Replacement Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

sat on the edge of Linda’s bed with her little brown and tan plaid suitcase open next to me, watching her pack slippers, underwear, and nightgowns.
    “Don’t worry, Jude,” Linda said. “I’ll be back before you know it. And stay away from my stuff, will ya?”
    Instead of an answer, I started picking apart one of the raised balls of fabric on her white chenille bedspread.
    “Hey, cut that out—you’ll ruin it!”
    I wanted her to yell at me. That just felt more normal. Better than thinking about her going into the hospital again, and about what they would do to her there. There was never much explanation to me about what would happen to her, and so my mind was left to wander about the cutting, the moving of bones and skin, and the reattaching pieces of her like some giant jigsaw puzzle. I tried to imagine it all without any blood, like in the movies when they cut away from the surgery scene and you only see the patient later recovering in bed. All pristine and clean and neat without a drop of blood even at the site of the intravenous needle. But when I closed my eyes, I saw the blood, remembered the raw skin graftsites I had seen when her bandages were changed, the reddened stitches and bloody gauze pads. I felt lucky and guilty about it at the same time, that I didn’t have to be cut with scalpels and prodded with needles. That I could stay safely behind.
    Some of the surgeries were to replace scarred skin with better skin from another part of Linda’s body, so she would have two places she would be healing. One where scar tissue was removed and replaced, and the other at the donor site where healthy tissue was taken from. She had one surgery to try to reconstruct her burned ears, but the donor ears were rejected and had to be taken off.
    When Linda went in for surgery, my mother always went away, too. She’d be in the hospital in New York with Linda when she had the operation, and then she’d stay in her room for the first few nights. After that, she might come back at night, and then go right back in the morning until Linda came home. Every year it was a couple of months before it was over.
    It was very lonely at home without them. Very quiet. My father read the paper when he got home from work, and we would heat up a dinner that my mother left for us. I’d watch the news with him; he’d ask how school was and if I did my homework.
    I was happy to have my father all to myself then, but not without a stab of guilt, feeling that my happiness must mean that I was glad Linda was in the hospital.
    On Saturdays, my father brought me to his jewelry store to help out. When I was too little to wait on customers, I helped wrap gifts and polish rings in the back. When gift wrapping was needed, he’d call me out to the front counter and introduce meto the customer with his arm around me. He’d give me instructions about what kind of gift it was and which paper to use. It felt like we were a team. My pay was sometimes a piece of jewelry: a ruby ring or a new charm for my bracelet.
    At night, when my mother would call from the hospital, I would stand next to my father to hear her. Snippets would filter through to me from their conversation:
    “Why did Linda have a bad reaction to the anesthesia? Was it different medicine?”
    “Well, how long did they say it would be to heal from this?”
    “What do you mean they don’t know if it’s going to take?”
    Mostly, I didn’t know what any of it meant. But I could tell from my father’s voice, the crease in his forehead, or whether or not he sat down heavily on the kitchen chair next to the phone as he listened to the report from my mother.
    After about a week, I could usually go up to see Linda. I liked to bring her candy or a magazine. Even when she was all bandaged up, with tubes coming out of her, or casts on her legs, she always greeted me with “Hey, Jude!” when I came in.
    Visiting Linda with both of my parents felt like the whole family was together again.