"Put the camera away," she said. "Please. It's a party, David."
"These tulips are so beautiful," he began, but he was unable to explain himself, unable to put into words why these images com?pelled him so.
"It's a party," she repeated. "You can either miss it and take pic?tures of it, or you can get a drink and join it."
"I have a drink," he pointed out. "No one cares that I'm taking a few pictures, Norah."
"I care. It's rude."
They were speaking softly, and during the whole exchange Norah had not stopped smiling. Her expression was calm; she nod?ded and waved across the lawn. And yet David could feel the ten?sion radiating from her, and the pressed-back anger.
"I've worked so hard," she said. "I organized everything. I made all the food. I even got rid of the wasps. Why can't you just enjoy it?"
"When did you take the nest down?" he asked, searching for a safe topic, looking up at the smooth, clean eaves of the garage.
"Yesterday." She showed him her wrist, the faint red welt. "I didn't want to take any chances with your allergies and Paul's."
"It's a beautiful party," he said. On an impulse he brought her wrist to his lips and gently kissed the place where she'd been stung. She watched him, her eyes widening in surprise and a flicker of pleasure, then pulled her hand away.
"David," she said softly, "for heaven's sake, not here. Not now."
"Hey, Dad," Paul called, and David looked around, trying to lo?cate his son. "Mom and Dad, look at me. Look at me!"
"He's in the hackberry tree," Norah said, shading her eyes and pointing across the lawn. "Look, up there, about halfway up. How did he do that?"
"I bet he climbed up from the swing set. Hey!" David called, waving back.
"Get down right now!" Norah called. And then, to David, "He's making me nervous."
"He's a kid," David said. "Kids climb trees. He'll be fine."
"Hey, Mom! Dad! Help!" Paul called, but when they looked up at him, he was laughing.
"Remember when he used to do that in the grocery store?" Norah asked. "Remember, when he was learning to talk, how he used to shout out help in the middle of the store? People thought I was a kidnapper."
"He did it at the clinic once," David said. "Remember that?"
They laughed together. David felt a wave of gladness.
"Put the camera away," she said, her hand on his arm.
"Yes," he said. "I will."
Bree had wandered over to the maypole and picked up a royal purple ribbon. A few others, intrigued, had joined her. David started back to the garage, watching the fluttering ends of the rib?bons. He heard a sudden rush and stirring of the leaves, a branch cracking loudly. He saw Bree lift her hands, the ribbon slipping from her fingers as she reached up into the open air. A silence grew for a long instant, and then Norah cried out. David turned around in time to see Paul hit the ground with a thud, then bounce once, slightly, on his back, the sea lily necklace broken, the treasured crinoids scattered on the ground. David ran, pushing through the guests, and knelt beside him. Paul's dark eyes, were full of fear. He grabbed David's hand, trying hard to breathe.
"It's okay," David said, smoothing Paul's forehead. "You fell out of the tree and lost your wind, that's all. Just relax. Take another breath. You're going to be okay."
"Is he all right?" Norah asked, kneeling down beside him in her coral suit. "Paul, sweetie, are you okay?"
Paul gasped and coughed, tears standing in his eyes. "My arm hurts," he said, when he could speak again. He was pale, a thin blue vein visible in his forehead, and David could tell he was trying hard not to cry. "My arm really hurts." /"
"Which arm?" David asked, using his calmest voice. "Can you show me where?"
It was his left arm, and when David lifted it carefully, supporting the elbow and the wrist, Paul cried out in pain.
"David!" Norah said. "Is it broken?"
"Well, I'm not sure," he said calmly, though he was nearly cer?tain that it was. He rested Paul's arm gently on his chest, then put one hand on Norah's back to comfort her. "Paul, I'm going to pick you up. I'm going to carry you to the car. And then we're going to go to my office, okay? I'm going to show you all about X-rays."
Slowly, gently, he lifted Paul. His son was so light in his arms. Their guests parted to let him pass. He put Paul in the backseat, got a blanket from the trunk, and tucked it around him.
"I'm coming too," Norah said, sliding in the front seat be?side him.
"What about the party?"
"There's lots of food and wine," she said. " They'll just have to figure it out."
They drove through the bright spring air toward the hospital. From time to time, Norah still teased him about the night of the birth, how slowly and methodically he had driven through the empty streets, but he could not bring himself to speed today either.
They passed the ROTC building, still smoldering. Wisps of smoke rose like dark lace. Dogwoods were in bloom nearby, the petals pale and fragile against the blackened wall.
"The world's falling to pieces, that's how it feels," Norah said softly.
"Not now, Norah." David glanced at Paul in the rearview mir?ror. He was quiet, uncomplaining, but tears streaked his pale cheeks.
In the ER, David used his influence to hurry the process of ad?mission and X-ray. He helped Paul get settled in a bed, left Norah reading him stories from a book she'd grabbed in the waiting room, and went to pick up the X-rays. When he took them from the tech?nician, he saw his hands were trembling, so he walked down the halls, strangely silent on this beautiful Saturday afternoon, to his of?fice. The door swung shut behind him, and for a moment David stood alone in the darkness, trying to compose himself. He knew the walls to be a pale sea green, the desk scattered with papers. He knew that instruments, steel and chrome, were lined up in trays below the glass-fronted cupboards. But he could see nothing. He raised his hand and touched his palm to his nose, but even so close he could not see his own flesh, only feel it.
He groped for the light switch; it gave at his touch. A panel, mounted on the wall, pulsed and then filled with a steady white light that bleached things of their color. Against the light were negatives he'd developed the week before: a series of photos of a human vein, taken in sequence, in gradations of precisely con?trolled light, the level of contrast changing subtly with each one. What excited David was the precision he'd achieved, and the way the images did not resemble a part of the human body as much as other things: lightning branching down to earth, rivers moving darkly, a wavering expanse of sea.
His hands were shaking. He forced himself to take several deep breaths, then took the negatives down and slipped Paul's X-rays be?neath the clips. His son's small bones, solid yet delicate, stood out with ghostly clarity. David traced the light-filled image with his fin?gertips. So beautiful, the bones of his small son, opaque yet appear?ing here as if they were filled with light, translucent images floating in the darkness of his office, as strong and as delicate as the inter?twined branches of a tree.
The damage was simple enough: clear, straightforward fractures of the ulna and the radius. These bones ran parallel; the greatest danger was that, in healing, the two might fuse together.
He flipped on the overhead light and started back down the hall, thinking of the beautiful hidden world inside the body. Years ago, in a shoe store in Morgantown, while his father tried on work boots and frowned over the price tag, David had stood on a machine that X-rayed his feet, turning his ordinary toes into something ghostly, mysterious. Rapt, he'd studied the wands and bulbs of shadowy light that were his toes, his heels.
It was, though he would not realize it for years, a defining mo^-ment. That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him. In the weeks that fol?lowed, watching deer run and birds lift off, leaves fluttering and rabbits bursting suddenly from the undergrowth, David stared hard, seeking to glimpse their hidden structures. And June—sitting on the porch steps, calmly shelling peas or shucking corn, her lips parted with concentration—he had stared at her too. For she was like him yet not like him, and what separated them was a great mystery.
His sister, this girl who loved wind, who laughed at the sun on her face and was not afraid of snakes. She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love—nothing, now, but bones.
And his daughter, six years old, walked in the world, but he did not know her.
When he got back, Norah was holding Paul in her lap, though he was almost too big for such comfort, his head resting awkwardly on her shoulder. His arm was trembling with minor convulsions from the trauma.
"Is it broken?" she asked right away.
"Yes, I'm afraid so," David said. "Come and take a look."
He slipped the X-rays onto the light table and pointed out the darkened lines of fracture.
Skeletons in the closet, people said, and bone dry, and I have a bone
topic't with you. But bones were alive; they grew and mended them?selves; they could knit back together what had been torn apart.
"I was so careful about the bees," Norah said, helping him move Paul back to the examination table. "The wasps, I mean. I got rid of the wasps, and now this."
"It was an accident," David said.
"I know," she said, near tears. "That's the whole problem."
David didn't answer. He had taken out the materials for the cast, and now he concentrated on applying the plaster. It had been a long time since he'd done this—usually he set the bone and left the rest to the nurse—and he found it comforting. Paul's arm was small and the cast grew steadily, white as a bleached shell, as bright and seductive as a sheet of paper. In a few days it would be turning a dull gray, covered with bright childhood graffiti.
"Three months," David said. "Three months, and you'll have the cast off."
"That's almost the whole summer," Norah said.
"What about Little League?" Paul asked. "What about swim?ming?"
"No baseball," David said. "And no swimming. I'm sorry."
"But Jason and I are supposed to play Little League."
"I'm sorry," David said, as Paul dissolved into tears
"You said nothing would happen," Norah said, "and now he has a broken arm. Just like that. It could have been his neck. His back."
David felt tired all of a sudden, torn up about Paul, exasperated with Norah too.
"It could have been, yes, but it wasn't. So stop. Okay? Just stop it, Norah."
Paul had gone still and was listening intently, alert to the altered tones and cadences of their voices. What, David wondered, would Paul remember of this day? Imagining his son into the uncertain future, into a world where you could go to a protest and end up dead with a bullet in your neck, David shared Norah's fear. She was right. Anything could happen. He put his hand on Paul's head, the bristle of his crew cut sharp against his palm.
"I'm sorry, Dad," Paul said, his voice small. "I didn't mean to ruin the pictures."
David, after a second's confusion, remembered his roar hours earlier when the darkroom lights went on, Paul standing stricken with his hand on the switch, too scared to move.
"Oh, no. No, son, I'm not mad about that, don't worry." He touched Paul's cheek. "The pictures don't matter. I was just tired this morning. Okay?"
Paul traced his finger along the edge of the cast.
"I didn't mean to frighten you," David said. "I'm not upset."
"Can I listen to the stethoscope?"
"Of course." David slid the black wands of the stethoscope into Paul's ears and squatted down. The cool metal disk he placed^Dn his own heart.
From the corner of his eye he saw Norah watching them. Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm. He longed to comfort her, but he could think of nothing to say. He wished he had some kind of X-ray vision for the human heart: for Norah's and his own.
"I wish you were happier," he said softly. "I wish there were something I could do."
"You don't have to worry," she said. "Not about me."
"Don't I?" David breathed in deeply so that Paul could hear the rush of air.
"No. I got a job yesterday."
"A job?"
"Yes. A good job." She told him all about it then: a travel agency, mornings. She'd be home in time to pick Paul up from school. As she spoke, David felt as if she were flying away from him. "I've been going crazy," Norah added with a fierceness that surprised him. "Totally crazy with so much time on my hands. This will be a good thing."
"Okay," he said. "That's fine. If you want a job so much, take it." He tickled Paul and reached for his otoscope. "Here," he said. "Look in my ears. See if I left any birds in there."
Paul laughed, and the cool metal slid against David's lobe.
"I knew you wouldn't like this," Norah said.
"What do you mean? I'm telling you to take it."
"I mean your tone. You should hear yourself."
"Well, what do you expect?" he said, trying to keep his voice even, for Paul's sake. "It's hard not to see this as criticism."
"It would only be criticism if it were about you," she said. "That's what you don't understand. But it's not about you. It's about free?dom. It's about me having a life of my own. I wish you could under?stand that."
"Freedom?" he said. She'd been talking to her sister again, he'd bet his life on it. "You think anyone is free, Norah? You think I am?"
