The One I Left Behind (6 page)

“Cool!” she exclaimed, squinting through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Just like Mr. Potato Head!”

A
FEW MONTHS AFTER
the dog attack (which in Reggie’s family was thereafter referred to only as
The Unfortunate Incident
) her aunt Lorraine had taken her to a doctor in New Haven, who, after studying Reggie’s remaining ear, fashioned her a prosthetic ear to match. Only it didn’t. Not quite. The color was off a bit and the glue that held it in place itched terribly, so the ear stayed in Reggie’s top drawer, hidden beneath her underwear. Her mother and aunt gave up after a while and only made her wear it on special occasions.

“Your ear!” they would cry as they were headed out the door, late for Christmas Mass or school picture day. And Reggie would run up, rummage through the drawer, and attach the ear only to remove it covertly in the car and place the lump of rubber in the pocket of her good coat, where she would feel for it from time to time, touching it the way another kid might stroke a rabbit’s foot.

Her mother had also been disabled by the dog, which, ever after, Vera referred to as Cerberus. The dog’s teeth had gone clean through the fleshy part of her mother’s right hand between thumb and forefinger, damaging a tendon and nerve that the doctors were not able to completely repair. The result of this, in addition to the thick, semicircular scarring ruining her once perfect hand, was that Vera would never be able to bend her pointer finger. She would go through life self-consciously hiding her damaged hand, holding it on her lap or down at her side, all the fingers curled but one, which left her perpetually pointing. When she was out in public, she took to wearing long white gloves—the leather supple, soft as butter, the pointer and index fingers of the left hand stained yellow from the Winstons she chain-smoked.

In Reggie’s mind, the dog truly became the three-headed beast with a serpent’s tail, who, her mother explained, was the guardian of the underworld.

When she went over the attack in the months and years to come, Reggie would picture her mother in her sparkling white underclothes twirling a gigantic black three-headed dog through the air, the word
Bastard
ringing in her one good ear.

It was years before Reggie learned the true meaning of the word
bastard,
and that the dog was not the only bastard on the deck that afternoon. Reggie was a kid without a father, the very definition of bastard, which was pointed out to her rather cruelly back in the fourth grade by a gang of fifth-grade girls, led by Dusty Trono.

“Say it,” Dusty said as she held Reggie pinned underneath her in the sandbox while Dusty’s friends looked on, giggling. Dusty grabbed a hunk of Reggie’s hair and pulled and twisted.

“I’m a bastard,” Reggie had whimpered, tears streaming down her face, sand sticking to it.

“Now eat sand, bastard,” Dusty said, twisting Reggie’s head so that her face was pressed into the sand.

R
EGGIE’S AUNT AND MOTHER
had convinced her to get the new ear before starting high school in the fall, saying it would be a fresh start. Her new improved ear was made of latex and snapped into two titanium screws the surgeon had implanted in her temporal bone. The ear was purely aesthetic: the dog bite had done a great deal of damage and the subsequent scarring left her almost totally deaf in her left ear. The surgeon had suggested that Reggie have an ear reconstructed from cartilage taken from her rib cage, covered with a flap and skin graft. He showed her a photo of a patient who’d had this procedure done, and the ear looked like an actual ear.

“The benefit,” the surgeon explained, “is that we create an ear using cartilage and skin from your own body. It will look and feel like the real thing. It would require two surgeries, six months apart.”

Unnerved and a bit sickened even hearing about the procedure, Reggie felt content, for the time being, to stick with the removable latex ear. It was at least far superior to the older, off-color rubber ear of her early childhood. Now she’d look almost like a normal girl.

R
EGGIE WATCHED AS
T
ARA
turned the new ear over in her hand. “It’s kind of freaky how real it looks,” she said. “Shit, it even feels real.” She touched the ear to her cheek and closed her eyes. Reggie squirmed a little at the strangely intimate gesture.

Charlie stubbed out his half-finished cigarette. “They make sex toys out of latex, and some of them look pretty real,” he said.

Tara laughed. “And you’re an expert on sex toys?”

Charlie’s cheeks turned pink. “I’m just saying.” He reached for his guitar and strummed a few chords. His fingers were long and nimble, the nails cut short and square. He always looked more comfortable with a guitar in his hands. It was the only time he ever looked totally relaxed, his shoulders slumping a little, his body curving around the instrument, melting into it almost. Sometimes Reggie would come up to the tree house on her own and hold his guitar. She’d lay down with it on the sleeping bag, arms wrapped around the hollow body, fingers caressing the steel strings but never daring to strum them.

Tara handed the ear back to Reggie, who snapped it in place.

“So I think we’ve got supplies for the roof in the garage,” Reggie said. “There’s a couple sheets of plywood left and a box of shingles. We’ll need cable for the bridge and some really heavy-duty eyebolts. Some kind of clamps to make loops with the cable ends.”

Charlie leaned over his guitar, looked down at Reggie’s drawing of the tree house, and scowled. “I still don’t think it’ll work,” he said, pointing to the suspension bridge she’d drawn leading from the tree house to the little balcony outside her bedroom window.

“Sure it will,” Reggie said. “We just need eyebolts and some metal cable. We attach the wooden slats to the bottom two cables. The top two are our handrails.”

“There’s no way,” Charlie said, shaking his head, pushing the drawing away.

“People build suspension bridges all the time,” Reggie told him.

“Maybe so,” said Charlie. “But for us to do it, to build a bridge all that way, it’s impossible.”

“It’s only fifteen feet. And if we —”

“It’s impossible,” he said dismissively, turning back to watch his fingers dance up the fret board, bending strings, making the guitar sing.

“W
HAT DO YOU DO
if you like someone and they don’t like you back?” Reggie asked her mom. They were in the waiting area at Hair Express. Vera was flipping through the latest issue of
Variety
that she’d pulled from her bag. She carried a large leather purse that was more like a tote bag, and kept it crammed full. To get to her keys or lipstick, she had to pull out handfuls of receipts, notes scribbled on little memo pads, matchbooks, dried-out pens, eyelash curlers, silver bird-shaped scissors, coupons, foundation, empty packs of cigarettes, lost buttons, aspirin, and tea bags. (Vera wasn’t a tea drinker, but placed the moist bags over her eyes to help with wrinkles.)

“How do you know he doesn’t like you back?” Vera asked, holding the magazine in her white-gloved hands so that Reggie could only see her eyes. Her mom’s lashes were so heavy with mascara that Reggie wondered how she kept them open.

It was Sunday evening and Reggie was the last appointment of the day. The other stylists were sweeping hair into little piles, soaking combs in disinfectant, and counting out their tips. Dawn was finishing up with an old lady with peach-tinted hair.

Vera was wearing a scarlet dress and matching high heels. That was one of the things about her mom—she always dressed up like she was going to party. She put on full makeup to run down to the donut shop, because, as she always said, “You never know who you’ll meet. The world is about connections, Regina. Not just who you know, but who they know. It’s all one big web, everything interconnected, everyone tugging on each other’s strings.”

Reggie knew that after the haircut, her mom would drop her at home, then go off to rehearsal. She was doing a play down in New Haven—something dark by a local playwright who was starting to build a name for himself. The play was directed by a man named Rabbit, her mom’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, who had the temperament of an artist and was, in Vera’s words, both a bastard and a genius. Reggie had never met him, but she’d heard countless stories about his temper tantrums during rehearsals and about how well connected he was. “He knows everyone,” Vera always said, a proud smile on her face. “He even has a cousin in Hollywood who’s worked for Martin Scorsese.” Vera spoke the names of famous people in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, like they were magic incantations that you didn’t dare say out loud.

Vera continued to study Reggie over the top of her magazine, waiting for an answer. Reggie bit her lip. “Because he likes someone else.”

Vera nodded knowingly. “And does this someone else like him?”

Reggie thought for a minute. “I don’t think so. Not like that anyway.”

Vera smiled. “Then let him know how you feel. That’s what I did to get Rabbit. He was seeing this little blond number until I swept him off his feet.” Vera smiled in a self-satisfied way.

“But I can’t do that!”

This was stupid. She didn’t have her mother’s looks or grace. Vera could sweep any man off her feet. Reggie was just a gangly, awkward girl with a chest as flat as a boy’s. Just last week, when she’d been at Ferraro’s market with her mom, the checkout boy had been unable to take his eyes off Vera. He’d said, “Can I help you out to the car with these? Or will your son get them?” Vera didn’t correct him, only said, “We can manage. Thanks.”

“There are other ways, Regina. But remember, you can’t change what’s inside a person. All you can do is help them open their eyes.”

The peach-haired woman walked by. Dawn called Reggie’s name and she jumped up and hurried to the chair. Vera went back to her magazine.

“And what are we having done today?” Dawn asked, moving close to put a plastic cape around her. She smelled like cigarettes and wintergreen gum.

Reggie looked at herself in the mirror, her hair long and wild, going every which way. “I’m ready for a change,” Reggie told her.

Dawn nodded. “I know just the cut for you.” She washed and combed Reggie’s hair, then went to work, the scissors singing, hair falling in great clumps onto the floor, mixing with the wispy tendrils of peach-colored hair.

Reggie had worn her hair long since the dog attack, when it had been pale blond and curly.
Cherub hair,
Lorraine called it. It was her mother’s color, the one trait they shared. As she grew, the tight curls turned to waves and the color darkened, as if the only evidence of her being Vera’s daughter was slipping away, year by year. By the time she sat in the hairdresser’s chair, it was chestnut brown. She looked over at her mother, who had switched to a
People
magazine and was scowling down at the movie stars and singers with a disgusted,
Who-do-they-think-they-are
look. Her platinum hair caught the light and glowed like a halo.

“Keep your head straight, hon,” Dawn said.

Reggie turned back to her reflection and had the strange sensation that it was some other girl she was seeing. Her face looked longer without the unkempt bangs covering her forehead. It was thin, freckled, with dark blue eyes and pointed, elven features that made her seem younger than thirteen. She watched how carefully the hairdresser worked the scissors around the false ear, never seeming to notice that it was any different from the other.

Chapter 5

October 16, 2010

Worcester, Massachusetts

F
OLLOWING
L
ORRAINE’S
INSTRUCTIONS, THE
first thing Reggie did when she got to the large, sprawling medical center was ask for the social worker—Carolyn Wheeler. The building was a confusing warren of waxed floors, elevators, beeping machines, and unimaginative art reproductions on the walls. The heels of her cowboy boots echoed in the halls. Doctors were paged. A code blue on B Wing was called. Elderly volunteers in green smocks manned information desks and wore cheerful buttons that said: how may i help you?

Reggie had won an award once for designing a community health center when she was getting her degree at Rhode Island School of Design. It was circular to represent unity and wholeness, and remind patients of their connection to the earth and nature. A curved wall was like outstretched arms ready to envelop and protect. It brought us back, on some deep level, to our original home: our mother’s womb. Reggie’s design included a living wall of plants and a large water feature in the center that could be heard and seen from every room. The hospital in Worcester was the antithesis of Reggie’s long-ago design. With the fluorescent lights, long corridors, sharp corners, and tiny windows that looked out onto the parking lot, she couldn’t imagine how anyone here could possibly get better. Reggie felt lost and off-kilter, and her forehead was damp with perspiration, even though the building was pumped full of cool air.

Carolyn led Reggie into a small office crowded with black metal file cabinets and a jungle of overgrown spider plants. Papers and file folders tottered in unorganized, precarious stacks across Carolyn’s massive gunmetal gray desk. There was a framed cross-stitch that said bless this mess—only upon further inspection, Reggie saw that it was just a picture cut from a magazine, not fabric and embroidery floss at all.

Carolyn wore a black turtleneck and a corduroy blazer with elbow patches. She had terrible glasses with aviator frames and something green stuck between her teeth. She smelled faintly of garlic. Reggie had been hungry when she came into the hospital, and now her stomach churned in an unfriendly way. Carolyn gestured to an upholstered chair with suspicious dark stains that Reggie had no desire to sit in. Looking around and seeing the only other choice was standing, Reggie sat perched on the edge of the chair, her leather messenger bag by her feet.

“As you can imagine,” Carolyn said, scooching forward in her own chair so that her belly was pressed against the overflowing desk, “we’re doing our best to handle this as quietly and sensitively as possible. As far as I know, the press haven’t got wind of it yet, but I can’t guarantee how long that will last. We’ve tried to limit the visits with detectives and special agents and so on, as they seem to exhaust her. And the truth is, I don’t think there’s much she could tell them.”