Page 57 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m here. We’re all here now.”
“Nah, I ain’t worried,” Levi says the next day. Presumably over the phone. Crane didn’t hear anyone come into the apartment, and Stagger is sleeping at the foot of the bed. “It’s not like he hurt the baby, so. Might as well just let him have it.”
Levi sniffs.
“The recovery’s consequence enough.”
After days spent crusted shut with discharge, Crane’s eyes blink open.
It takes a minute for the blurry forms around him, Stagger by the side of the bed and Levi folding laundry, to solidify into recognizablethings.But there they are, and then the rest of the bedroom too: the nightstand, the alarm clock, the American flag tacked to the wall, the trees beyond the window.
The scalding water, at least, did its job. When Crane makes it to the mirror and he sees not Sophie but himself—the first time he leans into his reflection, bright red burns and yellow crusts and peeling skin splashed across his nose, his cheeks, his mouth—he laughs.
It’s so bad.
It’s perfect.
It’s him.
The outside matches the inside.Something’s wrong here, it says,tread with caution, I beg you.
Crane’s stomach has swollen enough that his navel has popped into an outie. The start of stretch marks climb up from his hips to cradle the swell of his belly. Some of them cut through a tattoo, but he doesn’t mind. They look like claw marks, and they’re deep and scored.
However, he’d forgotten to take out his piercings before pushing his face into the water, and now that the skin is healing in a mess of crusts and pus, they’ve gotten disgusting. They need to be removed. But they’re stuck, melted into the skin, and Crane can’t do it himself with two of his fingers still out of commission. Levi has things to do, he says, so Stagger takes Crane into the bathroom and pins him down while he wrestles every piece of metal out of the red, raw skin.
One at a time. Septum, lip stud, a pair of eyebrow rings on the same side. All sitting on a paper towel on the edge of the sink, shiny with blister fluid.
How many weeks pregnant now? Crane stares at the calendar in the kitchen and struggles to do the math.
Thirty-two?
Stagger eases lotion across the stretch marks that have now started to itch and carefully cleans the holes the piercings left behind. The scald has begun to peel, skin sloughing away in layers as it heals badly. His face is new and shiny, uneven. He’ll be scarred for the rest of his life. Thank god, thank god.
His fingers are healing badly too. Tammy takes off the splint during one visit and finds she hadn’t set the fingers as well as she’d thought. They don’t move the way they used to. Crane tries to bend them and can’t quite get it.
Tammy tries to ignore it, just counts the baby’s movements as she stares at her watch. “You can hear the heartbeat,” she says to Levi. “If you get close enough.”
Levi doesn’t.
And sometimes there are contractions. Tammy says they aren’t the real ones, not yet. They’re called Braxton-Hicks. Sometimes Crane sits on the edge of the bed, holding his belly, eyes squeezed shut as he waits for it to pass.
Thirty-three marks on the living room wall. It’s hard to sleep with a tiny foot in his ribs. He’s tired, all the time.
Through the haze of cotton in his head, the fog in his brain, he thinks he hears Tammy yelling at Levi.
“I don’t give a shit what he did to his face,”she snarls.“You got him pregnant, you take care of him, you hear me? You HEAR me, boy?”
Then Tammy is coming into the bedroom, knocking on the doorframe with her gnarled hands. Crane thinks it’s kind of funny, that some of his fingers look like hers now. For a moment he feels bad that he hasn’t been paying attention to how far along her arthritis was getting, but it’s difficult to muster sympathy for her.
She still hasn’t said anything about Jess.
“Hey, sweetheart,” she says gently, like this isn’t partially her fault. She nudges Stagger, sitting on the floor with his back against the bedframe, with her foot. “Give us some privacy, will you.”
Stagger looks to Crane.
“I won’t let him do nothing,” Tammy says.
Crane nods that it’s okay, and Stagger leaves.
