She was wreathed in smoke, choking, when she finally turned to me. For a moment, I refused to meet her eye, sure that she would kill me if I did, would see the guilt and the knowledge in my face and keep her secret with murder. I’d watched enough daytime television to know about dark secrets.
But when she bent down to me, with the creak of stretching elastic, and she lifted me to my feet and bent to look me in the eye, she had tears in her eyes.
She went to the pile of oddments and junk jewelry that she had dumped out on the floor and sorted through it until she found a pair of sewing shears, then she cut away my T-shirt, supporting my broken arm with her hand. My wings were flapping nervously beneath the fabric, and it got tangled, and she took firm hold of the wingtips and folded them down to my back and freed the shirt and tossed it in the pile of junk on her normally spotless floor.
She had spoken to me less and less since I had fixed the television and begun to pick up English, and now she was wordless as she gently rotated my fingerbones and my wristbones, my elbow and my shoulder, minute movements, listening for my teakettle hiss when she hit the sore spots.
“Is broken,” she said. “Cholera,” she said. “I am so sorry, lovenu,” she said.
“I’ve never been to the doctor’s,” she said. “Never had a pap smear or been felt for lumps. Never, ever had an X-ray. Feel this,” she said, and put her upper arm before his face. He took it and ran his fingertips over it, finding a hard bump halfway along, opposite her fleshy bicep.
“What’s this?” he said.
“It’s how a bone sets if you have a bad break and don’t get a cast. Crooked.”
“Jesus,” he said, giving it another squeeze. Now that he knew what it was, he thought—or perhaps fancied—that he could feel how the unevenly splintered pieces of bone mated together, met at a slight angle and fused together by the knitting process.