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 get 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 frequent, so
that she was shutting herself in the basement only two or three days a week.
Then the healing had slowed. Now it had been nine months. The headaches
persisted, and Mother’s memory was erratic. At least twice a week she’d ask
me to cook breakfast long after everyone had eaten and the dishes had been
cleared. She’d tell me to weigh a pound of yarrow for a client, and I’d remind
her that we’d delivered the yarrow the day before. She’d begin mixing a
tincture, then a minute later couldn’t remember which ingredients she’d
added, so that the whole batch had to be tossed. Sometimes she would ask me