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The new door hung red as flesh in the side of the house.
My first thought, obvious as it might be, was that there was no need for another door. When I was young, we had always come in the side, but there was an entrance in the front as well, one that worked perfectly fine. But I don’t know why I latched onto that thought, because the new red door was not strange because it was unnecessary.
It was strange because its frame had been hacked through the wall of the house.
––––––––
It had been a long homecoming.
At the start, I dreamed of returning home, hiding away in our mountain village like a field mouse from the thresher. At the end, after receiving that horrible news, I could not bear the thought of returning, and now I had to. When I was finally allowed to leave the city, I took a train and then a cab from town. When I arrived, I was exhausted, wanting nothing more than some water and food and sleep, but I stopped at the red door.
Why was there a door?
The gap in which it hung was rough-hewn, quickly made. Wood splintered around the sides like it had been carved with a hatchet: driven through the pine and insulation and drywall by many frantic blows. The door was hinged but poorly, its weight barely supported by the metal brackets.
It felt unreal. It felt like a hallucination after an exhausted trip and an interminable winter, and yet I could run my gloved hands down the side, feel the roughness of the splinters like claws against the leather.
The spring frogs were peeping as I knocked on the front door, wondering how my parents had not heard the cab approach through the gaps of their ragged new entrance.
My father had grayed at the temples since last I had seen him, and my mother had more lines around the eyes and mouth, but their faces both lit up when they answered my knock. They were having the end of supper, and I joined them at the table, making light conversation about the first signs of spring in the city, and the soldiers at the checkpoints as I left. We did not mention her. Her unspoken name hung like the breath of air of someone about to speak. What more, I thought, was there really to say. Everything was already over.
Things had been quiet here, they said without elaboration. As conversation dipped, I felt the flutter of cold air on my ankles and the high singing of the frogs, and I had to ask: Why was there a new door?
My father didn’t look at me, just continued carving meat on his plate. I could see the tension in his neck, though, the whitening of his fingers around his fork and knife. But my mother stiffened sharply, and said, “What new door?”
Baffled, I said nothing, just pointed to where the red door hung beside me. The roughness of the hole was even more obvious from this side. Our other doors were heavy, well-sealed, a strip of rubber around the bottom and a sturdy bolt on the side. On this one, I could see the white insulation hanging out, the jagged strokes of the saw through the drywall.
“Oh, that,” my mother said dismissively, as if her lie hadn’t been obvious. “That’s been there for ages and ages. You haven’t seen it?”
“I haven’t been home,” I said, pretending that was an answer that excused anything. This was a door nearly open to the elements, a disaster, a wound. Clammy air poured in. Mice would squeeze through the gaps at the bottom. How long it had been there was not the question. “Why is it there?”
My mother looked to my father for guidance. My father was focused like a lens on his plate. “Well, it’s sort of... in style,” she said. My father scoffed. “Well, how would you describe it, Cameron?”
“What could that possibly mean?” I remarked, a sharp question that I softened with lilting humor at the end. They bristled regardless, and I reminded myself not to immediately overstay my welcome. This was how it had gone last time, too.
“Francis won’t understand,” my father said. My mother gave him a long and reproachful look, and finally turned to me.
“Dear, it’s really nothing,” she said. She spoke like she was describing the weather, but placed her hand on mine as if to restrain me from disbelief. “A bunch of us in the town put in the doors after it worked for Daniel Leary, you know? He – Do you remember Daniel? He’s a good boy, square head on his shoulders. Well, it came to him in a dream, he said. We all thought he’d lost it when he chopped a hole in the side of his house –“ she laughed, “- but then a few people heard it too.”
Spring frogs sang in the silence. “Heard what?” I asked, a chill running across my skin from where her hand lay.
“Well,” she said. “His wife.”
––––––––
I had kept close count of the casualties. I ordered the paper and watched the obituaries for familiar names, faces gone before their time. Gloria Leary was one of the first whom I recognized, though I had only ever known her by acquaintance. Others came after. Ella Marquette. Newsom Reese. Millie Johnson.
The telephone call came well before I saw her face in the paper, but when I found it, it still felt like falling into a pit in the dark. My sister’s face among all these others, one of many, half-in the gravedigger’s pile. It felt like a typographical error.
I had contributed words to the obituary, but when I saw them written out, I wanted to scratch them out and revise them again. “Abigail was a graduate of...” “An avid lover of the outdoors, she frequently...” “She will be dearly missed by her mother, father, and brother...” When I reread them, a strange embarrassment washed over me. They really were such pablum. They didn’t capture her at all. What bothered me the most was the feeling that Abby would mind. She would think they sounded stupid. How could I write something so boring, so rote? So... reductive, like we’d taken the brilliant coat of her life and scrubbed it til the dyes ran and grayed.
She would resent it.
There was no funeral; no one got a funeral. I was grateful that I could not travel immediately home, because it allowed it to remain unreal. I could go about my life, make the preparations I needed to, without falling still and listless. Intellectually I believed what my father had told me, but in my heart I knew it to be false. Abby would be waiting when I got home, and she would punch me on the arm and we would gossip about our neighbors, listening to the spring frogs in the pond far below the house. There would be no skipped beat between us. Why, I bet if I were to write her a letter, I’d get one back in her rounded script, with all her clever asides and parentheticals.
My mother told me that people heard Mrs. Leary’s voice outside that new door Dan built. I tried to understand how this could be possible, asking if he perhaps had been so distraught by grief, if he had been so alone that he began to hear her voice. But others had heard it. The pharmacist, first, and then the grocer and the reverend. They could all attest.
Then the pharmacist began construction on his own door, and then everyone started to do the same. They all had people they’d lost. We all did.
I sat dumbfounded at this tale, unable to hide my skepticism. “Well, you’ll see,” my mother said pointedly, like she was laying down bricks between us. “You’ll just have to see.”
Cold like runoff snow poured through my heart, and I jerked my thumb sharply to the door. “You haven’t heard her, have you?” I asked.
“Not yet,” my mother said.
My father suddenly pushed himself to his feet, and I flinched back. He did not look at me, but instead opened the drawer above the table for his lighter and cigar. My mother began to clear the dinner dishes. The conversation was at an end, and I could tell from the bluntness of my father’s movement that reopening it would be unhappy for me. It didn’t matter how many years went by, I guessed, because I was still not brave enough to risk it. That delicate fear burned deep.
I lay awake for bloody miserable hours that night, tossing until I practically strangled myself with the top sheet. I always slept with the window open when it was not winter, and the frogs sang all night. Once I would have found them restful, but now all I could think of was how I hadn’t felt her absence in the house tonight. Perhaps I hadn’t mourned properly because it didn’t feel as though she were missing. It felt as though she were in her room on the other side of my wall, lying in her bed just as I was in mine. In a few minutes, I would hear her knock twice, and I’d knock back, like we did when we wanted to both laugh at whatever our parents were saying downstairs. That was a lot of what Abby and I did: we shared the private joke that is knowing someone else is listening, too.
When I couldn’t sleep, I crept over to her room and peered through the door, careful to touch nothing. Her bed was stripped; her clothes and belongings which had always scattered the floor were absent, leaving bare boards. Signs of sickness still stood about: a bucket, a dry water glass, a small kerosene stove and tongs for sterilizing bandages.
I didn’t see any signs of her short dancing dresses, or her university books, or her boat-making materials, which shouldn’t have been contaminated. Maybe they were in the barn. I was sure that was it. They wouldn’t have.
––––––––
Being in my parents’ house was like being prodded with a stick. If I had to be around my father, then I would dig open old wounds or inflict new ones (and then who would be the villain, again?), so I planned to take the long walk to town. Coincidentally, in the back of my mind, I knew the Leary house was in between me and the errands I had concocted.
Before I left, I wrapped myself in coat, gloves and scarf, covering every bit of skin that might be touched, or touch something. The ritual of it was second nature at this point: turning gloves back from inside out, touching only the wrist. Winding the scarf tightly and well.
This was the route that Abby and I had taken every day to the schoolhouse, back when we were children. There was distance between houses out here, but there were still several to pass. At the first, I did another double-take, then stomped on even more quickly until I saw the next, and the next. Rough-hewn holes were in the walls of these houses like unclosed wounds. One and then another, made of different materials like they’d been whatever was lying around, they all cut through siding and drywall into the home beyond. I saw no black flags in the windows like you saw in the city, but why would they need them to mark infection with a warning like those doors?
When I reached Daniel Leary’s, I was shaking with rage and confusion. This had to be a sort of madness, or else some horrific joke. Surely it was the height of narcissism on my part to think everyone would unite to terrify an outsider, but the thought that they were serious, that they truly believed, that they had been tricked... My breath caught in my throat like a runner’s hitch, and heat rose to my head.
The sound of voices came to me on the road, and as I walked up the path, I found a horrific scene: a gathering of people. After spending months alone, avoiding touch and contamination, to see all these people in the yard before the white farmhouse, sharing food, standing near one another... I couldn’t understand. If Daniel had invited them here, if he were the one welcoming cataclysm, I...
I didn’t know what I would do. A few heads turned as I marched on by, keeping my berth, but no one stopped me. They were all occupied in laughing, drinking and unspooling a length of blue ribbon like one would at a spring’s-coming fest, and no one paid me mind.
The farmhouse was shut, but that black door hung carved in the side like a boil in dead skin. I climbed the front stairs and pounded on the front door with a gloved hand, muffled. The others stood close to the black door, pointing at it, speaking in light-hearted tones.
The front door popped open at my knock, and there was Daniel Leary. Older than he was when I knew him, as I must be as well, he looked tired, sallow, receding hair at his temples like the dried grass in the fields. We had been classmates once, and then for a summer I’d worked on his father’s farm with him. Though it embarrassed me now to remember, I had followed him around like a lost dog for those months without really knowing why. Then I’d pursued brighter prospects, returning only when I couldn’t avoid it. For a moment, I wasn’t sure he’d recognize me.
Then he said, “Francis Ather?” and ushered me in.
Standing in the front hall, I was careful of what I touched, where I stood.
“I haven’t seen you in a dog’s day,” Daniel Leary said, shutting the door behind us. He peered out through the crack before closing it. There was still a handsomeness to his face, like how a well-made table never ceases to be well-made, even when it’s been scratched and stained. “Your family doing alright?”
How does one answer a question like that? “Not really, Dan,” I said. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m beyond lost, I’ll tell you that.”
He was quiet for a moment, and scratched at his shaven cheek. “I was sorry to hear about Abby.”
“And Gloria.”
A short laugh escaped him. “We’re all hurting, aren’t we?” The statement lacked bitterness – it assumed I knew what he meant, and I did.
“I have to tell you what, though,” I said. “I don’t get for a minute what it is you’ve done with these...” I pointed to the side of his house, where the door waited like a passage to a starless night. He didn’t even turn his head. “I don’t understand and I think it’s mighty strange. Why would you do such a mighty strange thing? And what is with...” My finger turned to the people out front, the congregation that I could still hear. “Did you call them here?”
At this he started to shake, and braced himself on the wall. The chorus of voices outside swelled and sank, many high, rolling notes.
“Thank God,” he said, relief mixing with fear like water and foam. “Thank God you aren’t also thinking like them. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know why they’re all taking it to heart, except they’re grieving and they want them back, but... I don’t know what to do anymore.”
I told him that he’d better explain. Cold air swiped weakly at my back, and I turned to see the outline of the door in the next room, black wood bleeding white light. My heart pounded like footsteps on an empty road.
He spoke in a low voice like a clock tolling. “All I know,” he said, “is I had a dream where I was standing outside, and the moon was shining down, and she came to me saying, Dan, you need to make me a door. You need to make me a door so I can speak to you through it. It was... only about a week after she died. It was early.”
I folded my arms. Beneath my coat, the hair on my arms had risen like the fur of a spooked cat. “That’s mad,” I said.
He shook his head. “You think I don’t know? You think I don’t know that? But I somehow knew she would be angry if I didn’t, and now everyone else has done the same. I wish I understood why. Truth be told, it scares me, how much they all believed me. I’m wishing I’d never told Harris about it at all.”
“Why’s that?”
He met my eyes, then, and I felt as though I could see that pale green moon shining beyond them, that dead glow in the crack of a door. “Francis... She’s been wanting to come in.”
Outside the house, I was hailed by a familiar voice. “Francis!”
Another old classmate: Rick Danvers, with thick black beard and bright eyes, always a better student than me, but someone I might have once listed as a friend. He approached me now, trailing blue ribbon through his fingers, and widened his arms for an embrace.
I didn’t want to be rude. But I would not touch him, and held up my gloved hands to stop him. The fear of contact, of everything you then touched being contaminated, of spreading it like a rat, sat lurking in my mind.
“Rick, have you lost it?”
He lowered his arms by degrees, cooling. “You old coward,” he said, but not unfondly. I had usually been the one to issue caution when we were jumping into gorges or climbing up the silo. Now the insult felt odd in that it wasn’t pointed, had no trace of insult. “Back in town, I see. When did you get in?”
Idle talk was beyond me. “What is the meaning of all... this?” I asked, gesturing to the people. “Dan didn’t know –“
“Well, he’s in a bit of a way, I suppose.”
“Right!”
Rick Danvers shrugged. “It’s Good Saturday,” he said. “Lent is nearly over, the Resurrection is nearly here. We’re celebrating. You haven’t been home long, have you?”
He was never a religious man as I knew him. As I looked around, I saw people twining blue ribbon between themselves. Some twisted their hands close with it; some removed gloves as the day grew warmer, and there was the contact of skin, of flesh and proximity, carelessly. It trailed through them like a running stream.
I stared, wondering, was the purpose to drive infection? Did they want to die? I had spent so many rigorous months learning to fear touch that maybe I was paranoid, over-fearful, but why would they go out and court death?
“I just got back,” I said. “It’s run its course in the city, so I... Rick, I don’t mean to sound judgmental, but what are you all doing out?” It came out sharp, despite my efforts. It was sharp. It stuck in me like a pin in my abdomen. Rick’s face folded like a morning glory in the cold. “I’m sorry to be rude, but Abby – she – My point is, how can you do this? Risk all these people –“
My voice caught. Rick softened, and let out a breath. It was a humoring, forgiving sound.
“You really haven’t been back long, have you?” Rick said. “Francis, we’ve all lost someone. Me, I lost my little girl. Only four years old. She had hair like me, stood straight up, always stuck flowers in it. And you know what?”
Cold horror filled me.
“She’s coming back,” he said, and his words were filled with genuine joy, relief, the burst of sun after a storm. “They all found their way back from wherever they went, across the way. Usually they wouldn’t have been able to reach us, except for Dan and his door. But no one is lost. Your old man built a way in, didn’t he?” He reached out a hand for my shoulder, smiling, and I flinched from it like a flame. “You’ll be fine.”
––––––––
We lost so many, and yet I expected to lose more.
My parents could be in better health; friends, too, I knew were in danger. I expected to lose everyone, but instead I just lost Abby. Lost. Like something misplaced, someone wandering in a foreign land. I wondered where she was buried, if she was buried or if she were burned, if she were burned or if she were still walking somewhere, still in her room, still out on the porch and waving as I came up the walk.
Abby would think the people at Dan Leary’s were fools, and would spare no harsh words about it. As I considered what she would say, though, a chill crept over my shoulders.
She would be mad. But I didn’t know why. She was often annoyed, rarely mad, but somehow I knew. She would be angry at something. Angry at me. Why would she be angry at me?
I hurried on, dismissing the thought, and clouds passed before the sun like birds on the wing, poised and black and swift.
When we dined that evening, our conversation was superficial, a waxwing barely brushing the surface of the water. It plastered over distance, disguised it so that you could not see where the spring bubbled up and the mud was deep. We spoke like strangers passing by on the train, and even after all these years I still felt this childish want for them to love me, to care for me and make everything right. Likewise, I wanted to imagine that Abby was just living elsewhere, maybe with that boy she’d brought around at Christmas. She was busy building her boat beside the water. I kept wanting to ask how she was doing, what she had been up to. When she would be home.
But my parents would never be the people I wanted them to be, and Abby was never coming home. Every time I remembered, or felt the gasp of cold air around my ankles, my temper flared. That hideous door was an affront. It was a lie. How could you convince someone that they were losing their minds, insulting your intelligence, that -
At the end of the meal, my father spoke. “Should we stay up tonight?”
“Oh, I think so,” my mother said. “Should I brew coffee?”
“What do you think, Irene?” he replied.
“What,” I said, “does that mean?”
Neither of them met my eyes. My mother busied herself with the percolator; my father pushed back his chair and left the room.
“Oh, you can stay up too, if you like,” said my mother. “Can’t stop you, now can I? You’re a grown man.”
Of course it was the door.
Mute with rage, I stormed into the spring night. The night was clouded – didn’t know how they could know what moon it was – but the frogs were still singing, singing, singing down in the water. I shivered, regretting my coat but refusing to retreat, and walked down the old garden path to where it met the woods.
The pond was a sliver of mirror in the night, depicting the tops of trees and the yellow of dead reeds. I stood on the muddy earth at the top of the rocks where the stream cut through to the water, arms wrapped tight, and recalled a night some summers before. I was home and the cousins were up visiting, and we had brought ale down by the water. Everyone but me was jumping from the rock wall to the water, and after every jump Abby would call to me on the dock, saying, “Francis! Get your ass in the water! I’m not going to tell you again!”
Eventually, she succeeded, and I went in fully clothed and came out like a wet cat. She was always so utterly impulsive, spontaneous, willing to do so many things that I was not, willing to nudge me on. She stayed and made a life for herself, while I ran, not willing to put up a fight. She –
Don’t eulogize me.
The voice came like freezing water in my lungs. Stones scattered by my feet down the wall of striped shale, dropping into the pond. The chorus of frogs rose, drowning out the sound of my breathing and my pounding heart. I spun around, staring at the trees and the darkened water, certain I had heard something, but then became progressively less sure. There was nothing there. Perhaps my own thoughts were so loud as to sound like whispers in my ears.
Abby would hate being dead more than anything. Not even because she couldn’t do as she pleased, but because everyone would put things upon her. They would remember her wrong, painting a flawless, uncomplicated picture of her in their minds, and here I was, knowing this, doing the same. I was remembering the highlights. Not her many fights with our parents, not her humor that cut to the quick, picking apart everything you said for a scrap of a joke. How she’d teased me relentlessly when we were young about Dan Leary and my since-faded feelings about him, only drawing back when it almost broke things between us. She always pushed things right to the edge in a way that made you twice-wary of ever showing weakness.
I had thought about coming back when I heard she was sick. I almost packed a bag and made a run for it, not knowing when they’d shut down the trains or when I would be able to find someone with a motor car. It had been by collect call, urgent. My father said I didn’t need to come home, and I believed him because it was easier. There were so many reasons not to. I could bring the sickness with me. I could become infected on the voyage. Maybe she would recover with only some scarring, as many did.
We really thought she would, I think. I really did. It seemed likely. She was in good health.
My half-packed bag sat by the door for a week before I put it all back. It was a day later when I got the next call.
Would it have made a difference if I’d been here? What good would it have done? My fists tightened at my sides. Maybe a lot of difference, if I were to be honest with myself. I was better than my parents.
Abby would be furious at being sick, at being bedridden, at being taken care of, of being laid low. It was everything she hated. Mother would have never left her side. Father would have taken the opportunity to throw out her belongings from university, maybe, while she watched helpless. She wouldn’t have been able to stop her tongue from making him fly into a rage. If I were to sift through the ashes in the burn-pit, would I find costume beads and pages of economics?
Don’t pity me.
I still could not convince myself I heard anything except my own mind. I shivered, beating my hands against my arms. The air was frigid and damp, and it crept into my bones like an ugly glance. Maybe she wouldn’t have cursed at me for not coming home. She would understand why I hadn’t. The journey was long, and what good would it have done, to bring more illness with me. To bring raised voices and old fury to a sickbed.
I thought of that door cut into the wall of our home, and I couldn’t shake the thought. What if she came back?
What if she came back, and she hated me?
––––––––
When I climbed back to the house, the chill had burned off with the heat of the anger inside me. How dare they insult her memory like this. How dare they think that they were the only ones to miss her, and this mockery was how she wished to be remembered. Even more so, how dare they pretend that she would visit them.
I went instead to the old barn, where I found my father’s tools and a pile of rough lumber. Boards under arm, I returned to where the frame was cut into the house, and by the weak light from the windows, I set about my work.
It had been some years since I had been called upon to construct anything, but a youth spent working with my father came back to me before long. By the time he came rushing out with a fire in his eyes, I had two of the boards up and was working on the third.
“What are you doing?” he roared, and reached for the hammer. Flames roared up in me to match, and I held the hammer back behind my head. I would have hit him, had he grabbed for it again, and he must have seen that. He must have seen that, because he didn’t reach for it. I had grown taller than him, or maybe he had shrunk with age.
Old fear of his wrath bit at my tongue, but that fire kept it back. How dare he try to stop me. How dare he think he could. In that moment, I was utterly finished with being the one who always backed down.
“Go back inside,” I said softly. “Now.”
The fury in my father’s eyes was like a blue flame, but I couldn’t feel that heat through my own rage. “You’re going to take away our chance to sees our daughter. I hope you know you’re tearing out my heart. For what? For your pride? Because you never got over childishly sulking-”
“It’s a joke,” I spat. “It’s a disrespect. Will you stop me?”
I would never have spoken to him like that as a child. Even in our years of skirmishes, to say anything that sharp would be a suicidal opening. A boxer lashing out and leaving their jaw exposed to a breaking blow. I held still, hammer raised, certain I had pushed him too far.
He tensed. Mouth began to open. I was sure I would see his hand lift, his voice sharpen to a switch. But I wasn’t going to flinch. I wasn’t going to turn away this time.
I asked, “It’s because she’s easier to deal with this way, isn’t she?”
He drew his hand back.
Then my mother came around the corner, and she drew in a sharp breath.
At this, my father became stiff as a rod, locked like the gears of a motorcar. My mother’s presence had never stayed his hand before, but his face grew boil-red, and a dark and viscous shame passed behind his eyes. What it meant, I wasn’t sure. Was there something she had told him? Was there something he remembered? I wondered if it was how they had driven me away before. A raised hand and a departure in the middle of the night. Or was it something more recent?
He turned on his heel and marched inside.
My mother continued watching me, wringing her hands. I met her eyes for a moment, then returned to my work.
“I know you’re upset,” she said. I said nothing. “But I hope you know you’re hurting us deeply. So deeply, Francis. It hurts to even say.”
I missed the nail, then pounded it in with even more vigor. Did I mean it, when the tiny voice in me whispered, Good?
When my work was complete, the doorway was walled top to bottom. Tiny slits remained, but no human thing could reach through, and it would be mean work to pull the boards out. I returned inside and stared at the red door from my father’s chair. Now that the work was done and my breath had slowed, I found there was still a dread inside me like an ember sizzling in freezing water. I didn’t regret what I had done, but I had acted as a man possessed. Did I only wish to stop my parents from being foolish?
Or did I believe deep in my heart what Dan Leary had told me, that the dead had found their way home? Perhaps if Dan had seemed more manic, as fervid as my father. Perhaps then I could have dismissed him as a madman. But he had not seemed happy.
He had seemed very, very afraid.
As midnight passed, pale green light shone through the windows and the cracks around the red door. The clouds fell away from the moon, and that cold light shone like unfurling blossoms, or the white around an eye you thought had closed forever. The frogs sang with the sounds of springtime, and I was struck with the vision of fingers pressing up through the black soil like crocuses, like new growth.
But that was foolishness. I sipped coffee, the hammer before me on the table. It scraped down my throat. The hour waxed.
The air opens when someone is there. Their presence shifts it like a stone in water, and the sounds bend around them like ripples, spreading slowly on still glass. On the edge of my hearing, I thought I almost heard this gap. The slap of feet on stone, the rustle of cloth.
Then, there came a knock at the red, wounded door.
A quick rap-rap that filled the room and house like a sudden gust. I got quickly to my feet and then froze, my breath catching in my throat like a burr on wool.
Rap-rap. It didn’t sound as if it came from the wood I’d nailed over the door. It sounded as if the knock were on the door itself, between the boards and the door. Indeed, it shook in its weak and poorly-built frame. Behind me, boards creaked as my father and mother came back into the room, standing behind me like petitioners. Like children at my back.
Then from outside, a voice spoke. It was close to the red door, seeping through like the paint through the cracks. It was so familiar that it burned like hot iron filings in my gut.
“Francis?” it called.
I still held the hammer and nails in hand. I could rush to it, nail the door to the frame like a coffin lid. Ensure once and for all that it couldn’t get in. Instead I stood frozen with a grief I hadn’t been able to feel. A longing so strong it held back my fear like an arm across one’s chest, signaling wait.
The door began to open. Fingers curled around the edge, the nails blue, the knuckles bandaged and stained fever-red.
“Is that you?” it called. Then with the edge of accusation: “Where were you?”