Slowly, I turned my head to look at my right arm, frozen in a full cast up to my armpit and raised up on a stack of pillows. “Sieg Heil,” I murmured. My lips were dry, and my tongue pushed out between them, fat and rubbery, unable to wet them enough.
The man put his newspaper aside, stood up, and walked over to me. The first thing I noticed was that he was short. The second was that he held a blue plastic cup in his hand. He shook the cup and it rattled. “Here,” he said. “They said you could have this.” He held the cup to my mouth, and I managed to open my lips. A few crushed pieces of ice slipped into my mouth.
“Not too many,” he said. His voice was odd, a thin southern accent overlaying something hard in the vowels.
I sucked on the pieces of ice as if they were peppermints. “Where are my parents?” I managed. “My sister?”
“The doctor’s coming,” he said. “You hold on.”
“You’re from Ireland,” I said. That was what I’d heard in his voice. The dohkter’s comin’. It was a version of my mother’s accent. A memory surfaced: I was in a hospital room with Mom and Dad, meeting Susannah just after she was born, and a man appeared in the doorway, holding a wrapped present. Dad wouldn’t let him in. He was shorter than Dad and wore a flat cap and coat—Susannah was born in February—and he looked at me over Dad’s shoulder with a pair of deep, dark eyes. The same eyes that were looking at me now.
“Are you my uncle?” I asked him.
He nodded, once, then turned his head to the door. “Need a doctor in here,” he said, not shouting but something close to a bark.
“That’s the first thing … you say to me?” I asked. He turned back to me, and I continued, “I look like a Nazi?” It was stupid—hysterical, even. Heil Hitler. I started to chuckle, and even though I could see the alarm in his face and felt tears on my cheeks, I didn’t want to stop laughing, because if I did I’d have to acknowledge that this was my uncle Gavin, my mother’s brother, and if he was here that could mean only one thing. But then a nurse swept in and leaned over me—broad face, professional concern in her gaze, her voice kind and soothing—and everything was sucked down a gray whirlpool that went black.
When I next woke up, sunlight streamed through the thin curtains shrouding the single window. Uncle Gavin was sitting in the same chair, leafing through a magazine. He’d taken his cap off, and his hair was a tangle of black with a touch of gray at the temples. I managed to clear my throat, and he looked up. No gray in those eyes—just deep, deep black. “Ethan,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Never better,” I croaked.
He glanced at my arm in its cast. “The doctor says you’ll be in the cast for a few weeks,” he said. “Then rehab. But there shouldn’t be any permanent damage.”
I took a breath, released it. “I was shot,” I said.
He gave me a careful look of appraisal. “It was clean,” he said. “The wound. Bullet went right through. Broke the bone in your upper arm, two inches below your shoulder. You’ll have some nice scars to show off.”
“I got shot in my humerus?” I said. “Hilarious.” I took another breath, aware of a distant pain in my upper arm if I breathed too deeply. “Susannah?”
His face closed up, though his eyes were the same liquid black they had been. “Hanging in there,” he said. “Touch and go for a while, but the doctor says she’ll make it.”
“My parents are dead, aren’t they,” I said.
Another appraising look, as if he were calculating how much grief I could manage. “Yes,” he said.
I closed my eyes and nodded, then leaned my head back against my pillow. Once, I’d helped my mother make spaghetti squash, scraping the steamed squash out of the gourd with a fork. I felt like that squash, scraped and set aside on the counter.
“There … was a girl,” I said. “She lost her shoe.” There was more, I knew, just around the slippery corner of my memory, but the shoe was the important point. That and the fact that my parents’ deaths were my fault.
Mine and Susannah’s, a voice said in the back of my head.
Shut up, I said.
“Ethan?” I opened my eyes to see Uncle Gavin frowning. Had I spoken aloud?
“Did the police,” I said, then swallowed. “Did they find who …” I could not complete the sentence.
Uncle Gavin shook his head. “Not yet.” Another pause, and something gathered in Uncle Gavin’s face, hard and threatening. “But if they don’t find them,” he said, his voice lower still, his dark eyes fixed on mine, “I will.”
* * *
SUSANNAH’S INJURIES WERE far worse than mine. The doctors had explained that the bullet had so damaged her that she would never have children, but that seemed too ridiculous a concept to worry about right now—her lower body being swathed in bandages was a more immediate concern. The nurses had told me that she was on pain medication and so might not be fully alert. In her hospital bed, she looked so small and pale, the skin under her eyes bruised. “Hi,” she managed.
“Hi,” I said.
I was in a wheelchair, my cast-encased arm now in a sling. Susannah took this in with a long, slow look. “So we both got shot,” she said.
Because both of us fucked up, I wanted to say. Instead I nodded.
She lay her head back, looking at the ceiling. “Mom and Dad are dead, huh?”
Any resentment or anger I felt toward her at that moment drained away. Her hollow voice was more devastating than tears. My own eyes watered. I was getting sick of crying. “Yeah,” I said, wiping the back of my arm across my face. Orphans, I thought. I looked at my sister, pale and distant, practically mummified by her bandages. What were we going to do?
“You should’ve shot the other guy first,” Susannah said. Then she fell back asleep.
* * *
THE DOCTORS RELEASED me the next day, but I wouldn’t leave Susannah, who had to remain “for observation,” which I read as code for she still might die. I’d like to think that I wanted to stay because of filial loyalty. Looking back, however, I realize it was also fear. Leaving the hospital would mean that I was walking away from my previous life with my mother and father and heading into a new, frightening world without them. It would be an acknowledgment that my parents’ deaths were real. So I remained stubbornly at my sister’s bedside. It was only when Susannah finally told me to get out of her room so she could get some sleep that I left. But as Uncle Gavin steered me and my wheelchair out of Susannah’s room and down the hall to the elevator, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was deserting my post.
I probably should have been more freaked out by leaving the hospital with Uncle Gavin, who was a virtual stranger. All I knew of him was that he, like Mom, had been born in Ireland and that he had brought her with him to the United States after their parents died in a car accident. On the rare occasions Mom or Dad had mentioned Uncle Gavin, it was always to say he had “gone down the wrong path” or “made bad choices” or “had to lie down in the bed he’d made.” He was a sort of family bogeyman, an avatar of wickedness. What wickedness my uncle had supposedly done was never made clear. As far as Susannah and I could piece together from the rare instances when we overheard our parents talking about Uncle Gavin, somehow Mom felt she had failed as a sister, allowing Uncle Gavin to wander off into corruption and degeneracy. Of course, Susannah and I wanted to know all about him, to hear stories about bad old Uncle Gavin and his iniquity, but Mom refused to discuss it with us in any detail, and Dad forbade us from bothering Mom about him. And now he was rolling me out of the hospital. By all rights I should have been worried, but somehow I felt … not cared for, exactly, but protected.