Isabella’s ethnicity matters to me; it interests me, not just because it’s so entwined with her crime but also because of my habit of mind as an anthropologist. Knowing her ancestry gives me some skeletal context, something to latch onto when I reach out and try to grasp the enigma of her. Because she is one-quarter Asian, I know that most of her skeletal features are Caucasoid. Most — but not all. Some of the stories told in her bones are Mongoloid, Asian. Her cheekbones, as I picture them in my mind’s eye right now, are slightly higher and wider and flatter than, say, Miranda’s. Her skin is a few shades darker than Miranda’s, too, but then again, almost everyone’s skin is a few shades darker than Miranda’s. I remember her teeth in two ways: I remember how dazzling they were when she smiled at me and how quickly hidden they vanished behind the curtain of her hair when she ducked her head shyly. And I remember how they felt when we kissed, smooth and hard and slick against my tongue, nibbling gently at my lip and then, later, biting into the meat of my bicep and the heel of my hand hard enough to leave bruises outlined in tooth marks. If I had thought to run the tip of my tongue along the backs of those front teeth, I might have felt indentations, concavities: the distinctive scooped-out curvature of shovel-shaped incisors, a signature skeletal trait of Asians and Native Americans. But what man in his right mind would think of dental details when a lovely woman presses her warm mouth and trembling body to his?
As I listen to myself say these things, I feel foolish and pedantic. And yet. And yet: I have so few things to hang on to as I try to grasp Isabella that I suppose it’s understandable and forgivable that I should lapse into my comfortable role of professor and anthropologist — categorizer and explainer. Yet the truth is, I barely knew Isabella. Our lives intersected, briefly but powerfully, at two points — no, three. First when Garcia and Miranda and I were exposed to the radioactive pellet Isabella had used to murder Dr. Novak. Next when Isabella helped me discover the location where a murdered soldier had been secretly buried during World War II. And third when she offered her body and her passionate need to me. No, wait, there was a fourth time as welclass="underline" when I realized that she was the one who had killed Novak, when I confronted her, and she disappeared into the labyrinth of storm sewers beneath Oak Ridge.
I followed her into the labyrinth. In hindsight maybe that was a mistake. In hindsight maybe confronting her was a mistake. In hindsight maybe making love to her was a mistake. In hindsight maybe hindsight itself is a mistake — what’s the point of following the trail of regret back into the past? It’s not possible to choose a different path from the very one that brought me to the present, to this exact moment, where I hide in the darkness of my living room and the labyrinth of my heart, murmuring into the digital emptiness I clutch in my hand.
I hate this. I don’t know what to say. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
CHAPTER 9
I dropped the recorder at Dr. Hoover’s office the next morning on my way to campus, still feeling self-conscious and vaguely guilty about voicing my thoughts and fears into a microphone. When I walked into the bone lab, Miranda looked at me sharply and said, “What?”
“What do you mean, ‘What?’”
“You have a funny look on your face. Embarrassed or something. Like a kid who’s just peed in his pants.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You okay?”
“Sure,” I lied. “Just preoccupied.”
“Whatever you say. Anyhow, Eddie called. He’s got an appointment next week to get fitted for an i-Hand.”
“The bionic prosthesis? Just for his left hand?” She nodded. “I thought he was more interested in a transplant.”
“He was, but there’s a big problem with that, apparently.” She frowned. “It’s virtually impossible to be approved for a hand transplant unless you’re a double amputee.”
“Eddie is a double amputee, essentially,” I pointed out. “He’s only got two fingers on his right hand.”
“Apparently the hand surgeons consider those fingers more of a plus than you and I do,” she said. “He does have some function in them, after all. And once he gets the toe-to-thumb transplant — in a month or so, he hopes — he’ll have three digits on the right hand, including an opposable thumb.”
“Still,” I protested, “it seems harsh to rule him out for a transplant on the left side. It’s like he’s being punished for being not quite maimed enough, you know? Like that sick girl — what did she have, lupus? — whose insurance company refused to pay for her medical treatment until she was dying.”
“Well, yeah, sort of,” she hedged, “but on the other hand — ooh, remind me not to say that in front of Eddie — not everybody who wants a transplant can get one. If there aren’t enough hands to go around, what’s the best, fairest way to pick who gets one and who doesn’t? If you were the one parceling out hands, how would you pick?”
I didn’t have an answer to that. But I did have another question. “Are there really not enough hands to go around?”
She shrugged.
“How many kidney transplants were performed in the United States last year?”
She did a quick Google search. “Don’t know about last year,” she answered, “but over sixteen thousand were done in 2008.”
“And how many hand transplants?”
“Not a fair comparison,” she pointed out. “A lot of kidneys came from living donors — somebody’s son or sister or friend who was willing to give one up for a person they love.”
“You’re right, not the same thing. How many heart transplants?”
The keyboard rattled again. “Wow. Two thousand, one hundred sixty-three. I would have guessed a hundred or so.”
“Okay. So none of those heart donors got out alive. If my math’s right, those twenty-one hundred heart donors had forty-two hundred hands, plus or minus.”
“I don’t think you can say ‘plus’ unless some of them started out with three hands,” she said reasonably.
“Don’t be a hairsplitter. We’re talking about potentially four thousand transplantable hands, right?”
“Hang on,” she said. “This is a really interesting database. All categories of organ-donation stats compiled by the federal government. You can sort by organ, by donor type, by state, all kinds of things. Okay, actually, there were about eight thousand deceased organ donors in the U.S. in 2008. So, in theory, sixteen thousand hands, if all of them had both hands when they died.”
“And how many hand transplants in the U.S. in 2008?”
“No hand-transplant stats in the federal database. Let me try ‘hand transplants United States 2008’ and see if my friend Google can shed any light.” A moment later she said, “I say again, wow.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“Two thousand?”
“No,” she answered. “Two, period. As in ‘one, two, buckle my shoe.’”
“So the problem’s not a shortage of hands,” I mused, “but a shortage of hand-transplant experts? Not enough surgeons who’ve been trained to do it?”
She worked the keyboard again. “I believe you have sussed out the problem, Wise Master. Listen to this press release from Emory University Medical Center, dated February 2008: ‘The only physician in the United States formally trained in both hand surgery and transplant surgery is establishing a new program at Emory to train other experts and to conduct research on what is still an extraordinary procedure.’ One formally trained hand-transplant surgeon in the whole U.S. of A. — that would appear to be a bit of a bottleneck.” She turned to me and frowned. “I don’t get it,” she pondered out loud. “What makes a hand transplant a thousand times more complicated than a heart transplant? Hearts have lots of blood vessels and nerves, and the potential for the recipient’s body to reject the transplant would appear to be the same, whether it’s a heart or a hand, wouldn’t you think?”