Here So Far Away by Hadley Dyer

Author:Hadley Dyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-12-29T05:00:00+00:00

Twenty

A couple of weeks later, I went to fetch Dad’s cigarettes from his bedroom and came back to find him missing from his recliner. He was on the floor, writhing in pain.

“Oh my god, what is it? What is it?” I started grabbing at him, lifting his arms, patting his legs, checking behind his shoulders.

“My foot,” he gasped. “I need you to massage my foot.”

When I reached for it, he gripped my arm. “The other one.”

There was no other one. Just his stump in a compression sock that helped keep the swelling down.

“I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know how.”

“Please!”

I faked it as best I could. It was ridiculous, like I was pretending to be a baker kneading dough, and somehow the pretending was weirder and more uncomfortable than actually touching him.

Whether it worked or the pain began to subside on its own, I couldn’t tell. I helped him to his chair, which was crazy hard. It was only then that I saw how much weight he’d gained, how soft he’d gotten. He was soaked with sweat and didn’t fight me when I brought over a cloth and gave him a wipe down. Face, shoulders, arms. He leaned forward so I could do his neck. I worked as quickly as I could. All business. The cloth made a scraping sound against his three-day-old beard.

He was now completely without emotion, like his pilot light was blown out. “What were they thinking?” he muttered.

“Who were what . . . ?”

He waved off the question.

I placed a pack of cigarettes on the side table with his painkillers and a glass of water. “Where’s Mum?” I asked.

“Store.”

Right. I’d heard him ragging on her about running out of artificial sweetener for his tea—the tea he drank to wash down his new afternoon cookie habit—and she was so quick out the door, you had to think she was grateful to have a break from him. “Do you need anything else? Where’s your prosthetic?”

He shook his head, not looking at me.

“Alright, well. I have to go to work.”

Matty was sitting outside the family room, his arms wrapped around his knees. I gave him a hand up and we went to the kitchen.

“I think it’s something called phantom pain,” he said as I poured him a glass of juice. “I read about it at the library. It happens a lot, feeling pain where the limb used to be. Like, probably most of them have it. Sometimes right away, sometimes later. Sometimes for a while, sometimes forever.”

“You’d think they’d have warned him.”

“They must have; it’s in all the pamphlets. I don’t know why he’s trying to hide it.”

“Because he won’t cop to psychological problems.”

“I don’t think it is psychological. I think it’s really real.”

“He won’t get the difference.” I wasn’t sure I did either. If you felt a pain in a limb that wasn’t there anymore, how could it not be psychological?

“Do you think Mum knows what’s going on?”

Mum wasn’t exactly savvy about health issues. Like how

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