Tim Wynne-Jones: The Uninvited

He watched as the gaping wound was revealed in all its horror. It stretched from the fleshy part of the thumb up toward her wrist.

“You’ve sliced a palmar tributary vein, Ms. Lee,” said the doctor. “There might be nerve damage. Can you wiggle your thumb?”

Cramer stared at his mother’s thumb as if he might be able to make it move by the strength of his mind. It twitched.

“Well, that’s good, then.” Dr. Lou sighed. “You were that close to nicking the deep radial. How did it happen?”

Mavis glowered. “I already told the nurse,” she said, looking away. Her face was indignant. “An accident. Occupational hazard.”

Dr. Lou did not reply. But when Cramer looked closely into her brown eyes, he saw the same question there he had asked himself.

“She’s an artist,” he blurted out. “She was cutting glass for a picture frame.”

Dr. Page looked at him and smiled. “Well, your mother is very lucky,” she said. And it felt to him as if she was saying how lucky Mavis was that he had come along when he did. How lucky Mavis was to have a son with skill at bandages and emergency situations.

“I’ll have to stitch this up,” said Dr. Page. She passed through the pale green curtain, and Cramer heard her calling for a nurse to prep his mother.

“Cow,” muttered Mavis, cradling her wounded hand in the other like a broken-winged bird.

Cramer smoothed back the hair from his mother’s brow. She shook him off. “Lucky it’s your left hand,” he said. And his mother cast him a fierce expression.

“Did you hear her?” she whispered. “Did you hear what she was saying?” Mavis stared a hole in the curtain. “She accused me of attempted suicide.”

“She didn’t say that, Mom.”

“She insinuated it.”

Cramer sat back in his chair, folded his hands in his lap. He looked down at the linoleum floor, suddenly tired-so tired. When he looked up again, his mother was still staring at the curtain, but there was a sly kind of smile on her dried lips.

“Did you see her necklace, Cramer?” she whispered.

“Necklace?”

Mavis propped herself up on her right elbow and gestured for him to come closer. He leaned over until his ear was level with her mouth. “That big mother of an emerald,” she said. “As big as a fingernail?”

For a moment he wondered if maybe his mother was hallucinating. “What about it?”

“Shhh!” His mother’s eyes grew wide with alarm. When no one came, she laid her head back on the pillow. And there was that smile again, sneaky. Scheming.

“Did you notice how the green of it was the same as my eyes?” Mavis opened her eyes wide, the better for him to see.

He nodded, just to keep the peace. His mother looked pleased with herself, and he was glad for that.

“You wear a gem like that with a gown, Cramer, not hospital scrubs.” She held her right hand to her breastbone as if she were holding a jewel between her fingers, feeling its sharp edges and cool greenness against her sallow skin.

Cramer stroked his mother’s shoulder like you might stroke a child who’d had a fight in the school yard and come home with a black eye.

“When you wear a gem like that, people stare. People take notice. Do you think she measures up to a necklace like that, Cramer? I mean seriously?”

Her voice was getting an edge to it that he recognized. He wondered if he could sweet-talk Dr. Lou into some kind of downers. Painkillers.

“Does it do anything for her with her how-now-brown-cow eyes?”

Cramer remembered only the kindness in the doctor’s eyes, but he shook his head, just to quiet his mother down. Then suddenly the fingers of her strong right hand grabbed him by the chin, steering him to look her in the eye.

“When she comes back, you take a good long look at that emerald,” she whispered. “You tell me if it isn’t the same color as my eyes. Like it was made for me. You hear me?”

He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.”

And he did. And as the nurse and doctor concentrated on their work, he nodded to his mother to let her know he had done what she’d asked.

Her eyes gleamed back at him, the winner of some victory in her head. Then as they left the ER together, Mavis all stitched up and a little container of painkillers tucked in Cramer’s pocket, she leaned on him and whispered into his ear, her breath hot and heavy.

“I should have that necklace, honey,” she said. Then she kissed him on the cheek. “You get it for me, okay?”

Tim Wynne-Jones

The Uninvited

Cramer listens. They’re up there. Just above the darkness. Mimi is nearer; Jackson is a little way off. Her voice is clearer, though Cramer can’t always tell what she’s saying. Then Jackson comes near, too, and they don’t say anything now, but Cramer can feel them hovering above him, just hanging there. It’s as if they’re waiting for him to say something, as if they could actually see him. Then they go away and he’s alone again, and he tries to put things back together, tries to think how it all happened. There are so many beginnings, so he chooses just one: the summer day he first saw Mimi. The day she arrived at the house on the snye.

Mimi missed her turn and screeched to a stop.

“Shit!”

She checked the map on the seat beside her, backed up, and squinted through her own dust at the signpost.

Uppe V lenti e Rd.

“Close enough.”

A deep-throated bark seized her attention. A gargantuan dog was tearing toward her from the dilapidated house on the corner.

“Shit!”

The animal bounced up and down at her door, brindle and with far too many yellow teeth. She threw the Mini Cooper into reverse again and slewed to the left, almost hitting the ugly mutt.

“Take that, Hellhound!”

Then she thrust the stick shift forward and left the paved road, sending out a rooster tail of gravel.

Undaunted, the dog stayed on her tail-stayed with her for a hundred yards or so-then finally fell behind, his territory no longer in danger.

Mimi took a deep breath and patted the leather-upholstered steering wheel. “Ms. Cooper, we are now officially not in Kansas,” she said. And the Mini’s horn beeped twice in reply.

The little car was red with a black top, and Mimi had red shades and black hair. She wore a red T-back sports bra and black low-rise capris, as if the car were an accessory. Well, it was small, after all. Like Mimi-small and powerful.

Gripping the wheel tightly in her left hand, she picked up her digital camcorder from the passenger seat and held it at arm’s length, aimed at her face.

“News update,” she said. “This is Mimi Shapiro reporting from Nowhere!” She swiveled the wine-red JVC HDD around to take in the countryside: the empty dirt road stretching out before her, the overgrown borders and broken-down fences, the unkempt and empty fields, the desolate forest beyond them.

“Not a Starbucks in sight,” she said, returning the camcorder to her face. “What do you think, Chet? Have we actually entered the Land that Time Forgot?”

“Well, Mimi,” she replied in a low and amiable TV sidekick kind of voice, “you’d think the officials at the border might have warned us about this, wouldn’t you? ‘Welcome to Canada. Sorry we’re out right now.’”

She put the camcorder down in order to negotiate a long S turn, and there up ahead-just to prove her wrong-two huge mud-stained trucks were pulled over onto the shoulder, nose to nose. Farmer One leaned on the driver’s side door of Farmer Two. With both hands on the wheel, Mimi swerved around them, glad to be driving such a small and responsive vehicle. Both men wore ball caps, which they tipped as she flew by. They took her all in with their shaded eyes, and she wished she hadn’t taken her shirt off back at the rest stop on 401.