Pucker

by Melanie Gideon

  Every hour she gave me two teaspoons of an elixir made of wolfsbane and belladonna that kept me in a woozy, drugged state. A stranger named pain had moved into the house that was my body. It whispered that it had come to live with me forever. Nights were the worst, never ending and dark. I panted and hyperventilated my way through them. I flailed my arms and legs about; often I screamed.

  Cook said, “If your body is a house, there must be rooms. Show pain into the parlor and then lock the door so it can’t get out.”

  “Baby,” my mother said when I opened my eyes a week later.

  I looked around to see what newborn my mother was addressing. But the only new person in the room was her. A skinless mother, bizarrely dull to my eyes, like an old bolt or a piece of tarnished silver.

  “Where have you been?” I asked. It came out like, “Ooo ah oo be?” but she understood what I meant.

  She knelt down by my bed. “Right here.”

  “No. Cook’s been here, not you,” I said.

  “I have too,” she said softly.

  “Then why haven’t I seen you?”

  “I’ve been—” She broke off.

  “I thought you were dead,” I said.

  Her eyes pooled up with guilt. I could see that she didn’t know where to touch me. She awkwardly took my hand, which was swaddled in bandages. It was burned too, but nowhere nearly as badly as my face. Still, I screamed and Cook came running.

  “Leave us,” my mother told her.

  Cook slowly backed out of the room.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t come sooner,” my mother said. “It’s been hard for me to adjust to life without my Seerskin.”

  Her eyes searched my face. She was trying to find some safe place to rest her gaze. Somewhere not charred and seeping.

  “Why would somebody do this?” I cried.

  I was aware that neither of us was speaking of my father—of the fact that he was gone.

  “The Ministry,” she mumbled.

  “Did they catch the person?” I interrupted her.

  She shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “You don’t understand. They’re not looking. They’re doing nothing. They won’t help. There’s no place for us here anymore.”

  “Because you were skinned? That’s not your fault!”

  My mother touched my foot tenderly. “You don’t belong here. None of us do. Not your father, not me, not you.”

  “Serena,” Cook called out from the parlor.

  “I said leave us alone, Adalia.”

  She turned back to me. “The Ministry,” she continued.

  “I don’t understand. Why aren’t they helping?” I sobbed.

  My mother’s eyes turned cold. “Listen to me, Thomas. This is their fault. You here. Like this . . .” Her voice faltered, and I was filled with self-loathing. She was repulsed. She couldn’t stand the sight of me, her ruined, burned boy.

  Their fault? She was making no sense.

  “You’re saying they did this. The Ministry skinned you?” I asked.

  Her eyes blinked rapidly, but she didn’t deny it.

  “But that’s impossible. The Ministry was created to protect the Seers, not destroy them.”

  “Nothing’s impossible,” she said sadly. “I know that now.”

  Suddenly we heard a knock on Cook’s front door. Through the parlor window we saw a flash of bright blue robe.

  “Otak,” my mother groaned.

  Otak, the High Seer of the Ministry. My mother’s great-uncle as well. Many of the more powerful Seers were related.

  Despite what my mother had just told me, I was overcome with relief. She had gone crazy, blaming the Ministry for taking her skin. Otak would protect my mother and me. He would find the people who did this to my parents.

  “He’ll help us,” I told her.

  Cook strode into the bedroom and kicked aside a threadbare rug that hid the door to the root cellar. She pushed my mother down the stairs.

  “But he’s come to help,” I whispered.

  “No, Thomas,” said Cook.

  She took three deep breaths, then toed the rug back into place. She put her finger to her lips, warning me to be quiet, and shut the bedroom door. A few seconds later I heard the creak of the front door opening.

  “Where is she?” Otak asked.

  “She’s not here,” said Cook.

  “The boy?”

  “He’s not here either.”

  I was terrified that he’d find me. But I was even more terrified that he wouldn’t.

  “I’m here,” I brayed softly. “In the bedroom.”

  A few seconds later the door opened and Otak looked at me in silence. My face was covered in bandages. Blood and pus leaked through the white gauze. The room smelled like a butcher’s shop, but his features were perfectly composed.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked.

  “They took her Seerskin,” I said. “She can’t help the way she’s acting. She’s gone crazy!”

  Otak didn’t answer me. He wandered around the bedroom, picking up bottles of Cook’s tinctures and studying the labels. I couldn’t stand the silence.

  “Please help us,” I pleaded with him. “Help her.”

  “I can’t help her unless you tell me where she is.”

  “In the root cellar. There’s a door under the rug,” I told him, and passed out.

  That evening I woke and found myself alone in the room with Cook. I was frantic. “What happened? Where’s my mother?”

  “Otak brought her to the Ministry,” said Cook.

  I could tell by the look on Cook’s face that she was terribly worried, but she was trying to hide it from me. She unwound the crusty bandages, her practiced hands going through the motions, but she was in a daze, her thoughts elsewhere. She sniffed the gauze and frowned. It smelled terrible, like the innards of a pig.

  “She thinks the Ministry did this to her. But she’s wrong. They’ll catch the people who did this to my parents. They’ll help us,” I said.

  Cook was silent a moment. “Things are not always as they seem, Thomas.” She dipped a rag in warm water and dabbed at my chin.

  I grabbed her wrist. “Stop talking in riddles.”

  Cook dropped the rag into the bowl and sat back in her chair. “Very well. Your parents were part of a movement of Seers who wanted to stop prophesizing.”

  “Prophesizing?” I said weakly.

  “Telling the future,” said Cook.

  “My parents loved their jobs,” I protested, but even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true.

  “They did not love their gift,” said Cook. “What do you think all those meetings were about at your house?”

  I closed my eyes. “Dinner parties,” I whispered.

  “No,” said Cook gently.

  “But they would have known what would happen. They would have foreseen that somebody was coming to skin them. They would have foreseen this!” I pointed at my face.

  “They didn’t know what would happen to you or to them, Thomas. They didn’t take you to the Ministry that morning, remember? They didn’t read for each other either,” said Cook.

  I gasped. Suddenly I understood what I had done. My mother had been telling me the truth after all. My parents had been made an example of, punished for their traitorous thoughts, and I had told Otak where my mother was hiding. I cried out with shame.

  “Don’t blame yourself,” said Cook. “She would have had to meet with them sooner or later. You just made it sooner.”

  She was right, of course, but I would never forgive myself.

  That night I was shaken awake. I blinked rapidly, like an owl. It was my mother. Without her Seerskin she was so ordinary. It was hard for me to look at her.

  “Wake up, Thomas. We have to leave.”

  “You’re back,” I cried. I didn’t realize until that second that the Ministry could have done something far worse to her than take her skin.

  She nodded. “Get up. You can walk. There’s nothing wrong with yo
ur legs.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re leaving Isaura,” she said. Her lips worked silently for a moment. “We’ve been exiled.”

  “No,” I wailed.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Just tell them you’re sorry. Apologize,” I begged her.

  “I’m sorry; I can’t do that.”

  “Please!”

  “I have no choice,” she said.

  “They can’t make us go. We’ll hide. We’ll go to the mountains. They won’t find us.”

  She shook her head miserably. “There’s no place for us here anymore. Don’t make me say it again, Thomas. Get up. Now.”

  “But Cook—” I began.

  “Cook has new patients to attend to.”

  “She wouldn’t let me go. I’m not well enough.”

  “She wants you to come with me.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “That’s too bad; nevertheless, you’re coming,” she said firmly, tugging the blanket off me.

  “But I have to say goodbye,” I cried. “I can’t just leave!”

  “She told me to give you this.”

  My mother pressed a book into my hand, my Barker’s. Suddenly I knew I’d never see Cook again.

  The Ministry had exiled us to Earth. Later I would consult Barker’s and find that there was no record of anything like this ever happening: our family was the first to be banished from Isaura.

  We went by way of horse and carriage. My mother whispered to a man whose voice I didn’t recognize. We traveled deep into the woods, and to calm myself, I pretended we were taking a marvelous journey to the Northlands. Marvelous. A word from a life that was no longer mine. I tried not to touch my face, since it was streaked with pus and blood.

  An hour later we climbed out of the carriage. As soon as our feet touched the ground, the driver left. I was too weak to walk, so my mother carried me through a tunnel of laurel. The tunnel’s mouth was wide and got narrower as we walked farther in. It felt like we were being telescoped. At the end of the tunnel we either began to rise or fall; I couldn’t tell which. Perhaps it didn’t matter—perhaps rising and falling were the same thing. But gravity released its hold; we spun like dust motes through a coppery quilt of light and passed out of our reality and into another.

  FOUR

  BACK IN THE PRESENT, THE doorbell rings, startling us both.

  “Yoo-hoo,” a voice yodels. “I’ve brought breakfast. I’m letting myself in.”

  Huguette. My mother’s most loyal client.

  “We’ll talk about this tonight,” my mother says. She begins to cough and soon she’s gasping for breath. She waves at me, gesturing for a Kleenex. I hold out the tissue box and she stares up at me with bleary eyes.

  “Reschedule Huguette. This can’t wait until tonight,” I say.

  “No, we need the money.” She shakes her head at me and begins hacking again.

  Huguette walks into the bedroom. Barely eight in the morning and she’s dressed and fully made up as if she were going to the opera. Around her neck she wears a silk scarf, elegantly tied. Her face falls when she sees the tray on the bed.

  “Oh, you’ve already had breakfast.” She looks at the quiche she’s brought sadly.

  “But she’s eaten none of it,” I say, taking the dish out of her hands. “Heat her up a piece after your session.”

  Huguette nods and hands me the latest issue of Car and Driver. She always brings me something: a cupcake, a set of drawing pencils, Chapstick.

  “Tell me, what young man does not lust after cars?” she asks, content that I will now go and leave her with my mother.

  Despite the fact that I’m desperate to continue my conversation with my mother, my exchange with Huguette is artful, and we both enjoy it, for there is a secret, cruder conversation lurking beneath. You again. Yes, I know you’re guardian of this house. Here’s my offering. Now get the hell out.

  Even though Huguette’s gesture is largely self-serving, she’s not unkind, nor is she altogether wrong. I do lust after motorized vehicles, just not ones with four wheels; motorcycles are my passion. Still, I like that she takes the time to think what a teenager like me would enjoy. I mean, she could try so hard to pretend I’m normal that she would give me Maxim or Details, the grotesque images of a life that will never be mine. I adore Huguette. She sees no need to make apologies to me for my life.

  “I’m afraid I have nothing to offer you,” my mother tells Huguette, flashing me a dirty look.

  I haven’t done the shopping yet—I’ve been too busy with finals. I know what she’s thinking: she’s stuck in the house and I get to go out in the world. With my puckered face. She seems to forget about that.

  “I ate hours ago,” says Huguette.

  My mother glances at the clock. “Patrick will be waiting,” she says.

  I swig the last of my orange juice and stuff my leather gloves into the bowl of my motorcycle helmet, stalling.

  “I’ll be all right,” my mother says, her voice softening. “You can leave.”

  Huguette dismisses me. “Go, be with your tribe.”

  My tribe. Right.

  FIVE

  MY MOTHER SOUGHT HELP FOR me immediately after we arrived in Peacedale, a small town in the smallest state in America. We would have a lot of adjustments to make. America was years ahead of Isaura: it had electricity, cell phones, computers, and highways.

  Isaura was stuck in the horse-and-wagon days. This was deliberate. We could have gone America’s way; we had been on that track. But after the Great War the Ministry had decided that technological innovation would be the end of our civilization. So we’d purposely never moved beyond candle power and outhouses. We did have running water, the Ministry’s one concession to modernity.

  We wandered the streets at midnight. My mother knew we couldn’t afford to be seen in the day, not with me looking like a mummy and pus seeping out from beneath my bandages. She found the Valley Rehabilitation Center at 2:45 a.m. The doors were locked. She led me back into the woods and made me take a big swallow of Cook’s elixir so I could sleep.

  “Just a few more hours,” she said.

  The next morning she brought me back to the rehabilitation center. They took one look at my third-degree burns and rushed me to the Edward F. Anderson Burn Unit, where I would spend the next month. My mother was left to fill out the forms.

  “Names?”

  “Serena and Thomas Quicksilver.”

  My mother had decided she would change our last name. Maybe she thought somebody might come looking for us from Isaura. Or maybe this was part of forgetting, of moving into our new life.

  “Address?”

  She was tempted to tell them our address in Isaura but couldn’t bring herself to say the words out loud; she must look forward, not backward. Temporarily stumped, she said nothing.

  The woman at the desk looked her up and down impatiently. “Transient?”

  “Yes,” my mother said. She didn’t know yet what transient meant here. Not just “traveling,” “in between places,” but “homeless bum.”

  “I take it you have no insurance, then?”

  My mother bristled, hearing the woman incorrectly. “Of course I’ll give you assurance. He’s a good, obedient boy. He’s very brave. He suffers pain stoically. He will give you no trouble.”

  The receptionist looked at her like she was crazy. She wrote in big block letters on the form, UNABLE TO PAY.

  “That’s not the truth. I have money.” My mother stabbed the form with her index finger.

  She was lying. She had nothing but what she was wearing and a satchel that contained a wheel of cheese, my Barker’s, and a sketch of her and my father on their wedding day.

  My mother left me at the burn center on a Monday and didn’t return until Friday evening. During that time I thought I would die. Every morning I was given a morphine drip and I fell into a deep slumber, only to be wrenched awake when they were cleaning my wounds. They pe
eled me like a roasted pepper. I had a tube in my mouth and a smaller tube in my nose. They told me even the inside of my throat was burned.

  I couldn’t single out anybody’s face, for the shifts changed often and time was either stretched out or abbreviated. An hour could last half a day or go by in three minutes. But their voices I could differentiate. There was one nurse I liked. She spoke to me tenderly, as if I were her child. If her voice could have had a color, it would have been molten orange. You may think this strange, that I found the color of fire soothing. But I had eaten fire; it had marked me as its own and we would be kin for life.

  “How did it happen, Thomas?” the nurse with the orange voice asked.

  “Candle. Curtains.” Full sentences were beyond me.

  “Somebody cared for you. Some sort of herbal poultice?”

  “My mom.” We had agreed I would say this.

  “She did a good job; she kept the wounds clean. But I’m glad she brought you here.”

  I didn’t answer, because she was peeling a long strip of skin off my cheek with a pair of tweezers.

  “Just this last one,” she promised. I trusted her and steeled myself. She was not like some of the other nurses, who would lie and tear off the skin without warning, thinking it was better to be surprised.

  I knew what was coming next: the Xeroform, this cold yellow goop they spread on before the layers of gauze and Ace bandages. I loved this part. The ointment was cool and smelled like mints. The nurse’s hands became Cook’s hands applying the poultices, and my two worlds, Isaura and Earth, became one. Done with my torture for the day, I sank back into the arms of the morphine.

  My mother told me she spent the first day trying to get a job. Anything: waitressing, working in a toy factory, cataloging books at the library. She had no references, no job experience, and was turned away everywhere. She did the same thing the next day. People were far less generous on Tuesday. She smelled. Her hair was uncombed, her clothes unkempt. She was thrown out of more than one place. On Wednesday she made the rounds once again, walking into every storefront, every bank and grocery store. On Thursday, desperate, with fifty-five cents to her name (that she had found in a phone booth), she went into a café and sat at the counter. Her feet hurt. The two men sitting to her left moved into a booth. She tried to smooth down her hair.