way too much trouble to explain tonight to Brandy in writing, but Manus getting brain-damaged would be redundant.

Too bad it’s just the Valiums.

Brandy takes off her Ray-Bans for a better look. She takes off her Hermes scarf and shakes her hair out full, looking good, biting her lips, wetting her lips with her tongue just in case Manus wakes up. “With cute guys,” Brandy says, “it’s usually better to give them barbiturates.”

Guess I’ll remember that.

I haul Manus up until he’s sitting in the trunk with his legs hanging out over the bumper. Manus’s eyes, power blue, flicker, blink, flicker, squint.

Brandy leans in to give him a good look. My brother out to steal my fiance. At this point, I just want everybody dead.

“Wake up, honey,” Brandy says with a hand cupped under Manus’s chin.

And Manus squints. “Mommy?”

“Wake up, honey,” Brandy says. “It’s okay.”

“Now?” Manus says.

“It’s okay.”

There’s a little rushing sound, the sound of rain on the roof of a tent or a closed convertible.

“Oh, God.” Brandy steps back. “Oh, sweet Christ!”

Manus blinks and peers at Brandy, then at his lap. One leg of his army fatigues goes darker, darker, darker to the knee.

“Cute,” Brandy says, “but he’s just peed his pants.”

Jump back to plastic surgery. Jump to the happy day you’re healed. You’ve had this long strip of skin hanging off your neck for a couple months, only it’s not just one strip. There are probably more like a half dozen pedicles because you might as well do a lot at once so the plastic surgeon has more tissue to work with.

For reconstruction, you’ll have these long dangling strips of skin hanging off the bottom of your face for about two months.

They say that what people notice first about you is your eyes. You’ll give up that hope. You look like some meat by-product ground up and pooped out by the Num Num Snack Factory.

A mummy coming apart in the rain.

A broken pinata.

These strips of warm skin flapping around your neck are good, blood-fed, living tissue. The surgeon lifts each strip and attaches the healed end to your face. This way, the bulk of the tissue is transferred, grafted to your face without ever stopping its blood supply. They pull all this loose skin up and bunch it into the rough shape of a jaw. Your neck is the scars of where the skin used to lay. Your jaw is this mass of grafted tissue the surgeons hope will grow together and stay in place.

For another month, you and the surgeons hope. Another month, you hide in the hospital and wait.

Jump to Manus sitting in his piss and silver in the trunk of his red sports car. Potty-training flashback. It happens.

Me, I’m crouched in front of him, looking for the bulge of his wallet.

Manus just stares at Brandy. Probably thinking Brandy’s me, the old me with a face.

Brandy’s lost interest. “He doesn’t remember. He thinks I’m his mother,” Brandy says. “Sister, maybe, but mother?”

So deja vu. Try brother.

We need a place to stay, and Manus must have a new place. Not the old place he and I shared. He lets us hide at his place, or I tell the cops he kidnapped me and burned down Evie’s house. Manus won’t know about Mr. Baxter and the Rhea sisters seeing me with a gun all over town.

With my finger, I write in the dirt:

we need to find his wallet.

“His pants,” Brandy says, “are wet.”

Now Manus peers at me, sits up, and scrapes his head on the open trunk lid. Man, oh, man, you know this hurts, still it isn’t anything tragic until Brandy Alexander chimes in with her overreaction. “Oh, you poor thing,” she says.

Then Manus boo-hoos. Manus Kelley, the last person who has any right to, is crying.

I hate this.

Jump to the day the skin grafts take, and even then the tissue will need some support. Even if the grafts heal to where they look like a crude, lumpy jaw, you’ll still need a jawbone. Without a mandible, the soft mass of tissue, living and viable as it is, might just reabsorb.

That’s the word the plastic surgeons used.

Reabsorb.

Into my face, as if I’m just a sponge made of skin.

Jump to Manus crying and Brandy bent over him, cooing and petting his sexy hair.

In the trunk, there’s a pair of bronze baby shoes, a silver chafing dish, a turkey picture made of macaroni glued to construction paper.

“You know”—Manus sniffs and wipes the back of his hand under his nose—“I’m high right now, so it’s okay if I tell you this.” Manus looks at Brandy bent over him and me crouched in the dirt. “First,” Manus says, “your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”

To make you a jawbone, the surgeons will break off parts of your shinbones, complete with the attached artery. First they expose the bone and sculpt it right there on your leg.

Another way is the surgeons will break several other bones, probably long bones in your legs and arms. Inside these bones is the soft cancellous bone pulp.

That was the surgeons’ word and the word from the books.

Cancellous.

“My mom,” Manus says, “and her new husband—my mom gets married a lot—they just bought this resort condo in Bowling River in Florida. People younger than sixty can’t buy property there. That’s a law they have.”

I’m looking at Brandy, who’s still the overreactive mother, kneeling down, brushing the hair off Manus’s forehead. I’m looking over the cliff edge next to us. Those little blue lights in all the houses, that’s people watching television. Tiffany’s light blue. Valium blue. People in captivity.

First my best friend and now my brother is trying to steal my fiance.

“I went to visit them at Christmas, last year,” Manus says. “My mom, their condo is right on the eighth green, and they love it. It’s like the whole age standard in Bowling River is fucked. My mom and stepdad are just turned sixty, so they’re just youngsters. Me, all these oldsters are scoping me out like an odds-on car burglary.”

Brandy licks her lips.

“According to the Bowling River age standard,” Manus says, “I haven’t been born yet.”

You have to break out large enough slivers of this soft, bloody bone pulp. The cancellous stuff. Then you have to insert these shards and slivers of bone into the soft mass of tissue you’ve grafted onto your face.

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