Critical Injuries Read Online Free PDF Page A

she can sideways.
    Oh. This is the horror Lyle’s been looking at. For how long? If she could do one thing, one single thing, she would put her hands over this face.
    â€œTell me,” she says, and watches Lyle’s lips turn briefly inward, as he takes a difficult breath. She is relieved that she can see and hear even minor events exceptionally clearly, and wonders if that’s supposed to be some sort of compensation for loss, for what she can’t put her fingers on.
    For what, if she could put her fingers on it, she wouldn’t be able to feel.
    Where are her fingers? What are they doing? Lyle’s hands are down there somewhere, around where hers should probably be, his clever deft hands she would like to be holding. When they were in court, in the moments before Jamie’s verdict was announced, Lyle’s hand was the strongest, most comforting, sturdiest and most reliable set of bones and flesh in the world. She wondered right then how she would have managed to sit there without that hand, and what on earth she’d hung onto before it came along. She squeezed it, he said later, numb. Maybe now he’s squeezing hers numb.
    She not only looks grotesque, it seems she exists now only in her head. This is like an old horror movie: a laboratory run by a mad, wild-haired scientist, with a disembodied head in a jar, a battle between the proud but horrified scientist and the furiously calculating, raging brain. The scientist is a victim of his own sacrilegious ambition to create. The head, reliant on wits and ruthlessness, is also a victim of that sacrilegious ambition. Nobody wins. Everything is destroyed, for the error of hubris, the mistake of going too far.
    They were only going for ice cream, not far at all.
    â€œTell me!” Because terror does not improve for its causes being unknown.
    Vertebrae. Surgery. Bullet.
    In bitter moments James used to look at her, narrow-eyed, narrow-lipped, threateningly low-voiced, and say, “Don’t ask anything you’re not ready to hear the answer to.” It eventually became obvious what he must have meant. Isla would say there are some questions for whose answers there’s no such thing as being prepared, but which there’s also, as with the mirror, no option about asking. She also thinks that her outlook always was more complex and interesting than James’s, who turned out to be disappointingly simple-minded, really.
    â€œDo you remember any of it?” Lyle’s voice is low, slightly trembling, determinedly gentle. And oh, of course, he’d have no way to know what she knows and what she does not. He has no idea where gaps begin and end, and where he should start filling them in. Funny how she must have assumed he would know. Funny how much she has come to imagine he understands.
    Perhaps his deepest desire at the moment is to run out of the room. Or to rage, or to weep. At any rate, likely his deepest desire is not to sit here regarding her, looking old and speaking further words she’s pretty sure she’s not keen to hear, but must. “I’m sorry,” she says, meaning in a general sort of way, sorry for imposing, taking his energy, time, generosity of spirit, for looking hideous and for being a burden in a way she doesn’t yet understand, and which she has to rely on him to make clear. Even that, the explanation, is something he signed up for, marrying her.
    Mere love doesn’t encompass burdens like that. Marriage does. Lyle and Isla are tied up, bound down in ways that are not necessarily permanent, but which do apply, without doubt, to this moment. Just as Jamie and even Alix, who are irretrievably permanent, surely have no real choice but to come.
    â€œCholesterol,” she manages, although the word comes out somehow backwards. “Ice cream.” Even that’s slurred.
    â€œReally? That’s what you remember?” He sighs slightly again.
    If a sudden traffic jam had occurred