My broken hand still ached most of the time. Even loaded on pills and whiskey, I could always feel pain thumping through it. The breaks were bad enough that I’d been able to convince the different doctors I’d seen to give me two more bottles of painkillers after the first. Since I had no health insurance, I saw whoever was on duty at the walk-in clinic. One doctor, a woman I was startled to realize might be younger than I, with freckles and what I’d always called a boy’s haircut, dressed in men’s khakis and a man’s blue oxford shirt, told me I needed to get into physical therapy.
“Your hand’s going to wither away if you don’t do exercises,” she said. “You’ve got to stretch your fingers, flex them, start squeezing a ball.”
“I know it,” I said. “The thing kills all the time, though, still. I still can hardly even sleep with it.” She held my hand gently in hers and moved each finger in turn by putting a very slight amount of pressure against the tip. I sucked my breath in, because it hurt, but also to convince her that my need for more medicine was genuine. I lied, “I rolled over on it the other night and it felt like I rebroke it all over again.”
“Well, here’s some information about PT,” she said. “You really need to get on it. I’m going to give you some more of the painkillers, but I also have some concerns about that. Do you think it’s becoming a problem?”
“Jesus, I hope not,” I said. “I’m scared half to death of those things — getting hooked on them — but it’s really the only way I get any rest.”
“Okay. Try not to take them unless you really need one. Try to hold out as long as you can each time. Push on your pain threshold. Try taking just half of one. Try aspirin or ibuprofen instead. You really don’t want to get tangled up with this stuff. This should be the last script you get for them.”
“Got it,” I said. “And I’ll call for the PT first thing next week. Thanks so much, Dr.”—I looked at her name tag—“Dr. Winters.”
I opened the bottle and found a pill and a half. I tried to count how many pills I’d taken the night before — the two to begin, and a third I had intended to take two hours later, and another an hour after that, and another half pill an hour later, but I thought maybe I hadn’t split a fifth pill but had taken it whole, then maybe decided later that another half would be fine so long as I didn’t drink the whiskey any faster — and I could not make a clear tally. It all just blurred together.
I reached across the couch and snapped on the lamp, which was a contraption assembled in someone’s workshop sixty or seventy years before, by the look of it. It was a pewter tankard fitted with a cord and light socket and shade harp. The lampshade was sepia-colored and printed with botanical drawings labeled in French: Hypopétalie, 348. Anémone Hépatique, 304. Artichaut. Some of the words were chopped off at the ends, where the paper they were printed on had been cut and fitted into the shade: —orollie, svnanth—. The drawings and tallies reminded me of the pajama bottoms in which Kate had been cremated. The lamp had ended up in our living room after my grandmother died. It wobbled and clanked whenever it was turned on or off, and I could never figure out how to tighten it. Susan and I had been convinced that it would surely burst into flames and incinerate the house some afternoon, when it had been accidentally left on for the day while no one was home. Despite our certainty that the lamp was probably lethal, we used it all the time, with low-wattage bulbs, because it gave a pleasant golden glow to the room, almost like a cheap surrogate for a fireplace. Susan sometimes said, “It just hides the dirt and makes the worn-out furniture look antique, but that’s okay.”
I cupped my hand around the pewter base of the lamp because the morning was so cold and I thought that the pewter would be cold, too. The cold pewter made me think of the tankard stripped of its lamp hardware and sitting outside in the frosted grass in the light of dawn. The tankard would have frost on it, too, and the pewter would contract in the cold, buckle and split and release a sharp, sour metallic odor. The tankard was silvery gray and the frozen grass looked blue, like pewter made with lead, and the clouded sky behind it looked like layers of pewter alloyed with copper and bismuth and lead. Pewter is mostly made of tin, and I imagined my great-grandfather for a moment, soldering the breaks in the clouds with patches of tin. And I thought of Kate’s cremation urn, made of pewter, in the frost-tightened ground on the other side of the village. Choosing a pewter urn for my daughter’s ashes might have been the persistence of a trivial family conceit, which I remembered my grandmother invoking with the refrain “We prefer the classic colonial furniture,” which struck me at that moment as bearing witness against its own truth. The lamp now seemed surely to have been made by some company in New Jersey that manufactured cheap, ersatz colonial souvenirs, sold to credulous, working-class dupes on their crummy local weekend vacations to fake pilgrim villages, the sort through which I had suffered as a kid and romanticized as an adult. I felt terrible for my grandparents, and love for them, and deeper loyalty than ever to them for what they had given to my mother and me. And I felt both abashed and comforted by the fact that I had maybe deepened the connections between myself and my grandparents and my daughter, as best as I could, in an inadvertent, backhanded way, by having been susceptible to the notion of being a colonial son during the subdued sales pitch for my dead daughter’s urn rather than the whelp of mongrels.
In the kitchen, I saw that I’d run out of fresh coffee, so I dug around in the freezer and found an old, half-full can from what must have been a couple years earlier. The can was so cold that my hand stuck to it. I wondered what sort of metal it was made from, whether it was tin or aluminum or something else, and that made me think of the pewter tankard and Kate’s urn. Digging up the cold, grainy coffee with the yellow plastic scoop made me think of Kate’s ashes and for a moment the coffee became her ashes and I was performing the suburban variation of a ghastly pagan ritual, abominable to all good folk, during which boiling water was percolated through the ashes of the dead, her essence imparted into the water and absorbed by the person who drank the cannibal tea. As outrageous as the idea was, as shameful and gruesome, it also seemed like something that, were I to read about it in the history of an ancient culture, or to see it in a documentary about an isolated population deep in the Amazon, might seem perfectly appropriate, profound even, even blessed, and I considered that, after all, the only thing missing to ennoble the idea from morbid daydream to sacred rite was my consent, my belief. I sat at the kitchen table listening to the coffeemaker burble and steam, and then I poured the coffee into the least dirty mug I could find in the sink. Foolish as it was, I could not bring myself to spoon any sugar into the coffee. I didn’t have any milk, but that seemed as if it would have been blasphemous, too, and I swallowed the scalding drink black, strong and bitter.