The Damned by Andrew Pyper Page A

renovations to the place since you were there last?”
    That’s not where I went this time. This time it was someone trying to pull me the other way.
    â€œIt looks a lot like Detroit,” I said.
    O NE AFTERNOON, AFTER WAKING FROM a narcotic snooze, I opened my eyes to find someone in my room. One of the candy striper volunteers I’d noticed walking the halls, pushing carts stacked with newspapers and magazines and stuffed animals. Did they make them hang out there as a condition of some suspended sentence, counting the hours they had to put in handing out three-month-old People s and Time s instead of a stretch in juvie detention? Or were they just good kids trying to help?
    This is what I wanted to ask the teenaged girl who stood with her back to me, flipping through the newspapers on her cart. I was trying to think of a polite way to put the question to her when she spoke first.
    Special delivery for Mr. Orchard.
    Everything stopped. Her back, the sway of long hair over her pink smock, the comings-and-goings in the hallway outside the door, all of it stilled.
    Wasn’t easy to find this, I can tell you. But we aim to please.
    The girl turned. Mimicked the look of horror on my own face with widened eyes, her mouth stretched into a black oval.
    No.
    This wasn’t a word, wasn’t a failed scream. It was the hopeless denial I’ve felt every time she’s come to me. The wish for her to go away that’s never once been granted.
    She frisbeed the newspaper onto my lap.
    I recognized it instantly, though I hadn’t laid eyes on it in years. The Detroit Free Press of July 10, 1989. The paper that was tossed onto the front porch of our house in Royal Oak the morning after the fire that took Ash’s life and mine. The headline on the bottom corner of the front page pored over by my father, the paper laid on the kitchen table but never opened. TRAGIC FIRE CLAIMS ONE LIFE, ALMOST TWO: TWIN BROTHER AND SISTER IN BLAZE, QUESTIONS REMAIN .
    I looked up and she was standing there. Looming over me at the edge of the bed.
    Ash reached up and put her hand around my IV bag. Weighed it, swung it back and forth on its hook. Then her fingers tightened. The bag collapsing, forcing the fluid down the tube and into my arm. I felt it swell, followed by a shooting pain up my arm. My shoulder blades, my neck, my chest on fire.
    She let go.
    The bag expanded, sucking up the contents of the tube. This time, it brought blood along with the saline. Curdling the clear liquid, from pink to crimson to something darker still.
    She squeezed it again.
    And with it, the pain found a home inside me. My heart. Crushed as though held between the teeth of a vise.
    My eyes squeezed shut. A red road map against the backs of my lids, the capillaries enlarged and throbbing.
    From somewhere very close, Ash’s smell. Her lips—the skin flaked with dryness, the touch cold—brushed my ear.
    I miss you, Danny Boy.
    I threw a blind fist out at where she stood but it met nothing but the IV pole, knocking it back. Opened my eyes.
    The saline clear. The pain in my chest gone as though it was never there at all.
    No Ash.
    No Detroit Free Press on the bed.
    But the smell still there. The lingering trace of perfume that sent me stumbling to the bathroom to vomit onto the floor after missing the sink.
    I miss you.

14
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    A fter almost three weeks, and given there was little more they could do for me until a heart came through the doors in an ice bucket, they finally let me go home. The surgeon I liked was the last one to sign off. He brought his own fresh copy of The After . I signed it “For Helping My Achy Breaky.”
    â€œCute,” he said, snapping the covers closed. A finality to it that made it clear he would never open them again.
    â€œI wish I could do more to thank you,” I said. “You play golf? Red Sox tickets?”
    â€œGave up my membership at Brae Burn when I realized all the drivers I kept