one

Jiminy Christmas!" Heath resisted the call of stronger language out of respect for her aunt's southern sensibilities. "Cross them or fold them or something. Don't just leave them laying there like a couple of dead carp." Heath looked away from her legs. Though they were tidily covered in denim trousers and, to all intents and purposes, looked like the legs of any seated, trim, forty-one-year-old woman, she couldn't bear the sight of them.

"How about I pretzel them?" Gwen said, turning from the campground's specially designed picnic table where she was setting out a plate on the specially designed end so Heath's specially designed wheelchair would roll under oh-so-specially. "Why don't you get Wiley to do it? He's a highly trained helper."

Heath looked to where the dog lay under the table watching a momma mallard and her three late-season ducklings with an evil glint in his eyes. He was originally named Prince Theo III but she and her aunt called him Wiley because of an uncanny resemblance he bore to the cartoon coyote after a run-in with roadrunners and sticks of TNT.

"Wiley's off duty."

"Wiley's always off duty."

Heath leaned over, her belly pressed against the wheelchair's safety belt: an indignity the doctors promised she could forgo when she got used to her "altered circumstances" and quit pitching face forward every time she leaned too far. With hands as angry and curved as talons, she grabbed her right ankle and jerked upward. She could feel the leg in her hands but not her hands on her leg. It reminded her of a creepy childhood trick. Her best friend Sylvia would hold her palm to hers, then, feeling the backs of the fingers, one her own, one Heath's, she'd intone: "This is what dead people feel like," and the two of them would squeal in horrific delight.

"This is what dead people feel like," Heath said.

Gwen ignored her.

Wiley watched the baby ducks picking at crumbs with a fluff of ducky butts and murmurs of ducky glee.

Heath set her ankle on the opposite knee, like stacking firewood, and wondered if she'd cut off her circulation or done any other damage to her insensate lower half. At least the plastic tubes were gone. The modern-day Frankensteins who had reworked her lower half had cheerfully told her that regaining control of her bowels and bladder was a "positive sign." She tried to be grateful for this small shred of autonomy—and dignity—left to her.

For a couple months after the fall, she'd played Christopher Reeve, pretending to be as optimistic, as cheerful, but she was a lousy actor and when the doctors told her, with a crushed third lumbar vertebra, she had the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell of climbing again, she'd rung down the curtain. The first of many curtains.

Little light now came into her spiritual house.

"Shit," she said, for no other reason than it seemed to express the gestalt of the moment.

Gwen turned, leaned on the prosthetically elongated end of the picnic table. Gwendolyn Littleton was Heath's aunt. She was seventy-one, thin and in superb condition. Her hair was eternally and determinedly red. She swore she would go to the grave clutching a bottle of Lady Clairol in one hand and a bottle of hormone replacement pills in the other. She wore her naturally frizzy hair up in a wild bird's nest she referred to as a neo–Gibson Girl. Her face wasn't youthful or even pretty, but Heath loved it. Every wrinkle turned up at the end, forced against gravity and life's myriad evils by Gwen's tendency to laugh at that which did not kill. She wasn't laughing now. The hurt Heath had caused showed around Gwen's mouth and eyes. A flinching as if from a physical blow.

"Maybe a camping trip was a rotten idea."

"Not camping, handicamping," Heath retorted, and was sorry when the pinch of pain on her aunt's face deepened.

"Got to call it something, sugar," Gwen said gently, her southern drawl making "sugar" the sweetest of words.

Heath said nothing. Shame clogged her throat. Shame and self-pity and shame at the self-pity. "Hey, Wiley," she called the dog. He heaved himself to his paws with a gusty sigh and ambled over in his loose-jointed way. It had been said that every cloud had a silver lining. For Heath this bedraggled, smart, ugly dog was it, the one thin flicker in the great dark firmament, like low summer lightning beneath a midwestern tornado sky.

"Hey dog," she said, and scratched his ratty ears.

On December twenty-third, Heath had fallen from an ice chute up by the Keyhole on Longs Peak. Rotten ice had dropped her sixty-eight feet to a helicopter ride and her new life as a cripple. Sixty-eight feet. Lucky to be alive, everyone said. The hospital had been her world through March. Physical therapy, Prozac. More physical therapy, Effexor. Pool therapy, Xanax; lots of Xanax. Watching people in gaily colored scrubs, prattling in gaily banal conversation, manipulating chunks of flesh and bone she could no longer feel gave Heath the creeps.

On the ides of March she'd given up, quit. The antidepressants she flushed down the john. She wasn't depressed because her brain didn't work. She was depressed because her life no longer worked. The wheelchair came in April. Wiley in June. The dog and Gwen kept Heath from folding like a cheap kite in a windstorm.

"Lucky to be alive," Heath said, to see if it sounded true yet.

It didn't.

"Lucky for me," Gwen replied, and again Heath felt guilty.

Copyright © 2005 by Nevada Barr