Solace
God, they say, gives and God takes away—a door closes and a door opens—sometimes in the very same moment: a sixty-year-old brother succumbs to cancer—for three short but unbearably long years the disease has wracked his body; the same day, a cousin gives birth to an intensely silent baby with a shock of thick hair and dark eyes the Aunt remarks looks like the brother in his younger years and who only makes a sound when an angelic messenger slips undetected down through the acoustic tiles of the ceiling and looks invisibly over the delivery nurse’s shoulder and into the infant’s eyes.
Over the clamor and bustle of the delivery room the angel reached out its hand. Folks there say it looked like John the Baptist, or Azrael, or something else and not entirely an angel at all—and the infant reached out a chubby, awkward hand and the angel entwined it in its own and a doorway somewhere across the cosmos slowly clicked open and cast a lance of golden light across the stars.
That’s how Ned’s mother told it to him whenever either of them had had a long day. But he didn’t care if God himself had stolen his perfect little fingers out of jealousy. He wouldn’t care if his arm had gotten caught in the Delivery Room Woodchipper. He didn’t want explanations. He wanted fingers and a palm and a wrist.
The real explanations for his deformed hand, the “true” medical ones, weren’t much solace to him either. He kept Symbrachydactyly, a word with four Y’s, tucked in his left pocket. He took it out, when he had to, for the rude and the curious.
He was born in Boston, the kind of place that angels might visit, but grew up in Gorham, New Hampshire, the kind of place where cousins might live, with his mother and father who ran a trusted auto body shop there.
It was easier when he was younger and all the kids his age liked dinosaurs. When he started elementary school and inevitably had to explain his condition to the class, his mother made sure he compared the word to Pterodactyl. He was like the flying dino, and that was cool. They called him Ptero, P, or Silent P for a while. But ten years went by and nobody had seen him fly. All the boys had read comic books and learned new words and new ways. They called him Terror. When that nickname slipped out of a teacher’s mouth, Ned knew how it would be for the rest of his life.
The boys played corner-lot baseball, and there was no excluding him from that. Every afternoon, the whole class would laze in the field or hang on the fence, fingers and snaggleteeth hooking through the holes in the chain-link. Their three-quarter-sleeved baseball tees were useful or fashionable or whatever those were supposed to be. They’d take big-dreamed, bent-knee, flag-planting swings at primitive curveballs.
The other boys made him third base coach, and they’d do what he told them. They’d steal or slide on his signals. At first, Ned was intoxicated by their obedience. But, eventually, he intercepted a dusty baserunner’s Cheshire cat grin and realized what it was.
He’d go home thirsty and gulp down one glass of water after another. He’d have four glasses with dinner. His father would raise an eyebrow and busy his fork. His mother hadn’t read that growing boys got this thirsty.
And every night, he’d slip out his bedroom window and waddle very intently to the corner lot with the baseball diamond. He’d go right to third base, drop his pants all the way to his ankles, dig his toes in, and coat the bag and the dirt with his urine, so that when he signalled for a headfirst slide (which he did often), all the boys would get a mouthful of silent pee.
He would look up for the first time each night while he relieved himself. He would cock his head back to the sky that used the White Mountains as tentpoles. One night, he saw a lance of golden light sail across that sky. It had taken fifteen years to get there. He thought it was a shooting star, and he prayed: John, Azrael, just don’t touch my dick.