36
Two days later, on the morning of surgery, I get up early, too ramped up to sleep. Glenn is already outside, his cowboy boots deep in dirt as he mulches a row of tulips. The earthy smell triggers a memory of Mom and me planting bulbs in front of our house, our fingers and knees caked with earth.
“Your mom sure loved the spring.” Glenn reaches down to dust off a sunset-orange tulip. “As a kid, she thought it was magic how the flowers would shoot up as soon as the snow was gone. She’d forget they’d been under there working like the dickens all winter, growing toward the light.”
He shades his eyes with his hand as he looks east toward the mountains, where green spreads beneath the shrinking snowcap like the mountain is waging a civil war with itself over what season it is. “Although as long as there’s snow on those peaks, winter still has a few tricks up her sleeve.”
He clips the bright tulip at the base, handing it to me.
“Check on your aunt Cora for me?” he says. “Make sure she doesn’t pack the whole house in that bag of hers.”
I find Cora in her room trying to jam a pair of slippers into a too-full suitcase.
I sit on the bed next to her, eyeing a pile of shoeboxes wrapped in brown shipping paper just inside her open closet door. Each one has an address penned in Cora’s curly handwriting, and even though she’s tried to hide them from me, I know exactly what’s in each box. I imagine the hours she spent carefully wrapping and addressing each doll. I picture her dropping them into a package bin at the post office, shipping off little pieces of Sara. She probably sneaks them out while I’m at school so I won’t feel guilty.
“You don’t have to stay the whole time,” I say after she exhales in frustration at her overstuffed suitcase and takes everything back out to start again.
She pauses, her toiletry bag in one hand. “Where else would I be? It’s only a week. I’ll be with you every minute.”
I don’t doubt it. Cora rarely left my bedside in the months after the fire. She slept on couches and chairs, eating cafeteria food and peppering the nurses with questions every time they checked on me. No matter what, Cora stayed. Like both our lives depended on it.
And now we’re headed back in. Back to hoping. Back to crossing fingers that the graft “takes” so Dr. Sharp doesn’t have to rip it off and try again. Back to living in fear of the almighty infection we talk about in the same hushed tones as pubescent wizards at Hogwarts speak of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
She crams her slippers into the suitcase, which pops open as Cora throws her hands up like she’s just remembered something.
“Oh, I got you something!” She removes a square, wrapped present from her bedside drawer, and smiles as she hands it to me.
A DVD of The Wizard of Oz.
“And I downloaded all the songs for you to listen to in recovery. Help you get ready for the play,” she says.
I turn the case over in my hand, pretending to read the back, but actually thinking through all the things Cora has done for me. Taking me in. Selling the dolls. Working to pay off my bills. What have I ever given her?
I jump off the bed and run into my room to grab the piece of butterfly wallpaper.
“It’s not a big deal or anything.” I hand her the small square of Sara’s childhood. “And I need to get a frame so we can hang it on the wall. And I guess technically it was already yours and I’m just giving it back—”
Cora cuts off my rambling.
“Thank you, Ava.” She wipes her eyes, trying to laugh off her crying. “You’d think I’d be all out of tears by now, huh? But I just can’t get used to her being gone.”
She lays the butterfly paper on the bed.
“Like in the middle of the night, Sara used to squish between us, and we’d wake up with her feet up our noses. I always told Glenn we needed a bigger bed. We needed more space.” She runs her fingers across the top of the mattress. “Now all I have is space,” she says. “And it will never feel normal.”
I lean on the suitcase so Cora can zip it up.
“Dr. Layne says we have to find a new normal.”
“A new normal.” Cora says each word individually, as if she’s chewing them over, digesting them. “I like that.”
When the three of us walk into the burn unit, Nurse Linda’s ample bosom practically bowls me over as she hug-attacks me. You tend to bond with someone after they change your diaper and crusty bandages. Nothin’ says lovin’ like a little skin sloughin’.
The smell of her perfume—lilacs—whisks me immediately back to my bedbound days, fantasizing about when I could go home.
Now I’m heading back in.
I glance behind me at the exit. One week.
In the pre-op room, Dr. Sharp runs through the procedure with me while Linda inserts an IV into my arm.
“Now, this one’s going to be a little different,” Dr. Sharp says. “When you wake up, your eyes will be sewn shut. This will allow the skin to heal, but it will feel very strange.”
Different. Strange. Got it.
Nineteen surgeries. I’ve been down this path nineteen times, but Dr. Sharp is right: This one is different. He’s not just patching up the empty places.
He’s giving me back a piece of what the fire stole.
Cora smiles at me, gripping my hand before they wheel me away. I grip her back.
Linda switches out the saline for the good stuff, the clear elixir that transports me out of this bed while doctors work on my body. I count backward from ten until the numbers blur like the ceiling tiles above my head.
And everything fades to black.