The Secret Life of Owen Skye by Alan Cumyn Page B

was trying to save his father stuck on the roof. This could be faced too, if he stayed calm.
    Margaret got the car in gear, finally, then drove faster than Doom Monkey on his way to rescue the world. She didn’t stop, in case the car stalled again, but honked her horn and waved a lot out the window. After awhile the kids shifted from crying to screaming, but Margaret told them to stay quiet, and there was enough baseball bat in her voice to make it last most of the way into town.
    The hospital was made of gray crumbling rock with gray walls and gray-looking people inside. Margaret and the children sat in the waiting area for most of a lifetime. Owen held onto his finger in the tissue paper. The other kids sat still with big eyes, just looking.
    There was a large man with a brown beard and an enormous belly sitting next to them, his eyes hazy. Owen couldn’t tell what was wrong with him. But the boy next to him had hurt his arm, and a woman across the way who looked as old as ashes had broken her hip just walking to the door. A vacuum-cleaner man had been right there to catch her, and instead of selling her a vacuum cleaner he’d brought her to the hospital.
    And there was a little girl in red shoes who’d been sick since she was born and came into the hospital at least once a week. She knew the names of the nurses and took six different kinds of medicine every day.
    Owen’s finger hurt all over again when he finally got in to see the doctor. He had to take the tissue paper off and though he didn’t want to watch he couldn’t help seeing that the tip of his finger looked squished and purply. The doctor washed the wound and had Owen hold the tip back on and said he was going to re-attach it.
    â€œHow do you do that?” Owen asked. He figured that because this was medical science there would be a kind of bone glue and maybe a special ointment they could use. But the doctor got out a needle and thread instead.
    â€œYou’re going to
sew
it back on?” Owen asked.
    The doctor told him not to watch, but Owen couldn’t help himself. There was the needle going into his skin. There was the black thread being pulled through. The black thread made a stitch pattern that you’d expect to see on some attached part of Frankenstein.
    â€œThere. That should hold it for now,” the doctor said.
    There was an operation later to make sure everything really was in place. When Owen woke up he had a huge plaster cast on his finger. He was alone in a green room with gray curtains around his bed, and the cast looked like something a mummy would wear. Owen drifted in and out of sleep. Margaret came by later and said she’d taken the kids back home to stay with Lorraine. She was going to make Horace buy a proper car and how was he feeling? Was there anything he wanted?
    â€œHow long am I going to be here?” Owen asked. Margaret said three days, and Owen told her which comic books he wanted. Then Margaret opened the curtains and wound up his bed so that he could look out the window. His room was up on the fifth floor, and he could see rows and rows of houses and a curving part of the river and half a bridge. He imagined that Sylvia might be walking down the street with her parents for some reason that he’d think of later.
    After Margaret left, Owen kept looking and looking, and even when it was starting to get dark he didn’t want the nurse to close the curtain just in case.
    That night he had a hard time sleeping. He thought again and again of standing in the driveway bleeding and screaming, and sitting so quiet and still while the doctor threaded the needle, and those long moments when the car wouldn’t go. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be that little girl coming into the hospital every week practically for your whole life.
    Breaking one finger seemed like a lucky thing then. He might have caught all his fingers in the