But most of all, this land would be all that Alexander ever knew of his father. This land was Tom. Over that first lonely winter, Vicky studied farming operations, learning all she could, for the sake of her missing husband and her infant son. She needed to do something, anything, to minimize her brooding over Tom’s unjust theft by the sea. But every morning, while the sun rose, Vicky stood at the cliff’s edge for one hour. “Tom’s dead,” the locals said. “Why can’t she accept it? Poor thing!”
When spring came, Vicky mobilized operations. At first the laborers were hesitant to follow her lead but when it became apparent that she knew what she was doing, they stopped muttering. They decided that Wennington money was as good out of Vicky’s hand as it ever had been out of Tom’s. She worked hard to prove herself, and while the harvest was not as good as that of the year before, it was good enough. On the first anniversary of Tom’s disappearance, Vicky removed her widow’s weeds, but each morning she still visited the cliff’s edge. It was not anything that she could ever explain to anyone else, but she believed that somehow the return sweep of the tide took her love out to Tom.
Over the years, the farm flourished. Vicky became known as a fine farmer and a shrewd businesswoman. She got the best hands because she always paid the best wages. She always paid the most because she always made the most. Eventually she started to buy out neighboring farmers, at a fair price, and when she brought new land under her management, its yield invariably increased.
For twenty-two years, Vicky worked. She became the greatest landowner in the region, and Alexander became a healthy young man, strong in body, spirit, and values. Then one day, he met a bright, energetic young woman from a nearby town. He fell in love, proposed marriage, and was accepted. Vicky knew that her son would be happy.
For twenty-two years, she had spent an hour every morning looking from the cliff at the crooked, inviting fingers of the surf. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Everyone knew she was waiting for her husband. Eight thousand days. Rain, wind, sleet, snow, sun; it did not matter to the Widow Wennington. Eight thousand hours. Never once did she desert her lonely command post at the edge of the world, where the earth fell into the sea.
In the autumn after Alexander’s wedding, there was a terrible storm. It was, in fact, the worst since the one that had claimed Tom. Strangely enough, it occurred during the same weekend, in early November, in which she’d lost him. The wind raged, but not even a storm of such magnitude could keep Vicky from the cliff’s edge. In truth, she liked stormy days best, because they made her feel closest to her missing husband. Vicky stood with her arms out, embracing the rain as it pounded into her skin. She whispered his name, “Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom…” Her hair leapt about in mad directions, and then she yelled into the gale. “I love you, I love you, I love you. I will always love you.”
Alexander watched from the farmhouse, fascinated and dismayed. He had accepted his mother’s ritual because he had never known a life without it, but this was different. Usually, she was quiet and contemplative in her lookout; this day, she was jerking about as if she were the storm’s marionette. Alexander rushed out to confront her. “Mother! I’ve never asked you to stop before. Come in, this is dangerous!”
Vicky shouted back over the storm, “No!”
Alexander braced himself against the winds. Against his mother. “It doesn’t matter how long you watch.”
Vicky shook her head. “Of course it does.”
Alexander pulled the neck of his raincoat tight. He shouted from under his yellow rubber hood. “No one doubts your love.”
Vicky turned her face away from her son, towards the sea. She spoke softly, too softly for him to hear. “I only want to remember him.”
The thrashing of the rain had dug tiny gutters around her feet. The ground had begun to loosen and Alexander felt it shift. A crack opened between them: twenty-two years of standing in the same spot had undermined the cliff’s foundation. Alexander reached out frantically towards his mother, his eyes wide with fright. He screamed for her to take his hand. Vicky reached out towards her son but when her hand was almost in his, she stopped. Her fear left her and she smiled. She let her hand drop to her side.
“For God’s sake, Mother!”
Alexander could say nothing more. The wind and rain howled, and blasts of thunder and lightning crashed everywhere, but he had never seen his mother so calm, so beautiful. It was as if she had been waiting for her turn, and it had finally come. The ground gave out under her and he watched his mother disappear with the cliff’s crumbling edge.
Her body was never found. All the villagers said that she was finally returned to her beloved Tom, beneath the ocean’s waves.
XI.
Next to my bed, on the small table, I found a glass lily the morning following Vicky’s story. I was at a loss to explain how it had gotten there, as Marianne Engel had left the hospital well before I fell asleep. When I asked the nurses whether any of them had left the glass lily, they all swore that they had not. Furthermore, Maddy firmly held that no one had passed by the nurses’ station during the night. Which meant that either the nurses were lying, or Marianne Engel had sneaked back in under the cover of darkness.
The second question about the glass lily was: what did it represent?
Why, you might be asking, do I assume that it had any meaning at all? Some things, blown-glass objects among them, are simply pleasing to look at. (And need I remind you that real flowers were not allowed in the burn unit?) Nevertheless, I was certain that it did have meaning; the more time I spent with Marianne Engel, the more certain I became that all things are inexplicably connected.
“Well,” Dr. Edwards said, “a little mystery is not always a bad thing. It forces a person to have faith.”
“Don’t tell me that you’re religious, Nan. I don’t think I could stand it.”
“My religion, or lack of it, is none of your business. You have your life, like last night’s big feast, and I have my life.” There was a touch of—jealousy, anger, disdain? what?—in her voice.
It was odd that Nan would resent a meal she herself had authorized. Ever the opportunist, I saw this as an opening to ask a question that had been bothering me: yes, I knew that hypermetabolism required me to take in an inordinate number of calories, but what was the real reason she had authorized Marianne Engel to bring meals for me?
“Everybody needs to eat,” Nan said simply.
Her answer, of course, was not an answer. So I asked again. Nan, as she sometimes did, took a moment to weigh the benefits against the drawbacks of speaking the truth. I liked it when she did this. True to form, she didn’t lie. “I allow these meals for a number of reasons. First, it is good for you to take in as much nourishment as possible. I’m doing it for the nurses, too, because you’re a nicer person after Ms. Engel visits. But most of all, I’m doing it because I’ve never met anyone who needs a friend as badly as you do.”
It must have felt good for Nan to get that off her chest. I asked what she thought about Marianne Engel helping with my physical therapy, and she admitted exactly what I suspected, that she did not like the idea very much.
“You worry I’m going to come to start depending on her too much,” I said, “and that she’ll let me down.”
“Doesn’t that worry you, too?”
“Yes,” I answered.
Since Nan had chosen to tell me the truth, the least I could do was reply in kind.
Everything seemed to be progressing more or less exactly as it should. Now that I actually had a desire to improve my body and was working to do so, I could feel myself becoming stronger. ARE YOU SURE? But preparation for the real world included the mental as well as the physical.
Maddy put me in a wheelchair and pushed me into a common area with four other burn patients. A man stood at the podium in a dress shirt and tie: Lance Whitmore was a former patient who had survived burns that were almost (but not quite) as bad as mine. His damage was less visible—only the right side of hi
s jaw and neck revealed that he had been burned—but he said he had extensive keloid scarring on his torso that he could show us at the end of the lecture, should we desire to see what we could expect a few years into our recoveries. I didn’t; it was enough to deal with the present day.
Lance’s presence was intended to be both inspirational and informative. He’d been on the outside for three years and he was ready to pass along some hints for a successful transition, just like an AA speaker.
“Look up the word insult in the dictionary,” Lance began, “and you’ll find a number of definitions. In the medical sense, the word refers to harm brought to the body from an outside force, which in our case was fire. Of course, there’s also the more common meaning, and you’re going to get your share of insults—both intentional and not—when you leave this place. People don’t quite know what to make of us.”
Lance’s speech went as one might expect: he talked about the “challenges” and “opportunities” he’d faced, and what he’d done to reclaim his life. When he was finished, he opened the floor to discussion.
The first question was from a female patient who’d been scratching herself through the entire talk. She wanted to know if her “damn donor sites” would always itch “so damn much.”
“The itching will eventually go away. I promise.” There was a general murmur of relief through the group. Even I, who had vowed to remain quiet, let out a thankful sigh. “There’s nothing you can do but tough it out, unfortunately, but I always found it helpful to remember what Winston Churchill once said.”
“‘We shall never surrender’?” suggested the itchy female.
“Well, yeah,” laughed Lance, “but I was thinking about ‘If you’re going through Hell…keep going.’”
Another patient asked, “What’s it like when you go out in public?”
“It’s really hard, especially the first couple of times. Most people pretend they can’t see you, but they whisper. Some will mock you openly, usually young men. The interesting thing is that a lot of people think that if you’re burnt, you must’ve done something to deserve it. The teaching of the ages, right? Fire as a sign of divine retribution. It’s difficult for people to face something as illogical as us—burned, but alive—so we must have done something wrong, or otherwise they’d have to accept that it could happen to them.” He paused. “Who here thinks their burns are some kind of punishment?”
We looked at each other before one patient tentatively raised his hand, followed by a second. I was not going to raise my arm, no matter how long Lance waited.
“It’s completely normal,” he assured us. “Why me? I asked the question every day but never got an answer. I lived a good life. I went to church, paid my taxes, volunteered on weekends with a boys’ club. I was, and am, a good person. So—why—me?” Pause. “There is no reason. A moment of bad luck, with lifelong consequences.”
Another patient asked, “Do people ask about your burn?”
“Children, because they haven’t learned tact. Some adults do, too, and to be honest I appreciate it. Every single person you meet for the rest of your life will be wondering about it, so sometimes it’s good to get it out of the way so you can move onto other things.”
A timid hand went up. “What about sex?”
“I like it.” Lance’s delivery of the line earned some laughs, and I guessed that he had given this speech often enough to perfect his answers to the questions that always came. “It’ll be different for everyone. Your skin was a pretty amazing part of the experience, right? The largest organ of the body, a surface area of about three square meters, and that’s a lot of possibility for pleasure. Now we’ve lost a lot of our nerve endings, and that really sucks.”
The patient who had asked the question sighed heavily, but Lance held up his hand to indicate that he still had a few more things to say. “Skin is the dividing line between people, where you end and others begin. But in sex, all that changes. If skin is a fence that divides people, sex is the gate that opens your body to the other person.”
Never again would I have that option, not with anyone. Not with Marianne Engel.
Lance cleared his throat. “I’m lucky: my wife stayed with me. In fact, the burn brought us closer together emotionally, and that’s translated into our sexual activity as well. It forced me to become a better lover, because I’ve had to become more, umm, creative. That’s all I’ll say about that.”
“What was hardest for you, after your release?”
“That’s a tough one, but I think it was wearing the pressure garments twenty-three hours a day. They’re amazing, you know, for limiting the scarring but—Jesus Christ!—it’s like being buried alive. You look forward to your bath, even though it hurts, just to get out of the damn thing.” Lance held my eyes for a moment, and I had the feeling that he was speaking to me specifically. “I wore mine for the first ten months after release but for some of you it’ll be a year, or longer.”
He continued, “It’s only after you get out of here that you’ll finally realize that a burn lasts forever. It’s a continual event, one that constantly reinvents itself. You’ll swoop from incredible highs when you’re just glad to be alive, to those lows when you wish you were dead. And just when you start thinking that you’ve accepted who you are, that changes, too. Because who you are is not permanent.”
Lance looked a little embarrassed, as if he’d talked himself into an area where he didn’t want to go. He moved his gaze around the room, engaging all eyes for a few moments, before beginning the big wind-up. “Modern burn treatment is incredible, and the doctors are amazing, and I’m so thankful to be alive. But none of that is enough. Your skin was the emblem of your identity, the image that you presented to the world. But it was never who you really are. Being burned doesn’t make you any less—or more—human. It only makes you burnt. So you’re in a unique position to understand what most people never will, that skin is the clothing but not the essence of a person. Society pays lip service to the idea that beauty is only skin deep, but who understands like we do?
“Some day soon,” Lance said, “you’ll walk out of here and have to decide how you’re going to live the rest of your lives. Will you be defined by what other people see, or by the essence of your soul?”
TWO VERY POOR CHOICES.
Gregor brought an assortment of goodies to wish me a happy Halloween. Because we are men, we didn’t mention our previous conversation, and the candy was his way of saying that we should pick up where we’d left off before our spat. If the place hadn’t been a hospital, I’m certain he would have brought a six-pack of beer.
The evening proved to be a breakthrough in our friendship. Gregor told me a somewhat embarrassing story about his very worst Halloween, when he’d dressed—in a misguided effort to impress a medical student he fancied—as a human liver. He’d gone to great lengths to make his costume as realistic as possible, including a rubber hose that was supposed to approximate the hepatic tube, which he hooked to a hidden bag of vodka in the organ’s left lobe. His rationale was that he could take sips throughout the evening, whenever his nervousness with the woman became too much. (For perhaps the first time in history, a man filtered alcohol out of his liver to put into his body.) Unfortunately, his shyness was so great that he soon became completely drunk. At the end of the evening, Gregor and his date found themselves in the loft of an artist who made a living imitating the works of Jackson Pollock. The story ended with Gregor paying the artist several hundred dollars after vomiting onto one of his canvases, although I don’t know how it could have made any difference to the work.
I tried to one-up Gregor with my most embarrassing Christmas story, of a failed attempt at seducing a department store elf who was married to a steroid-abusing Santa. Gregor responded with a yuletide tale of his own, in which he accidentally shot his mother with the BB gun he’d received after months of swearing that safety would be his primary concern. In the end, we somehow decided to share the single most embarrassing
stories of our childhoods, holidays or not. I went first.
As a normal young boy I discovered it was pleasurable to stroke my penis, but as I was living with my addict aunt and addict uncle at the time, I had no one with whom to discuss my biological discovery.
I had a vague understanding, from eavesdropping on the meth-smoking adults, that there were such things as venereal diseases. You certainly did not want to contract one, as nasty things would happen to your jigger if you did. (Aunt Debi, when she found herself unable to avoid referring to my penis, always called it a jigger.) I also knew that venereal diseases were passed in the fluids that resulted from sexual acts. I could have done some research, I suppose, but I knew the librarians too well to risk being caught looking through such books. Besides, it was all pretty straightforward: since there was venereal disease in ejaculate and I was now capable of ejaculating, I would have to be careful not to infect myself. So I reviewed my options.
I could stop masturbating. But it felt too good.
I could cover my stomach with a towel to catch the offending fluid. But the towels were too large to hide and too difficult to clean discreetly.
I could masturbate into a sock. But all my socks were of a loose cotton weave, through which seepage threatened to enter the pores of my skin.
I could masturbate into zip-lock sandwich bags. Yes: not only was this approach medically sound, but also it offered an unusual level of convenience. Clearly, this was the way to go.
Before long I had a large collection of brimming Baggies under my bed, but I couldn’t simply bundle them up with our regular trash—what if someone discovered them, or if a scrounging dog spread the salty bags across the front lawn? So I decided the best option was to place them in another family’s garbage can; the farther away from our trailer, the better.
The ideal location would be the rich area of town, removed from the trailer park both in distance and social standing. What I failed to consider, however, is that moneyed folk react suspiciously to young boys sneaking around their trash bins. Before long a police car arrived and I was standing in front of two burly officers trying to explain my surreptitious actions.
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