He had one wish: to be able to alter Penelope’s brain like he altered breast tissue and nasal tips and eyelids, to cut away the things that were not meant to be there. So easy to fix a body, make it look young and firm and perfect. He was capable of rewinding time but how could he fix a brain, one in which something malign did push-ups every day?
This he knew for sure: Penelope wasn’t a model or a scientific equation. She was a human being and he’d failed her. That was certain, and for that he didn’t need to run labs, check blood, or observe a cutting site. Failure. In all his years as a plastic surgeon he had never known what failure was.
The tremor was gone and his confidence returned. He could fix anything. He had successfully operated on a nose and septum once that was nothing but a gnarly pulp. Sometimes he had to perform controlled fractures, had to make it worse to make it better, and that’s what he’d do, with mallet and chisel, he’d do what he had to do to make it all better.
8
PENELOPE
Penelope’s mother spent hours looking at old photographs. She made Penelope sit next to her and pointed. Here is your first time at the beach. Look, your first birthday. Remember the day you learned to ride your bike?
Penelope stared at pictures of a girl in front of dollhouses, at beaches, and in the family cabin. Her mother remembered years and places—1993, Florida, Disney World; 1995, a cruise to Mexico—and recited the details like an itinerary. She never got confused, never mixed up the details, never said wait a minute, what year was this? There were photographs of a girl hanging upside down on monkey bars, a girl at birthday parties blowing out candles, a girl in a room filled with the quintessential childhood of American Girl dolls and Boxcar Children books.
Penelope believed her mother was telling the truth, didn’t assume those stories to be lies. She recognized the girl in the pictures, yes, it was her, she was sure, but most of the details her mother relayed seemed made up. You loved the beach—Penelope broke out in hives within minutes of being exposed to the sun, tiny bumps merged into raised patches on her chest and arms—and how did her mother come up with having a fondness for animals? That was some far-fetched tale. There were photographs of Penelope kneeling next to a dog but they’d never owned a pet. Her body language clearly showed she was reluctant around the animal, she could tell by her forced smile and how she leaned away from it and her mother would never allow hair on furniture or the destruction of her immaculate lawn. There was a faint memory of a wooden swing, the creaking frame, swinging back and forth, feet lifted upward—a recollection of being suspended—but there was no picture of a swing anywhere. Her entire life felt that way, her mother relaying some picture-perfect past for which Penelope dug in every corner of her mind, yet she came up empty as there was never any proof for what she clearly remembered.
Penelope was about ten when those stories began to lead up to another activity: Her parents handed her paper and markers. Penelope looked forward to this and their undivided attention, and they didn’t stare at her directly but clandestinely, via peripheral vision or random glances, they watched her. Later they’d gather the drawings to give them to someone to look at. Penelope knew that because a doctor asked her once about oversized hands she had drawn on herself and she told him those were leaves and not hands. Though there were red veins but he never asked about those. What she drew seemed to be very important to everyone.
Draw a picture of your parents.
Draw a picture of your house.
Draw a picture of your friends.
How childish to make her color as if she were a toddler, but she liked how pushing down on the tip extracted the ink and dried out the once-vibrant marker until the paper dissolved and soiled the table underneath.
She couldn’t explain the drawings, it wasn’t anything recognizable or real. Once she drew a picture with waves coming out of her head. That was the closest thing to getting people to understand how she felt.
And so she drew happy pictures of happy houses with crooked roofs and crooked flowers bigger than the house itself and her happy family holding happy hands behind a crooked fence, the crooked slats taller than the happy house but spaced so you could still see the happy people in the yard. But that was not what was going on in her head. The inside of her was much darker. She imagined the doctor’s thoughts, how they contemplated a possible switch between good and evil within her though they didn’t call it good and evil but right and wrong.
Her mother was very specific about what was right and what was wrong. Right made her mother smile, like displaying concern and positive interactions (her mother’s words) with other children. Her mother called it “lovable qualities” which in turn made up for her infractions, as if good deeds canceled out the wrong, as if pretending to be good made the wrong inside of her bearable.
And how exhausting it was to hide the wrong parts of her, with her mother always being around, watching. Penelope didn’t pretend around her father as much, for one she hardly saw him but on the weekends, but she could somehow be herself around him, he never saw anything nefarious (her mother’s word) in her every action. He asked her about the fork incident. That’s what everyone called it as if she hadn’t just planted fork tines in the forearm of a girl who chewed with her mouth open. The girl also moved her arm when she lowered the fork, which made it all worse.
Dad asked her why she did it.
The question rattled around in her head, and she kept her hands steady. It builds up, and then I have to do it, I can’t keep it away. Penelope didn’t say that. Even she knew that would be cause for concern.
“You didn’t do it deliberately, did you?” he asked but Penelope remained quiet. “You weren’t trying to hurt her?”
Penelope sat, listened, and concentrated.
“Was it an accident?”
Penelope moved her head in what could pass for a nod.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay,” her father responded after a long while.
They played board games, but mostly he read to her and afterward she thought of alternative endings, born of her own imagination, and sometimes she got carried away, adding dark twists and turns. She was glad they never asked her to write but to draw instead.
Later, Penelope overheard a conversation between her parents. She stood in the dark behind her parents’ bedroom door, which wouldn’t shut because her mother had the door and the frame around it replaced for the third time.
“She was in a mood, all those kids and the noise,” her mother said on the other side of the wall. “Should we take her back to the therapist, you think?”
“She’s just a child, and we have to help her learn to function in the world, it’s not rocket science,” her father said.
Her mother’s voice then. Solemn. Calm. “I don’t want to see the other shoe drop.”