Who knows how long the doctor and I would have played cat and mouse, but early that December, I opened my eyes to a pain so fierce marauding across the top of my skull that I knew immediately I needed more than the aspirin I usually swallowed. When I sat up in bed, my vision blurred and twisted like the picture on a failing television, making me squint. I realized I was staring at the cloth buds on Tabitha’s quilt. They seemed to vibrate and whisper. I cocked my head, trying to catch their song, but a wave of nausea crashed over me, and I let myself flop back down on the mattress, grateful to close my eyes again. A few moments later, I opened them again to find Bobbie’s face hovering anxiously over mine.
“Aunt Truly?” His voice seemed to be coming from someplace far away. He shook my shoulder. “Are you okay? What’s wrong? Dad sent me in here to see what was taking you so long.”
I fumbled for the alarm clock on my bedside table. “What time is it?” My words came out woody and dry.
“Seven-thirty. School starts in half an hour. And Dad wants his breakfast.”
At the mention of food, my stomach roiled and lurched. I let out a burp and hauled myself upright again. I waited, but I felt a little better this time. Well enough, maybe, to fry up an egg or two and pour some coffee. I looked again at Bobbie, whose outline was still imprecise and fuzzy. Two weeks ago, I’d walked with him to lay some flowers on Serena Jane’s grave, and he had bowed his head in a similar solemn pose, like a leaf curling into itself for the winter. I’d had the urge to wrap him tight in the wing of my coat and kiss him warm, but instinct told me he would only pull away if I tried. He was accustomed to me, but not yet attached. He let me read him stories and peck him good night on the cheek, but he still stiffened when I went to embrace him, and when he left for school, he only waved briefly through the rectangle of the kitchen door before turning around and plodding glumly down the street.
But maybe he was fonder of me than I realized. I recognized an expression of concern colonizing his face now, as if he were contemplating the idea of all the adults in his life shriveling up and blowing away like corn husks. He’d just turned eight, but he was already hovering on the dark threshold of adult cynicism, I saw. One more push from the world, I suspected, and he’d shoot all the way through to the other side of mean, just like his father. Unless I could figure out a way to keep that from happening. I swung my feet onto the floor.
“I’m a bit lopsided this morning,” I reassured him while the room righted itself and lurched again, “but I bet your daddy is a genius when it comes to healing. I bet he can make anyone better, even me.”
Bobbie frowned and sat next to me on the bed. “I thought you said you’d be hell-bent before you let Dad lay a hand on you.”
I scowled. That was true. Over the past month, all through the lead-up to Thanksgiving, Robert Morgan had kept up his pressure to examine me, and so far I’d resisted him step for step, a fact that left him practically frothing at the mouth. He’d wheedled, and reasoned, and finally resorted to out-and-out insults. “You’re as pigheaded and mean-minded as your father was, Truly,” he pronounced at the table one awful night. “You should be grateful you’re living with a person of science and reason, and not still stuck on that mudflat the Dyersons call a farm.”
“I liked it there,” I replied calmly. “They were good to me.”
“If they were so good to you, then why did they let you grow into a behemoth? Why didn’t they ever bring you in to see my father when something could have been done?”
I put down my fork. “And pay with what? A good tip at the track? Besides, when I was out there, I wasn’t this heavy. It’s only since I’ve moved in with you that I’ve gained all this weight.”
That shut the doctor up for a minute, but it still didn’t dissuade him from trying to guess how much I’d put on. He eyeballed me. “I’d say it’s thirty, maybe forty pounds. In just a few months. Do you pay attention to how much you’re eating?”
I looked down at my plate. The remains of half the roast chicken were piled in a little pyramid, next to a muddy puddle of gravy and a smear of mashed potato. I’d had thirds, but I couldn’t help it. As soon as the food melted off my tongue, my stomach screamed for more.
The doctor sat back in his chair and wrinkled up his napkin, confident he’d won his point. “One visit to my office, and I’m telling you we could figure out what to do about your appetite. Besides, you’d be doing me a favor. I’ve got a bet going with John Hinkleman that you weigh over four hundred.” He snickered. “All you have to do is step on the scale and the money’s mine.”
I threw my own napkin on the table and stood up, my cheeks blazing. “I’ll be a baboon’s butt before I give you that satisfaction.” Bobbie put his hands over his mouth and giggled. I looked at him and winked. “With cherries and whipped cream.” Then I’d stomped off to my room and left the dishes to rot, not caring if we got bugs and not caring if the doctor shouted at me all night long.
Bobbie wasn’t laughing as he sat next to me on the bed now, though. He looked worried, his narrow face even more pinched than usual. Another jolt of pain arrived, and I clenched my teeth, made weak by pain. “All right,” I whispered. “You can run out and tell your father he won this round. Today is his lucky day. I’ll be down to his office directly.”
“I’ll tell him,” Bobbie cried, rushing into the hallway. “I’ll tell him to get his medicines ready.”
“Make it double dose,” I murmured to myself, squeezing my temples. “I’m going to need the extra to drown my pride.”
To his credit, the doctor didn’t outright throw his hands in the air and stomp out a victory dance when I knocked on his door, but it wasn’t far off. He certainly didn’t waste any time on niceties, just handed me a starched sheet, directed me behind a screen, and told me to strip and then wrap up. “I apologize for the sheet,” he said as I emerged. “I just didn’t think my regular gowns were up to the task.” He rubbed his hands together, not even trying to hide his triumphant grin as he ushered me over to the scale. “At last! Are you ready to see if my bet with John Hinkleman is good?”
I scowled and folded my arms. “On one condition.”
The doctor’s smile faded. “What?”
“I don’t want to know what the scale says.”
“What do you mean?” The doctor’s face fell, and just then I thought he looked a little like a boy who’d had his football taken away.
“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. And I don’t want to know how tall I am, either, or what my blood type is, or how big around my hips are. You can keep all that to yourself. I’m just here because my head is about to blow a gasket.”
Robert Morgan fiddled with his clipboard. “It’s just a migraine,” he sniffed. “We’ll get to that in a minute. But how can I treat you if you won’t let me give you any information?”
I set my jaw. “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
The doctor debated with himself for a moment, then threw up his hands in defeat. “Okay, fine, I won’t tell you anything. You’re as stubborn and stupid as the rest of those Dyersons, but I guess we just are what we are. Now, will you step on the damn scale?”
I hesitated, wondering if he would keep his word, but then I climbed onto the little platform and let the doctor slide the weights all the way to the right. He let out a long, slow whistle. “Wow. That’s even more than I expected. You must be carrying a ton of hidden weight to come out that high.” I shot him a warning look, and he shut up and scribbled on his clipboard. “Have a seat.” He gestured to his examining table, and I sat on it reluctantly, hoping it would hold me while Robert Morgan rapped my knees with a rubber tomahawk, stuck a wooden stick down my gob, lit up my ears, eyes, nose, and throat like the Empire State Building, and shimmied the cold disk of a stethoscope all around my chest.
“What does it sound like?” I asked. My heart was the one organ I did have some curiosity about, wondering if it was like everyone else’s on the inside, but the doctor just held a rigid finger straight up in the air as if he were testing the wind, and I knew that I’d broken some sort of medical commandment. He pulled the round circle of metal off my chest and slinked his fingers up and down my windpipe. “Swallow,” he ordered, before pulling a tape measure out of his pocket and winding it around my breasts, hips, and upper arms.
“I’ve always been big. You know that.” I blushed, watching as he jotted down numbers on his chart. “Your father said it was something inside my brain. A little clock.” I remembered the way his father’s fingers had pressed into the base of my skull so gently, telling me about the mechanism inside of me that was ticking too fast, and I wondered if that’s what Robert Morgan heard when he slid that stethoscope against my skin. Or was it just the slow sludge of my blood, confirming everything he thought he already knew about me? “Maybe that’s why I have this headache.”
Robert Morgan’s eyes swam into focus, as if he were reeling his thoughts up out of a very deep, very cold lake. “For now, just take some aspirin. You’ll get over it. Migraines happen to women sometimes. But in your case, I think it could be linked to something else.” He frowned.
“What is this exam for,” I stuttered, “if you’re not going to help my headache?” Outside, I noticed, the day was growing darker, the trees shedding leaves and dead twigs, slimming down for snow and ice.
Robert Morgan blinked and slid a needle into my arm for a blood sample. The pinch was sharp and familiar, just like all his thumbtacks I’d sat on years ago. I wondered if he was enjoying sticking me with a needle as much as he’d enjoyed tormenting me in the schoolroom. The little gleam in his eye told me yes, but it also spoke of a bigger, more adult anticipation.
Suddenly, all the breath in my body seemed to stop. It was a spooky sensation, like God putting down His fury for five minutes in the middle of a storm to think up something even worse. “This isn’t about my headache,” I said. Maybe if I’d been better practiced in the art of anger, I would have recognized the symptoms of rage and would have released some right then on the doctor’s head, like hail dumping on a tin roof. But when you’re raised by Dyersons, you learn not to do that lest the whole damn house falls in and crushes you. I uncurled my palm and watched the test tube fill with blood.
Robert Morgan slid the needle out of my vein and stuck a cotton ball in its spot. He pressed down, harder than he really needed to, I thought. “Did you really think I’d keep you in my house and not take the opportunity to examine you? You’re about as normal as a dog with two tails, Truly. To be honest, I don’t even know if I can cure whatever’s wrong with you.” He let my arm go.
“Well,” I said, my cheeks burning, “you said it yourself. We are what we are in this world.” I dipped my chin and thought about my sister, who had been born beautiful, and then Amelia, predisposed to silence. I was strong and square, I knew, born to brush the horses down in the barn. But I liked August’s horses. I missed the comforting smells of their hay and dung. Even just the memory of the barn’s dusty air could make my breathing slow and all the muscles in my back relax. I looked back up at the doctor. “Anyway, what makes you think I want to be cured?”
“I’m sorry?” Robert Morgan seemed distracted, probably by all the collaborations with big-city doctors he was no doubt imagining. A case like mine, I realized, would do wonders to help broadcast his name in the world beyond Aberdeen—a world he probably missed, a world my sister and Bobbie had yanked him out of before he’d gotten to taste of it.
I crossed my arms. “What makes you think I have any intention of letting you try to fix me?” It seemed ridiculous to be locking horns with the doctor when one of us was all but naked, but if there was anything I’d learned so far in life, it was that you didn’t get to pick your moments.
Robert Morgan stared at me as if I had just grown an extra toe in the middle of my forehead. “Of course you’re going to try to let me fix you.” He leaned down close, his voice a snake hiss slithering into the tight chambers of my heart. “Admit it. You want it as much as I do. You’d let me turn you inside out and back again if you thought I could make you as pretty—or even as small—as your sister.”
I didn’t bother to respond, just left his office with hunger pains erupting in my belly with the ferocity of fireworks, my headache all but vanquished. I scuttled from his clinic door to the kitchen as quickly as I could, and flung open the icebox, soothed by its electric hum and the blast of cold air. Hot dog relish, leftover chicken, parsley leaves—I tamped my mouth as full as a cannon. It didn’t matter with what as long as my gullet got filled. I suppose I might have appeared greedy, but my gorging offered no relief, no reprieve. I spread my hands wide on the table’s yellow oilcloth and swallowed with difficulty, tears budding in my eyes, and then, because there was nothing else left to eat in the immediate vicinity, I swallowed those down, too.
One day, I vowed, Robert Morgan would know what it felt like to be pricked, and prodded, squeezed, and studied. He would know what it felt like to be one of his own experiments. Of course, the difference between the doctor and me was that Robert Morgan would always be divining for some cure, whereas I knew better. And so there you have it. Long before I ever did it, I’ll admit that I thought about killing Robert Morgan. Right then and there I promised myself that if I ever found the occasion, I’d give him such a good dose of his own medicine, he’d never have the backbone to survive it.