Pucker Read Online Free PDF Page B

The doors were locked. She led me back into the woods and made me take a big swallow of Cook’s elixir so I could sleep.
    â€œJust a few more hours,” she said.
    The next morning she brought me back to the rehabilitation center. They took one look at my third-degree burns and rushed me to the Edward F. Anderson Burn Unit, where I would spend the next month. My mother was left to fill out the forms.
    â€œNames?”
    â€œSerena and Thomas Quicksilver.”
    My mother had decided she would change our last name. Maybe she thought somebody might come looking for us from Isaura. Or maybe this was part of forgetting, of moving into our new life.
    â€œAddress?”
    She was tempted to tell them our address in Isaura but couldn’t bring herself to say the words out loud; she must look forward, not backward. Temporarily stumped, she said nothing.
    The woman at the desk looked her up and down impatiently. “Transient?”
    â€œYes,” my mother said. She didn’t know yet what transient meant here. Not just “traveling,” “in between places,” but “homeless bum.”
    â€œI take it you have no insurance, then?”
    My mother bristled, hearing the woman incorrectly. “Of course I’ll give you assurance. He’s a good, obedient boy. He’s very brave. He suffers pain stoically. He will give you no trouble.”
    The receptionist looked at her like she was crazy. She wrote in big block letters on the form, UNABLE TO PAY.
    â€œThat’s not the truth. I have money.” My mother stabbed the form with her index finger.
    She was lying. She had nothing but what she was wearing and a satchel that contained a wheel of cheese, my Barker’s, and a sketch of her and my father on their wedding day.
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    My mother left me at the burn center on a Monday and didn’t return until Friday evening. During that time I thought I would die. Every morning I was given a morphine drip and I fell into a deep slumber, only to be wrenched awake when they were cleaning my wounds. They peeled me like a roasted pepper. I had a tube in my mouth and a smaller tube in my nose. They told me even the inside of my throat was burned.
    I couldn’t single out anybody’s face, for the shifts changed often and time was either stretched out or abbreviated. An hour could last half a day or go by in three minutes. But their voices I could differentiate. There was one nurse I liked. She spoke to me tenderly, as if I were her child. If her voice could have had a color, it would have been molten orange. You may think this strange, that I found the color of fire soothing. But I had eaten fire; it had marked me as its own and we would be kin for life.
    â€œHow did it happen, Thomas?” the nurse with the orange voice asked.
    â€œCandle. Curtains.” Full sentences were beyond me.
    â€œSomebody cared for you. Some sort of herbal poultice?”
    â€œMy mom.” We had agreed I would say this.
    â€œShe did a good job; she kept the wounds clean. But I’m glad she brought you here.”
    I didn’t answer, because she was peeling a long strip of skin off my cheek with a pair of tweezers.
    â€œJust this last one,” she promised. I trusted her and steeled myself. She was not like some of the other nurses, who would lie and tear off the skin without warning, thinking it was better to be surprised.
    I knew what was coming next: the Xeroform, this cold yellow goop they spread on before the layers of gauze and Ace bandages. I loved this part. The ointment was cool and smelled like mints. The nurse’s hands became Cook’s hands applying the poultices, and my two worlds, Isaura and Earth, became one. Done with my torture for the day, I sank back into the arms of the morphine.
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    My mother told me she spent the first day trying to get a job. Anything: waitressing, working in a toy factory, cataloging books at the library. She had no references, no job