Spare and Found Parts (7 page)

“I've heard enough, Oliver. I don't care. You can go risk your life in a burned-out old hospital, make profit out of artifacts belonging to the dead, and give my best friend an operation she's been refusing for her entire life all you want; just please leave me out of it. I have my own work to do.”

“Do you, though?” he asked her. “Do you really? Nell, come with me and see the workshop I've made. Nobody even knows it's there yet; it's brand-new. I built it myself. There's real enterprise to be had from passing these old limbs on; it's a real contribution. If you band with me, you'll be spared the statue. You'll get a second chance. To get involved, you know? Really contr—”

“The next person who says the word
contribute
anywhere near me is liable to get physically injured. Don't you dare turn this into another proposition. I am leaving.”

Nell kicked the stand up and hopped on her bike. Oliver reached out to touch her arm, but she gave him a look so dark that he retreated.

“But Ruby said—”

“Ruby apparently says a lot of things, Oliver.”

Nell put her foot down on the pedal. Her whole body was on fire, and somewhere in the blaze a small voice asked if maybe Oliver was on to something. A chamber of possibility, a way to quiet Nan. A suitable partner whose contribution aligned with her own. Maybe, ugh, it wasn't wise to blow him out of the water yet—just in case. He was so desperate. Cruelty wound its way up Nell's throat, and she said, “Let's talk in a few days.”

She didn't even look at him.

Oliver gasped with joy. Nell rolled her eyes and began to cycle away.

“Good night, Nell! I'll see you soon!” she heard, echoing down the path behind her. She didn't look back.

Nell waited until she was far into the thicket to let the hot tears pour out of her tired eyes and roll down the colors Ruby had so delicately painted on her lids
and temples. There was nobody out in the parklands to see her as she tore through the blackness; it was just she and Kodak. She'd go home, and she'd draw the boy some more. She'd sleep, and she'd wake up and make some plans, figure out how to start. In a few days she'd talk to bloody Oliver if she hadn't thought of another way by then.

As she passed through the wilds, in the distance she saw an elephant, slowly and gracefully walking across the meadow. She'd seen it before, when she was alone. Her mother had drawn the tall gray creatures for her when she was a child.

She didn't know much about them because she'd never seen one up close, but Cora had told her that they never forgot. They had vast and endless memories; they were wise and gentle. In hushed tones Cora had told Nell that some of the elephants were hundreds of years old; something to do with experiments around the time of the Turn had slowed their aging. Nell looked at the great shadowy creature and wondered what it knew, what it had seen.

She thought about that all the way home.

T
he door of her father's laboratory was cold against Nell's cheek as she knelt against it, her face wet, kohl and purple powder streaking her cheeks. Her eyes were heavy and sore from crying, but the argument trickling through the wood hooked around her and pulled her closer.

“You're
sick,
Crane,
sick
!” came Daniel Underwood's voice. It was an awful shock, the sound of Ruby's father, raising his voice like this to her da.

“I should have known you wouldn't understand! You
can't
understand what I do!” her father shouted back, furious, desperate.

The rest was barely decipherable through the heavy old door.

She hadn't intended to eavesdrop. When she'd gotten home, she'd dashed up to her bedroom without
thinking, ignoring the commotion coming from the lab, assuming it would die down. But it rose and rose.

Nell had spent years listening to her father and Ruby's father roar with laughter at each other; she knew that tune well. This was different. Something was badly wrong. She locked a skittish Kodak in her room and crept back down the stairs as quietly as her ticking would let her, the mannequin hand in hers, offering some strange but solid comfort.

There was crashing. Was that glass breaking? She placed one hand on her chest as if to try to drown out the sound of the loud machine inside her. Should she just burst in, ride out the end of her fury at Oliver and Ruby, and rescue her father from Daniel's stream of insults?

“Sick”

“Madman”

“Abomination”

Nell knew in her gut this would be a stupid thing to do; she'd never gone into the lab, not in her whole entire life. What if her father became angry at her for intruding? He'd know she'd been listening. The last thing she wanted was to betray his trust. She strained against the barrier, trying to make out more.

Eavesdropping was dangerous; if she were meant to hear angry conversations, the door would not be closed. The conversations would not be happening in
the dead of night when she was assumed to be asleep or at a dance hall three and a half miles away either. Nell was not meant to be part of this, but here she was.

She held the hard, lifeless hand tightly in hers.

“Madman, abomination, sick, sick.”

“How could I have trusted you?”

“How could I have trusted you?”

Nell choked back a sob. Suddenly she couldn't hear any more of this. She didn't want to know what they were fighting over. Let them, let them. She slowly, silently moved back up to her bedroom, fingers knotted around the hand, the sterile digits of her future. Kodak was scratching against the bedroom door, mewling to get out. When she went in, he immediately scampered up her legs and arm to her shoulder, his tiny nose seeking the crook of her neck.

Nell sat on her bed and stared at the hand. The figures and plants drawn on the paper all over her walls were still and stark around her. Sometimes she felt as though her bed were lying in the middle of an open notebook. This was her only comfort, surrounded by the plans for things she intended to create.

Could she build a boy? Could she make metal think? Could she create something that wasn't still, something that could breathe and feel? She shook the hand a little, not knowing what she was hoping for.
Would she cast more limbs in plastic, or porcelain, or terra-cotta? She'd have to ask her father for the molds. Nell didn't consider herself much of a carver—and where would she get the plastic? Or clay. Or metal. She'd have to sterilize a lot of material, and she'd never be able to weld something the size of a human being in this room; she'd smoke the place out.

Never mind making it think. Never mind computers. That was just another impossibility.

“Am I fooling myself, Kodak?” she asked him quietly. He looked up at her, his eyelids drooping, sleepy.

Of course the
one
impressive idea she finally had would be totally out of reach. Naturally. She wished she'd never found the hand or had had the common sense to throw it back into the sea.

There was no way she was going to sleep, not now. Nell stood and walked over to her wardrobe. It was four blurring into five now, but she was wild with awakeness. Dawn began to spiral fresh pink into the dark outside. She placed the hand on a small shelf while she changed from her Bayou frock into her culottes and a loose, wide-necked gray wool sweater, over which she placed her mother's work apron, a blue denim thing, stitched by the great-grandmother she'd never met. It was worn and soft, stained and scorched by a variety of impermeable substances. It was hers.
She hadn't worn it in a while, since she'd resolved she was a useless inventor. As she placed it over her head, she could almost swear she smelled her mother from it, even though she knew it had stopped smelling like Cora long ago. She wasn't very good at pretending, but it was nice sometimes. It might be what she needed to keep her going today.

She tied the apron on and slipped the hand into the deep front pocket. She unwound her hair and wound it up again more neatly. She dabbed the makeup off her face with cotton and tea astringent, all the black and purple streaks erased from her cheeks and replaced with pale powder and a tincture of rose to give her cheeks the flush they otherwise severely lacked. She was making herself up for nobody, but it helped. As she dressed and assembled herself, her ticking hushed to a normal, just about audible rhythm. When dawn flooded in, she would be a person who invented and discovered, who helped her father and who made a difference. Today would not be another wasted opportunity.

The birds outside were an orchestra of awake. She could not hear her father and Daniel anymore, only the symphony of morning calls. Kodak was sleeping now on her pillow. His tiny rib cage rose and fell with each breath. Nell didn't rouse him.

When she got down the stairs to make herself a
cup of tea, her father's lab door was open. She nearly stopped to stare inside or creep over the threshold, but now was not the time. Not at all. With all the resolve she could muster, she walked right by, giving the door a push shut as she passed. It clicked, it closed; that mystery passed for the moment.

The kitchen floor was covered in frogs again. The garden door was wide open, the fresh leafy smell of morning lifting in on the tips of the early breeze, edged with tobacco. Julian sat on the kitchen table, a mess. His shirt was half undone; his tie hung loose around his neck. The knuckles on his flesh hand were bleeding, and a finger was missing from the mechanical side. It was making an irregular chiming and bleeping sound, horrible and worrying, but he was ignoring it. He had a lit cigarette between two of his remaining steel fingers. Ash fluttered softly to the tabletop without his noticing.

Nell hadn't seen her father smoke in years.

“Da?” she asked softly from the doorway.

“Would you please, please get rid of these poxy frogs, Nell? I just opened the door to let in some air, and in they bloody marched. I really have to start setting up traps.” Her father's voice was ragged. He didn't even look up.

Nell set her jaw, plucked the broom from the corner,
and set about herding the tiny green creatures back out. The first time the frogs had gotten into the kitchen, her mother told her that she must never touch them with her fingers. Her mother, full of strange advice. Her mother, whose voice and heathery laugh she was only half sure she remembered. Who she couldn't picture whole. Big hair, bright and crooked grin. Maybe the rest was imagination and grief.

“Human blood is hot; frog blood is cold. Our fingers are like fire to the poor little babies. Scoop them up in a jar, or sweep them outside; just don't touch them!” Cora had shown her how to tip the little amphibians into old mason jars with a piece of paper, never touching them at all. Julian had been watching and picked up a stray from near where he was sitting at the table, using his mechanical hand. It had been an early version, still gray and squeaky. Cora had put her hands on her hips and scowled at him. “Jules, don't. Didn't you hear me?”

“It's cold, Cora, look, the little lad isn't even hopping away.”

Julian had then gotten to his knees and shown Nell the frog up close, sitting calmly in the steel palm of his new hand. Its eyes were peaceful and black, the thrumming of the tiny engine in her father's arm so loud to her, in that moment, so much to bear. Alive,
but cold and safe for the small frog. Cold and safe.

Thirteen years later Nell swept around the same old table where he'd held the small creature, which he was now sitting on top of, a picture of devastation. Still, she would not pity him, not right now. She was resolved to see the brightness in this morning. So she swept the frogs out into the garden, gently and carefully, and closed the door.

“Did you hear us fighting?” her father asked, breaking the terrible, awkward silence hanging in the kitchen air like something about to turn sour. His voice was shaky, exhausted.

“Only from a distance,” Nell replied, composed. “I understand if you don't want to talk about it.”

“I don't. Thank you.”

“Would you like something to eat? I actually have a few questions for you if you want to, you know, take your mind off, em, everything.” She was holding the hand in the pocket of the apron, its stillness a relief. “I heard something last night that you might be interested in—”

“I don't think there's even any food here,” her father interrupted. “I've had about three liters of tea. I've to go back to the lab. I have so much work to do, now that Daniel won't help me. So much work.”

Julian sat up, his face somehow more drawn than
usual, eyes reddened. He smoked the end of the cigarette, stubbed it out in the teacup by his side, and got up. He walked to his daughter and placed his human hand on her shoulder. “I'll answer your questions tomorrow. If you don't hear from me, don't fret. Maybe we'll talk the next day.”

And he ambled out of the room. Even after the laboratory door had opened and shut, the pulse of kindness from his small embrace charged her, made her all the more willing to be brave, be the inventor she was born to be. To contribute.

Nell felt a pang of hunger. The refrigerator, as Julian had noted, was empty, bar a tall jar containing some cloudy water and some floating things that could have just as easily been eyeballs as they could have been pickled eggs. Nell grimaced. The cold thrum of the machine was refreshing; the morning heat was already descending on the house. Nell closed it again and moved to the cabinets: empty, empty, empty. Where had everything gone? She was positive that there'd been enough for a fresh breakfast, at least an egg and an avocado, maybe some cured bacon. One onion sat in the back of a barren shelf, happily sprouting green shoots among the cobwebs. A single tin of butter beans was housed in the shelf above it.

Nell looked over to the sink. It was full of smashed
dishes. Cracked shards of white and blue ceramic stained with whatever they'd eaten before they started fighting. They must have come right back after their meeting with the mayor. What could have gone so wrong that a meal could turn this ugly?

Nell was suddenly furious at Ruby's father for being cruel to hers when he had gone to all that effort, but as soon as the ticking inside her grew loud, she shut her eyes and focused: no, no, no more energy wasted on being angry and sad. Her hand went instinctively to the totem in her apron pocket. How calming it was.

She imagined him again, the person she would build. Drew him soft, graphite in her mind. She tried hard to hear his voice as she leaned against the counter, the depth or softness, but there was nothing but the distant clanks of her father in his lab again. No voice. Not yet. No voice, no name. Just a hand.

She decided, as she cleaned the broken crockery from the sink piece by piece, that she would go for a cycle, maybe down to the markets. It wouldn't be nice—it would be busy and loud—but she could prepare something good for Julian to eat that evening, something to cheer him up. Plus cycling always helped her think. She had a lot to figure out, mostly whether or not it was worth her while investigating what exactly Oliver had in the back rooms of the Gonne Hospital.
She was annoyed at herself for even considering it, for placing a fishhook of deceit onto Oliver's tongue. But if she couldn't cast or carve or weld all the limbs herself, she had to get them from somewhere. Otherwise she was just left with paper and a mannequin hand. Oliver owed her this access, surely, for all the space he'd taken up in her home over the years.

Once Nell had cleared the debris of her father's and Daniel's falling-out from the kitchen and blocked the crack under the back door to prevent any further frog invasions, she packed a satchel, wrapping the hand in a scarf and shoving it below her notebook and a flask full of iced, fresh tea. Her little purse of tokens was still full. She decided to let Kodak sleep; the poor creature had such a long night.

At the bottom of the stairs up to the house she checked the postbox. Nothing today. She
must
write back to Nan.

As Nell pulled away on her bike, she noticed Ruby in the distance, making her way down the path to her house. Ruby waved, a stripe of color against the forest, but Nell ignored her and cycled on. She didn't want to talk to Ruby yet because of both the nonsense with Oliver and whatever Daniel was shouting at her father for.

How could it be so easy for Ruby? They never talked about anything anymore. Not their worries, not
their mothers. The glass eye wasn't just a simple little omission from their conversations; it felt steep to Nell. Deliberate. Perhaps Ruby didn't need to talk to her anymore.

Maybe, she thought, as she spun down toward the big road, maybe Ruby was just normal now. So many of the other apprentices had had a parent swept away from them by the epidemic, but they were all still capable of relaxing, being happy, dancing, partnering up. Ruby was like them. Over it. She was all right.