Turn of Mind - Alice LaPlante [22]
Is there a size ten blade in here? He indicates the baggie.
Of course.
Why ‘of course’?
Because it’s the most appropriate blade for many of the most common surgical procedures. You would always have one handy.
You know who these photos are of, don’t you? Whose hand this is?
I look at my lawyer. I shake my head.
Amanda O’Toole.
Amanda?
That’s right.
My Amanda?
That’s right.
I am left without words. I look at the young woman who has her arm around my shoulders. She nods.
Who would have done such a thing?
That’s what we’re trying to find out.
Where is she? I must see her. Do you have the digits? Replantation might be possible with cuts this clean.
I’m afraid that isn’t likely.
The room contracts. Somehow I know what he is going to say. Those photos. This station. A lawyer. My scalpel handle. The blades. Amanda. I close my eyes.
My daughter/niece breaks in. How many times are you going to do this to her? How cruel can you be?
We have no choice. When Detective Luton found the scalpel we had no choice.
You mean, when my mother handed over the scalpel. Would she have done that if guilty?
Perhaps. If she didn’t remember what she’d done. He turns to me.
Did you kill Amanda O’Toole?
I don’t answer. I am focused on my own hands. Whole and unbloodied.
Dr. White, pay attention: Did you kill Amanda O’Toole and then afterward cut off four of her fingers?
I don’t remember, I tell him. But there are images that nag.
The man is watching me closely. I meet his eyes and shake my head.
No. No. Of course not.
Are you certain? For a moment there . . .
My client has answered. Do not badger her. She is not a well woman.
One of the other men, smallish and blond, the one who had been sipping the energy drink, interrupts.
Strange how she knows some things and not others.
That is the nature of the disease, says the woman sitting next to me. She fades in and out.
I’m just saying. I could have sworn just then she remembered something.
He turns to me.
Anything. Anything at all pop into your head?
I shake my head. I look straight ahead, not at him. I place my perspiring hands on my lap, under the table.
My lawyer rises. Will you be charging my client?
The first man hesitates, then shakes his head. We need to run some tests.
I don’t like the way that the woman next to me and the lawyer look at each other. We get up to leave, one of the men hands me my coat. I look for the other woman, the blond one, but she is already gone.
From my notebook. In an odd, backward-slanting handwriting, it is dated January 8 with the name Amanda O’Toole.
I stopped by today to say hello. Jennifer, you seemed to be doing well. You knew me. You remembered my knee surgery from last fall and the fact that this coming spring I plan to plant heirloom tomatoes in pots on the back patio where it catches the sun. You don’t look particularly well. You’ve lost weight and your eyes are ringed with red. I hate losing you like this, old friend.
But today was a day for being content. We sat in the front room and talked, mostly about our men. Peter and James and Mark. You didn’t remember that both Peter and James are gone, one to California, the other to a place that is either much better or much worse than here.
Peter loves California. He e-mails me frequently, you know. He asks about you. After forty years of marriage you don’t just sever all ties. Peter and his vision quest. To live in a trailer in the Mojave Desert with a new age graduate student. People ask how I can bear that—the abandonment, as they see it.
Isn’t the house empty? they ask. Well, it always was, I say, the two of us in that great big cavern. Maybe when you sell this place and move, I’ll move too. There’s not much else keeping me on this street.
You spoke of your worries about Mark. About how he takes too much after James in all the bad ways, with none of his—James’s—strengths.
I can’t agree with you there. Mark has a vulnerable side