The Gilly Salt Sisters (23 page)

A
t first Jo thought Claire might have been trying to kill her when she set the barn on fire, but later, after she found out that Ethan had run off to join the damn priesthood, she decided that maybe Claire had simply been trying to kill herself and Jo had just gotten in her way. That would be more typical of Claire, Jo thought, who tended to conduct her affairs like a mad dog on the hunt. She went where instinct told her and never stopped to consider the poor creatures she might flush out into the open.

Claire had been a pain in the ass all that summer, mooning over Ethan and not doing much else. Mama hadn’t been well, and even more of the burden of the marsh was teetering on Jo’s shoulders, which were sturdy enough, but even she had her limits.

The fire Claire had started that day did more than tear Jo’s body in half. It split her memory, too, for whenever she tried to compose a whole picture from that evening, all she ever wound up with were a handful of molten fragments, and she couldn’t ever do much with those except scoop them together and return them to the flames. The thing she most recalled was how fast Claire had disappeared behind the shifting blaze. One minute Jo was telling her not to light her stupid cigarette, and the next Claire was just the outline of a girl consumed by sparks and a wall of smoke. It was like a magician’s trick gone wrong, and Jo’s only thought had
been that if she didn’t get Claire out of that barn, she would disappear for good, and Jo had had enough of people disappearing out of her life.

Jo ended up burned on almost 40 percent of her body, all of it on her right side. For weeks she lay cocooned in the special burn unit in Boston, moist bandages covering her seared skin and eyes, drifting in and out of consciousness. Even though she couldn’t remember actually saving Claire, she had an impression of her sister’s bird-thin wrist gripped in her palm and of the weight of Claire’s bones. But the details—whether she’d carried or dragged Claire, whether they’d escaped out a window or the flaming doors—were fuzzy. According to Mama, Jo had thrown Claire from the barn doorway and then gotten trapped when the beams came down, but the person she wanted to ask about that was Claire herself. Whenever she fought her way up through the haze of drugs and pain, however, Claire was never there. And then one afternoon she suddenly was, her voice trilling and rising like a bird in pain.

“No,” she was pleading. “Please don’t make me. I know what she did for me, but Jo’s so strong, and I’m not like her. Please.”

“But your sister’s already endured so much trauma,” another voice responded, a female’s, lower in register, weary with a hint of impatience laced behind it. It was Dr. Meyer, the only female doctor Jo had ever known. “It’s still an experimental procedure, but we’ve had wonderful success with the ones we’ve performed. We would take the skin from your buttock area,” she was explaining, “and graft it onto your sister. Normally we like to use skin from the patient herself, but in this case we think you’d be the best match to prevent donor rejection.”

No one spoke. To Jo it felt as if the sanitized hospital air had turned back into a cloud of oily smoke.
How bad is it?
she wondered. She hadn’t yet been able to open her eyes or see herself, but everything about her hurt.

Dr. Meyer spoke again. “You don’t have to decide today, but we need to know soon. This could make an enormous difference to your sister.”

There was another silence in the room, but this one was a thick sort of silence, like a pillow being pressed over a sleeping person’s face. Then Jo heard her mother pull the doctor to the far corner of the room and start whispering. Lying blinded for so many days had made Jo weirdly attuned to the quietest of noises. Through the fog of drugs, she tried to pick out her mother’s hushed speech.
Nor’easter. Two, not one. Our Lady.
She quit listening. It was a story she already knew.

“I see,” Jo heard the doctor say. Now Dr. Meyer knew it, too. Jo rolled her swollen tongue in her mouth and tried to squeeze the walls of her throat together to make a sound, but she only managed to moan.

“Joanna?” Dr. Meyer’s clothing rustled as she approached and bent over the bed, checking equipment, flipping open her chart. Jo moaned again and tried to move her head, but the bees in her brain escaped to her skin, stinging with such venom that she gasped.

“Lie still,” the doctor commanded, and she rang for a nurse.

Jo heard Claire step to the other side of her, the long red ends of her hair brushing the sheets. Even without sight Jo could picture Claire’s face, as milky and smooth as a piece of sea glass. The fire had not touched even an inch of her, Jo was guessing. She’d made sure of that. But, of course, Claire was nursing her own wounds.

“She hasn’t spoken to Ethan once,” Mama had told Jo in one of the long hours she’d spent sitting vigil by Jo’s bedside. “She won’t see him, and he’s due to leave in just a few days. She won’t hardly speak to no one.”

Claire was talking now, though. “I called Whit for you,” she breathed in Jo’s ear, her breath even then tinged with a trace of tobacco. “I thought you’d want me to. He says—” She hesitated, and in her voice Jo detected a small channel of envy she’d never noticed before. “He says he sends his best regards. He asked me to give them to you for him. So here.” Claire leaned down closer, careful not to touch any part of Jo except her left side, and pecked her with cherry-scented lips. Jo wondered if Claire was being
cautious or calculating, for she had picked her good side, the part of her that could still get hurt. She listened to Claire’s light footsteps retreat down the hall like rain slipping off a roof, and in spite of herself she began to ponder all the things Claire hadn’t said.
Forgive me
, for instance, or
Thank you
, or
I love you
. Her steps disappeared, and Jo lay there trapped in a charred cocoon of skin, wondering what to call someone who was kin, yes, but also the better half of her flesh, the ambulatory part, walking all the paths Jo now knew she was never going to get to.

A
t first the hospital staff seemed concerned about Jo’s mental faculties. They kept asking her if she knew what year it was and who the president was, which she did. “Lyndon B. Johnson,” she croaked, wanting to add that he had a face like a dried-apple doll and a personality to match, but lacking the energy to do so. Her vocal cords hurt just from breathing.

Above all, the doctors and nurses liked to warn her about her future. “Your life won’t be like it was before,” Dr. Meyer told her in her deadpan fashion, flipping through charts and scribbling notes all at once. “Not right away. But after some time, you will begin to feel like your old self inside.”

“New skin for a new soul,” Bea, her favorite nurse, clucked. “Now’s your chance to become whoever you wanted, honey. Just go for it.”

“Take it day by day.” That was Raymond, the night orderly. “Real slow. It’s better that way.” Jo thought maybe that’s why he’d chosen to work nights, because he liked to stay in the dark.

Three months later, when the nurses finally peeled back her bandages and masks and she got her hands on a mirror, Jo figured out why she’d become a lightning rod for other people’s concern. Her face had melted into a contradiction in flesh, tattered and seared on the right side and perfectly preserved on the left, as if her whole self had been forever stopped in one burning moment. People never knew which side to look at when they were talking
to her, she discovered, and she couldn’t help them out any, for she didn’t know herself yet which half she desired to inflict on the world.

She was fitted with a new glass eye that she could pop out of her socket and roll in the palm of her hand like an egg if she wanted. “You’ll have to develop strategies to compensate for the loss of vision,” Dr. Wynn, her portly ophthalmologist, chirped in the British accent that Jo sometimes found annoying and sometimes soothing. “Driving will be challenging. You will need to exercise caution when it comes to stairs and uneven terrain, but on the whole you’ll make out fine, I should think. What do you do for a profession?”

Jo settled her forehead into the metal band of the complicated machine in front of her, resting her chin on the foam pad. She fought off the image of cows lining up in an abattoir. “Salt,” she murmured, running her tongue over her teeth, missing the crunch of gray salt between them. The hospital food was so bland. “My family scrapes salt and sells it.” Dr. Wynn adjusted a dial, and a miniature sun seemed to ignite in Jo’s remaining eye. She struggled not to blink.

“Do you really? Now, that’s absolutely fascinating. Have you ever baked a salt-crusted fish?” When Jo didn’t answer, he continued on, adjusting knobs and dials on his side of the examining contraption. “You take a whole fish,” he chortled, “bury it under a mound of salt mixed with egg whites, and then pop it in the oven for a few hours.” He switched off the light shining in her eye. “Sounds dreadful, but it’s absolutely scrumptious. Try it.”

She blinked, still shocked by the way her eyelid curved over the glass like a tongue skimming a tooth. It was the only smooth thing on that side of her body. Jo felt her real eye grow heavy and wondered if she would only cry half as much now, or if her body would just send all its grief scooting over to her remaining eye. It didn’t seem like a fair arrangement to have twice as much sorrow jamming up a single outlet, but Jo wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that that was how things were going to work from now on.

“Here.” Dr. Wynn spun around on his metal stool and handed her a prescription for eyedrops. He wasn’t nearly as old as his speech made him sound, Jo realized. From certain angles he was almost even handsome, if also balding and a little paunchy. But he made up for it with his kind gaze.

“How’s your family handling all this?” he asked, and Jo didn’t answer. Mama had been a rock, but Claire had only come to see Jo three times—once when she’d refused to donate the skin graft, once when Jo had the first surgery on her face, and once when Jo had a fever so high that devils could have danced on the ceiling and she would have called them blessed.

“Claire doesn’t like the hospital,” Mama had tried to explain. “You know that. She’s still so young. And you know how teenagers are—wrapped up in their own lives.”

No
, Jo had wanted to snap.
I have no idea how teenagers are. I never got to be one.

Dr. Wynn’s voice broke into her thoughts. “You’ll need to use these for the first few weeks until everything is fully healed. The dosage is written at the top.” His plump forefinger underlined a row of chicken scratch on the page, which Jo pretended to decipher.

She reached out and accepted the paper. “Thank you.”

It was time for her to stand up, which still occurred in stages: first the dulled soles of her feet applied to the ground, then a rickety heaving of knees, hip bones, shoulders, and finally her head. None of her seemed to go together the same way it used to.

Dr. Wynn cleared his throat. “Take care of that eye, then,” he said, and Jo wondered if he meant her real eye or the fake one. “Call if there are any problems, and remember that a blind leap of faith is more than just an expression.”

He closed his office door, leaving her to shuffle and grope her way to the orderly, pondering whether it still counted as a leap if her feet never left the ground.

T
he next morning Mama drove her home, stopping as they neared the long, sandy lane to wind down the car windows. It was the tail end of the cold season, and the frosted air stirred up the ends of what was left of Jo’s cropped hair. She had missed the fall and most of the winter. Two seasons gone.

“That’s better,” Mama said. She’d grown so thin over the past few months, Jo noted. The worry over Jo’s health and the crushing burden of the medical bills was taking its toll, but Mama still sat straight as a sergeant, her hands at two and ten o’clock on the wheel. “Good salt air,” she said. “Makes a solid change from that hospital. A solid change.”

Even with a single eye, Jo could see that nothing on Salt Creek Farm was any different—only the season. Then they rounded the last corner and she spied the black scar where the barn had stood. It had been skeletal before the accident, but now there was only a suggestion of a structure. One charred beam remained, stuck up into the sky like a bony middle finger. “What about the salt?” she asked.