Second Nature Part 1

Second Nature.

by Alice Hofman.

Nature never deceives us, it is always we who deceive ourselves.

--Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

BY APRIL most people had already forgotten about him, except for some of the nurses on the floor, who crossed themselves when they walked past his room. The guard stationed outside his door, who had little to do but read magazines and drink coffee for more than three months, bragged to his friends that on nights when there was a full moon he needed a whip and a chair just to set a dinner tray on the other side of the door. But in fact, the guard had never even dared to look around the room, where the metal bed was made up with clean white sheets every week, though it had not once been slept in.

The man who occupied the room had no name. He refused to look anyone in the eye or, even after months of work with the speech therapists, to make any sound whatsoever, at least not in the presence of others.

Officially he was listed as patient 3119, but among themselves the staff called him the Wolf Man, although they were expressly forbidden to do so. He was underweight and had a long scar along the inside of one thigh that had healed years before but still turned purple on cold or rainy days. For two months he'd needed to wear a cast on his reconstructed foot, otherwise he was in surprisingly good health.

Since he had no birthday, the staff at Kelvin Medical Center had a.s.signed him one. They'd chipped in to buy him a sweater, blue wool, on sale at Bloomingdale's, and one of the cooks had baked and frosted an angel food cake. But that was back in January, after he learned to use a fork and dress himself, and they'd still had hope for him. Now, they left him alone, and when he sat motionless, and sunlight came through the bars on his window, some of the nurses swore that his eyes turned yellow.

The evening before his transfer upstate, the barber was sent to his room. There would be no need to sweep the floor after his shave and haircut, the raven that had been perching on the window ledge was waiting to dart through the bars and gather up the hair to wind into its nest. One lab technician, who had been brave enough to look through the gla.s.s window in the door, had once seen the raven eating right out of his plate while the Wolf Man calmly continued with his dinner. Now, the raven watched as the attendants strapped the Wolf Man into a metal chair and held his head back. The barber wanted no chances taken, a human bite was the most dangerous of all. In the interest of speed, he used a razor rather than scissors, and while he worked he quickly recited a blessing.

The following morning, two attendants helped the Wolf Man into a black overcoat, which would be taken away once he settled into the State Hospital, since he'd never need it again and another patient could make use of it. The cook who had baked the angel food cake for his birthday wept. She insisted he had smiled when she lit the candles on the cake, but no one believed her, except the guard stationed at his door, who hadbeen made so anxious by this bit of news that he took to biting his fingernails, close enough to the skin to draw blood.

The cook had discovered that the Wolf Man would not eat meat unless it was raw. He liked his potatoes unbaked as well, and would not touch a salad or a pudding. For his last meal, an early breakfast, she had simply pa.s.sed a hamburger patty over a flame for a moment. So what if uncooked meat was bad for you, and most of the patients liked cereal and toast, she wanted him to have what he liked. She had an impulse to hide a knife or a screwdriver inside the folded napkin, because she knew that as soon as he'd eaten his breakfast, he would be handcuffed, then released into the custody of a social worker from the State Hospital for the ride along the Hudson. By afternoon he would be signed into a ward from which no one was ever released. But she didn't follow her impulse, and after the Wolf Man had his meal, the attendants dressed him and helped him into the black overcoat, then clasped the handcuffs on him, quickly, from behind, before he could fight back.

Outside the door, the guard turned his Walkman up to the highest volume, and he slipped his sungla.s.ses on, though the April sky threatened to storm. His friends liked to hear stories about the Wolf Man--how he crouched and circled three times before he curled up to sleep with his back against the wall, that five strong men were needed to hold him down each time they drew blood or inoculated him against measles and teta.n.u.s--and the guard was always happy to oblige. But what he never mentioned, as he drank cold beer with his friends, was that on nights when there was thunder he often heard a whimpering behind the door, a sound so pitiful it turned his bones cold and his heart inside out.

That was the sound the trappers had heard on the last day of December, when the snow was ten feet deep and deer stuck in the drifts and froze solid. There, at the edge of northern Michigan, much of the land had never been charted and trees were so dense they blocked out the sun.

Beneath the ice, streams were filled with green water. Bears in these mountains grew to seven feet, and their hides were so thick a whole hive of bees couldn't sting them. It was dark as night on winter afternoons, trappers had to carry flashlights and leave lanterns hung on their snowmobiles in order to find their way back. Most of these men never poached enough to get caught by the rangers, and anyone looking for them would have had a difficult time. In the spring, moss appeared overnight and covered any footprints completely by morning.

In winter, no one but a maniac or an experienced hunter would venture into the forest. For those men who didn't fear the woods, there was little chance of legal action against them. Trapping was, after all, a criminal act without a witness. There was no one to hear a shotgun fired, or the peculiar cry made by a fox when a piece of cyanide-laced lamb takes effect.

The men who found him were an uncle and nephew who had worked the forest for more than ten years and who were not nearly as greedy or cruel as some of their neighbors. They worked in silence, not with poisoned meat but with steel traps, and they were always particularly careful to stay together, even when it made sense to split up, since they had seen, several times, huge paw prints, three times as big as a dog's. In these mountains all sorts of things were said on winter nights, some to be believed, some not.

A man they knew, over in Cromley, had a wolf-skin rug on his living room floor, head and all. He told everyone he'd shot the wolf, a male of more than a hundred and ten pounds, head-on, but his wife had let it slip that he'd simply found it the spring before, dead of natural causes, preserved all winter long by the cold. Wolves were rare, eventhis far north, you could probably count on your fingers the ones that had come down from Canada and stayed.

Still, their tenuous presence made for good talk and real fear.

An old trapper who hadn't been caught once in sixty years of making a living liked to scare some of the boys who were just starting out by swearing that it was possible for some wolves to become human. He'd seen it himself on a night when there was an orange hunter's moon. A wolf was crouching down with the pack one minute and standing on two feet like a man the next. That happened with old trappers sometimes--they had killed more animals than they could number and, now that they were senior citizens who couldn't eat anything but oatmeal, they suddenly started to have some kind of funny regret that mixed them up so badly they didn't even notice people were laughing at them.

The uncle and his nephew didn't listen to stories and they didn't take foolish chances. As far as they were concerned, they weren't breaking the law so much as taking care of their families. They were interested in deer for the meat, foxes and racc.o.o.ns for their skins, but they got much more than that on the last day of December. This was the season when the sky turned black at four-thirty and the cold made breathing painful and sharp. They were inspecting the traps they had left out the day before when they heard the howling. Normally they would have backtracked, but they had worked all day with nothing to show and still had one trap left to check. As they walked forward, it wasn't the cold that made them s.h.i.+ver, and their brand-new parkas from Sears couldn't help them one bit. The nephew's teeth were hitting against each other so hard he thought he'd chip the enamel right off them.

It was hard to tell from the howling exactly how many wolves there were until they saw them. What sounded like a dozen turned out to be three, up above, on the ridgetop. All three were silver, brothers by the look of them. They seemed to be waiting for the uncle and his nephew, because as soon as they saw the men, the wolves stopped their racket.

Yet they stayed where they were, unprotected up there on the ridge.

When the uncle saw a pool of blood, he thought the wolves were after a deer or a fisher caught in the last trap, and he figured it might be best just to let them have it. The temperature had begun to drop and the sun would soon be going down. The uncle would have turned back then if his nephew hadn't grabbed his arm.

The last steel trap was a good one, kept oiled and cleaned, it would last another fifty years. When they heard the whimpering sound, they a.s.sumed they were simply suffering from the cold.

Hallucinations occurred in severe weather, they sprang up from the ground fully formed. Jack Flannagan insisted he'd been visited by his dead mother one day in the woods, when the temperature was ten below zero. A friend of the nephew's would not hunt after dark, convinced that a deer he had shot one snowy day had cried real tears, just like a baby. So the wailing they heard might have been caused by twilight and ice. The notion of going home began to feel about right, even necessary. Then they saw the thing in the trap, struggling and bleeding, its foot partially crushed, and they might have shot it then, to put it out of its misery, if they hadn't realized, all at once, that the struggling thing had the shape of a man.

The wolves took up their howling again, while the uncle labored to open the trap. The nephew fired his gun in the air, even though he knew it was bad luck to shoot at wolves, and they took off, across the ridge and through the pine trees. It took almost two hours to get the poorcreature out of the trap and carry him back to the snowmobiles. A trail of red blood burned through the snow. The drifts were now much higher, so that a mile seemed to go on endlessly. The nephew wondered aloud whether they'd be charged with murder if their unintended victim should die. He was already unconscious and his skin had turned blue.

How had it been possible, the nephew asked his uncle, for him to have survived through the winter, wearing only skins on his body and wrapped around his feet? Why had they never seen him before, when they knew every man for a hundred miles around?

The uncle didn't bother to answer, he was too busy tying the limp body into the snowmobile with thick brown rope. Clouds were moving in fast, threatening more snow. They had to get to the rangers' station, where a helicopter ran an airlift to St. Joseph's Hospital in Cromley. The uncle's breathing was ragged.

He knew for a fact that the trap had shattered the left foot, bone jutted through the skin. As the uncle was positioning the head onto a blanket he realized how young their victim was, younger than his nephew.

Once he looked at the pale face, with its high cheekbones and knots of dark hair, he couldn't look away, even though he had removed his gloves to lash the rope to the snowmobile and his fingers were freezing. If he'd seen anything like this face before, it was in the chapel at St.

Joseph's, where he'd waited while his wife was being operated on for something wrong inside her stomach a few years back.

To the right of the pews, in a dark alcove, there had been a statue made of white wood with a countenance so calm it had made him weep.

He pulled his gloves back on and started his snowmobile. In less than three hours, work would begin in the only operating room in St. Joseph's as an orthopedic surgeon repaired the bones the steel trap had shattered. Two weeks later, the patient would be flown to Kelvin Medical Center on East Eighty-sixth Street in New York, a hospital that dealt exclusively with victims of traumatic stress. There he would stay, in a locked room, for the next few months, while some of the best doctors in the city tried to ascertain what they were dealing with.

But the uncle knew what they had right then and there. It didn't matter what people said on winter nights this year or the year after or the one after that. It didn't matter what people believed. The uncle knew exactly what it was they were dealing with, on this night and forever after. They had caught themselves a wolf.

Robin Moore was stopped for speeding every time she drove through town.

It made no difference whether she was going thirty-three miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone, or if teenagers in Trans Ams were revving their engines and pa.s.sing her by. She could tell when it was going to happen, she'd get a funny taste in her mouth, as if she'd eaten a lemon or a spoonful of salt, and then she'd hear the siren.

Robin always pulled over to the side of the road calmly, then rolled down her window and waited.

"Is there a problem, Officer?" she'd say in a voice so sweet you'd never guess at the depth of her bitterness or imagine that she knew every local policeman by name. She'd had coffee with their wives, and invited everyone over to the house for barbecues, she'd fixed onion dip and guacamole on nights when the men had sat in her kitchen playing poker.

The problem was that she was divorcing Roy, and either he thought it wasamusing to have his buddies stop her for minor infractions--an inspection sticker overdue, a broken left taillight, the alleged speeding--or he believed this hara.s.sment would make her realize she needed him. Either way, Robin's glove compartment was now chock-full of tickets, none of which she'd paid. She had fallen for Roy when she was sixteen, the same age their son, Connor, was now: a dangerous and stupid year when boys jumped into fast cars without thinking twice and girls drank themselves silly down at the beach near Poorman's Point and sometimes did enough damage to last a lifetime.

She couldn't keep away from Roy back then. The more trouble he got into, the more her family despaired, the more she had to have him. His father, Neil, had worked for Robin's grandfather and drawn up the sketches for the arboretum when the land was nothing more than cattails and scrub pine. In Na.s.sau County, Roy's father was known as the Doctor, since he could cure almost any tree, whether it was a dying elm or a willow hit by lightning. Roy had started coming around with the Doctor during the summer Robin turned sixteen, although it was clear he didn't give a d.a.m.n for willows and elms. He started throwing rocks at the patio whenever she was out reading in the hammock. He began to wait for her outside the kitchen door, near the rosemary and the Russian sage.

He kissed her for the first time beneath the arbor where the wisteria bloomed. Not long after this kiss, and hundreds more like it, Robin's grandfather made his declaration that under no circ.u.mstances could she marry Roy, which pretty much sealed her fate.

And now, although they had a legal separation, Roy was somehow convinced they were still together, even after their final fight, a nasty display of distrust on the corner of Delaney. That night Robin went home and dragged all of Roy's clothes out to the driveway, and when he got home and saw his clothes flung across the concrete, he must have known where they were heading. Yet almost a year later he continued to appear at the house unexpectedly. He was there, he said, to check Connor's homework--something he'd never done when he lived with them--or to make certain the hot water heater wasn't on the fritz.

Once, he had arrived on a Sat.u.r.day night and had done everything possible to try to get her into bed. He came up behind her and whispered, the way he used to: Just this one time, one littlef.u.c.k, come on, baby. She thought he was kidding until he shoved his hand into her pants, and she had to push him away. The next day he'd come back, sheepish and polite, with a peace offering: a truckful of manure, which he said the Doctor had asked him to deliver, highly unlikely, since Robin had just seen her father-in-law that morning and he hadn't mentioned a word about cow s.h.i.+t.

When Robin was starting out, the Doctor never viewed her as compet.i.tion, surely there were enough gardens on the island for them both. He sent her customers and called nurseries out on the East End to get her a discount. He taught her to hang jars of beer from fruit trees so that wasps could drink themselves to death, and to circle herb gardens with a ring of salt, which slugs wouldn't dare to cross.

It was true that Robin spent too long with each client, poring over books, plotting out designs for perennial beds in watercolor and ink, but that wasn't the reason her business was ailing.

Lately, everything she touched seemed to die. Robin attributed this to the anger she had carried around all winter, ever since her breakup with Roy. If she pruned a rosebush in the morning, by midafternoon the canes would begin to wither, by evening they would turn black. Just last night, she'd discovered that every bulb in the pot of forced tulips on her dining room table had decayed only minutes after she'd torn off someof the yellowing leaves. All week there had been good weather for gardens, with a light rain turning the cold earth squishy and warm--perfect conditions to begin spring cleanup for her regular clients-- but Robin didn't bother to return any of their calls.

Whatever bad luck she was having might seep through the old leather gloves she wore when she cut back brambles and raked mulch off the season's first lilies-of-the-valley.

This stretch of sour fortune wasn't the reason she was driving in to see her brother, although it now seemed as if just getting out of town would take all day. Already she had been pulled over twice, once near the King Kullen supermarket by that moron Woody Preston, who grinned as he wrote out a speeding ticket--four miles over the limit-- and the second time only a mile from the bridge, where George Tenney at least had the decency to look embarra.s.sed as he wrote out the ticket for failing to signal when she changed lanes. Robin had tossed the ticket into the overflowing glove compartment right in front of him.

"You're going to have to start paying those," George said of her growing collection.

"I don't think so," Robin said. She hadn't bothered to dress up and was wearing her rain slicker, a pair of jeans, a khaki-colored sweater, old green boots. She had small callused hands and beneath each fingernail was a line of dirt that seemed never to wash away, not even if she sat in the bath for hours and used her good soap from Italy.

"You could give Roy another chance," George suggested. He was a large, soft man who loved poker and almost went nuts when his own wife left him. For months afterward, Roy brought him home for dinner on Tuesday nights, and George ate steadily and slowly, asking for the peas or the rolls in a wounded voice.

"Are you a marriage counselor?" Robin asked him.

"Well, no," George said. "I can't say that I am."

"Okay, George, just tell me this. Was Roy f.u.c.king around the whole time we were married, or just at the end?"

"Robin," George said in that wounded voice. "That's not nice."

"No, it's not," Robin agreed. A fine rain had begun, and Robin turned on the winds.h.i.+eld wipers, then gunned the engine of the pickup so it wouldn't die on her as it often did in damp weather.

"Do you want to come over for dinner on Friday? Vegetarian lasagna, but you won't be able to tell there's no meat."

"You know I can't," George said. He'd known Robin forever and he hadn't had a home-cooked meal for months, but it wasn't a good idea to socialize with a beautiful woman who happened to be Roy's not-quite ex-wife.

"It's not like I'm asking you for a date, George," Robin said.

"But hey, I guess it's good to find out who your real friends are."

She said this just to ride him, since she knew that anyone connected with the police department had to side with Roy. People simply couldn't stand it when your marriage broke up, they took it personally.

Even Robin's oldest friend, Mich.e.l.le Altero, who had never liked Roy,and had cried at their wedding, real sobs, not just polite tears, had suggested she give him another chance.

"Can I go now?" Robin asked George.

"Sure," George said. He wasn't too happy about standing on the side of the service road in the rain, getting involved in someone's private affairs. "Where is it you're going, anyway?" he asked. He truly believed he was being casual.

"Who wants to know?" Robin said.

She could be real fresh when she wanted to be, which George figured came from growing up with the notion she'd be rich someday. As it was, he knew for a fact she'd been hours away from having her electricity cut off the month before. Roy had thought that might bring her back to him, but it hadn't worked out that way. The electric company had given her a five-day extension, and before Roy could persuade them otherwise, Robin had paid offher bill.

"Come on, Robin," George said.

"Tell Roy, where I go is none of his business."

"How do you think Old d.i.c.k would have liked what's happened between you and Roy?" George asked. "Did you ever consider that?"

Robin hated to hear her grandfather referred to as Old d.i.c.k, but she kept her mouth shut. This is what happened when you grew up on an island, people a.s.sumed they had a perfect right to pull you over on a service road and give you marital advice. Maybe Robin's brother had been right, when he and Kay broke up, Stuart moved into Manhattan. He couldn't pa.s.s a single street corner in town without being reminded of a dozen things he'd done or said. It was like living with ghosts: he couldn't have a cup of coffee at Fred's Diner in peace without having some phantom settle down on the stool beside him.

"My grandfather always despised Roy," Robin announced. In fact, there wasn't a man in town her grandfather hadn't loathed. "He refused to come to our wedding."

"Old d.i.c.k would never have favored a divorce," George insisted, but he let her go and watched mournfully as she pulled her truck onto the service road, then headed toward the bridge where the willow trees grew.

Once she crossed over, no one on the local police force could stop her, she'd be out of their jurisdiction, driving as fast as she pleased.

Beside the wooden bridge, the thick twisted roots of the old willows coiled through the muddy earth. Anyone who approached the island for the first time at dusk could easily believe that these willows had once been men, they seemed to cry out loud and their thin branches tapped against the hoods of pa.s.sing cars. No one knew when the trees had been planted, but they were already old when Richard Aaron first came to the island in 1923. They'd frightened off everyone but the bravest fishermen and the cats that someone had once brought across to drown in a burlap bag but that had escaped to breed in the marshes, living wild on bluefish and sparrows.

There was no bridge back then, and Aaron had to put on black hip boots and wade through the water to the other side, stepping over hermit crabs and moon snails. He'd paid thirteen thousand dollars cash for the island--a good deal even then, one he'd managed because the previous owner believed that warm air rising from marshes caused malaria and scarlet fever. On the north side the first big Queen Annes were built,with stone fireplaces and fish-head s.h.i.+ngles, on the south side were workers' cottages for the stonemasons and carpenters, some of whom stayed on after their work was through. Off to the west, Aaron built his own house, with bricks carted over the bridge, and panels of stained gla.s.s that were tied to the masons' backs with thick rope, then covered with white muslin to protect them from cracking. He kept five acres of black pine and beach gra.s.s and Rosa rugosa for himself, most of which was to become Poorman's Point after his only son squandered everything on a real estate venture in Florida that went wrong because of hurricanes or bad economic times or simple carelessness.

Old d.i.c.k was not dead, as many people on the island a.s.sumed, although he was always talked about in the past tense. He was ninety-one years old and had outlived his son and his sisters and brothers and just about everybody else he considered to be worth two cents. The main house had been closed down for more than twenty years, and Old d.i.c.k lived above the garage with his housekeeper, Ginny, who was eighty-four. He couldn't get out of his bed unless he was lifted, and he hadn't seen sunlight for years, but when Robin went to visit him he was still able to muster the strength to scream at her. She went only once a month, on the last Sunday, making certain always to bring an apple pie.

A good apple pie was the one thing Old d.i.c.k wouldn't scream about, and Robin sneaked slices to him, on paper plates, since Ginny didn't allow him any sugar or salt.

And that's what Robin was going to see Stuart about. Trying to get Stuart on the phone was always so frustrating, and this was too important, she couldn't wait. Ginny's health was failing and her daughters wanted to send her to a nursing home in NewJersey, and then what the h.e.l.l would they do with Old d.i.c.k? Stuart had been all but supporting him, since Social Security was barely enough to pay Ginny's weekly salary, and there were food and heating bills and medicine to consider. The truth of it was, Stuart had been helping Robin out, too, since she didn't want to ask Roy for any more than the pittance she was legally allowed.

Thank goodness for Stuart, who was so practical, he liked to joke, that he applied to medical school when he realized he needed a twenty-four-hour-a-day psychiatrist and decided it was cheaper to become one than to engage one at the going rates. When he and Kay divorced, Stuart had insisted she buy a Volvo, after checking every import's safety record, he heartily disapproved of Robin's old pickup, which, as she now approached the Midtown Tunnel, skidded as it always did when she was in a hurry and the asphalt was wet.

There were no meters free, so Robin had to park in one of the expensive lots, on Eighty-fifth, then run through the rain over to Kelvin Medical Center, but at least she was wearing her boots.

By the time she reached the building, her hair had unwound from its elastic band and her rain slicker was dripping wet. The storm had now begun in earnest, the kind of downpour that flooded gutters and whipped umbrellas into the air. When Robin got out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor, her ears ached with the drop in air pressure. She was on her way to Stuart's office, thinking about Medicare and lasagna and a new mildewresistant variety of aster, when the Wolf Man was led into the hallway.

Because he was handcuffed, the attendants a.s.sumed he was harmless, they left him in the corridor while they went to sign for his transfer. The air was so murky and still that the mice grew confused, and believing itwas midnight, they dashed out of the heating vents. A few nurses and attendants who had the day off had come in just to get a glimpse of the Wolf Man, and they were disappointed when he kept his eyes downcast.

Patients on crutches struggled to their doorways in their hospital gowns so that someday they could tell their grandchildren they'd been there, right in the same hospital, breathing the very same air, but most of them mistook the Wolf Man for a maintenance worker and looked right past him.

"Is that him?" Robin asked one of the nurses. "The Wolf Man?"

"We're not supposed to call him that," the nurse told her, but of course Stuart called him that all the time, at least in private.

Stuart had talked about this patient constantly when he'd first been flown in from Michigan. All the cases of children raised by animals had been dubious, records had been tampered with, fears reported as fact, medical histories obscured, so that one never knew whether ill children simply had been abandoned out in the woods, where no one was likely to find them, by families too poor or overwhelmed to cope. Not one of these children had ever gained enough language to tell his own story, and Stuart's hope was that this patient would change all that.

If they were lucky, he had been able to speak before he was lost, and with help he might remember all he once knew. But by the beginning of March, Stuart no longer discussed the Wolf Man with Robin, and by the end of the month the arguments he offered to his colleagues about keeping the patient at the medical center sounded weak, even to him.

Through all the hours of therapy, the patient had not spoken one word.

"Well, he doesn't look very fierce," Robin said to the nurse.

"Oh, really?" the nurse said archly, as she started down the hall.

"He'd bite your head offin a minute. He'd slit your throat and never think twice."

The Wolf Man was hunched over on a wooden bench in his black overcoat, which was two sizes too big. His hair had been clipped so short Robin could see his scalp. There was a gash in the back of his neck, left when the barber's hand had begun to tremble.

Robin took off her yellow slicker and shook out the rain, she would have continued on to Stuart's office at the end of the hall if she hadn't seen a mouse scurry along the bench. Behind his back, the Wolf Man closed his fist over the mouse before it had the chance to dart away.

Then he looked at Robin, suddenly, as if he knew he was being watched.

Robin stayed exactly where she was, dripping rain onto the linoleum, even after the Wolf Man turned his back to her. Slowly he opened his hand, and the mouse ran in circles, as though dazed by the scent of human flesh, before scurrying off to hide in a heating vent. For weeks the WolfMan had been thinking how easy it would be to tear out one of his doctors' throats during their sessions together. The doctor would reach for a pen, or turn to look out the window, and he wouldn't even know what was happening until his s.h.i.+rt was drenched with blood and clouds filled his vision. It was the same with a deer. Even if it was still struggling, you knew it had given up the fight when its eyes turned white, when it saw something so far away it wasn't even in this world.

The thunderstorm had moved in quickly, across the river, from NewJersey.

The windows were rattling. Alone on the bench, the Wolf Man began tos.h.i.+ver. If he hadn't, Robin would never have gone over to him. When she reached out and touched his arm, the heat from her fingers went right through his black coat and into his skin. She was the first person to touch him who didn't have to. He still had blood blisters all over his hands and feet, and on rainy days like this the scar that ran along the inside of his thigh ached horribly. Lately, he had been remembering things that seemed to belong to someone else: forks and spoons set out on a kitchen table, slices of an orange on a blue china plate.

"It's just thunder," Robin said.