The Phantom Limb (8 page)

Plus, he had to admit, it was nice to get away from the hospital. He was concerned about Vera, but he felt so uneasy there. School could distract him for a bit.

Isaac saw DCynthia and Destiny approaching. They strolled past him as he was locking up his bike.

“How old is that rattletrap you ride?” Destiny said. “Look at all the other bikes. They're lightweight, and they have twice as many gears as yours.”

While Destiny made fun of him, DCynthia fidgeted. She looked away, then shook it off and turned back to him.

“Yeah,” she said, joining in. “
Our
father drives us to school in his awesome new Mercedes. He buys a new one every year.”

For the first time, Isaac couldn't care less what the twins were saying. He shrugged. “Of course he can afford a car like that,” he said. “I bet he makes his money scamming people. I'd be
ashamed
to ride in his car.”

They stopped dead in their tracks and stared at each other. For a moment they actually looked shocked.

“What did you just say?” Destiny asked. “You better be on the lookout for Matt Kravetz, twig. He'll take care of a loser like you. No one insults us and gets away with it.”

Isaac rolled his eyes. “I'm looking forward to it,” he said. “You know, I hate to end this lovely conversation, but it's time for me to get to class. I want to learn something important, not spend my time making people miserable. Maybe you should look into it.”

“Mommy's little crybaby!” Destiny chanted.

Isaac fixed his stare on DCynthia until her eyes
dropped down. She didn't look back up. He turned and slowly strolled away. He felt a sense of pride in standing up to them. He had found a little bit more of his own voice.

At lunch, as Isaac sat alone, he was suddenly interrupted by Matt Kravetz. He was holding a tray, so it didn't look as if he wanted to fight. Besides, nobody actually started fights in the cafeteria. Fights took place only if people were so out of control that they didn't care about the consequences. And Kravetz didn't look particularly angry. Still, he dropped his tray onto the table and stood there, hovering over Isaac.

Isaac was nervous, but he figured that he had already stood up to the twins. What could he lose by standing up to Kravetz too? So he looked him squarely in the eyes. “What do you want?” he said.

“Destiny told me what you said to her and DCynthia outside this morning,” Kravetz said, leaning forward threateningly.

Isaac shrugged, trying to keep his cool, even though he was clearly nervous. “They're never nice to me,” he said. “I was just giving them a taste of their own medicine.”

Kravetz seemed taken aback that Isaac was not more intimidated by him.

Isaac went back to eating his tuna sandwich.

Kravetz watched Isaac for a moment, his lips parted, unsure about his next move. He had obviously not been expecting this reaction from him. “Well … you just watch it, man,” he said, almost as an afterthought.

From the sound of Kravetz's voice, Isaac sensed he had won this encounter.

Kravetz turned and walked away.

After school, Isaac hopped on his bike and started home. As he headed toward the corner, he put on his brakes to slow down, but nothing happened. He tried again. The bike wasn't stopping, and he was zooming straight into the traffic! He started to panic. There was nothing he could do—he was going to collide with a car.

His heart pounding, Isaac knew he had to come up with a plan, and fast. He looked down and realized the only thing he could do was use his feet. He took them off the pedals and dragged them along the ground. It hurt, and he was scared, but he was able to come to a stop just in time.

Sweating and terrified, he got off his bike and
walked unsteadily over to the curb to examine the brakes. He saw that a thick, sturdy twig had been jammed into the place where the brake cable was attached to the wheel. He pulled it out and tested the brakes again. Now they worked.

Isaac was angry. Upset. Furious. And he knew just who to blame. The only ones who could have done this were the twins. They could have killed him! Obviously, DCynthia helping him at the hospital had been some sort of weird fluke. He almost felt like crying.

When he got home, Grandpa was napping on the living room couch. Isaac was still shaken up by his near accident. To calm down, he took a stick of licorice from a jar in the kitchen and went up to the storage room to mess around with his optical illusions. He touched one or two of them, but even as he did that, he was acutely aware of the mirror box. Its allure was irresistible.

He went back to his room, took a bite of the licorice stick, grabbed the mirror box, and put it on his desk. He put the licorice stick down next to the mirror box. Without hesitating, he stuck both forearms into it and looked into the right-hand mirror.

The phantom limb appeared. It made a beckoning
gesture. Instantly, the stick of licorice was
sucked
into the mirror box. Isaac almost jumped out of his chair. How could the mirror box do that?

Then he remembered that the mirror box had already shown him that it had supernatural powers. After all, it was allowing him to communicate with a dead person.

The phantom limb dropped the licorice stick and began pounding on it, hard. Isaac was surprised the mirror box wasn't shaking by the force of it.

He had no idea what the phantom limb was trying to tell him. It was frighteningly clear that Joey was warning him about something—but what?

The next day after school, Isaac went to visit Vera again. Reluctantly, he pushed open the door to the intensive care unit. He was getting tired of spending so much time at the hospital. It seemed to him that things were never going to be normal again—whatever that meant.

He saw Candi sitting at her computer and said hello. Smiling at him, she stood up and followed him into his mother's room.

Vera was asleep. Dr. Ciano was in the room, her
expression somber. “I just got her to rest,” she said. “She had trouble sleeping last night.”

“Do you know what that bruise on her arm is from?” Isaac asked.

“No, we don't,” she said, sighing. “We'll have to do a biopsy.” She paused and then turned to Isaac. “Shouldn't you be in school?”

“School's over,” Isaac said. It sure seemed that Dr. Ciano didn't want him to be there, that she saw him as a nuisance and not as the son of a very sick patient.

Suddenly, the door opened and a strange but oddly familiar-looking pudgy woman entered the room. For a moment she focused her attention on Vera, then on Isaac. “Oh, excuse me,” she said. “I must have the wrong room.”

Isaac went over to the sink and turned away from the others to wash his hands. He heard the door open again and two sets of footsteps leave the room.

He hadn't noticed it before, but there was no mirror above the sink.

He barely had time for this to register before he felt someone jab him with a needle.

 

HEN ISAAC FINALLY AWOKE, HE WAS groggy and bleary-eyed. He knew he was on a gurney—but where? He tried to get off, but he felt too dizzy.

“Whoa, pal!” the orderly said as he wheeled the gurney down the dimly lit corridor.

It was the same dark corridor where Isaac had gotten lost the night Vera was admitted. He didn't like being there. The ceiling was low; the space seemed to close in on him.

As the orderly pushed the gurney around a sharp curve and through a doorway, Isaac saw the sign: E
NDOSCOPY
. A nurse held the door open.

Inside the small room there were more nurses, all looking cheerful and welcoming. A dark-haired man with a blue mask over his nose and mouth sat at a desk with a computer screen in front of him. The screen did not have a normal display on it, but rather squares with strangely shaped rounded objects inside of them.

The man nodded at Isaac. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I'm Dr. Fields. Nice to meet you.”

“What's happening?” Isaac asked, feeling more alert. Whatever knockout drug they had given him hadn't lasted very long. Just long enough to trap him here in this awful room.

“You passed out in your mother's room,” one of the nurses said. “You were bent over in pain. Thank goodness someone was there to sign the order and send you down here.”

“But wait—I'm not a patient,” Isaac said. “Someone knocked me out. They gave me a shot with a needle.”

“You don't understand how serious this could be,” the nurse said. “You need to let us do our job. Doctor's orders.”

“But—” Isaac tried to protest.

“Let me explain what we're going to do here today, Isaac,” Dr. Fields said. He stood up and walked
over to a large black apparatus. He picked up a snakelike object, which was also black. It was thicker at the top end and had concentric bumps on it. “We need to take some pictures of your stomach. This is an endoscope—a camera. I'm going to lower it down your throat and into your stomach, and that's how we'll get the pictures. Do you understand?”

Then Isaac remembered the phantom limb smashing the black licorice. This was what it had been warning him about.

The doctor picked up a small spray bottle. “Don't worry. I'll spray your throat with this anesthetic first. That will make it a lot easier.”

The nurses were holding him down now.

“But somebody gave me a—”

“Please try not to scream,” Dr. Fields continued. “It makes the procedure more difficult for me. And don't bite down on the camera. It's expensive. Just concentrate on swallowing. That will make it easier for everybody. Open, please,” he instructed Isaac.

Isaac pressed his lips together as hard as he could.

“Look, son, we can do this the easy way … or the hard way. Open up.”

Not knowing what else to do, Isaac opened his mouth. Dr. Fields shot a tiny whisk of spray into his
throat and dropped the bottle back into his lab coat pocket. He picked up the endoscope. “OK, let's get going!” he said enthusiastically.

Isaac felt sure that the excitement he heard in the doctor's voice was real and not just in his imagination.

Dr. Fields wedged a hard white plastic cylinder into Isaac's mouth, forcing it to stay open. “This is to keep you from biting down on the expensive equipment,” he explained.

Down went the snakelike plastic knob—down past Isaac's uvula, the gagging point. Isaac tried to scream, and then he was hacking and gagging and spluttering. He was in agony.

“Swallow, Isaac,” ordered Dr. Fields. “Swallowing will make it easier!”

Isaac tried to swallow, but screaming overcame it.

Meanwhile, Dr. Fields kept pushing the tube down his throat. “Keep swallowing! Keep swallowing!” he said. “It's almost over.”

“Yes, yes, it's almost over,” the nurses repeated, almost in a chant, holding him down.

Almost over? It looked as if the cable had hardly gone down.

Dr. Fields kept feeding it down with force. Every once in a while he glanced back at the screen and
clicked a button, and a picture appeared. “Almost over,” he said, grunting.

“Almost over!” the nurses chirped in their sweet little voices, like a chorus from an operetta.

“Almost
over
!” sang Dr. Fields above the sounds of Isaac's agony.

“Almost
over
!” twittered the nurses.

“Just need a couple more snaps now to make sure we got everything. You don't want me to have to do this to you again, do you, son?” Dr. Fields smiled.

He looked back and took another picture.

“Done!” he said.

Finally, Isaac felt him start to pull out the cable. Tears welled up in his eyes.