Pucker (5 page)

“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.

“What do you want, honey?” The waitress, a woman in her fifties who wore her pink uniform with panache, looked at her kindly and my mother didn't know what to make of it. This world was so different from her own. People showed their emotion all the time in America. She could see what people felt when they walked down the street, when they talked on the phone; it was even evident in the way they drove their cars. She found it exhausting.

“I have fifty-five cents,” she said to the waitress, showing her the coins.

“You can stay here twenty minutes—half an hour, tops. I'm sorry, but you smell and it's bad for business. Fifty-five cents will buy you a cup of coffee and a pastrami sandwich,” said the waitress.

My mother didn't know the cost of things yet, so she didn't know the waitress was doing her a favor. The food came quickly and my mother gobbled it down. When the waitress brought her a large glass of milk, then my mother understood she was being nice.

“Thank you,” said my mother, touching her hand. The waitress flinched, unable to move as an invisible current of energy leapt between them and my mother received a vision of the waitress later that night opening the door to a middle-aged man.

“Tonight you will have a visitor. It's been twenty-two years since you've seen him,” my mother told her.

The waitress, spooked, retracted her hand. “I think you'd better go.”

My mother found a park and sat under a tree, far away from the small children and their mothers, their strollers, their bags of snacks and juice boxes. As soon as she sat, her grief began to rise, from her toes up through her body. The tears started slowly, just one creeping down her left cheek. A few minutes later she was weeping openly.

Her visions had returned. In this world she could see the future even without her Seerskin. Something must have happened when she passed through the portal. She had never considered that Isaurian magic might manifest itself differently here.

The following morning she went back to the café and again sat at the counter. The waitress walked up to her slowly. My mother was unfamiliar with the complex look on her face: gratitude, awe, and a tiny bit of fear.

“You have a gift,” the waitress said.

“Some call it that,” said my mother.

“There are people who would be interested in your gift and would pay well for it.”

“I'd need a place to see them.”

The waitress pointed to a table in the back. “You can work there. There's a shower in the back. Go get cleaned up. I'll make some calls.”

My mother hesitated. “I don't know what to charge. I don't know how to attach value to this thing . . . what I can do.”

She looked at the waitress—at her shiny face, her perfectly coiffed hair. Pinned to the woman's uniform was a name tag that read
Huguette
.

Huguette didn't hesitate. “One hundred dollars,” she said.

 

By Friday evening, when my mother returned to the burn unit, she had told twenty-two fortunes, had put a security deposit down on an apartment, and had five hundred dollars in cash. She marched up to the receptionist's desk.

“My first payment,” she told the woman, slapping the money down in front of her. The woman looked at her suspiciously.

“I thought you said you were a transient.”

By this time my mother knew that
transient
was an insult.

“You'll get five hundred dollars a week until my bill is paid off.”

It was May when I had my first graft. In June my mother was told she could take me home to rest, but she would need to bring me back in September for another series of grafts.

My mother came to pick me up from the hospital in a Chevy Impala. I hadn't seen, never mind ridden in, an automobile before. I couldn't believe that people lived like this, with so many conveniences.

I rolled down the window. The air smelled of wood smoke. I gulped in the familiar scent like oxygen. I saw children playing ball in the streets and mothers hanging up laundry in their backyards. All of these people with their easy, taken-for-granted lives. I missed Isaura, I missed Cook, and I missed my father most of all.

“I thought you'd like the car, Thomas,” my mother said. “Everyone has them here.”

“I hate it.” I was lying, of course. I was fascinated by the car.

I had been waiting to leave the hospital for so long, but now that the day was here, I couldn't wait for it to be over. The sight of my mother's worn face, her eagerness to have me home, and her excitement for us to start our new life sickened me. Didn't she miss Isaura? Didn't she hate it here, on the world to which we had been banished?

“Stop looking at me,” I cried.

My mother sat quietly, absorbing my rage. “We have to make the best of it, Thomas. This is our life now. This is where we live.”

“I'll never get used to it,” I said.

My mother reached out for me and I flinched, trying to get as far away from her as I could. Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the passenger-side mirror. My face was no longer oozing: instead it was a patchwork of purplish squares, skin harvested from my stomach. I wept hard and noisily, my rib cage heaving up and down. My mother kept driving, but she reached out and covered my hand with hers.

“I know it seems that way now,” she said.

Now she began to cry. I made myself watch her. What a funny thing, crying. The way her shoulders jerked up and down, how she let the tears stream down her neck and wet her shirt collar.

“Stop it,” I finally said.

She nodded, but it took her a few minutes to collect herself. It was my first experience with telling my mother what to do. It frightened me, this power.

“I like the car,” I admitted. “How did you get it?” I ran my hands over the red vinyl seats.

“I bought it.”

“But how did you pay for it?”

“Doing readings.”

I stared at her in shock. “But you don't have your Seerskin.”

“That's right—I don't have my Seerskin,” she repeated.

“Then how can you see the future?”

My mother pounded the steering wheel with her fists. “You think I know?” she cried.

The car swerved to the left and I slid into my mother. I quickly scuttled back to my side of the seat—I didn't want to touch her. Because of her rebellion, my father was dead and we had been exiled to America. But apparently it had all been for nothing, because here she was, still getting visions, even without her skin!

“But Barker's,” I said.

“Damn Barker's!” she shouted. “The magic works differently here, Thomas.”

A car whizzed by and my mother winced. I thought she was reacting to the roar of the engine—America was so loud. I didn't know she was flinching because she had just received a vision that the driver would run a red light at the next cross section and hit a dog. What my mother hadn't told me yet was that her ability to see into the future had intensified without the protection of her Seerskin. She no longer had to be touching somebody to see their future. In Isaura a skinless Seer would go mad from the loss of visions. Here in this world, a skinless Seer would go mad from too many visions. My mother would hide this from me for years.

“I'm afraid,” I whispered.

My mother pulled the car over to the side of the road. I was quaking, cramming myself into the space in front of the passenger seat. She got out, walked around the car, opened my door, and gathered me up. She carried me into the shade of a giant beech tree.

“It's all right, baby. It's all right,” she crooned.

It was four in the afternoon. It was a busy road, a main thoroughfare. At this time of the day the traffic was largely made up of women shuttling their children from school to soccer, from violin lessons to the dentist. I had my back to the road and to them must have looked like a perfectly normal boy.

These women, these kind women, nodded to my mother as they drove by, the way mothers acknowledged other mothers when their children threw tantrums in the stores, or hurled their shoes into a pond, or threw up after eating too much candy. We were just like them, just another mother and child having a rocky moment. Until I turned around and they saw my face.

 

My mother had rented the upstairs of a two-family home in Rockridge: not the best of neighborhoods, but not the worst.

“Mums.” She pointed to the two pots that she'd placed on either side of our front door.

I shrugged; I was too young to comprehend the effort she'd put into making that apartment presentable. Suddenly the door opposite ours flew open with great force. I took an involuntary step backward.

“Whoa!” said a redheaded woman, catching sight of me. Then, a long drawn-out “Whoa” again.

She tried to look at me without flinching. She couldn't do it. Her eyes slid off mine and darted around my face like dragonflies looking for a safe place to land. Eventually she focused on a spot by my temple.

I had been forewarned that this would happen. The staring, the looking away, the coming back for more. I felt a crushing loneliness; even at that young age I knew I would always be alone, the old Thomas looking out from the new Thomas's monstrous face.

My mother put her hand on my shoulder protectively. “Marla, this is my son, Thomas.”

“Your son? I didn't know you had a son.”

My mother unlocked the door and pushed me ahead of her onto the stairs. The screen door latched behind us. Marla pressed her face to the mesh. “How'd he get burned?”

My mother didn't answer.

“Hey, I asked you a question. How'd he get burned?”

“That's none of your business,” my mother said.

Marla let out a large “humph.”

My mother hesitated, her fingers twitching.

“Hey, little man. Head up. You don't look so bad,” Marla called out to me.

I spun around. Any kind thing said by someone belonging to the normal world would make me beholden to them; it would be this way for many years. I gave Marla a little wave and my mother marched me up the stairs.

 

The next afternoon I overheard Marla talking to her boyfriend in the backyard.

“The kid's a freak. Wait till you see him. His face looks like uncooked sausage.”

Grown-ups lied. They lied all the time.

 

I had endured only one out of what would be five skin grafts. The first week I was home I missed the rehabilitation center terribly. I had gotten close to many of the nurses in the burn unit, in particular one named Clara Graves—she of the molten orange voice. She had a crooked fang tooth and long blond hair and she smelled of gardenias. Often she would bring me gifts: yo-yos, something called an Etch A Sketch, and once a packet of Twinkies. I couldn't bring myself to eat them. They looked too perfect—twin loaves of yellow sponge cake. I waited until she left and threw them out.

One day the doorbell rang.

“Thomas!” my mother called.

I ran to the top of the stairs. At first I didn't recognize Clara: she was out of her hospital greens and her hair was loose instead of pulled back into a ponytail. She waved gaily. Attached to her hand was a boy. Did she know I had thrown away the Twinkies? Had she come to yell at me?

“Are you up for some company?” Clara asked.

I wasn't sure. I wanted to see Clara but was nervous about the boy.

“Okay,” I said.

The boy ran up the stairs first. He was shorter than me but stronger and stockier. His hair was a silvery brown and cut choppily all over his head so that it stood up. He plowed into me like a little bull.

“I'm seven and three-quarters,” he crowed.

I fell to the ground.

“Patrick Edward Graves!” Clara shouted.

Patrick got up, slapping his jeans with his hands. “Sorry.” He stood very close to me and examined my face.