“Anyway,” said Lone. “So, do you want to see it?”
“Do I want to what?”
“Do you want to see my leg?”
Kelly shrugged. The truth was that she did want to see it, badly. “If you want to show me.”
“Well, I only want to show you if you want to see it,” he countered.
“Then show me.”
Lone reached down, undid his left shoe and pulled it off, then his white athletic sock. Underneath was the pink plastic foot, toeless, curved, as delicate as a woman's shoe. He started to roll up his jeans, then stopped. “You know what? This would be easier if…” he said.
“That's fine.”
“Okay.” He took off his other shoe and sock, then stood up and undid the buttons at his fly and balanced himself with one hand while he pulled his jeans down with the other. When he sat down again he pulled them off completely and sat there in his boxer shorts.
She found herself looking back and forth between his face and his legs, as if this were somehow the most polite approach to the situation. He leaned back and rested his arms on the sides of his chair. “That's the prosthesis,” he said.
She nodded, and leaned closer. It was attached to the end of his leg with a brown strap. “Can I touch it?”
“Sure,” he said.
She started at the ankle, which wasn't really an ankle at all, no bone, little contour, just a thinness above the foot. The plastic was scratched and peeling in places, having been through God knows what trouble. Her fingers went from the ridge of the plastic onto Lone's real skin, which felt weirdly, almost wrongly soft. She rubbed her fingers up and down the hair on the side of his leg, and Lone exhaled a little laugh. She lifted his leg a bit with her left hand and slid her right hand underneath. They were sitting close together now.
“That tickles,” Lone said.
She unbuckled the strap that held the prosthesis to his leg and set it gently on the table next to the beer bottles. On the stub of his leg the skin was rippled and folded, as if the doctor had wrapped it like a present, and she slid her fingertips over the bumps. Some of the ridges were red, like welts. “Does it hurt?” she said.
“No.” Lone put his hand on her shoulder.
While they kissed, she kept her hand on his leg.
Up in her room, Luz watched Marie-Claire walk away. She couldn't breathe without crying. Marie-Claire swung the leg back and forth as she walked, like a baseball player warming up with a bat. After she turned the corner, Luz climbed under her desk and pulled the chair in as close as she could and sat with her knees up to her chin. One of her knees had a scab from when she fell at the park a week ago. She scratched it off and watched blood well up through the skin. Hearing her father moving around downstairs, getting a drink out of the fridge, she knew he was going to sit down at the kitchen table and open the mail. Then he'd read the newspaper because he never had time in the morning. Then he'd call her downstairs and have her sit in the kitchen while he made dinner, asking her questions about what the day was like, and then she could watch TV for an hour before she had to go to bed.
She pushed the chair away, softly, and crept out from under the desk. She could feel dry tears crinkling her cheek. She went into her father's bedroom and smelled the soapy smell that was always in there. When the floor creaked she stood still, but he didn't call upstairs or anything. Very slowly and quietly, she opened the bottom drawer of the nightstand, lifted the stack of Macleans, and pulled out the tin box. She put the joint in her pocket, closed the box and the drawer, then went into the bathroom and shut the door and looked at herself in the mirror. First she wanted to practice, to make sure it looked right when she said, Marie Claire showed me how.
Afterwards, they were lying in bed, drowsing in and out of talk and sleep, when Lone murmured softly, “God, you know it's so true.” He shook his head.
“What's true?” said Kelly, looking at him. His eyes were closed.
He put his arm around her and stroked her hair. His skin was hot and sticky against hers. “Girls love the leg,” he said.
She slept for an hour or two. When she woke up, Lone was breathing steady and slow, his hand on his chest. She got out of bed and dressed. Starting for the door, she stopped at the table and picked up the leg. She was afraid someone might ask her about it, but there was no one around. At the parking-lot pay phone she called a cab to take her back to her car at the Edge-water. There was a suggestion of light in the sky, nighttime opening up and letting go. She guessed it was around four.
Back in her car, she put the leg on the dashboard. Then she put it on the seat beside her, the foot dipping down over the side of the upholstery, but no matter how she placed it, the leg looked splayed out, violent, accidental. There was no point, she decided, in keeping it.
She got out of the car and walked behind the bar to the water, where waves splashed and foamed, swirling detritus around the rocks, and heaved the leg into the lake as hard as she could. It bobbed a few times before floating beyond her sight. This action felt deeply satisfying, as if it were a part of her own self she wanted to leave behind. Driving home on the highway she saw dawn lifting into the horizon, though it was still far off and had a long way to go.
Wonders Never Cease
The house was isolated and charming, and though they'd looked at other rentals, the first sight of this one was all it took. It was a red farmhouse at the very end of a country road, ten minutes from the small, picturesque college town, and behind it spread a hill covered, at the time they moved in, with lazy, late-summer wildflowers. The first floor had a fireplace, green wallpaper with a pattern of vines, and old-fashioned wall sconces with electric bulbs; the second floor was a warren of small bedrooms. Penny moved through the place gingerly, touching her fingertips to the wallpaper and wooden door frames, planning where things would go. Everything, for now, was still in boxes.
When Tom went off to school every day, she unpacked, starting with the kitchen. Then, upstairs, she made herself an office, for the freelance graphic design she'd arranged with her former employer, but had a difficult time focusing on it. In the back of her mind — or, more properly, in the back of her body, a warm liquid sensation, almost like sickness, a fever that threatened but never did descend — lurked other ambitions, shadowy yet insistent plans. This was the year they would start having children.
Sitting on an unpacked cardboard box, drinking a cup of coffee gone cold, she heard a car in the driveway. She was still used to city living, and it took her a second to realize that any vehicle this far down the road had to be coming to their house. Through the window she could see Irene, the landlady, getting out of her station wagon, holding something wrapped in foil. They were the first people she had shown the house to — it belonged to her daughter, who lived in Boston — and she'd taken an immediate shine to them. Shine was her word—“You're going to take a shine to this area,” she'd said — and she was shiny, too, her small, plump face glossy with August sweat and dappled with marks left by the sun over the course of her seventy years. She came, she said, from farming people.
“I don't need to show it to anyone else,” she told them that first day. “I know you're the right people for this place.”
“We're definitely the right people,” Tom said with his usual confidence, and Irene bestowed on him a beatific smile that revealed small, brown teeth.
Today was warm, and Irene was huffing visibly as she came up the driveway. She was a short woman, at most five feet, and the way she beamed up at the world made her look like a character in a kids' book, some smiling, helpful gnome. Penny opened the door before she could knock.