The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [11]
“What did I say?”
“Well, you were in kind of a daze. You kept talking to him about your alimony check. You said, ‘You didn’t love me. You didn’t even like me,’ and then, ‘Are you happy now, you sad—?’ You repeated the word sad a few times. I think you were trying to say sadist. ‘Are you happy now, you sadist? It nearly lopped my thumb off.’ ”
She felt her face coloring—something that hardly ever happened to her now that she was an adult. She told him the story of the carving knife and the tape-sealed package and how she had found her alimony check buried beneath a pile of wood curls. “So I guess he did cause my injury, yes, in a roundabout way, but really it was my fault. One stupid mistake, and …” She made a sound she did not think she had ever made before, a sigh like the beginning of all sighs.
“Well, concerning that,” Dr. Alstadt said. He told her about the physiotherapy she would need after her wound had healed—“not a lot, but some. The thumb is important. You can expect to lose about twenty percent of the function in your left hand. Twenty percent might not sound like much, but you’ll probably have to learn a new way to tie your shoes, for instance. Brush your teeth. Trim your garden—do you garden? Hold a knife and fork.”
The prospect of resuming her life after she left the hospital depressed her. Dr. Alstadt perched his glasses on his eyebrows and rubbed his eyes with his index fingers. He still wore a barely visible aura of emotional turmoil. She wondered where it came from. “Yesterday in the gas station you said you were having a bad day at work. You look like you’re having another one.”
“That’s nothing you need to worry about. I’d rather talk about you.”
“I’ve been learning how to tie my shoes and use a fork without my thumb for two weeks now, remember?”
He paused, made a decision, nodded. “Right. Well. The situation is that the hospital is facing a budget crunch. We either have to cut hours or cut jobs. I’m supposed to make the decision for the A&E.”
“Arts and entertainment?”
“Pardon? Ah. No. Accident and emergency.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Make life a little harder for everyone, as opposed to a lot harder for someone. The staff won’t be happy about it, but I’ve weighed all the options, and it seems like the one that will do the least harm. You know, ‘First do no harm’ and all.”
“That sounds like the responsible choice.”
“Yes. Well. Nobody can say I’m not conscientious. It might be my one shining virtue.”
“What’s your one shining vice?”
He amused her by pondering the question. “Nostalgia,” he answered eventually, and a few seconds later, “Self-pity.”
“I think we share a shining vice.”
She spent another day lost in pain and reverie, staring at the patients bearing their light past her door and dozing off between outbursts of noise from the television. Every so often someone would arrive to feed her, medicate her, or change her bandages, and if she was sleeping she would rouse herself, and if she was hurting she would try to hide it. The tip of her thumb was gathered together in a smart little pucker around her stitches. She could only presume that, like a sausage, it had been hollowed out to make room for the skin to close. There was a fairy tale that had disturbed her when she was a child, too young for school, and she thought about it now, the one about the quarreling couple who waste all their wishes attaching sausages to each other’s noses. Her mother used to read the story out loud to her, and whenever she reached the illustration of the poor wife tugging at the sausage on her nose, a look of cross-eyed fury on her face, Carol Ann insisted that she turn the page. She always rushed to put the book away the second the story was finished. There it would stand on its shelf, giving out an aura of indignation and menace, just as her teddy bear gave out an aura of sleepy affection, her toy box an aura of cheerful excitement,