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How many times has Bobby
insisted that I dance with him since our parents died? Why,
every Tuesday and Thursday evening since I left the
hospital! How he copes with our new, busted lives. Copying
theirs and boss of mine. I try not to mind because I owe my
little brother that much.
No different tonight.
Over a year since that car crash, five months since I'd
healed enough to join Bobby living with Uncle Jonathan. I'm
the girl, but I'm bigger, stronger, so I dip and twirl
Bobby.
Jitterbugging -- our
folks are so corny -- to how many tunes tonight? Our
computer blasts a familiar playlist from the
American-Bop-Association web-site -- our folks belong to the
Birmingham chapter.
Were so corny.
Belonged.
Goodman's wailing
"licorice stick." Count Basie weaving his piano through his
band's jumping beat.
How late tonight?
Homework's done -- dumb stuff I learned last year, the first
time I started eighth grade -- none of the fun, though, no
basketball, of course, no girlfriends, no boys, either -- so
does late really matter?
"Casey!" Bobby calls me
out of distraction. He twists a smile at me: pay attention
to here, to now, not to our folks, but to me. I grimace one
back: I still hear their screams; don't you? I still feel
the fire that ate them -- and part of me -- why didn't you
get hurt? Why do I resent that? Why am I still here to
resent that? Why? Why?
Give me a break! I want
to snap, but don't.
The music plays. Bobby
dances furiously. Boogie, Stroll, Shorty George, SuzieQ,
Tic Toc -- and Break 'n Twirl. How Bobby loves to twirl!
Break, twirl, then snag hands and back to the Stroll. How
many times do I hook him without a hitch? Dozens, yet Bobby
demands we dance on. How can I refuse my savior? As usual,
we open the French doors to the balcony, inviting the
late-summer breeze. As usual, it joins us dancing four
stories up.
How tired will I get
tonight? Too tired to brush my teeth? Just pee, strip off
my elbows, wrists, and hands, and fall into bed? Yet not
too tired for nightmares where the car crash runs and
re-runs, again and again, where I try anything -- everything
-- to get it right, yet I never save Mom and Dad ...
Over and over, we twirl
until even he gets bored and tries something new, clapping
three times before reaching for me.
He misses, lurches back,
stumbles over Scooter, our cat who loves to watch. The
French doors would have caught him, but it's the old balcony
rail instead. Maybe he expects it to hold, even lets
himself pinwheel into it. It splinters, though, giving way
to a long, deadly drop.
Horror pops within me,
hot and sticky. Covering my insides. Blocking my ears so I
can't hear his scream. Narrowing my vision down to a flash
of dark sky encircling him for an instant till he falls out
of sight.
Life breaks, and you
choose. Nobody else can, Zhuhndí said. Even those who
would choose for you cannot. Doing nothing, you choose, and
there it stops. Doing something, you choose to start more
choosing. Choose the right way before, not after, guessing
at what might happen.
Zhuhndí who, propped up
like a sack of cat food, with no arms or legs, in his
wheelchair, dominates the dayroom of the veteran's ward
where Uncle Jonathan works, where he takes me for prosthesis
training. Zhuhndí who, right from the start, glared at my
hopeless face, my trembling lips and brimming eyes, my
helpless arms hung with leather, plastic, and steel, and
dared me to choose a different future.
Hot and sticky, I choose
to try again, try to not fail Bobby as I failed my parents.
I scrabble at our
apartment door and its old-fashioned handle a moment before
Zhuhndí's lessons about calm catch my panic and crush it. I
take the stairs like a repetitive tap dance routine, all
feet and legs and no mind so I can drive my thoughts at
Bobby lying down there. Live, Bobby! Till I get there!
A moment later, I kneel
over his twisted body. But it doesn't matter how quickly I
got there: it wasn't quick enough.
Nobody should ever look
like that, especially Bobby. Blood plops and gurgles like
purple mud in the garish streetlight. Bones jab white
through his clothes. A leg -- which leg? -- all wrong under
him. I ache to help, to fix him, push him back together,
but I dare not. Make it worse if that's possible. I hug
myself instead, clenching trembling, helpless fake arms to
my chest. Even if I knew what to do, what can my cables,
braces, and prehensors (not really hands after all) do for
him now?
Zhuhndí calls life
"dreaming with your eyes open." In dreams, you can do
special things; in life, you can't. Zhuhndí slapped me when
I whined that protest into his face. No arms, no legs, and
he slapped me ... with those silver-light eyes boring into
mine ... then stroked my head with forgiveness and a deeper
touch, somehow, beyond my ear, deep inside my brain,
stirring something dream-like in my mind.
Can I use it now? Is it
time?
I choose to try and ...
something blossoms, here on the damp concrete next to
Bobby. I reach out to help him -- huh! I reach out, not
with my prosthetic arms, but with spectral limbs I can
barely feel, barely see. They stretch out of my heart and
fumble at his wounds. I don't know what to do nor how to do
it, but when those ghost hands touch his shuddering body, I
demand that they do something.
They flinch then, not
away, but toward that angled leg and the thick blood surging
out around a thrust of bone. They sink into that mess
because I send them there. They slide among vessels like
Dorsey's lyrical trombone soaring through octaves. Muscles,
though, fight back like the lumps of kettle drums in "Stompin'
at the Savoy." Weaving like Count Basie, I find the rupture
in that hot mixture and squeeze it closed.
More to do. More that I
can do! I want more limbs -- they grow. I reach with them
--
Hands grab my shoulders
and drag me away! People from the other apartments. Adults
thinking they know better what to do. One does -- a nurse
from the first floor -- but even she couldn't've sealed that
artery as I did. I fight to keep focus while they shelter
me from that awful sight. I clamp down with my ghost hands
till the police push everybody back, and I let go, and the
paramedics pounce on the "bleeder" like the pros they ought
to be.
People clump around me,
trying to be nice while getting in my way, sympathetic and
protective when all I want is to be with Bobby, to treat him
with my newfound healing touch. He vanishes into an
ambulance, then it too vanishes, though the flashes of its
red lights linger in the night air, like footprints begging
me to follow.
In front of the police,
another neighbor demands, "Where's Jonathan, child?" as if
I'm helpless.
Jonathan ... who
restores and releases more patients than all the therapists
on all the wards across the city, though if it weren't for
Zhuhndí -- why does Z never heal himself, never leave? Is
it just the way he wants it? Or can't this psychic healer
heal himself? He who's done so much for others.
Pity wells -- I
shouldn't. Anger gushes -- at what? A calling swells
within me -- to what? I've nowhere to go with that, so I
snap at the neighbor, "Gone out! I'm 14 and Bobby's 10.
We're old enough!"
I send a pleading look
at the policewoman. "Jonathan's our uncle." I spout out
his cell-phone number. "Can we go to the hospital now?"
That works, and I keep
on leaning on people, leveraging their sympathy, working on
attitudes and personalities so familiar from my months in
places just like this, getting closer and closer to Bobby,
till I stand outside the trauma room. I stare through a
large window at five professional healers who don't want me
in their way. They did keep me out of the room itself, but
now I am close enough to help Bobby.
I grow long, limber,
dark-gray ghost arms, and I send them into Bobby from all
directions. I have to fight past clumsy fingers and cold
tools and gushes of water and prickles of drugs, but I do.
In Bobby's leg, I nudge off their clamp and fend off their
pokes as I smooth the limp artery back into healthy,
throbbing resilience. I turn to the wound itself, but can't
do any good with all their stuff stuck in there, so I spread
my attention. I send my limbs after ruptured vessels all
over, letting them work on their own while I burrow into his
Humpty-Dumpty belly. I race those doctors who, discovering
that the thigh no longer needs them, look inside Bobby
also. They bring up portable scanners, searching for
problems that I can see and feel and smell and taste as if
Bobby's jumbled guts are laid out on a table right in front
of me. They shoot pictures, then reshoot them as the scene
changes without their intervention. They reach for needles
and blades and threads while I coax and coo and soothe parts
of him that know where they ought to be and how they ought
to work and desperately want to return there. All I do is
help them.
How long it takes isn't
an issue. How fast is. I work fervishly, there with my
nose against that cold glass, until finally no pleas come to
me and my spectral arms wither for lack of need. I leave
Bobby inundated with their doctors' fluids and medicines and
sag against the wall ...
I had tried on that
horrible night ... but it ended with Bobby, thrown free and
unhurt, saving me instead. Dragging me what was left of
his big sister -- only burnt stubs left of the arms that
couldn't save our folks -- but Bobby did drag the rest of me
out of there and away to safety.
The double doors of the
trauma room bump open. Snapping and popping their medical
armor, the doctors and nurses murmur surprised acceptance.
"His spleen's upside
down," says one of the professionals, "but it's functioning
normally. Must've been congenital."
Oops! I feel their eyes
upon me. A male nurse turns on me. "What are you doing
here? Family is supposed to --" He points dramatically.
"Waiting room!"
I backpedal.
"Leaving."
Leaving. That's for
sure. That's forever. A vision comes to me: a spotlight
somewhere, beckoning me to work in its light, hot with
faith, loud with joy, healing and healing ...
I turn to the door. The
nurse offers more gently, "I'll get that for you."
"Nah, I got it."
I push out into the
night. It's cool and big.
Way too big for me right
now.
Yeah, Bobby, we're even
now, but I'm not leaving you ... just yet. More important,
I'm not leaving Zhuhndí, not while I've more to learn, not
while this student still has a chance to pay the master back
with a real limb -- or four.
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