The long ridges of collarbone, and the pool of shadow beneath.
The faintest scent of her sweat.
How could he love someone this hard and be so disciplined, and stay silent and still so long?
Maybe if he’d done it then: if he’d found the nerve earlier, it wouldn’t have gone the way it did. But how could he ever predict such things? How could he know that Carey—this girl who lay across him, and whose breath drew in and out on him, who’d had a life, who was a life—would make up his trifecta, or triumvirate, of love and loss?
He couldn’t, of course.
He couldn’t.
It was all in what was to come.
Back then, for Penny Dunbar, she packed her bags for the hospital, and the world that waited within it.
They would push, they’d prod and cut bits.
They would poison her with kindness.
When they first talked radiation, I saw her standing alone in the desert, then boom—a little bit like the Hulk.
We’d become our own cartoon.
* * *
—
From the outset there was the hospital building, and all the infernal whiteness, and the spotless shopping mall doors; I hated how they parted.
It felt like we were browsing.
Heart disease to the left.
Orthopedics to the right.
I also remember how the six of us walked the corridors, through the pleasant terror inside. I remember our dad and his hard-clean hands, and Henry and Rory not fighting; these places were clearly unnatural. There was Tommy, who looked so tiny, and always in short Hawaiian shorts—and me still bruised-but-healing.
At the very back, though, long behind us, was Clay, who was scaredest, it seemed, to see her. Her voice fought out from the nose cord:
“Where’s my boy, where’s my boy? I’ve got a story, it’s a good one.”
Only then did he come between us.
It took all of everything in him.
“Hey, Mum—can you tell me about the houses?”
Her hand stretched out to touch him.
* * *
—
She came in and out of the hospital twice more that year.
She was opened, closed up, and pinkened.
She was sewn and raw-and-shiny.