1
JONAS
Jonas had done two things when he’d come home from the hospital for the first time after The Accident.
He’d taken a permanent marker and scribbled out the lower half of the left leg on his Bones of the Human Skeleton poster, which had hung on his closet door since fifth grade (when he’d decided he wanted to be a doctor).
He’d looked at the newly-altered poster and cried, for the first time after and the only time since.
He was looking at the same poster now.
“Jonas?”
His mom’s tone was familiar. It was the same tone she’d been using with him for the last year. It was as if she was tiptoeing around him, walking carefully to avoid stepping on something sharp like glass shards or a Lego brick. His gaze fixated once more on the mass of permanent ink on the poster that obliterated the left tibia, fibula, patella, half the femur—irrevocable, unshakable. It won’t go away! he’d screamed in his head, that first day, as he angrily smeared ink on the poster. This won’t ever go away! And that was when he had cried.
“Are you there?”
Jonas sighed into his phone, the static breath rebounding in his own ear. “Yes, Mom. Here.”
“Okay,” she said. “Look, I know you haven’t really driven since, well, you know.” She paused before pressing onward, her tone diplomatic. “Your sister forgot the waiver for her summer camp, and you know they’re leaving later this afternoon. I really wouldn’t ask under any normal circumstances, but I have a big meeting at work today and I can’t get away to bring it to her.”
Jonas thought about his sister being unable to zip-line or white-water raft or any of the other things she had been going on and on about doing at summer camp since school had first let out back in May. He thought about his sister, so excited to go off and do something, the first thing their parents had had any extra money for, what with Jonas’s stack of receipts for doctor’s appointments, hospital stay, therapy, and prosthesis (which hadn’t left his closet since the day he’d gotten it).
“I was just wondering if you could take it to her.”
Easier said than done. Jonas frowned, massaging the place right above his nonexistent left knee, where the rest of his leg should have been.
“Jonas?”
He pictured himself saying no and then pulling the covers over his head to block out the outside. “Okay, Mom,” he said instead. After all, he’d put her through enough, hadn’t he? He could do one thing for her, right? And for Taylor, who had kind of been the forgotten one in all this mess.
“Okay? You’ll do it?” Jonas could hear his mother’s relief through the phone. He also didn’t miss the hope in her voice. He wondered if she had expected more arguing. She’d been trying to get him to leave the house for something, anything, since the end of the school year (really, since Jonas’s Great Tragedy). He could also hear the concern in her voice. He knew she’d be worried that she was asking too much. Jonas felt bad—the uncomfortable feeling of guilt squeezed at his insides. After all she’d done for him, she shouldn’t have to worry about asking too much. She shouldn’t have to worry that her son couldn’t handle a little thing like a quick errand.
“Okay,” he said again. Maybe she’d believe him a little more after he said it a second time. Maybe he’d believe it a little more too.
He could practically see the smile on her face. “Thank you, Bird!” she exclaimed. Jonas closed his eyes and tried not to cringe at the childhood nickname (You’re so skinny, like a bird! his mom used to say). He could picture her smiling an actual smile (not tired or forced) and he felt a little better about himself for once. His mom was continuing, her words humming in his ear. “Taylor said the form is either on the counter or on her desk in her room. If you could just take it—they’re meeting in that parking lot behind the school, you know the one.”
Jonas knew the one. He didn’t think he’d forget it. He and his older brother, Rhys, leaving school. That same parking lot around four thirty, post Rhys’s track practice. Crash. The sound of crunching metal echoed in his head.
“Yes.” He forced the word out. “Got it.” He swallowed and closed his eyes.
“If you could just take it there and give it to her …”
“Yeah, all right,” he said. There. All right. Something other than okay.
“All right.” A pause. “I love you, Jonas.”
Jonas pictured his mom. In the year since his accident she’d seemed to shrink somehow. Her dark eyes didn’t hold as much light and there was a little streak of gray in her dark hair, which she always tried to tuck behind her ear. Jonas thought that maybe the worst thing of all of this was what it had done to Elise Nguyen-Avery. He held his breath a moment before letting it out and replying. “Love you, too, Mom.”
Jonas hung up and dropped his phone on the bed next to him.
He stared at the ceiling’s bumpy plaster for a few moments, as if gathering his strength. Then he sighed and flung the blankets back, sat up, and swung his right leg over the side of the bed, ignoring what remained of the left. Pretend it’s not there. Don’t look. (When it had first happened, there had been moments when he almost forgot. He wished he still had more of those moments—the forgetting. Of feeling nothing for a while.) Standing and using the edge of his bed for balance, he tripped over to his closet, where he hesitated, staring at the poster’s ink-mangled leg once more before pulling out the prosthesis from the dark corner he had shoved it into.
He sat back down on the edge of the bed and examined the prosthetic leg. A part of Jonas hated the thing. It was a poor substitute for what he was missing. He frowned, then situated it against the stump. No, that didn’t feel right. Wasn’t there supposed to be a sock or something that went on before the prosthesis? A stump liner? Jonas shuddered a little; for some reason, he’d always hated that word. Stump. Stump, stump, stump. He had tried to get used to it, lying in the hospital bed in the pediatric unit (there were clouds and stars and stuff on the ceiling tiles; he wasn’t old enough for the adult unit yet) and thinking it over and over in his head, but it didn’t work—didn’t sound right. Trees had stumps. Legs weren’t meant to have stumps.
After a bit more digging, he managed to find the practice liner they’d given him when he’d first gotten the prosthesis. (Wear it a little every day—get used to it. He hadn’t.) He put it on and refitted the prosthesis. It felt loose, and he was a little worried that the suction between the liner and the prosthesis wouldn’t hold. Somewhere there was a new liner, one fitted to his leg a few months post-accident, after his leg had atrophied a bit. Shrunk. The thing—stump, leg—had actually shrunk.
Jonas’s gaze moved to the floor, unable to look at the leg for very long. “It will be fine,” he muttered into his empty room (empty house, really). “It’s only for a little while, after all.”
Jonas stood, wobbling for a moment, keeping all his weight on his good leg. After The Accident (Jonas’s Great Tragedy was always referred to as The Accident), he’d gone through the motions: minor inpatient therapy, practice wearing the liner, trying on a prosthesis. He’d gone through the motions because after he did, he felt less guilty when he looked at his mom. The motions had stopped when his mom had suggested getting the permanent prosthesis. Something about the word permanent had made everything sink in. So he’d given up on replacing his missing leg with metal and plastic. His mom hadn’t; she’d had him fitted and worked with a prosthetist to order it, hoping that once he had the leg, he might show a little more interest. He’d taken it almost as a challenge. Think again. It had spent most of its time in the corner of his closet, gathering dust. Jonas preferred the crutches. He’d gone to therapy long enough to learn how to use them properly. Why pretend everything was normal when it clearly wasn’t?