Tess Gerritsen: Bloodstream

His face was no longer numb from the cold, and he was now aware of pain throbbing insistently in his temple. Clutching the sink for support, he rose to his feet and looked in the mirror. Just over his left ear, the gray hair was stiff and matted with blood. A streak of it had dried across his cheek, like war paint. He stared at his own reflection, at a face deeply etched by sixty-six years of hard winters and honest work and loneliness. His only companion was the cat, now meowing at his feet, not from affection but hunger. He loved the cat, and someday he would mourn her passing with tears and a solemn burial and nights of longing for the sound of her purring, but he was under no illusion that she loved him.

He removed his clothes, the frayed and blood-stained shirt, the urine-soaked jeans. He undressed with the same care he devoted to every other task in his life, leaving his clothes in a tidy heap on the toilet lid. He turned on the shower and stepped in without waiting for the water to warm up; the discomfort was only momentary scarcely worth a shiver in the context of his cold and uncomfortable life. He washed the blood out of his hair, the laceration stinging from the soap. He must have sliced his scalp open when he fell on the woodpile.

It would heal, as all his other cuts had. Warren Emerson was a walking testament to the durability of scar tissue.

The cat renewed her meowing as soon as he stepped out of the shower. It was a pitiful sound, despairing, and he could not listen to it without feeling guilty.

Still naked, he walked to the kitchen, opened a can of Little Friskies chicken bits, and spooned it into Mona’s cat bowl.

She gave a soft growl of pleasure and began to eat, no longer caring whether he came or went. Except for his skill with a can opener, he was extraneous to her existence.

He went to the bedroom to dress.

Once it had been his parents’ room, and it still contained all their possessions. The spindle bed, the bureau with the brass knobs, the photographs hanging up in their tin picture frames. As he buttoned his shirt, his gaze lingered on one photo in particular, of a dark-haired girl with smiling eyes.

What was Iris doing at this moment? he wondered, as he did every day of his life. Did she ever think of him? His gaze moved on to another photo. It was the last one taken of his family, his mother plump and smiling, his father ill at ease in a suit and tie. And wedged between them, with his hair slicked to one side, was little Warren.

He reached out, fingers touching the photo of his own twelve-year-old face. He could not remember that boy. Up in the attic were the toy trains and the adventure books and the brittle crayons that once belonged to the child in that photo, but that was a different Warren who’d played in this house, who had stood smiling between his parents for a Sunday photograph. Not the Warren he saw when he looked in the mirror.

Suddenly he felt a terrible longing to touch that child’s toys again.

He climbed the steps to the attic and dragged the old blanket chest under the light. With the bare bulb swinging overhead, he lifted the chest lid. Inside were treasures. He took them out one by one and set them on the dusty floor. The cookie tin with all the Matchbox cars. The Lincoln Logs. The leather pouch of marbles. At last he found what he’d been looking for: the set of checkers.

He lay out the board and set up the checkers, red on his side, black On the opposite.

Mona came padding up to the attic and sat beside him, her breath smelling of chicken. For a moment she regarded the board with feline disdain. Then she tiptoed over to it and sniffed at one of the black pieces.

“Is that your first move then?” said Warren. It was not a very smart move, but then, what did one expect from a cat? He moved the black piece for her, and she seemed satisfied.

Outside the wind blew, rattling loose shutters. He could hear the branches of the lilac tree scratch against the clapboards.

Warren advanced a red checker and he smiled at his companion. “Your move, Mona.”

At six-thirty, as she did every weekday morning, five-year-old Isabel Morrison crept into her older sister’s bedroom and climbed under the covers with Mary Rose. There she wriggled like a happy worm in the warm sheets and hummed to herself as she waited for Mary Rose to wake up. There would always be a great deal of sighing and moaning, and Mary Rose would turn from one side to another, her long brown hair tickling Isabel’s face. Isabel thought Mary Rose was the most beautiful girl on earth. She looked like the sleeping Princess Aurora, waiting for her prince to kiss her. Sometimes Isabel would pretend she was Prince Charming, and even though she knew girls weren’t supposed to kiss each other, she would plant her lips on her sister’s mouth and announce: “Now you have to wake up!”

One time, Mary Rose had been awake all along, and had sprung up like a giggling monster and tickled Isabel so mercilessly that both girls had fallen off the bed in a duet of happy squeals.

If only Mary Rose would tickle her now. If only Mary Rose would be her normal self.

Isabel leaned close to her sister’s ear and whispered, “Aren’t you going to wake up?”

Mary Rose pulled the covers over her head. “Go away, pest.”

“Mommy says it’s time for school. You have to wake up.”

“Get out of my room!”

“But it’s time for-”

Mary Rose gave a growl and lashed out with an angry kick.

Isabel slithered to the far side of the bed, where she lay in troubled silence, rubbing her sore shin and trying to understand what had just happened. Mary Rose had never kicked her before. Mary Rose always woke up with a smile and called her Dizzy Izzy and braided her hair before school.

She decided to try again. She crawled on hands and knees to her sister's pillow, peeled back the sheets, and whispered into Mary Rose’s ear: “I know what Mommy and Daddy are getting you for Christmas. You wanna hear?”

Mary Rose’s eyes shot open. She turned to look at Isabel.

With a whimper of fear, Isabel scrambled off the bed and stared at a face she scarcely recognized. A face that frightened her. “Mary Rose?” she whispered.

Then she ran out of the room.

Her mother was downstairs in the kitchen, stirring a pot of oatmeal and trying to hear the radio over the screeches of their parakeet, Rocky. As Isabel came tearing into the kitchen, her mother turned and said, “It’s seven o’clock. Isn’t your sister getting up?”

“Mommy,” Isabel wailed in despair. “That’s not Mary Rose!”

Noah Elliot did a 360 kick-flip, popping the skateboard off the curb, into the air, and landing it neatly on the blacktop. All right! Nailed it! Baggy clothes flapping in the wind, he rode the board all the way down to the teachers’ parking lot, ollied the curb, and came around again, a sweet ride all the way.

It was the only time he felt in control of his life, when he was riding his board, when for once, he determined his own fate, his own course. These days it seemed too many things were decided by other people, that he was being dragged, kicking and screaming, into a future he’d never asked for. But when he was riding his board, with the wind in his face and the pavement streaking by, he owned the moment. He could forget he was trapped in this nowhere town. He could even forget, for one brief and exhilarating ride, that his dad was dead and that nothing could ever be right again.

He felt the freshmen girls watching him. They were standing in a tight group behind the trailer classrooms, glossy heads bent close together as they made giggly girl sounds. All their faces moved in unison as their eyes tracked Noah on his board. He rarely talked to them, and they rarely talked to him, but every lunch period, there they’d be, watching him as he worked through his repertoire.