Tin Fingers: Book 2 in the Arachnodactyl Series Read online

  He turned around and counted the chairs in a clockwise direction. All the while, his left arm insisted it was still there. It throbbed and tickled. It recalled the sensation of wood beneath its fingers, smooth and hard and polished to a shine that went unnoticed in the dark.

  As Ikey took his seat, the kitchen stairs creaked. Rose emerged into the room. Her boots clipped across the floor in long strides that marked her height.

  “How was the hospital’s food?” Rose asked as she walked past.

  “Bland. Cold. Edible.”

  A serving dish clinked as it was placed upon a trivet.

  “Cross said you lost a lot of weight.”

  “My whole damn arm.” Ikey inhaled sharply. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t mind it. It was quite humorous. But I think he meant you lost meat off your frame.”

  Cross stepped into the doorway. “What did I mean?”

  “You said Ikey lost a lot of weight.”

  “They fed us on gruel there,” Cross said as he stepped to the head of the table. “If the nurses didn’t get you, then the food was meant to.”

  Rose walked away. Chair legs grumbled, then creaked as Cross fell into his chair. As he pulled the chair back up to the table, the legs grumbled again. The music boxes murmured, then quieted down until just a slight, barely audible hiss from a burning lantern remained. The sounds and sensations fell over Ikey with the comfort of gazing on a safe, familiar face. His shoulders relaxed, and the cotton bandages around his head didn’t push so tightly against his brow.

  “I bet you’ve hardly been able to wait for real food, eh?” Cross asked.

  Ikey nodded. The quality of the food in the hospital had been such a small concern. It sat untouched before him, growing cold, leaking out what scant flavor might have been infused in it as the patients and staff bustled around him until the nurses came along and announced that everyone had finished eating, and he needed to eat and have a hearty appetite in order to heal.

  No amount of food would heal him.

  Cross cleared his throat. “As I understand it, that blonde nurse is supposed to come over tomorrow and see to your bandages, correct?”

  “Her name is Hailie.”

  “Oh, you’re on a first name basis, are you? Too bad you can’t see her. Man, she has a shape to her. All the curves in the right places. And a sweet, round face. The kind you want to gather up in your hands and—”

  “That’s enough,” Ikey said.

  “Enough of what?”

  Ikey sighed. “I’ll see what she looks like when I get my bandages off.”

  “See that you do. And see that you make a good impression on her. You’ll be glad you did when the bandages come off.”

  The stairs creaked with Rose’s presence, and with each step, a small weight of iron was dangled by twine from Ikey’s heart, placed with a hook into the tissues of his muscle like an ornament hung from a tree. With his reduction in form, he had hoped that he might come to understand Rose on a better level, a deeper level. He might make a stronger connection with her, reestablish whatever they had before Ikey had tromped off to Turk’s Head and demanded Cross step aside for him.

  Rose placed a dish before Ikey. A warm billow of beef and vegetables and some spice welled up into his face like a hug. He inhaled deeply and wished for a place to tuck the scent into.

  He patted at the table for his utensils. His fingers happened upon a spoon. He grabbed it, then slid his hand to his left until it bumped against the bowl. Ikey spooned some of the stew up, but held it still before his mouth, blowing on the heat that radiated against his lips.

  He placed the spoon into the bowl.

  “Don’t you like it?” Cross asked.

  “Too hot.”

  “You didn’t even try it.”

  “I can feel it,” Ikey said. “The heat against my lips.”

  “Bah. You’re thinking of that nurse.”

  “Shut up.”

  Cross chuckled. “It’s good to have you back, kid.”

  “Indeed, it is good to have you back,” Rose added. “I’ve missed having you around.”

  Ikey held another spoonful before his mouth. The steam rubbed against his upper lip, tickled his nose.

  Rose set a plate before Cross, and went back to the sideboard.

  After a few seconds of silence, Cross said, “And he’s missed being here, too. You should have seen him at the hospital. A mess, he was. Wrapped head-to-toe in bandages, still as a dead man. I used to lay there and stare at him just to see his chest move, to make sure he hadn’t passed off while I wasn’t paying attention. Or every now and then, his chest would catch and he’d start to cry, but it was real quiet-like, you know, like it took everything he had not to out-and-out bawl, you know?”

  Ikey dropped his spoon into the bowl.

  “Felt so bad for him,” Cross said. “All he’d been through, and for what?”

  Rose placed her dish at the foot of the table. She pulled out a chair and sat herself. “I appreciate what you did, Ikey.”

  “What?” Cross asked. “You do realize he saved my life, right?”

  “It took remarkable courage. Only one man in a hundred would have done what you did.”

  “But you do realize that it was my life he saved, right?”

  “It doesn’t matter whose life it was,” Rose said. “Even if it was your wretched life, the point is that it was a heroic, selfless act. Thank you.”

  Ikey’s left arm screamed for him to put it up on the table, stretch it out with the palm down and fingers spread, shift it to the left so that Rose might find it, might lay the grace of her long, delicate fingers upon the back of his wrist and draw them along his hand before finding his palm and gripping his hand tight. His arm screamed and throbbed and yelled for this until Ikey reached over with his right arm and grabbed the jumble of ribs on his left side. His severed arm was reduced to a ghost’s low moan once it was reminded that it no longer existed.

  “Cold?” Cross asked.

  Ikey shook his head. “No.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s nothing to you. Don’t know how you couldn’t be freezing. Eat up. Put some meat on those bones.”

  “Please,” Rose said.

  Ikey rubbed his hand along his thigh. He passed a spoonful of stew over his lips, and his mouth nearly shuddered with the flavor. His jaw ached. His nose quivered at the remarkable taste. It was the best thing he’d eaten since that last time he ate with Rose and Cross. It was the best thing he’d eaten ever.

  He chewed slowly, swallowed, and wanted to cry for the stew.

  “How about it, eh?” Cross asked. “Better than hospital gruel, right? We should save a bowl for Heidi—“

  “Hailie.”

  “Eh? Whatever. Hailie. Let her see what real food is. She can take it back and show the kitchen.”

  Ikey mashed his teeth into the beef and vegetables of another spoonful. He relished the consistency of the food as flavor flooded his mouth and washed over his tongue. As he chewed, he took regular, slow breaths to hold the tears at bay. The proximity of Rose burned him. But it was a cold burn, a hand thrust deep into a bank of snow and held there as long as a person could stand it, and then held a moment longer. Until the feeling of it had melted into fact and no longer did it matter. Sitting next to Rose was like that after the long weeks of aching for her visit, for her to come see him, to sit beside his bed as he told her that he lived, despite everything, because he wanted to see her again.

  Regardless of what Cross had said about it being the nature of Rose, it sat on his chest with the solidity of betrayal. A heavy betrayal that cracked his ribs when he squirmed. It wrung the breath from him. This is why he’d have to leave. As soon as his eyesight came back.

  As dinner went on, the conversation withered until the clinks of spoons on china remained, punctuated with the occasional rip of bread as Cross tore a bite off. After what felt like an age, Cross pushed his chair back. The floor creaked as he stoo
d.

  “I’m heading out to the workshop. Would you please help Rose clean up?” Cross asked.

  The request fell on Ikey like shackles. He lowered his head and nodded.

  Ikey scraped his spoon along the bottom of the bowl as Cross picked up his lantern and left Ikey and Rose sitting in their individual darknesses.

  “Are you finished?” Rose asked.

  “I am.”

  “If you’ll please bring the dishes back to the scullery, I’ll start washing.”

  The floor creaked and her skirts rustled and the music boxes purred with her passing. Her physical movements were so damned intricate, precise. The ease with which she moved about left Ikey sitting before a dark table of dirty dishes and feeling like an engine missing a driving rod.

  He stood and grabbed the bowl before him. He stepped away from the table, then paused a moment to recall the arrangements of the table and the chairs. Like a fool, he had gotten used to counting them off, his hands touching each as he passed around. He no longer had a free hand.

  Ikey thought of his left arm, and it began to tingle and moan. He imagined it reaching out and tagging the back of the empty chair that had sat next to him. He stepped forward. The music boxes whispered, trading bits of gossip in their tinkling voices as Ikey imagined his hand reaching down and tweaking the corner of the table as he swung around to the head of it. Then he would lift his hand and set it on the back of Cross’s chair. He stepped forward and repeated the move, swinging around the corner and along the backs of the chairs until he stood perpendicular to the scullery door. Ikey turned 90 degrees to the right. After a short breath, he took several steps forward.

  As he entered the scullery, the sound of running water came at him clear and unobstructed. He took another step forward and turned to his left. He held the bowl out before him.

  “Here.”

  Rose lifted the dish out of his grip. Without a word, he returned to the dining parlor, picked up Cross’s bowl, and headed back to the scullery. As he took the fourth step forward, the bowl met something hard and resistant. It snapped down out of his grip and shattered across the floor.

  “Piss,” Ikey hissed.

  “Are you all right?” Rose asked.

  “Yes,” Ikey said. “I’m sorry. I…”

  “Don’t concern yourself with it. It’s only a bowl. I’ll help you clean it up.”

  Ikey crouched. His fingers drifted down over the spot where he believed it had fallen. They landed on slick shards of porcelain. He tried to pluck a shard up, but he couldn’t grip it without cutting himself.

  Rose’s footsteps approached. “Where are you?”

  “Right here,” Ikey said from his crouch.

  “Here, I brought a broom and a dustpan.”

  Ikey reached out to take both, then the reality of the situation sat on him hard. His hand trembled.

  “Why don’t you take the dustpan. I’ll sweep,” Rose said.

  Ikey groped through the air until he found the tin dustpan. He ran his fingers up the edge of it until his touch bumped Rose’s hand. It felt as cool as the tin.

  Ikey gritted his teeth and snatched the pan from her. He plunked it onto the floor with a clang. The music boxes stirred.

  “It’s been a while,” Rose said. “You’ll get your bearings back before long.”

  The porcelain tinkled over the whisking of the broom as Rose swept in a circle, drawing the broken pieces together, gathering them like a herd of lost sheep to shepherd into the dustpan.

  “I waited for you,” Ikey mumbled. The words staggered out of him, his chest pressed up against his thighs as he leaned into his crouch. “I needed you to come see me.”

  Rose said nothing. She continued to sweep. The broken shards of porcelain said all that needed saying.

  Ikey straightened his back and took a breath. “I don’t want to stay here. I want to go to Kerryford. I want to get my arm replaced. I want to go back to the farm and set things right there.”

  “What for?” Rose asked.

  “What?” Ikey asked.

  “What for? Why? Why would you do any of that?”

  “I have to. I need to go back and set things right.”

  “What is right?”

  “My dad…”

  “Cross told me the full story. Everything. I know what you did when you last left here, and I know how Cross got shot.”

  Ikey swallowed.

  Rose ushered the shards into the dustpan. “So you get to select what is right?”

  “It wasn’t right what the admiral did.”

  “And what of you? Was it right what you did?”

  “I saved Cross’s life.”

  “And so Cross lives to tell me that he doesn’t fully know how Admiral Daughton died. How did he die? Or do I want to know?”

  Ikey stood with the dustpan balanced in his hand. Without another hand to reach out and feel for the wall, he felt adrift, lost in the darkness behind his eyes. He waited for Rose to speak, to move, to give him a bearing on his position.

  A sigh fell out of the dark like snow. “I feared as much.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Ikey asked.

  The shards in the dustpan trembled.

  “Is this how you’re going to make restitution? You take one life, but save another. But it doesn’t quite feel even, does it? You lost your arm. Your eyesight. And so now the deal is that you’ll make your father pay, that you’ll personally bring justice to him for what he did to your family, if God will only allow you your arm and your eyesight back. Is that it?”

  Ikey took a deep breath. He tried to feel it down through his abdomen, his legs, out through his toes and into the floor like the roots of a tree. He wanted to know where he stood, where to go, which direction offered him escape. Sweat licked his palm, and the handle of the dustpan felt slick.

  “If you choose to leave here, that’s your own volition,” Rose said. “But I ask you to not pursue this course. Don’t go trading. Don’t go making deals with God and the Devil. You can’t win against either one of them any more than you can come out ahead when dealing with a banker.”

  “What would you do?” Ikey asked. “If you could get your eyes back? If you could get new eyes, would you do it?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I doubt there will ever be a day when you can test that claim, but it’s true and honest. I am fine with who I am. I am not at a disadvantage because I can’t see like Cross, or like you used to be able to. I see differently. And you know that. You know what it’s like to hear the silent things. To feel the way the air trembles. The tiny pulses in the floor. The wafts of shifting scents that tell you where the air has come from and where it is going. I see in all these ways that people don’t. And you will know that, too.”

  “My eyes will be fine.”

  “You are fine as you are, Ikey.”

  Ikey opened his mouth, but words wouldn’t come. They sat in his chest, clinging to his ribs, climbing them like the rungs of a ladder, and at his throat, a heavy stone sat.

  “I don’t leave the house,” Rose said. “It is who I am.”

  Ikey crouched and set the dustpan down.

  “Excuse me,” he rasped as he stood back up. “I have to go—”

  “No! You have not been excused,” Rose said. “You live here for now, and you will help me clean up this mess. You will help me clean off the table and do the dishes. You will do so first, and then you can go upstairs and cry and wonder at the uselessness of your eyes. But the work gets done first.”

  Ikey’s throbbing jaw dropped in protest, but again the words did not come.

  “I need your help,” Rose said. “I always have.”

  “I needed your help,” Ikey said. “And you weren’t there.”

  “And if I had shown up, if I had entered the infirmary and sat at your bedside and took your hand in mine, what difference would it have made?”

  “The world.”

&
nbsp; The words died away. They fell to the ground like the dried husks of leaves. Ikey wanted to stomp his foot, goad the music boxes into chattering, singing, covering over his stupid response.

  “I see,” Rose said, her words slow and cumbersome, tired beasts wading through the dark. “It is too easy to shroud oneself in pity and call it the world. If that is what I have denied you, then let that be the clearest example of my esteem for you.”

  “Esteem? You speak of hiding in pity, yet you never leave this house.”

  “I am not asking anyone to come here and see me hide.”

  A grunt escaped Ikey. His hand clenched into a fist. “Damn it, Rose! You’re as confounding as these bloody music boxes.”

  “I make perfect sense when you’re not trying to take my words apart.”

  A throbbing ache shoved into Ikey’s left shoulder. Weariness draped itself across him, hung from his frame like yards of wet fabric and reeds. He took a deep breath, crouched, and found the dustpan where he had left it.

  He stood back up. “I’ve lost my bearings.” The statement was so much larger than he had intended.

  “Here’s the doorway,” Rose said. The handle of the broom ticked off the door case and the noise lit through the dark like a spark and then Ikey was seeing the admiral dancing again, the flames curling around him, winding over his body like a lover’s arms and wandering fingers.

  Ikey shook his wrist to hear the shards chatter in the dustpan. He stepped forward, heard the shape of the room change. The hiss that underlay everything changed in pitch, and he knew he stood inside the scullery.

  In silence, the two worked to finish the dishes and clean up the dining parlor. Once Rose announced they were done, Ikey drifted away. His feet retraced the steps to the stairwell. Up he went and made his way along the hall to the bedroom that had once belonged to Cross’s dad, and now belonged to him. He entered the room, stepped over to where he remembered the bed resting, and he sank the tips of his fingers into the plush mattress. Once he confirmed it was still there, and of course it was, he turned around and fell onto the bed.

  After a moment on his back, he struggled to his knees and made his way across the plush mattress to the thick curtains that swaddled the window. Ikey shoved the curtains back and pushed the window open until a waft of cool, evening air washed over him. Outside, sparrows chattered. A robin called. A couple laughed. A train whistle stirred and shrieked and died away. The details painted themselves in his head, welled up in colored blurs and blotches. And this was the difference between himself and Rose. Born blind, she knew the world only as she knew it. There was nothing missing because she missed nothing. But Ikey had seen the images that went along with the smells and the sounds and the sensations. The images lived and stirred in his head. They shambled about and chased him down and reminded him of how much he had lost with an insistence equal to the throbbing pain of his missing arm.