The first afternoon Sam was home from hospital he secluded himself in his room and read comic books. His throat was still bandaged and the tape that secured the dressings to his skin itched horribly. Whenever he moved his head he could feel the stitches pulling, and he spent hours staring in the mirror trying to talk, as if he could somehow will his voice back. The inside of his throat felt tender, like a fresh bruise, and it hurt to swallow or breathe too deeply.
Katie had kept sticking her head into his room to smile and then run away. It bothered him to feel watched like that, so he shut the door and wedged his shoes beneath it. When his mother came to bring him lunch she had to knock with her foot and wait for him to open up. As she edged her way in, Sam turned and crept back under the covers.
She set the bowl on his bedside table and laid a spoon and a napkin on his knees. Steam drifted up from the soup and filled the room with the aroma of tomato. Sam grimaced and tried to roll away from the smell.
‘What’s wrong, honey? Don’t you want something to eat? I can hear your stomach growling.’
Sam shrugged and pulled the blankets up over his shoulder.
‘Come on, you love tomato soup.’ She petted his hair. ‘I made it especially. Honey?’
He curled up his legs and squinted until he could barely see. He wasn’t going to cry until she left.
‘That’s fine, sweetie, you get some rest. Try to eat something. And if you need anything…’ She trailed off. The silver bell she’d bought him was missing from his bedside table. Sam had thrown it across the room, and when she found it under a pile of his clothes, she nodded and left with it tucked inside her hand.
‘We’re here for you,’ she whispered, and pulled the door to, but not shut.
With the lights off, Sam began to learn the creaks and clicks of the house. Soon he could make out the activity going on in the other rooms as he lay in bed. He heard the floorboards give in the lounge room as his mother moved about; the thump of Katie’s door when the draft pulled it shut; the stomping whenever she ran down the hall. In the quiet, it was as though the house was breathing, and he wondered for a moment why this was something he had never noticed before.
Outside, he heard Dettie clatter through the back door and into the kitchen, jangling her keys and calling out a hello. The flyscreen swung closed and Sam could tell a bag of groceries was being spilled across the countertop. A few minutes later the kettle boiled, and for an hour or so the room went quiet while his mother and Dettie sat and talked.
Just as Sam had finished reading the same comic for the third time in a row, his door was elbowed open, and Dettie slid inside, the halo of her hair glowing above her silhouette like a match. She snapped on the light and Sam shielded himself from the glare.
‘You’ll ruin your eyes if you keep that up,’ she said, and gently kicked her way through the toys on the floor. Easing down onto the bed, she tapped his foot. ‘What are you reading?’ She lifted the comic from his hands and flicked through the pages.
Sam scrunched his blankets into a knot. He shrugged.
‘Hmm, looks exciting,’ she said, unconvincingly. She flattened out its creases and placed it on the floor.
‘So how are you feeling, Sammy?’
Motionless, he sat staring down at his empty lap.
‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘It’ll be sore for a while, but it’ll keep getting better. Soon, you won’t even feel it.’
Sam knew he was glaring, but he didn’t care. He was grinding his teeth and he didn’t mind that it pulled against the stitches.
‘You’re probably feeling like things are different now, aren’t you? That you’re not the same? That a piece of you is gone?’ She shook her head, slowly. ‘Maybe you feel like someone took something from you? Something that was yours.’ She leaned in, and reaching over, flicked on his bedside lamp, turning it towards herself. ‘And it’s okay to feel like that, Sammy,’ she said. ‘They did take something from you. They had to.’
Dettie was undoing the top two buttons on her blouse as she spoke. Sam wriggled away, staring over at the closed curtains.
‘See, I know how you feel,’ she said, pulling open her collar so that he could see the top of the long scar left over from her heart operation. It was flushed pink and stretched down her chest like a strip of barbed wire.
‘You might have a scar like this for the rest of your life too, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve changed. You’re still who you are. No matter what.’ She was still holding her arms up. Her elbows started to tremble. ‘You’re not broken, Sammy,’ she said. ‘Remember what I said? People like us—we don’t break. We get fixed, and we get stronger.’
Sam still didn’t know what to say to that. And he remembered suddenly, almost disinterestedly, that he couldn’t say anything anyway. He nodded.
Dettie nodded too, fixing up her blouse and pulling back his bedsheets. ‘Now why don’t you come out and sit with us in the lounge room?’
He wilted, but she took his arm and led him to the door.
Outside, his mother was putting away the shopping. ‘Did you have a good talk to Aunty Dettie?’ she smiled. ‘Did she tell you about how impressed all the nurses were?’
Sam shook his head, but felt Dettie’s hand squeeze him gently on the shoulder.
‘Wonderful,’ his mother said, smiling, and turned back to the pantry to shelve two more soup cans.
Sam shrugged, wandering over to sit on the floor by the couch.