I remembered all the times I’d seen one of my brothers burst
through the back door, howling, pinching some part of his body that
was gashed or squashed or broken or burned. I remembered two years
before, when a man named Robert, who worked for Dad, had lost a
finger. I remembered the otherworldly pitch of his scream as he ran to
the house. I remembered staring at the bloody stump, and then at the
severed finger, which Luke brought in and placed on the counter. It
looked like a prop from a magic trick. Mother put it on ice and rushed
Robert to town so the doctors could sew it back on. Robert’s was not
the only finger the junkyard had claimed. A year before Robert,
Shawn’s girlfriend, Emma, had come through the back door shrieking.
She’d been helping Shawn and lost half her index. Mother had rushed
Emma to town, too, but the flesh had been crushed, and there was
nothing they could do.
I looked at my own pink fingers, and in that moment the junkyard
shifted. As children, Richard and I had passed countless hours in the
debris, jumping from one mangled car to the next, looting some,
leaving others. It had been the backdrop for a thousand imagined
battles—between demons and wizards, fairies and goons, trolls and
giants. Now it was changed. It had ceased to be my childhood
playground and had become its own reality, one whose physical laws
were mysterious, hostile.
I was remembering the strange pattern the blood had made as it
streaked down Emma’s wrist, smearing across her forearm, when I
stood and, still shaking, tried to pry loose the small length of copper
tubing. I almost had it when Dad flung a catalytic converter. I leapt
aside, cutting my hand on the serrated edge of a punctured tank. I
wiped the blood on my jeans and shouted, “Don’t throw them here! I’m
here!”
Dad looked up, surprised. He’d forgotten I was there. When he saw
the blood, he walked over to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t
worry, honey,” he said. “God and his angels are here, working right
alongside us. They won’t let you be hurt.”
—I WASN’T THE ONLY ONE whose feet were searching for solid ground. For
six months after the car accident, Mother had improved steadily and
we’d thought she would fully recover. The headaches had become less