The Wednesday Sisters(95)

“I burned them in a chemical explosion when I was twelve. I hadn't thought through what would happen if . . .” She blinked once, twice, her leaf-bud gaze fixed on Linda, who alone still stared at Brett's bare hands. “I guess it was an accident,” she said.

She was silent for a long time. We were all silent, the only sound the flapping wings of the birds, big ugly black crows landing, gathering to peck at the grass seed that had, once again, been spread across the scar of dirt.

“Not even an accident, exactly,” Brett said, her voice uncertain, as if this was something she'd only just realized, something she'd stuffed deep inside herself and kept hidden there, even from herself, all these years. “My brother dared me. He never dreamed I could make such a dramatic bang.” She intertwined her scarred fingers. “He's as badly scarred as I am. In a different way.”

Linda's gaze lifted from Brett's hands to her thin little face.

“Chip says he loves my hands,” Brett said, seeming to be speaking only to Linda now. “He loves me more for my hands. He says he can see that twelve-year-old girl I was, showing her brother she was so much smarter than anyone could imagine.

“Jeff loves you, Linda,” she said. “It isn't your hair or your breasts he loves. It's the person you are. Just like Chip loves me.”

It seemed we'd been sitting there for an hour, for two, for a lifetime, but the sun had not yet crested the tree line. The sky was still the soft color of dawn.

“But Chip fell in love with you and your hands,” Linda whispered. “Jeff fell in love with a blond Jewish girl with”—her hand went unconsciously to her wig—“with perfect C-cup breasts, in a sweater that wasn't blue.”

She adjusted her wig, her cap, almost surreptitiously, while Brett sat there with her hands free, touched by the fresh morning air.

I wondered if people would stare less at Brett's bare hands than they had always stared at the gloves. I wondered if she'd ever thought about having plastic surgery, or if there was anything they could do. If she could afford it if there was. I imagined her watching the medical news, waiting for the day to come when they could fix her up, when they could give her new hands.

I wondered if it was more complicated than that, if she didn't on some level cling to the gloves as a kind of protection against the world. It was just her hands people were rejecting, then. They weren't rejecting the odd girl who could talk about science better than most scientists, the girl who had wanted to be an astronaut when most of us had no idea what an astronaut was, when most of us aspired only to be the homecoming queen. I imagined her as a young student at Harvard, not belonging in that man's world but belonging no better at Radcliffe. One of the very few women who'd crossed into that world. I imagined her thinking they all would love her—the Harvard boys and the Radcliffe girls and everyone who had ever made fun of her in the school yard or sniggered behind her back in class—if only they could get past her hands.

She would tell us more later. She would tell us that her brother was so good at science that he really could have been an astronaut. His eye had been injured in the explosion, but he'd had an operation and she'd sat through the recovery with him, even as a girl laying out the facts for him. But Brad never took another science class beyond what he was required to take in high school. In college, he majored in history even though he'd never liked history, and he flunked out. And when he was twenty, he had a breakdown. He couldn't get out of bed for weeks. He spent several months at Sheppard Pratt outside Baltimore, and he was better after that, but he never was the same. “It's as if he can't do anything but relive the past,” Brett said. “He thinks my hands are his fault, because he dared me. But it was my fault, really. I knew what I could do.” And I would remember then Brett's reluctance to send out that first essay, and see it for the first time as what it was: not fear of failure but fear of success. I would wonder what it was like to love a brother so selflessly, to give up your own success lest it make your brother's failure worse.

That afternoon when we first saw Brett's scarred hands, though, I thought only that those hands were her hands, that she wouldn't be Brett without them, with or without her gloves. I took one scarred hand in mine, and Kath, across the picnic table from her, did, too, and then we had all joined hands, even Linda. We just sat there, not saying anything, just sitting together as the sun rose above the trees, as the sky lightened from pink to blue and the shadows shortened and the day became just another Sunday to the people waking in the houses around us. Men strapping on running shoes to run marathons. Toddlers dragging stuffed bears they'd cuddled since the moment they were born. Husbands and wives spooning together. Little girls placing their fingers on white piano keys, then reaching up for the black.