Sunrise

It hurt terribly—far worse than it had at the moment it had been lopped off. Yet I could still feel my missing hand, still tell it to clench and unclench. Doing so sent waves of pain washing up my arm, but I did it anyway, holding up my arm, making my phantom hand form a phantom fist over and over again, relishing the pain in some sick way.

Darla lay next to me. She was always asleep when I woke. I didn’t wake her, didn’t want her to see me staring at my stump, manipulating my invisible fist until the pain made tears run down my face.

I woke one day to an argument. Uncle Paul was sitting on a nearby cot, trying to convince Darla to come help him wire the inside of a heating tank. She kept saying she couldn’t, that one-handed, she’d only get in the way. He told her he didn’t know how to do it, which sounded like

BS to me. Finally Darla sighed and levered herself up out of the cot. I pretended to sleep through the whole thing.

The next morning I woke to Uncle Paul shaking my shoulder. I was deep in a dream about flashing knives, and I lashed out, hitting Uncle Paul in the chest with my stump. The pain was so intense that tears involuntarily poured from my eyes. Uncle Paul either didn’t notice or pretended not to.

“Darla needs you,” he said.

I glanced at the cot beside mine; Darla wasn’t there. “What’s wrong?”

“She’s just sitting in the greenhouse, staring at her stump. She doesn’t say anything or do anything unless I ask her to and tell her directly and exactly what I need. She’s like a robot.”

“We’ve both had a rough week, if you hadn’t noticed.” “Yeah, I noticed. And Darla’s one of the toughest women I’ve ever met. But everyone needs some help sometimes. She needs you.”

I rolled over to face away from him. “I’m tired,” I said, which was true.

I heard Uncle Paul standing up behind me. “Think about it, would you?”

I grunted something noncommittal, and he left. How was I supposed to help Darla when I didn’t even want to get out of bed? How was I even supposed to put on my boots one-handed? How would half a man be useful to anyone, let alone her? I rolled over, heedless of the pain it caused my stump, and tried to get back to sleep.

Chapter 41

I couldn’t sleep. The image of Darla sitting in the greenhouse, flexing her phantom hand, had wormed into my mind and wouldn’t leave. I tossed and turned for more than an hour and then threw the covers off, hunting around for some clothes.

Getting dressed one-handed is ridiculously challenging. Buttons, zippers, drawstrings, shoelaces— all of them are designed to be operated two-handed. I cussed at imaginary clothing designers in the most inventive terms I could think of. Velcro: Why didn’t they make everything with Velcro fasteners? It worked fine for toddlers.

I didn’t go straight to Darla. Instead I talked to Max, Zik, Ben, Alyssa, A

Darla was on her back on the dirt floor of the underconstruction greenhouse. Her head was turned so she could stare at her stump, and I could see the muscles in her arm tensing and relaxing, over and over.

Uncle Paul was messing with some wire nearby. When he saw me, he smiled and said, “I’m going to go get lunch. Want me to bring you guys something?”

“No,” I replied, “we’ll be along in a bit.” I flopped down alongside Darla as Uncle Paul left the greenhouse. Darla didn’t even look at me.

“I got you a gift,” I said.

Darla didn’t respond, so I pulled out the item Wyn had given me, a lucky rabbit’s foot, and held it in front of Darl’s head, where she couldn’t fail to see it.

“What the hell?” Darla said.

“Well, I thought, you know, the last time you were so . . . anyway, your rabbit, Jack, seemed to pop you out of it, so I thought—”

“You thought giving me a dead rabbit’s foot and reminding me of my mother and my dead rabbit would cheer me up?”

“Um . . . yeah?”

“Christ, Alex. That is the most idiotic, wrongheaded . . . and sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“So you don’t want the rabbit’s foot?”

“I didn’t say that.” Darla snatched the rabbit’s foot from my hand and tucked it into her pocket.

“You hungry?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I stood and reached down with my good hand to help Darla up. I wrapped my good arm around her waist, and we leaned on each other, walking toward the greenhouse door. “We’re going to get through this.”

“I know. It’s just—every morning I wake up, and I’m sure I still have a hand. Even when I stare at that damn stump, I can feel my hand moving, my fingers flexing.”

“I know.”

“Red’s got to pay for this.”

“He will. Sooner or later, he will.”

Darla and I started working half days. We still needed far more sleep than normal; most of our energy was being spent on healing. Dr. McCarthy stopped by every two or three days for a while, checking our arms and feet, although it wasn’t really necessary—they were doing fine. Maybe the antibiotics had worked, or maybe the boiling tar had killed all the bacteria in our stumps. After about three weeks, the tar on our forearms started to flake off as new skin grew beneath it. The new skin was pink, shiny, and hairless—it looked like it belonged on a newborn piglet, not my arm. One thing you could say for Red—he was precise. He had chopped through our forearms in the exact same place, about an inch from the wrist.

As soon as we could, we started trying to learn how to do everything one-handed. Darla had a rougher time of it than I—she was trying to train her left hand to do jobs she’d used her dominant hand for before.

Some tasks were ridiculously challenging—climbing the ladder to the sniper’s nest, for example. I finally managed it by hooking my left elbow over each rung as I ascended. It was painfully slow, and by the time I reached the platform, I was shaky and sweating. I rested up there for nearly an hour before starting down the ladder—that was worse still.

It was even harder to relearn to shoot. Operating the bolt on the hunting rifle was a problem—the whole rifle would move instead of just the bolt. I had to move my left forearm to the top of the rifle, hold it down, rack the bolt, and then get back into a shooting position. Not exactly fast or efficient. And while I could line up one shot fine, I had no way to control the recoil. My rate of fire wasn’t even a quarter as good as it had been before I lost my hand.

The semi-automatic rifles were easier, but reloading was still a pain. I could either roll the rifle onto its back to give me something to push against when I needed to seat a new magazine, or I could cradle the rifle against my body

It didn’t really matter—I had never been much good with any kind of firearm. And I didn’t take myself or Darla off the watch rotation, despite the difficulty we had climbing the turbine tower. Hurt or not, it didn’t feel right to ask everyone else to do something I wouldn’t do.

Zik’s family pitched in with a mad fervor. They seemed determined to outwork everyone, as if they were terrified we’d kick them out if they didn’t. We finished the third greenhouse and started building a fourth.

All the tar gradually flaked off our stumps, as if it had been a scab, leaving behind a riotous mess of scar tissue, scabs, and new pink skin. Dr. McCarthy debrided the wound, cutting away some of the scabs, while Ed and Max held my arm still. It hurt so intensely that I nearly passed out. Then he stretched out the skin, stitching it up to protect the end of the bone. That hurt too, but not nearly so bad as the debriding.

Our arms healed faster after that. As soon as my arm quit hurting, it started to itch like ten thousand starving fleas were trapped under my skin. The itching was almost worse than the pain. Every now and then, I unwrapped all my coats and sleeves from the stump and plunged it into a snowbank. That stopped the itching—for a few minutes.