“Oh, not for your wrist again, was it?” asked my mother. “Is it feeling any better?”
“No. But they’re trying to figure out what’s going on, why the splint didn’t help. I got an MRI this morning—”
“Which wrist is it again?” my father interrupted.
“The right.” I held up my hand. “But they take the MRI of your whole upper body, to see where there’s swelling, what’s out of alignment, that type of thing. And when I got up to leave, the technician came running after me, all excited. She asked me—how crazy is this?—she asked, ‘How did you get that bullet in your neck?’ ” I paused for dramatic effect. “A bullet in my neck. Can you imagine?”
You would have to know my father well to have noticed him flinch. His jaw tightened, the faintest flicker of a movement. I glanced at my mother. She was staring down, intently focused on her potpie, chasing peas around the plate with her fork.
They were silent. Not the reaction I’d expected.
“Goodness,” my father managed finally. “What did you say?”
I gave him a strange look. “I said she must be mistaken, of course. You’re supposed to stay still while they scan you. But I must have twitched. Maybe that shows up as a blur or a shadow on the image.”
He nodded. “Right. Well, sounds like you had an adventure.” He turned to my mother. “Chicken’s delicious. Pass me a bit more?”
They sat chewing.
“That’s it?” I demanded. “That’s your reaction? I thought you two would be falling over laughing.”
“Well, you said yourself, the likely explanation is the technician made an error,” said my father.
“Darling, we’re just concerned,” my mother added. “I don’t like the idea of you being in pain. I keep hoping this whole wrist issue will go away.”
I sighed. “So do I. And now I have to go back and get x-rayed. I’ll be in a full-body cast before they’re through with me.”
My parents exchanged a look.
“That was a joke. I’m fine.”
My mother opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind. Dinner proceeded. The conversation turned to an old Brando movie they’d just watched. But my father’s hand trembled as he topped up our wineglasses. He saw me register it and pretended to lean down to pat the dog. “Old age,” he said, grimacing as he sat back up. “Senility will set in soon.”
As we stood up from the table, another look passed between my mother and father. Long-married couples develop a language all their own, one that requires no words to communicate. I couldn’t decipher everything they were saying to each other. Just enough to know that they were choosing not to tell me something.
Three
* * *
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2013
The X-ray was striking.
Unlike my older brothers, I had been a calm child, not prone to broken bones and late-night emergency-room visits. I do not ski or mountain bike or ride horses or, indeed, partake in any dangerous activity whatsoever, if I can avoid it. I told you, I’m no Lara Croft. And so—aside from dental checkups and the resulting blurry images of my molars—I had never been x-rayed, never glimpsed the interior architecture of my body.
I found it fascinating, the play of dark and light, shades of silver and charcoal and chalk. You could see the long, forked roots of my teeth. They were outlined more sharply than in the images I’d viewed at the dentist’s; this must be a superior-quality machine. Farther down came the fragile curve of my neck, vertebrae stacked neatly. The soft tissue of my skin and muscles appeared as a ghostly haze. The X-ray, in its way, was lovely.
It was also unambiguous. I had still not set eyes on yesterday’s MRI, so I couldn’t compare the two. But that MRI technician had been utterly, unassailably correct.
The bullet glowed. It glowed bright white, brighter even than the metal fillings in my teeth. The denser an object, the brighter it appears on an X-ray. And the bullet was presumably made of lead. It looked about half an inch long, tapered at one end. The tip pointed down -toward my shoulders. The flat end was lodged near the base of my skull.
I studied the image in disbelief. It simply was not possible. Over and over I blinked, looked away, looked back—and there it still was, glowing luridly. My mind flailed through loops of Cartesian logic. That’s the French scholar in me: Je pense, donc je suis. I think, therefore I am. I doubt the bullet is there, therefore it must be. No, that wasn’t right. But I was too addled to figure it out. René Descartes never tried to practice philosophy with a bullet embedded dangerously close to his brain.
A bullet. Good God. I was sitting on an examining table on the second floor of a medical-office building on M Street. It’s the same building where Dr. Zartman practices; he had called a radiologist friend and wangled a lunchtime appointment for me. Now the radiologist was glancing back and forth between me and my X-ray, illuminated on a flatscreen monitor hanging on the wall. His eyes were wide, his face lit with a mixture of excitement and horror.
“You really had no idea it was there?”
“No.”
“Did you say you got an MRI already? Do you have that image with you?”
“No.” I frowned. “Dr. Zartman has it. We can ask him to—”
“Come to think of it, don’t do that again.”
“What?”
“Don’t get an MRI again. The machine’s a giant magnet. That’s what the M stands for. And you’ve got a slug of metal in your neck. Then again . . . lead isn’t magnetic.” He cocked his head, considering. “Still, if it’s an alloy . . . or if you’ve got metallic fragments . . .”
He inspected the X-ray again. “No, not worth the risk. The bullet’s right up against your spinal cord. Major blood vessels all around it. You don’t want it to move.”
I swallowed. The room felt as if it were closing in.
“May I?” He placed his hand on my neck. Prodded gently up and down. “There’s no bump. No subcutaneous scar tissue that I can feel. Where was the entrance wound?”