The New Black (20 page)

H
er skin parts like wet silk under a razor, and even with a gaping hole in her face, she's quite beautiful. Marcel blots sweat from his forehead with the bandana cinched around his wrist. The scent of iodine and Pine Sol hangs so heavily in his basement, it's almost visible. At least it covers the mildew tang usually present.

“Knife,” he grunts, stained palm extended.

“Filet or paring?”

He chews on the inside of his cheek, debating, then looks up at me. “What do you think?”

Adjusting the clamp light above the table, I lean over the girl, probe her opened cheek with a modified barbecue fork. After a minute, I shrug and suggest the paring knife, and say, “But you're the doctor.” He mutters something in French that doesn't sound complimentary. Another brief contemplation, he snatches the paring knife and goes to work.

She came to us because her smile was uneven and it made her self-conscious. How this girl could despise her appearance is beyond my pay scale, but that's why I assist a surgeon, not a psychologist. Her name is probably just as beautiful as her lips, something that could turn your knees to water as you shout it across the bus terminal, begging her not to leave. Megan, our pseudo-secretary, keeps the clients anonymous, though. Sometimes things happen in home-surgery, and it's easier to be objective when the body doesn't have a name, an address, a way they take their coffee. Everything's easier when history is malleable.

Marcel nudges my arm. Isopropyl alcohol slops over the side of the cup in my hand.

“Eight inches of fishing line. Please.” His tone says that he's asked this more than once and I was miles away.

I help him close the girl's face, holding the knot with a finger while he ties the line. It makes me glad that Mom bought me Velcro shoes as a kid, but I can't fall down that wormhole right now. For having fingers as thick as hotdogs, he's surprisingly nimble. He once told me he was a boxer, back where he came up, but I've never known if that was an inside joke.

Marcel snips the line and takes an appraising look, pursing his lips. He looks at me and raises an eyebrow. I nod.

“Wake her,” he says, then carries the mixing bowl of cutlery and flatware to the laundry sink in the corner.

Her eyelashes are delicate spiderlegs. Pallid eyelids flutter as she dreams of ethereal places. I brush the back of my hand across her good cheek, warm with blood. Curls of hair pool behind the soft slope of her skull like a puddle of coffee. Lips twitching as if they're hoping for a kiss and I startle when Marcel coughs. He's bent over the sink, scrubbing at a pair of tongs.

I fidget with my hands—as if nothing unusual had happened—then move towards her feet, and, until I glance down and see her arm, she's the most beautiful creature to lie on our table. Just below the crook of her elbow sit three purple dots that could be mistaken for ticks, and if dots like these didn't turn my blood to acid, I could say they were innocuous bug bites, not trackmarks.

Two jabs on the bottom of the feet wake her, though if it was an ice-pick instead of a needle, she'd be a bloody mess. She jerks to the side, blinking away the haze. I wait for the disorientation to pass before giving rudimentary healing instructions and sending her to Megan in the other part of the partitioned basement.

“Pretty girl,” Marcel says, head down into the sink.

“Mmhm.” I double-check the nitrous valve and make sure it's closed. A few months ago, I didn't twist it far enough. Marcel thought it was funny at the time, for obvious reasons, but proceeded to berate me for an hour once the drugs wore off. Clowns bounce around the tank in various joyful positions. It's a wonder people will still lay under our knife after we offer them Krusty-brand anesthetic. Then again, we're not exactly your normal HMO.

“Do you have time to get dinner tonight?”

The big hand relentlessly follows the little hand around the face of my watch. Mom will need to eat within the hour.

“Can I get a rain check?”

He's already nodding before I answer.

“Leave the clean-up for me. You'll miss your bus.”

X

Rain collects in buckets and pots and pickle jars scattered across the floor of our house. The anonymous cheering on her gameshow trickles from upstairs. I light scented candles to cover the smell of damp smoke, then balance a glass of milk, a mug of tea, and a bowl of soup on the orange plastic tray.

“Mom,” I shout. “Did Daniel drop off any bread today?”'

The crowd roars at something inanely thrilling.

“Mom?”

Someone wagered too much or bought the wrong vowel and now the crowd is disappointed. I pile a few crackers on the cracked plastic and tentatively shuffle up the steps. The rain falls with a rhythmic plink. Hung in the stairwell are prints of flower paintings, gilded frames around the edges. I remember, when I was younger, Mom would get mad because I'd leave smudges all over the glass. The colors were so vibrant, I had to touch the prints to check if they were real. Now, soaked in water and old smoke, they all look dead.

Her wheelchair is facing the wall when I walk in. ‘Jesus, Ma,' I mutter.

“Henry, darling.” She raises her hand, feeling for my face. “I didn't hear you come in.”

Jagged lines of soot stagger along the walls like a cursed mountain range. I nudge her hand with my chin. “That's because the whole neighborhood is listening to
Wheel of Fortune
with you.”

“It's
Press Your Luck
.”

“Whatever.” I press my foot against her wheel and turn her towards me.

Her hand flutters like an epileptic moth in the dim light. “Henry, let your mother say hello to you.”

“My hands are full. Just give me a minute.” I drag a table over with my foot and set her tray down. Rain drips from the roof, cloudy with insulation and ash, and lands on a towel at the foot of the bed. I toss it onto the pile in the corner and place Mom's hands on my cheeks.

“There's my boy,” she sighs. Her smile is almost as cockeyed as her pupils, as if they're joined by some of Marcel's fishing line. ‘How was your day, darling?'

“Fine, Mom.” I wedge the edges of the tray between the armrests of her chair and wrap her fingers around the spoon, guide it to the bowl. “Eat your soup before it's cold.”

The crowd roars again, and I press mute instead of throwing the TV out the cracked window. A blonde who really wants the trip they're offering beats her hands together and looks strikingly like a seal. Through the thin walls, I can hear the junkie next door playing violin. It's more seizure than concerto, but at least he's learned the concept of rhythm in the past year.

I wipe beads of broth from Mom's chin and light a cigarette. Smoke twists from the burning end and dissipates in the grey air. She pauses, spoon halfway to her mouth.

“I thought you switched from menthol.”

I drop the cigarette in a soda can and thumb one from her pack. “I did.”

She just smiles.

I watch game show contestants beat their hands together, silently laughing and throwing their arms up in awe. The house smells of dampness, of a dog in the river or unwashed clothing. When the wind blows, I swear to Christ it gets ten degrees colder in here. I close my eyes and visualize smoke filling my lungs, concentrate on the wet air dissolving me. The metal spoon clatters on cracked porcelain. She gives a contented sigh and extends her hand.

“You almost ready for bed?” I light a cigarette and set it in her mouth.

“Thank you, but I was reaching for your hand.” She gropes my elbow, working her way down to my wrist. Squeezing my palm, head cocked and pupils floating like drowned flies in a pool of yellowed milk, she says, “Talk to me.”

“I am talking to you.”

“Real talk.” She jerks her shoulders, trying to move her chair closer.

I light another cigarette. She slowly shakes her head. A bus passes our house, the wet whoosh making our walls shiver. Rain falls in steady droplets from the ceiling, plinks matching my heartbeat.

“I'm fine, Mom. Let's get you into bed.”

I push her to her room, lay out her pajamas, and after she calls out that she's decent, lift her into bed. I kiss her goodnight, and her forehead is cold as a forgotten hallway. She holds my wrist and I turn to leave.

“If you won't talk, please sing to me.”

“Mom,” I look at my watch, as if I have someplace to be, as if she could even see it.

“Please, Henry.” She squeezes my hand again. I sigh and give in. Even through my pants, I can feel that the chair is wet when I sit.

“What song? Not Johnny Cash, we always do Johnny Cash.”

She nestles her head into the pillow and a smile trickles across her face. “Hank Williams.”

“Why do you keep asking?”

“Because your father loved it.”

“Exactly.” I push the chair back to leave.

“Henry.” Her chin trembles despite itself, as she tries to mouth please. “For me?”

“I'll sing you something, but it won't be Hank.”

She purses her lips and, eventually, nods.

I hum the opening verse of a Roy Orbison tune she used to play a lot, making up a few of the words I can't remember, and drag the covers up to her chin, pressing them around her body. Sitting on the night table is a framed picture of her with cat's-eye glasses and a pencil skirt, shaking the hand of a man in a suit that looks so expensive, I can practically smell the wool through the photo. She was young, really young. Her first real job, I think, as an assistant at Bethlehem Steel, a few months before the plant shut down. The certificate that the man is handing her used to hang on the wall in what used to be her office, before my father commandeered it and blacked out the windows with tinfoil and duct tape
.

Halfway through the bridge and her breaths are slower, longer. I ebb from singing to humming and creep away from her bed, minding the few spots that creak.

For a blind woman, she can be incredibly crafty, and before I turn off the light, I lay facedown a sheep stuffed animal my father won for her at the State Fair, back when they were dating. It holds a sign in its mouth with I Love Ewe scrawled in what I suppose is sheep-script. Every night I turn it down, and every morning, it's upright again. I tried to tell myself that it was only ghosts, that poltergeists were toying with me, trying to make me insane. Truth is, it's far worse than that.

It's love.

X

The unconscious boy sprawled facedown across the table poked a hole in the vacuum of my chest the minute I saw him. His arms could've passed for a January sky finger-painted by a four year-old. The cloud of bruises started around his bicep, drifting down a fading sun the color of pus. His back was less artistic; the shapes of belt buckles competed with spoons–probably wooden, if they left marks like that–and all a similar shade of scarred brown. I paced in the alley, chain-smoking four cigarettes before I could get my head together to operate.

Marcel goes to work on the back of the kid's neck. I ask him what the procedure is and he flaps his arms like a mad duck, mutters a bunch of words and the only ones I can pick up are nerve endings.

I laugh to myself. “Are you an electrician now, rewiring sensations?”

He glares at me above his safety goggles. “Deadening them.”

“Oh,” I say, more into my shoulder than aloud.

The surgery proceeds in forty minutes of silence, broken only by single phrases. Knife. Melon baller. Corkscrew. Hold it, not there–there. Whether he's concentrating or pissed, it doesn't really matter: all I can focus on is the pattern of scarred-brown that covers the kid's back.

When Marcel clears his throat, it's my father standing over my mother, laughing, as she's crumpled on the floor. When he re-sterilizes the knife over flame, it's the click of my father's lighter under a tarnished spoon. When he coughs, it's my father with his face in the crook of his arm, hurrying down the steps as smoke billows behind him.

A bright white spot flashes in my eyes. I startle, and Marcel's right hand is reared back to smack me again, his left holding down the boy's head.

“I said get the goddamn nitrous! He's waking up!”

I scurry to the tank and drag it over, crush the mouthpiece on the boy's face and in seconds, he's unconscious again. Marcel releases his tentative grip and exhales hard through his nose.

“Send in Megan. You need to go home.”

X

The rain drips. The studio audience cheers. The haunting smoke lingers. My life is a crooked deck of cards: all varying slightly, but basically the same and repeated endlessly.

While Mom eats her stew, I excuse myself to the bathroom and, silent as a shadow, grab the stuffed animal from her dresser. I flush the toilet and open the window while the water is still running and throw the sheep into the alley between houses.

She's stopped eating when I return.

“Where were you?”

“In the bathroom, Ma. I just told you that.”

“What were you doing in the bathroom?”

I light a cigarette and laugh.

“Don't laugh at me, Henry,” she snaps. “What were you doing in the bathroom?”

“Christ, what do you think?” In some remote part of my brain, I'm wondering if she can hear my hands twitching. “What people always do in the bathroom.”

She sits, silent but for the breathing coursing in and out of her nostrils. She takes a deep breath and crosses her arms. “I'm ready for bed.”

“Okay, keep your wig on.” I wheel her towards her bed and she sticks her arms up like a toddler waiting to be dressed.

“I want you to sing to me, Henry.”

“I sing to you every night.” I hand her a pair of pajamas. “Change your clothes first.”

“You're the only one I see. I don't need to keep up airs.” She's gnawing on her bottom lip, and the way her eyes float when she gets angry is almost comical. “I want you to sing.”