Collin blanched at the sight of the empty sleeve. Standing next to his mother, Jane who managed the gas station, he looked as though he wanted to disappear into the ample folds of her sweater to hide from the specter coming toward them.
Rosemary had, of course, had to explain ahead of time what had happened. She had used Nan’s cellphone to call from the hospital after surgery. Collin and his mother had spread the word around liberally, stunned by the disfiguring violence of removing a hand and most of a forearm with a circular saw.
Jane looked tearful when she looked up to meet Rosemary’s eye. “Oh, honey,” she breathed, “how are you?”
More words issued from Rosemary’s pale lips than had ever before in the gas station. Bethany stared rapt from where she crouched restocking candy bars in front of the counter, her fuzzy reddish dreadlocks illuminated by late afternoon sun; Collin all but gaped leaning subtly toward his mother’s comforting girth.
“I took the money from my Nan. It wasn’t right. She practically raised me. Always looked out for me. I took her money. Just took it. That bastard Frank is the one that’s got it now. I didn’t sleep with him or any of that sh*t. I mean, we slept in the same bed, but not like that. Don’t listen to what he’s telling around town. He took Nan’s money because I stole it from her. I had to cut my hand off. I had to. It’s what I deserved. When I cut it off, I only had the flashlight and I couldn’t see it well, but I knew what I had to do. I seen Fin use that saw. I knew what to do and I knew when it was off. I just watched the blood drip down for a few minutes before I called anybody. Just watched the blood drip. It’s what I deserved.”
“Oh, honey,” repeated Jane, clearly shaken. Trying desperately to smooth things over, she said plaintively, “We can make sure everything is really easy for you to reach, and we’ll help you with stuff when you need it. Whatever you need.” Rosemary blinked silently, shuffled behind the counter, and assumed her usual seat, unfazed by the looks of concern on every side of her.
As Frank wasted away from pleasures and escapes, his mother’s skeletal frame was vanishing under the punishing presence of tumors and disease. Seen together, you could not doubt that they were both terminal, one by suffering and one by choice. The two were wrapped in a deathly embrace without any indication of who’s disintegration fueled the other’s and how.
Jessica lay awkwardly on the recliner, eyes tired but sleepless, far away with a mixture of pain and regret. Frank rummaged through drawers and kicked cabinets, tornadoing through the kitchen in a flurry of activity, the antithesis of his mother’s stillness.
“Ma?” Frank yelled, the noise startling Jessica from her listlessness.
“Frank? What do you need, Frank?” she called back as if addressing a needy toddler and not a full-grown man. Indeed, her face looked quietly stunned by Frank emerging from the lighted kitchen into the dim living room. Emaciated as he was, he was undeniably man more than boy.
“You seen my pipe? Where is it? What did you do with it?” Frank said with an accusatory air.
“Umm, I…I don’t think I’ve seen it,” Jessica said, as if from far away, her eyes struggling to see through a haze that clouded the room only for her.
“I told you not to take my stuff! What did you do with it?” Frank bellowed, agitation reaching a manic pitch.
“Frank, sweetie, I don’t feel so well. I’ll help you look for it in the morning. I just need some rest…just need some rest…” Jessica’s voice trailed off as she closed her eyes, seeming to will herself not to see what was in front of her.
Frank sighed. A twinge of concern played across his brow. His hands fidgeted as if of their own accord, darting from pocket to pocket, along furniture, through his hair. In the end he muttered absent-mindedly, “Yah, ok,” and drifted up the carpeted stairs bringing with him a cloud of electric worry.
Rosemary, who had moved so little before her disfigurement, did not struggle to adjust to life with a severe handicap. Her days at the Artic Zone looked remarkably similar to those before her encounter with a rapidly rotating serrated blade. She sat. She watched people come and go, roused herself from the chair behind the counter long enough to make people stop asking for help, and sat again.
Glowering as was her custom, Rosemary received little sympathy for her affliction that first week back, most motorists passing through the town failing to notice one sleeve limp and empty. Those who did notice quickly looked elsewhere, not stopping to consider the anguish behind such an absence.
By all accounts, Rosemary appeared unchanged by her experience. Except when Frank came in the store. He still carried that frantic energy of a man desperate to find what he had lost. He heard about the mutilation days before but assumed it had nothing to do with him or chose to think so. He was there on a mission.
“Rose, hey!” Frank called out as he walked into the Artic Zone, relief that she was there showing in his every feature. Only when he approached the counter did his eyes dart nervously to her billowy sleeve, a spasm of horror registering in preoccupied eyes. “Hey, sorry to hear. You’re really nuts, haha,” Frank awkwardly tried to skirt the subject, pressing on to his main objective. “Listen, you wouldn’t by any chance have a glass pipe that maybe I left at the party? Do you have that?”
Rosemary’s dull eyes flashed with a menacing energy. “Yeah, maybe I just might.”
“Well, can I have it back…?”
“Maybe.”
“What do you want? What do I need to do?”
“Meet me at the cemetery tonight.”
“You want to meet at the cemetery; that’s what you’re into. Ok, I’ll go there right now. See you there, bug girl.”
Rosemary glowed with an air of triumph, quiet confidence growing in her slumped frame as Frank walked briskly from the store, heading down the highway in the direction of the old cemetery.
Sergeant Willard was the first to see the car, bobbing ominously in the Oteka River between jagged rocks turning the water white. In a town as small as theirs, most knew the news later that day, speculating wildly as to why Frank and Rosemary would be in the same car. “She really was a hooker!” the hardware store owner remarked. “He was trying to get more money outta her,” replied the school principal. “And his mother in such bad shape…real shame,” Barb kept repeating to her clients at the salon.
Jessica said simply, “Nan,” by way of greeting and explaining her presence. Her thin wrists looked as though they might snap under the weight of a grocery bag stuffed with packaged bakery goods.
“Here, gimme that,” said Nan, reaching over to hoist the bag into the house while holding the screen door open to invite Jessica in.
Jessica scanned the room as she entered, recognizing the lady with fuzzy, strawberry blond dreads from the gas station and seeing another figure curled up under a fleece blanket in the corner. Bethany’s eyes were red and sleepless, despair pulling the corners of her mouth down in a grim frown. At Sergeant Willard’s suggestion, Bethany and Amethyst had spent the night at Nan’s house to keep an eye on her. Nan wiled away the endless hours with infomercials blaring, her head bobbing as she sat. Gradually, she fell into a deep sleep, head cocked back, tongue protruding slightly.
Amethyst, always able to sleep through anything, had curled up peacefully in all the noise, but Bethany had been unable to sleep. Her head throbbed, her hand, still bandaged, ached. Nan’s snoring turned into a rattling roar, causing Bethany’s adrenaline to surge, heart pounding out of her chest at every sudden snort or gasp for air. She felt terror that Nan would not survive the night. The morning light and Jessica’s car on the driveway were a welcome relief.
“I’m so sorry,” Jessica mumbled.
“Wasn’t your fault,” said Nan dismissively, settling into a recliner.
“Still, I feel like I’m responsible for this. My boy, Frank, was a bad kid. He was up to no good. Why did Rosemary go up there with him?”
“No, no, no,” Nan insisted. “Rosemary wasn’t some babe in the woods, and Frank wasn’t some kid. They both decided to go out there and we don’t have to worry about why.”
“But what do you think it was?” pleaded Jessica.
“I think they really wanted to help each other,” said Amethyst, everyone turning in surprise to find her awake and listening to the conversation.
Bethany volunteered, “Well, I heard that Frank came into the gas station yesterday, and there was something he wanted to pick up from Rosemary later. I didn’t hear what it was, but I think Collin knows.”
“Probably that pipe,” Jessica said absently, her body looking drained of all energy, threatening to collapse into a lifeless heap on the sofa where she had sat next to Bethany. “It was just a little glass thing. Not even worth much. I thought he just used it for something harmless. Now I don’t know. I guess I didn’t pay enough attention.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Bethany put in.
“It doesn’t matter,” interrupted Nan.
“Maybe they were just going to make things right,” said Amethyst, again causing everyone to turn to look at her having forgotten she was there.
“It really may not have been anything intentional,” said Bethany, desperation in her voice. “Sergeant Willard said it couldn’t have been easy to steer down the hill with only one arm.” Bethany seemed to be imagining vividly the scene from the early morning hours of an Oldsmobile crashing through the guardrail, falling into the river, the car filling with water, trapping a one-armed woman and a skeletal man in their metal coffin, fates sealed by a meeting at the cemetery to recover a trinket misplaced in the theft of hundreds of dollars from a grim old woman.
“Look, I just thought you might need some breakfast,” said Jessica, her voice trailing off, the mere thought of the food making her want to vomit.
Nan rummaged through the bag, extracting a box of Danishes and gazing at them affectionately. “Rosemary did always like these damned things,” she said almost fondly.
Amethyst dug in, relishing the rare treat of store-bought processed food, a departure from the usual vegan farm fare. In between bites she mused, “I wonder what it’s like to die drowning in a car in the river. Is it cold?”
Bethany, used to such morbid queries from her daughter, said without hesitation, “I hear it’s actually pleasant to die by drowning. You get warm and sleepy or something, and see a light. That’s what my cousin who almost drowned told me.”
Momentarily brought back to the present, Jessica said quiety, “It’s certainly not the worst way to go.”
The End
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