Tim Wynne-Jones - The Uninvited

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.