The gunshots of that night would stay with Mimi for a long time. It was as if the bullets had exploded inside her head and her bloodstream had carried the fragments to every cell in her body. She imagined minuscule shards of metal lodged in the mitochondria, or whatever subcellular organism it was that stored foreign bodies. So deep was the sense of those gunshots, Mimi wondered were she ever to have children whether the shots would be part of their memories, too.
The first bullet had ricocheted off the open trapdoor and smashed downward through Cramer’s cheek, fracturing his upper jaw and jawbone and lodging in the anterior skull base. In an emergency craniotomy, his contused brain was cleared of damaged flesh and metal splinters, the fractured bone plugged with bone wax and mashed muscle taken from the fascia lata of Cramer’s thigh. There were tubes to help him breathe and to keep down the orofacial swelling. There were cerebral decongestants being dripped into his head and antibiotics to fend off meningitis. There were anticonvulsants.
There were so many things that still might happen. Time would tell if there had been traumatic brain injury.
Mavis Lee was dead. That was the third shot. And Mimi found herself trying to imagine the madwoman’s last few minutes. What happened between shooting her son and shooting herself? Did she look down into the hole where Cramer lay, half his face shattered, and realize who he was? Because Mimi was pretty sure it wasn’t Cramer that Mavis thought she was firing at. “You,” she said. “You!” There was so much in those words. Surprise mixed with some kind of weird delight in the first “you” and then utter, soul-wrenching fury in the second. Did she think it was Marc? Was it Marc’s blue eyes she saw peering up at her from that face emerging as if from the grave? Is that who she intended to kill? And when she was alone, did she come to her senses long enough to realize that she had it all wrong?
The police dug the second bullet out of the wall above the desk in the front room. It was lodged in the plaster not a foot from where Mavis’s initials and phone number were framed in pencil-crayon splendor. The irony was incidental and unintended. Mavis had been shooting at someone in the doorway-two someones-who were there one moment but gone by the time the gun went off. Jay had saved Mimi’s life. And Cramer had saved her life, too, and might still lose his own.
He had been airlifted from Ladybank to the city, where he underwent a series of operations. Even when they moved him from intensive care, his head wrapped up like a mummy and with only his left eye and ear exposed, he was still unconscious. His one visible eye was closed, but Mimi watched it twitch, imagining he was trying to say something and trying to decipher this inarticulate language. She spoke to him, to his one open ear, imagining he could hear her-needing for him to hear her.
“We found the bag you left,” she said softly, “with the picture in it and the stone.” His eye twitched and she looked, hopefully, at Jay, who was sitting silently on a chair on the other side of the bed. He didn’t believe the twitches were communication at all, but he was being indulgent about it. “Thank you, Cramer,” she said. “It means a lot to us that you returned the things you took.”
Mimi came often to the hospital. She had found a brother and then a second brother. It was the summer of discovering brothers, and she was going to do everything in her power not to lose either of them. All she could do right now, however, was be there, bear witness. At first, even the thought of Cramer’s broken face made her feel sick. But she found herself drawn into his medical care, wanting to know about it in every detail. It became less gory the more she learned. The injury, the materials and methods required to reconstruct his face: she found that her repulsion eased as her interest grew. She asked questions-too many questions, Jay thought. She demanded to know how words were spelled so she could ask Dr. Lou what they meant or Google them herself. So “proptosis” was the displacement of the eyeball, and “pneumocephalus” was the presence of air in the brain cavity, and “hematoma” was the mass of clotted blood that formed in the tissues and body space as a result of broken blood vessels, and “debridement” meant the surgical removal of lacerated and contaminated tissue. She wrote these things down and wrestled them into the form of a report. In her clinical account of Cramer’s suffering, she felt as if she was writing something that mattered. She had played at writing that summer. Writing fanciful scenes loosely based on her life. But this-this was hard and important. It was training, she thought, good training, she wasn’t sure for what.
What she did know was that she was writing it for a very particular audience. She had told her father next to nothing so far about the extraordinary events of that summer. So she was going to write an account of meeting Jackson and Cramer and of what had happened in the end. The account, especially the last bit, would be in painful detail. Excruciating detail. Through the police, she was able to get a copy of the autopsy report of Mavis Lee. She was part of the story. Mimi would lay all this at her father’s feet. She wanted him to know in a very itemized way what he had done when he promised Mavis Lee that he would marry her, what happened when you walk out on people.
“Isn’t that a bit simplistic?” Jay asked. She nodded. She knew it was. “I mean, that’s what Marc’s going to say.”
“I know,” said Mimi. “He can say what he wants, he can deny what he wants, but he’s going to hear about this.”
“Do you think it will make any difference?”
She shook her head. “I doubt it.”
“Maybe he never made such a promise to Mavis,” said Dr. Lou. “This poor woman was clearly unstable. Maybe she built it up in her mind.”
Mimi thought about that seriously, but it didn’t change her mind. She had known Mavis Lee for something like half an hour-the longest half hour of her whole life-and she was clearly nuts. But as far as Mimi could tell, Marc had pledged something to that woman when he got her pregnant, whatever he might think, whatever he might say to the contrary.
“How do we know Cramer is really Marc’s son?” said Jo.
“His eyes,” said Mimi. And nobody questioned it.
“She may have been crazy even back then,” said Mimi. “It doesn’t matter. The truth is that my father is not a man who keeps promises.”
She had a plan. Marc owed Cramer something, and she was going to see he got it.
“Sounds like emotional blackmail,” said Jo.
“You bet. Big-time.”
“He’s twenty-two,” said Jay. “He’s not a kid.”
“He might be too proud,” said Lou. “Might not want to have anything to do with Marc.”
“Maybe,” said Mimi. “I wouldn’t blame him. But I dropped in to see Hank Pretty, and he thinks Cramer has got what it takes to go to college. So I think Marc ought to do that for him at least.”
Jay stared at her. “You went to see Pretty?”
“Somebody had to tell him what was happening. Anyway, if Cramer wants to go back to school, I’m going to make sure Marc pays up.” She had decided that Cramer, whatever else he had done, had acted as her guardian. She just wanted to return the favor. All of this she would bring to her father’s attention.
“Do you hate Marc?” Jay asked.
She shook her head. “It’s not about love or hate; it’s about right or wrong. I’m not going to let Marc off easy.”
The cops arrested Waylin Pitney two hundred miles north of Ottawa on Highway 117, in the middle of La Verendrye Provincial Park, on his way back to Val-d’Or. The Taurus had broken down, and an officer with La Surete du Quebec had stopped to help out, only to end up arresting him. In a surprising act of clarity, Mavis had phoned the police after the beating she had suffered at Pitney’s hands. He had tried to kill her, she said, only she had held him off with his own gun before he had done too much damage. She told the police he had stolen her car and was traveling with several thousand dollars he had stolen from her and a valuable emerald necklace. She saved for last telling them about the panel truck filled with televisions that she had driven into Butchard’s Creek.
Decisions had to be made. Cramer was holding stable now, and the worst was passed, but recovery would be a long and painful ordeal. There was the risk of meningitis, cerebrospinal fluid leakage, rhinorrhea, hydrocephalus, brain abscess. He would need medical attention when he left the hospital, and it would be awhile before he worked again. So Lou and Jo decided that, if Cramer wanted to, he could come and live with them.
“How do you feel about it?” Mimi asked Jay. They were driving to Ottawa again. It was late August. Soon she would have to go if she was returning to school. And she wanted to return to school, though she wasn’t sure anymore about what she ultimately wanted to do.
“I’m good,” said Jay, not looking her way. She waited. There was more and she wanted to give him the space to get it out. She was learning about that. “I mean I really hated him,” said Jay. “I hated the guy who was breaking into my house, screwing with my head. But that wasn’t the same guy I met the day… the day we…”
“I know which day you mean.”
Jay swallowed hard and looked out the window at the dull scenery along Highway 7, on the outskirts of the city, the swampy land, the dead trees, the endless construction of new lanes. “I have this picture in my head of the way he looked when I got back to the house in that storm. He was standing on the bridge over the snye with the rain just pouring down on him. He was scary-intimidating. Like Frankenstein’s monster. But when he talked to me, I could see that he was scared, too. Not just scared about what was happening in the house, not just scared about you. Scared at meeting me like that. Scared of me in a way. I guess he was going to try to do something on his own, then he saw the car and had to deal with me first so I didn’t screw everything up.”
“He needed you,” said Mimi.
“Yeah,” said Jay. “He did. He even said it. But it took me awhile to figure it out-later, I mean. At first I thought he was just coming to warn me, but he needed help.”
“Of course he did. Shit, can you imagine? His own mother.”
They were quiet for a while, both of them thinking about the scene in that little house in the middle of a storm in the middle of nowhere and how it all played out and how many other ways it might have gone down.
“Anyway,” said Jay. “You asked how I felt about him living with Lou and Jo, and it’s okay. It’s better than okay. And it’s not just something we should do, a duty. It’s… I don’t know exactly.” He paused. “It’s right,” he said.
Mimi merged onto the 417. The hospital was twenty minutes away.
Jay laughed. “This sibling business is hell,” he said.
“Who knew?” said Mimi, and grinned a little maniacally, as she flicked on her indicator light to pass a truck. “But, apparently, it’s always like this.”
“Oh, really?”
“Well, not quite like this. Jamila said something to me the other night when we were talking. She said when her younger brother was born, it really pissed her off. It was such an intrusion.”
And they thought about that. About intrusions. How Mimi had burst into Jay’s life two troubling months ago and how Cramer had been there already like something circling, planning to land, and then been born into their lives two weeks ago in a startling and bloody birth. Each of them had been unwelcome, uninvited. And yet they knew-Mimi and Jay did, anyway-that they were ready to spend the rest of their lives learning how to do this, how to welcome in the outsider and to become family. This most unlikely of families.
Had he heard the other shots when he lay in the bottom of the hidey-hole? Had Mavis spoken to him, apologized, cried over his battered body, said some final words? Or had he only overheard what had happened to her, while lying here in this dim room drifting in and out of consciousness? Had Mimi explained to him about his mother’s death, or was it just her absence that let him know she was gone?
However it was that he knew, he had grieved alone in his darkness. He has missed her and ached for her and been furious at her for dying and finally, all on his own, come to a place of her being gone. The only question was how long she had been gone. It seemed like a long time now.
Mimi’s hand was on his chest. She loosened the sheet that the nurse had just tightened. Jay was there, too, a little way off, as always. But his voice had sounded okay when he’d said hello. Like he wanted to be there.
“Do you know who I am?” Mimi asked, her voice soft and yet firm. “Do you know, Cramer, who I really am?” He wanted to nod. He wanted to take her hand and grip it tight and let her know. “How much did you hear before you opened the trapdoor?” she asked.
He had heard enough, enough to know who Mimi was. It changed everything and didn’t change anything. He would have to try to explain that to her somehow. Find words to let her know that it was okay. Not to worry. There were so many words he was going to have to find. Words to apologize with, for one thing. He would somehow have to find a way to repay them for the harm he had brought upon them, the evil he had brought into their midst.
“We’re here for you,” said Mimi. “Right, Jay?”
“Right,” said Jay. “But you’re going to have to come out of hiding.”
That made Mimi laugh. And maybe it was the sound of her gritty laughter or maybe it was hearing that they were there for him, but suddenly, as if he had been holding back, Cramer found the will to open his eyes-his one good eye. And it filled up with Mimi’s face, and she was smiling. His sister.