This was the dregs between July and August and the air was stilled and the bay lay flat like a shining sheet fitted tight to the coast. Hours slipped into hours, folded in, and circled back. Heat lay in thick panes cast luminescent by the sun. Four days ago, the police brought Meadow’s older brother, Christopher, to the hospital without his left hand. They found him dazed and spurting blood and unable to speak for the drugs he had hidden beneath his tongue. His hand—snapped off just below the wrist by an alligator—was retrieved when the creature was pulled from the retention pond where Christopher was attempting to hide after someone called the cops on him for checking cars. The gator was slit up the belly the morning after. Both the hand and the gator lay mangled in the gleaming sun, as if in fate. There was no possibility of reattachment. But there were two surgeries in quick succession, rounds upon rounds of antibacterial injections, and a recommended counsellor. Now it was time to go home.
It was nearing seven when they left the hospital and golden hues sculpted the peaks of clouds, the lines of the buildings, and the swell of the coast. Christopher sat with his head against the car window. Meadow thought he was colored greenishly, like a baroque portrait. His handless wrist was wrapped and Meadow imagined the skin was pulled over the shaved shard of bone smooth and shiny and taut, like a gemstone. Christopher was informed that the alligator that ate his hand was killed by state-sanctioned poachers. This agitated him greatly.
“Big mistake,” he proclaimed.
“Well,” their father said. “Well, well.”
“Horrible, awful lizard,” their mother said.
“It’s a disappear machine,” Christopher said.
“So, what’s for dinner?” their mother asked. She looked up and down the road at the glittering lights of chain restaurants with exaggerated interest. “Chrissy? You wanna pick?”
He offered nothing. The bridge they followed reached into indigo clouds and it was like they were driving right into the sky, mirrored in the bay below in repetition.
Meadow was aware of each person they passed as they were led to their table. She wanted to see someone stare at her brother and she wanted them to wonder. She wanted them to riffle through the catalogue of possibilities as to why a teenaged boy would be freshly missing his hand. She wanted to see it settle on their faces that it could have been an alligator. But nobody gave more than a glance and Meadow discerned no hushed conversations or quick, sneaky stares.
Of the recent major change to his person, Christopher provided no insight. Meadow and their parents tried to match his apathy, but Meadow was fascinated, and she was slightly sick over it. If she thought too hard about what had really happened, she got caught on the details: whether his hand had made a popping sound when it was pulled off, those gnashing gator teeth, and Christopher’s hand resting solitarily in the dark caverns of the alligator’s stomach until it was yanked back out into the sun. She wondered if the poacher had clutched it in handshake. There was a new cadence to everything, but nobody acknowledged it. Nobody said anything about it, and it was right there. Christopher was nagging their mother for another pain pill and made no attempt to conceal his wrist. He sent his silverware clattering to the table in an attempt to unwrap his napkin. He squeezed four lemons into his water with his fist in succession. He admired the IV marks at the tangle of veins in the bend of his arm. He expressed his pleasure that his larceny charges had been dropped.
“You know what that means?” their dad prompted. “A second chance.”
“Give me my pill. It’s my choice,” Christopher said, working on their mother again.
“Are you in pain?”
He lifted his wrapped wrist and dropped it on the table.