The Gargoyle

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll replace your necklace with a better one.”

I felt better than I had in years, even before the accident, by simple virtue of an undrugged mind and veins not sluggish with narcotic syrup. This is not to say that I never felt a twinge of desire rising for the old drug-I did; the habit had been with me too long-but it was different. I could do without morphine; I wanted to do without it. I looked forward to my sessions with Sayuri and progressed faster with my exercises.

But best of all, the bitchsnake really was gone.

I was better able to look after myself than at any time since my accident, and Maria

From February nineteenth to the twenty-first, she pulled statue 16 out of the stone. On the twenty-second, she slept and absorbed; from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth, she extracted number 15. She took a day of rest and then she worked until the first day of March, producing number 14. One does not need to be a mathematician to realize that this brought her past the halfway point of the final twenty-seven hearts: thirteen more hearts and she would be finished. Thirteen more hearts until she thought she would die.

Her return to carving seemed to affect even Bougatsa, who lacked his usual bounce. When we came back from our daily walks, he would eat a huge bowl of food before settling lethargically to drool on my orthopedic shoes.

In early March, I had a routine checkup with Dr. Edwards. We reviewed my charts and talked about a minor surgery that was scheduled for the end of the month. She seemed genuinely pleased. “You’ve been out of the hospital for over a year and things couldn’t be going any better.”

I kept my mouth shut about the fact that Maria

“You know,” Nan added, “it just goes to show how wrong a doctor can be. There was a point when I thought you had given up, and then you became one of our hardest-working patients. And when you left, I was certain that Maria

Maria

I was scheduled to enter the hospital for surgery on the twenty-sixth. Before I went in, I needed to decide what to do with Bougatsa. Not only did I doubt Maria

I made her stop carving long enough to explain that if she chose sculpting over Bougatsa’s care, I would have to place him in a ke

There was a large puddle of shit on the floor. It was not mine.

In all the time I’d lived in the fortress, Bougatsa had never once relieved himself inside. I am somewhat loath to write a detailed description of the stool, but two things need mentioning. First, the stool was more liquid than solid. Second, it contained leafy remains.

The only plant in the house was the one that Jack had brought. (Perhaps there had been others before my time, but they had become casualties of Maria

I tracked the dog down and found him stretched out in the study, breathing shallowly. When I swept my hand along his side to comfort him, fur came off in my fingers. His ribs were a story of starvation and I was shocked: not strictly at his thi

I headed into the basement to inform Maria

She looked up at me, as if she had heard some mysterious clatter coming from an area of the room that was supposed to be empty. Blood was flowing from one of her wrists where the chisel had gone wrong, and streaks of red were painted across her forehead where she’d wiped it. “What?”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I am a thorn prick on Christ’s temple.”

“No,” I said, pointing. “Your wrist.”

“Oh.” She looked at it, and some blood flowed into her open palm. “It’s like a rose.”

“Did you hear me? Bougatsa is sick.”

She tried to pull a strand of her hair away from her breast, where it was awkwardly pasted with sweat and stone dust, but her fingers couldn’t quite gauge the distance. She missed, over and over. “Then go to the infirmary.”

“You mean the vet?”

“Yes.” Drops of her blood fell into the rock chips at her feet. “Vet.”

“Let me look at that.” I reached towards her wrist.

Maria

I took a step back, lifting my hands in the gesture people automatically make to show they mean no harm. “He’s your dog, Maria

The name seemed to stir her memory. The knots of her hunched shoulders released and she let out the breath she’d been holding. Most important, she lowered the chisel as the fear left her eyes.

“No.”

There had been no anger in her voice, but also no regret. Her voice was simply dull and hollow, lacking any nuance of compassion, as if her words were not new sounds but echoes.

By the time I had my foot on the stairway’s bottom step, all her attention was once again focused on the stone in front of her.