Carved in Bone - Jefferson Bass [68]
“Miranda, you’re hurt. Let me take a look at that.” I laid a hand on her shoulder.
She shook it off. “Don’t touch me. Just leave me alone.”
“No. Until I get you to a doctor, I’m not leaving you alone.”
“Look, I’m a big girl, okay? You don’t have to take care of me. Besides, I wouldn’t want to make you late for your next babysitting session.”
“Miranda, I made a mistake. I’ve never done that before, and I’ll never do it again. I’m sorry, but I’m only human.”
“But…why her?” And she began to sob anew.
Jess was right. I had been blind and careless. “Oh, Miranda. Listen to me. You’ve already got the best of me, don’t you understand? If we tried to have more, we’d end up with nothing.”
She raised her head and stared at me with anguished eyes. “You don’t know that. Why do you say that?”
“Miranda, I love working with you. It’s my favorite part of my job, and my job is the only bearable part of my life these days. When we’re in the lab together, I don’t feel thirty years older than you. I feel young and smart, and connected to a person I like and admire enormously. But if we were together in a different way—in a relationship, in a bed—our thirty years’ difference would hit us like a ton of bricks. Sooner or later you’d feel sorry for me, and then you’d feel trapped by me, and then you’d start to despise me. And that would kill me. It would absolutely kill me.”
Something in her face softened a bit. “Oh, bullshit, how could I ever despise you? I worship the damn ground you walk on.”
“Not so much. Not lately.”
“Don’t be stupid. Of course I do. I’m just…so…furious at you for messing around with…with some child!”
“Temporary insanity. Point taken. A never-to-be-repeated mistake. She is, after all, a whole five years younger than you. But just for the record, in the eyes of the law, I believe she’s an adult.” A low growl emanated from Miranda’s throat, which I took to be a good sign—too much feistiness in it for a suicide candidate. “She’s smart, too, for an undergraduate.” The growl ratcheted up a few decibels. “And fairly easy on the eyes…” An elbow—her left elbow—shot out and caught me in the ribs. “Ow. Not as smart or fetching as you, of course, but then again, who is?”
“Damn you, why can’t you just let me stay mad?”
“Well, judging by that arm, it’s not so good for your health.”
“Oh, that. I did that on purpose. So I could file a worker’s comp claim. I’m tired of being your defleshing slave.”
“You’re saying you needed…a break?” She groaned at the pun. “By the way, if you really want to sound professional, you should use the German term, diener.” She rolled her eyes. “Come on, let’s get you over to Student Health and get that ulna set.”
“Okay. No, wait. First I want to show you something on these ribs.” I helped her up from the steps, picked up her things, and held the door for her, seeing as she was wounded and all. Back in the lab, she made a beeline for the tray of bones and picked up a rib with her left hand. “Look at this,” she said, pointing with her right index finger. “Yow!” She laid the curved, ivory-colored bone down on the counter and pointed with her left hand. It was easy to see what she was excited about.
The bone—rib seven or eight, I guessed from the size—was a comma-shaped arc roughly ten inches long. Its curve was asymmetrical, though that wasn’t the odd part: ribs arc sharply near the spine, but the curve flattens out near the sternum. There’s a slight sideways warp to the curve, too, which keeps the bones from lying flat on a desk or examination table. With all those compound curves, students sometimes have trouble telling which way is up on an individual rib, until they learn to look at its cross-section. In cross-section, the rib is shaped like an upside-down teardrop; in other words, the rounded part is the top surface. The lower, more pointed edge