My favorite thing to do was to tell him jokes. He’d always snort through his nostril holes, then write: You have me in stitches.
Later, I would come to see the irony in that statement.
4: Cadaver
Clover and I were sixteen and a half, and The Collector had become a man. He looked to be eighteen or nineteen, though I could only guess by the way his suits hung different on broader shoulders and thicker arms and legs. He still showed up each time in the mask that never revealed his face, and mittens that covered his hands.
Pa’s final dismembering had been a success, bringing us to our last meeting with our strange friend and business partner.
I’d just laid out a batch of gingerbread men to cool so I could decorate them while we waited for his arrival. A brisk breeze blew through the half-opened picture window and the early sun slathered the room in an apricot haze. It was only Pa and me that day. Clover had taken Oakley out to bird-watch in the forest.
“Did you substitute brown sugar for the molasses in this batch?” Pa asked after taking a bite. As a side effect of his tongue transplant, he could pick out spices and flavorings in the things I baked and he’d lost the taste for liquor completely. Hadn’t touched a drop in over a year.
“I used both,” I answered. “Just wanted to try something new.”
Pa nodded. I could tell by the crimp between his eyebrows he was troubled. Today we would get his final puzzle piece. Blots of red dotted the bandage that covered his left wrist and fresh stump. The blood looked like birds flying across a horizon to some unexplored destination. Maybe to carry some dead soul between the real world and the afterlife.
Pa lifted his right hand to take another bite of the cookie. He had started favoring his right even before we removed the left. Apparently, his cadaver donor wasn’t a southpaw like him.
His frown deepened as he chewed on the gingerbread man’s head.
I pressed gumdrop buttons into the other cookies while I waited for him to say what was on his mind. Maybe he was going to miss The Collector as much as I was. Or maybe he was scared to see the money stop coming in.
There was no reason to worry. We’d managed to live off only a small percentage of the one hundred thousand dollars, and the rest was in savings. Clover had found a job in town at a local grocer, and Pa and Oakley had revived Ma’s vegetable garden, providing us plenty of food with enough left over to sell to Clover’s boss. I planned to get a job too, once Pa was finally put together for good. Although I wasn’t sure what sort of job I was qualified for . . . other than baking things, or chopping parts off of people and sewing them back on pretty. I’d become good at making perfect stitches. Pa had been my guinea pig.
“There’s something I need to give you,” Pa said at last after swallowing a swig of milk. He reached under the table and dug in his pocket, pulling out a small box and offering it to me.
I opened the lid. Ma’s bird-shaped diamond ring glittered from inside a nest of tissue paper.
My throat swelled up. “Where did you find this?” I asked. She’d had it on when she ran out the door into the storm that night. I saw it reflect the lightning in the darkness. Something inside me started to uncoil . . . something teetering between numb and potent, like a snake that had been dormant.
“This has to do with that magnolia tree you’re so fond of,” Pa answered, his gaze turned down. “The one with the gash in its side. Sage, it wasn’t lightning that caused the wood to split. Something crashed into it. I had suspected that all along after seeing it the day after Ma went missing. The tree knows. It—” Pa couldn’t finish. He started coughing, as if something had caught in his throat. He guzzled his glass of milk and studied me over the rim.
The sadness in his blue eyes scored me deep. There was more to this story, but it was as if his new tongue refused to work . . . as if it physically hurt him to recount it.
At last I understood. All those months after Ma left, he looked for her. That was why he refused to get a job. Why he’d go into town and stay away until he was skunk drunk. Because he could never find the answers he was seeking, and it was killing him not knowing. And he held it all inside himself.
But that changed the night he met The Collector.
Pa laid his right palm on the table and stretched his long, delicate fingers. “These replacements have given me peace. The doctor helped me find your ma again. And I finally did right by you kids.”
His words were cryptic and smoky, as if secrets singed the edges of each one.
He took out the ring and dropped it in my palm, wrapping my fingers around it with his soft hand. “You keep this part of her. She’d want you to have it. You’re the strongest of all of us. Remember that today, when you get the last cadaver piece.”
I slid the ring on, wondering if one day I’d have a bird indention in the skin above my knuckle like hers. My chest twisted up tight. I’d always figured she’d come back. And now, the reality of that never happening felt like a knife sawing my heart, back and forth, until it snapped clean through.
I squeezed Pa’s palm for the first time since he’d had the new hand. It felt so familiar, like when Ma would wrap her fingers through mine. Like when I first learned to walk. When I broke my elbow. When I had scarlet fever.
The flutter of wrens outside the window startled me. I pulled away.
The Collector’s motorbike roared into our front yard and Pa looked at me as if in a daze, then stood and left the kitchen to let our guest in.
I put the finishing touches on the gingerbread men, drawing hair, faces, and tailored vests with icing. My hands trembled and Ma’s ring sparkled on my finger in the soft light. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something. Something I’d been missing all along.
Something Pa’s new tongue just couldn’t tell me.
The screen door opened and closed and I waited for The Collector to come in. But it was only Pa, holding the ice chest.
“He left,” Pa said, handing me a note. “But this is for you.”
I unfolded the paper and silently read the words: Your family is together now. I hope at last we can all have the pieces we deserve.
Pieces. In place of peace. I’d read enough of The Collector’s notes to know he had perfect spelling. The pun was intentional.
“I’m going to sleep now,” Pa said, taking the sedatives with him. “Wake me when it’s over.” He started out the door for the shed but paused. “Don’t judge the doctor or the boy. They tried to do right by us.”
I stared at Pa’s retreating shadow, then back at the note. My whole body quaked as I opened the ice chest’s lid and carefully lifted the cadaver hand to the light. There, on the left ring finger, was the dove imprint worn into the skin.
I gasped and dropped the hand.
I clamped my jaw shut, swallowing the bile that climbed my throat.
The doctor helped me find your ma again, Pa had said.
Looking into his blue eyes, listening to that gentle tongue, it was as obvious as the scars upon his wrist, ankles, and ears. Both of my parents were inside the patchwork quilt of skin that had sat in the kitchen with me minutes ago, eating gingerbread.
The donor cadaver’s identity was a mystery no more. And it was time to pay the reclusive doctor a visit.
5: Burying the Hatchet
That night, I stitched on Pa’s final piece, but there was no pretending. I couldn’t block out or forget that it was Ma’s hand, but I also could never let Clover or Oakley know where it came from, either. I understood on some level that Pa was innocent. He only wanted to give us back our ma and give us a better life. He’d done that. He deserved to be complete and to never have any regrets. He also deserved to be perfect, all but one left ring finger, amputated just below the knuckle.
As he slept off the sedative, and Clover and Oakley dreamed the simple dreams I would never have again, I tossed an ax i
nto the back of Pa’s Chevy and headed for town. When I passed Ma’s tree, I could finally see why Pa thought something violent happened there. The split no longer looked to me like a streak of white in auburn hair like it once did. It looked like a gash—an infected pus-filled wound.
The town looked different too. Lonely and looming. All the stores and cafes that usually pulsed with life stared back with dark windows, reflecting the truck’s headlights. I took the same side road where I’d once caught sight of The Collector’s motorbike turning and wove my way toward the outskirts of town where the doctor was rumored to live.
I hadn’t let myself stop to think how The Collector was involved in all this. Somewhere in my heart, I couldn’t imagine he’d been behind Ma’s death. But if he was . . . he would warrant the same ending as his employer.
The three-story house, large and dark, looked like a black gaping maw in the moonlight. I parked the truck and wove my way through the hundreds of wrens pecking the ground. They didn’t seem to notice or care that I was there. They just moved aside, busy with their routines. There were even more, some singing soft and haunting from the house’s roof and eaves, high above, and others flapping their wings in the oak trees that surrounded the estate.
Spirit carriers.
My fingers tightened on the ax’s handle. They’d be happy tonight. Soon they would have someone new to whisk away.
My climb up the creaky steps seemed to take forever, stretched out even longer by my realization that the windows were boarded up. The hair on my arms bristled as the wrens grew quiet and still, as if watching when I came to the front door. It had been left ajar and a flutter of yellow candlelight seeped out. I gulped hard and cinched my hand around the ax, prepared to swing without question, then I pushed it open.
The scent of cinnamon, vanilla, and something stale wafted over me. As my eyes focused on the flickering room, the air drained from my lungs. I was alone, but dioramas stretched from wall to wall on multi-tiered shelves. Little boxes with miniature, three-dimensional scenes numbered and played out in still life. Instead of clothespin dolls to represent the people, as one might expect, there were gingerbread men, boys, and girls. All the ones I’d given The Collector over the years. Their bodies were stiff and shellacked, tilted in place to play out strange, unsettling events.
Gripping my ax, I walked closer to the diorama marked number one, where a gingerbread girl stood on the roof of a building in a big city. Flames made of tissue paper spewed out from the windows. Diorama number two showed her in a pile of icing and crumbs on the sidewalk next to the burned-out building, where she’d jumped to escape the inferno. In the next, a man in a doctor’s coat with a Bible in hand, and a young boy in a modern grown-up’s suit, stood at a grave. The one after showed the boy with his shirt off, as the doctor pressed feathers into his skin. Miniature dead birds speckled the floor. In scene five, the man drove a black car up a familiar twisty mountain road, with the boy in the passenger side. A storm and lightning streaked the painted sky. Next, the car tilted on two tires, as if losing control. Scene seven: The car crushed up against a tree. Sandwiched between the bumper and tree trunk was a gingerbread girl with two white streaks in her reddish hair. Her top half tilted off-kilter. She’d been split in half at the waist.
Wooziness filled my head, but I couldn’t stop staring. I stumbled along, my gaze trailing each diorama. The one where the doc had a gash in his head from the wreck as the boy drove him and the broken gingerbread girl back down the trail. The next, where the boy put my ma’s dead body into the freezer, and tried to stitch up the doctor, who I now understood was his pa. When I came to the one where the boy sat across from a prisoner in jail and offered him a box, I knew. The night The Collector visited Pa, he gave him her ring and explained what happened. That’s what broke Pa.
That’s what changed him.
As if to verify this, next to the diorama was another contract, where The Collector offered Pa a way to fix our family . . . to save his hell-bent spirit, and at the same time save his own pa from going to prison. My pa had been so drunk and heartbroken, he waived his rights to take legal action for the doctor’s involvement in the accident.
My throat burned, as if it had been hornet-stung from the inside. I didn’t even have to see the next diorama, where The Collector was breaking off Ma’s left foot. Because every other scene that remained, I’d lived it as we stitched my ma’s pieces onto Pa.
In the final diorama, the gingerbread boy in the suit sat in a chair by a bed where the doctor lay, hooked up to an IV and other machines. The painted background showed it was a room on the top floor of the very house I stood in. The Collector had been putting these scenes together since the day he first came to our house, in preparation for me to come tonight.
He wanted me here. Now, to find out why.
The ax’s handle was slick in my palm as I squeezed it on my walk up the stairs. The unsettling flutter of wrens gathering in the eaves outside scattered my nerves. They were waiting. And I wondered if it might be my spirit they’d be escorting away tonight.
There were five rooms on the top floor, but only one was open at the end of the long hall. Candlelight streamed out, painting dancing shadows on the wooden floor and walls. When I stepped inside, The Collector was right where I expected, seated next to his pa’s bedside.
My ears barely caught the sound of the beeping machines and the pumps filling the doctor with oxygen. I was too intent on his face. He looked younger than I’d have thought. A handsome man, in spite of the fact he’d been in a coma for three years. There was stubble on his chin and jaw, as if his son had tried to keep him shaved but given up recently.
“Was it your ma who died?” I asked The Collector, my pulse drumming below my jawline like a sledgehammer.
He nodded under his mask.
“And your pa, he heard about the bird folklore. He was trying to fix you so you could be a bird and fly to your ma. Be with her without dying.” I looked at the doctor’s arm where it was arranged atop the cover. “If it worked for you, he was going to fix himself too. Am I right?”
The Collector looked down, flinching in the mask’s eyeholes.
“But I don’t understand. There are birds everywhere on your lawn. You have enough feathers already. Why were you on my mountain that night?”
He slipped off his mask. Candlelight flickered across him, his face a tragic mishmash of stitches and feathers. He didn’t have any lips. They’d been removed, and the skin sewn shut. I realized then what the extra IV in the room was for. It was how he’d been surviving.
I couldn’t move, so stunned by the scarred, twisted image. His pa must’ve gone to the mountain in search of a bird with a bigger beak, like the hawks Oakley watched through his binoculars. A bird with a beak big enough to sew on The Collector’s face in the place of a mouth.
I took a shaky breath and forced myself not to look away from the young man who’d been so kind to my family. Forced myself to see past the ugly, vile things that had been done to him through no fault of his own.
“You tried to give me my ma back,” I said. “In the only way you knew how. And you fixed my pa.”
He nodded.
“What your pa did to you. It was wrong. Do you understand that?”
He nodded again.
“So I’m gonna kill him now. It’s the only way to make things right.”
The moment I said it, The Collector stood and worked off his mittens. All his fingers were stitched together except his thumbs, as if to form a wing tip. Gray and black feathers sprouted where there should have been only skin.
Slowly, he drew a knife from his jacket lapel.
I tensed and raised the ax in self-defense, but he backed up and turned his mutilated hand over, laying the knife in his downy palm—a peace offering.
It looked similar to a paring knife. The kind you use to peel skin from fruit while leaving it intact
to make pretty embellishments for special desserts.
Then I understood.
He’d been keeping his pa alive, just for this purpose. So he could become human again using his skin and limbs.
Even if The Collector’s hands hadn’t been damaged, he would’ve needed me. Not everyone has the ability to imagine themselves away. I’d had years of practice being Ma’s fanciful girl, and had perfected it through Pa’s reformation.
I set aside my ax and took the knife, squeezing The Collector’s feathery hand for comfort. “I’ll fix you good as new,” I promised.
With a somber nod, he left the room.
In the flickering light, I took the doctor off his IV and the machines keeping him alive. Then, the moment his heart stopped, I slid the knife beneath the flesh at his ear, carefully cutting away his stubbled face while leaving it intact.
I was no longer Sage Adams, quiet country girl with tears streaming her face, thinking of the jar of formaldehyde hidden in the garden shed with a finger afloat inside, worn with the dove-shaped imprint of a ring. Instead, I was a chef in a renowned restaurant, peeling the skin off a kiwi for a gourmet fruit sorbet.
ON THE I-5*
KENDARE BLAKE
EmmaRae Dickson sits in the booth nearest the kitchen of the Flying J Truck Stop just outside Lodi, California. It isn’t much to look at, at nearly four in the afternoon, not that it would be at any other time. The red-brown pleather under her ass sticks to her thighs despite the A/C, and something else sticks her hands against the tabletop even though she hasn’t ordered yet. She grabs a napkin from the dispenser and wipes her fingers, then pushes the ratty green duffel bag deeper into the booth. The metal buckles clang against the wall. Not her bag, but she’ll make do. And it makes her look less out of place, anyway.
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