Chapter 11

~Bella~

Dr. Clearwater had an entire foot in the grave.

He was the closest thing to a doctor for almost a hundred miles—the hospital in Topeka basically inaccessible in a decent amount of time. The town had been waiting for him to kick the bucket for years now, leaving us without a person to bring our broken bones and busted hearts to for mending. Stitches, pills, and a healthy dose of "That was stupid; don't ever do it again." They took bets on his actual age, guesses that ranged anywhere from 80 to 180. Most people thought he was a miracle, alive despite all the obvious evidence that someone his age should be bedridden or dead. Others thought he was magic, a medicine man with the blood of the eternal bubbling through his veins, destined to live forever and ever, amen.

I was pretty sure that he drank enough gin to have fully pickled himself from the inside out.

The office still smelled the same as it always had. Antiseptic and peppermints. Baking soda and mothballs. Juniper or gin, depending if you were a bad enough kid to snoop through cabinets while the doctor took your mom down the hallway for a shot to help her settle her nerves. I had spent a lot of time here in my early teens, waiting for Mom to cry out all her problems in the back rooms. It was almost comforting really—the fact that nothing had changed. The sagging couch in the waiting room, the magazines from twenty years ago piled on tables, and the way the air conditioner still squeaked. The scratchy carpet and the wood-paneled walls seemed destined to remain the same for as long as the good doctor gave the town something to test their gambling skills on.

There was a boy slumped across the room from me, clutching a bloody hand to his chest, pale as the first snow of winter. He was ushered into the back room by a flustered Mrs. Cope, who had been with Dr. Clearwater for as long as anyone could remember. She twittered around the boy like an agitated bird, her permed hair vibrating, helping him into the examining room, leaving me momentarily alone.

My leg was throbbing but not as badly as it had been before. I wondered how much of the pain was actually from the residual sting of the alcohol rather than the injury itself. It didn't look so bad once the blood had been wiped away, but the burn of the whiskey was enough to make my head spin and my teeth try to bite off my lip. If I had been alone when it happened, I would have cried. I would have maybe sat there with the porch eating my leg for a long while before working up the courage to pull myself free. I would have probably dragged myself up the stairs and into bed, letting my leg rot off from whatever horrible bacteria the wood pushed beneath my broken skin.

I wasn't sure if I didn't cry because he was there or because I was too numb to feel anything anymore.

I was still half-amazed that he had gotten the truck started. He spent a solid twenty minutes beneath the hood, fiddling with wires and valves, scraping crusty white corrosion from the battery. The ancient thing had sat slouching in the weeds for so long, I was sure it was a lost cause. It was faded almost pink in the sunshine, the red paint gone soft and pale. The tires looked brittle, and the seat felt hard, and it belched like a drunk when it finally spluttered to life. We sat in it for a long while, silent, with Neighbor gripping the steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white, his voice muttering under his breath like he was talking himself into doing something wrong. It took him five minutes to unwrap his death grip from the wheel and push the truck into gear. We rumbled to town—the truck sounding like it had a chainsaw stuck in the transmission—backfiring every time it tried to crawl out of a standstill. Neighbor cursed under his breath and ground the gears a lot, but he somehow managed to pull up in front of the doctor's office, stomping hard and fast on the rusty brakes.

"I'll be here when you're done." He turned toward me, a swatch of sunlight through the windshield burnishing his hair coppery-gold. His face looked gray around the edges, as though he wanted to run around the corner to empty his stomach onto his shoes. He was pebbled with sweat around his hairline and seemed to be holding back a full-body shake.

The way his mouth had warped when he saw the blood running down my leg…

If I wasn't certain this person had ghosts before, I was positive of it now.

"You're not coming in?"

He shook his head, glancing down the street. "Hardware store is right down there. Need some things for my place. And yours." He looked at me again, and I couldn't decide where to focus. His eye, looking tired and sad and drawn, or the eyepatch, with his scar-broken eyebrow pushed down hard over the top of it. His forehead wrinkled with concern or worry or stress. His lips pressed tight and thin against his teeth. His hands still clamped down hard around the steering wheel.

I looked away.

"Be sure to get a tetanus shot," he reminded me.

"I hate needles," I grumbled, glaring at the nondescript building in front of me. It looked as though the storm had broken a window—the glass taped back together and the faded sign hanging askew.

"Everyone does."

He grabbed the fawn by the scruff when I hopped gingerly out of the truck, catching it before it could follow me. The animal had refused to be left behind, scampering down the porch steps and running circles around the truck until it finally started. When Neighbor opened the cab door for me, the fawn had leapt up on the seat.

"That thing can't come," he'd grumbled, reaching for the fawn.

"It's okay. She'll behave," I promised. He shook his head and muttered some more but left the fawn, helping me into the truck. I curled up on the seat, the fawn snuggling in close, my leg on fire and my skin burning hot where he touched me, and I spent the entire drive trying hard not to stare at the way his muscles roped his forearm when he pushed against the gear shift. Trying not to study the way his jaw seemed to tense in time with his thoughts. Trying not to let the flame that was starting to splutter to life somewhere deep in my stomach grow strong enough to glow out from underneath my skin. He was too mysterious, too handsome, too scarred and lonely for me to douse the flame entirely.

Moments like that—he felt like the only flame I had left.

Mrs. Cope resumed her seat behind the desk, breaking me out of my daydream, shuffling papers as she shook her head. "That poor boy," she said. "His hand doesn't look salvageable."

My stomach rolled. "What happened?"

"Tractor," she answered bluntly, leaving the rest up to my wild imagination.

I had barely gotten my stomach under control by the time I was granted access to the back rooms. I sat on the examining table with my leg out in front of me while Dr. Clearwater poked and prodded all around the gash carved into my skin from my traitorous porch. He mumbled to himself; my hiss of pain when he hit a particularly tender spot going completely unnoticed. I tried to gulp down my nausea, studying his wiry hair, his giant, white mustache, the wrinkles in his dark brown skin. He was wearing a tweed jacket the color of wet dirt, a cloth handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket, and he smelled of tobacco, which was an odd thing for a doctor to smell like.

"No stitches, I think. We'll just glue you back together." He sounded as though I was a craft project, and he had a new glue gun.

"I probably need a tetanus shot?" I wasn't even sure what that was, only mentioning it because Neighbor had suggested, but the doctor nodded in agreement.

"Yes, quite. Your porch collapsed?" He was rummaging in a cabinet, speaking to me over his shoulder, which meant he didn't see me redden around the edges. "How've you been out there, girlie? Everyone is worried about you."

Sure they were. Worried that I was sliding off the deep end like Mom had, probably. Worried that I was going to show up with a plastic baby doll under my arm at the grocery store. This town survived on gossip, and I certainly gave them more than enough to wonder over.

Mom had given them even more.

"I'm fine," I muttered.

Clearwater stopped what he was doing, turning to look at me with an extra wrinkle between his eyes, and his mouth gone sideways. "You sure don't sound that way."

"How am I supposed to sound? After…" I waved my hand in the air because we really didn't need to hash out all the gritty details here. He knew. Knew better than me, probably, what she'd been dealing with, and a small bit of me hated him for that. For the forced honesty his presence demanded. There was no lying here.

He shook his head with a sigh and leaned back on his desk, gripping the edge and staring at me like I was a math problem. "Bella, your mama… she knew she was slipping. All those years ago, she knew she was losing herself, and I knew it too. We tried, Bella. We tried everything, but I'm no miracle worker, and there just wasn't enough money. Maybe if she'd gone to Topeka..."

"Yeah, right. She would have never," I snapped, tears threatening and my voice wobbling.

"You're probably right, she was better left alone most days. Those fancy head doctors would have scared her off. But I… I couldn't give her what she needed. I couldn't find a way to make her head right again." He shook his head, staring down at his shoes with a faraway look in his eyes. "I'll always regret it."

"Regret her, you mean?"

"No," he said firmly, eyes hard on me again. "Your mama was sweet and soft and kind when she wasn't so lost."

I huffed, something rotten bubbling up in my throat—memories of her early years clouded by the big black maelstrom of the end. "She was always lost."

"Not always. But you were so young when it started. She loved you, Bella. She loved you more than anything, and I think she might have let go a lot sooner if it wasn't for you. You gave her something to hold on to."

I looked away, shaking my head because I couldn't even come up with anything to say to that. It was probably true. He was probably right. But it sure made the whole shitty situation feel even shittier than before.

"Mrs. Whitlock said she's been sending Jasper out to check up on you. He's a good boy, that one." Clearwater finally got around to gluing my leg back together. I was a little annoyed by it, wondering if I should have just stayed home and done it myself.

I had super glue.

"He comes. Can't say he wants to, though."

"She's in bad shape, that Alice. Arthritis like I've never seen before, getting worse. It's a good thing she has that boy, with all those kids out there."

Alice Whitlock had moved slowly since before I could even remember. A pause to her steps and a hesitancy in her grip. It was as though she was asking herself with every movement if she was capable of it, wondering if her feet would fail or her hands would clamp up. She ended up seated at the front window for most of her days, watching over her brood like a lame hen watches her chicks, lots of calling out of names and swats to the backside if they ventured too close. Jasper had taken over the duties abandoned by his father, pulling that farm up from the bootstraps, managing six large fields, a herd of fair-grade cattle, and his wild younger siblings all while carting his Mom around from room to room.

I hunched over a momentary stab of guilt to the guts, watching intently as the doctor glued me up. I should have gone to see Alice long before now. She had been Mom's closest friend for years, as good as a second mother to me for most of my existence, but the thought of leaving my house to be comforted in the soft, squashy breasts of someone else's mother was almost too much to bear.

"Heard you got a new neighbor out your way." Dr. Clearwater was flicking at a needle, forcing bubbles out of the cylinder. I scowled at him. The mouths that were betting on his own age and death had surely spun the news of the new inhabitant right through his front doors as efficiently as an over-spun windmill.

"Yes," I said firmly. "He drove me here."

"Town is all aflutter... got everyone talking," the doctor mused, approaching me with the needle and a look of determination on his face. I didn't need a dad to tell me that he was about to give me a warning that I didn't want. That eyepatch and those scars had probably spawned enough rumors to drown out my Mom entirely.

"All they do is talk," I grumbled.

"Just think you should be careful, girlie." He shrugged. "Don't go trusting someone until you know they're worth it."

"He's worth it. He's fixing my porch."

I squished my eyes shut as he grabbed my arm and flinched when the needle pricked, making him jab me harder than he needed to. He patted my knee consolingly when he was done.

"Keep it clean; don't let it get infected. The glue will fall off in a week or so. And honey, if you need anything… you know I'm always here. We all are."

"I know when to ask for help."

"Sure you do. Just don't wait too long."

I fled the good doctor's well-meaning concern, thrusting some crumpled cash at Mrs. Cope before limping out of the office, squinting in the bright sunshine. My leg felt too hot, and my head felt too full, and my stomach was growling around a solid lump of resentment. I wanted to get out of town, wanted to get back to my house and out from under the fish-eye lens of all the faces pressed to the windows, watching the spectacle on Fourth Street that was Bella Swan. It was easier when Mom was alive, when the weather and the new highway out past Topeka and the never-ending drought were the biggest topics of conversation. It was easier when Old Man Ashby was the crazy one with the cats and the rabbits and the bad case of Alzheimer's. It was easier when the school had burned down, and the post office fired Mrs. Stratton with little fanfare and no pension after forty-five years of service. But now that the rains had come, the highwaymen had moved on, Ashby was dead, and the school was rebuilt. Mrs. Stratton had opened a little flower shop next door to the post office out of spite.

I was the only one left standing in the face of the town's boredom.

Me... and Neighbor.

The truck was still parked at the curb, the fawn hanging its head out of the window with her tongue drooping, and her ear waggling at me like an eager dog. Neighbor was leaning against the engine, his arms crossed over his chest, feet crossed at the ankles. He pushed off of the engine as I approached.

"Get that shot?"

I nodded glumly.

"You don't look so hot."

I nodded again.

I didn't feel so hot either.

Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.

Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!

HB&PB