Riding home on her bike after work was as second nature as finding her way through the hallways of her home in the dark. Fern had done it a hundred times, finding her way home around midnight without noticing the familiar houses and streets around her, her mind often somewhere else completely. She was the night manager at Jolley's Grocery Store. She’d started at Jolley's her sophomore year in high school, bagging groceries, sweeping floors. She eventually worked her way into a cashier position and finally, last year, Mr. Morgan had given her a title, a small raise, and the keys to the store so she could close it up five nights a week.
She was probably riding too fast. She could admit that now, but she hadn't expected a giant grizzly bear running on his hind legs to come around the corner as she turned onto her street. She yelped, yanking her handlebars to the left to avoid a collision. Her bike flew over the curb and up onto the grass before it struck a fire hydrant and she was propelled over the handle bars onto the Wallace's well-kept front lawn. She lay there for a minute, gasping to recapture the air that had been forcibly expelled from her chest. Then she remembered the bear. She scrambled to her feet, wincing, and turned to retrieve her bike.
“Are you okay?” the bear growled behind her.
Fern yelped again and jerked around, finding herself about ten feet from Ambrose Young. Her heart dropped like a two-ton anchor and rooted her to the spot. He was holding her bike up, which looked a bit mangled from the impact with the fire hydrant. He wore a snug, black, sweatshirt with a hood that hung low on his forehead. He kept his face averted as he spoke to her and the streetlight cast his face in partial shadow. But it was Ambrose Young, no doubt about it. He didn't look wounded. He was still huge, the width of his shoulders and length of his arms and legs still impressively muscled, at least as far as she could tell. He had on a pair of fitted black knit pants and black running shoes, which was obviously what he had been doing when she mistook him for a bear running down the middle of the road.
“I think so,” she answered breathlessly, not believing her eyes. Ambrose was standing there, whole, strong, alive. “Are you? I just about ran you over. I wasn't paying attention. I'm so sorry.”
His eyes darted to her face and away again, and he kept his face angled to the side, like he couldn't wait to be on his way.
“We went to school together, didn't we?” he asked quietly and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the way an athlete does when they are preparing for an event. He seemed nervous, jittery even.
Fern felt a stab of pain–the hurt that comes when a life-long crush acknowledges that you look vaguely familiar, but nothing more.
“Ambrose, it's me. Fern?” Fern said hesitantly. “Bailey's cousin, Couch Sheen's niece . . . Rita's friend?”
Ambrose Young's gaze shot to her face again and held. He was staring at her from the corner of his eye, keeping one side of his face in the shadows, and Fern wondered if his neck was hurt, making turning his head painful.
“Fern?” he repeated hesitantly.
“Uh, yeah.” Now it was Fern's turn to look away. She wondered if he too was remembering the love notes and the kiss at the lake.
“You don't look the same,” Ambrose said bluntly.
“Um, thank you. That's kind of a relief,” Fern said honestly. Ambrose looked surprised and his mouth quirked ever so slightly. Fern felt herself smiling along with him.
“The frame is a little bent. You should try it. See if you can make it home.” Ambrose pushed the bike toward her, and Fern grasped the handles, taking it from his hands. For a second, the light from the streetlight hit him squarely in the face. Fern felt her eyes widen, the breath catching in her throat. Ambrose must have heard the swift intake of breath, because his gaze locked on hers for a heartbeat before he pulled back. Then he turned and was running swiftly in smooth strides down the road, the black of his clothing melding with the darkness and obscuring him from view almost immediately. Fern watched him go, frozen in place. She wasn't the only one who didn't look the same.
August, 2004
“Why won't anyone let me see a mirror, Dad?”
“Because right now it looks worse than it really is.”
“Have you seen what I look like . . . underneath?”
“Yes.” Elliott whispered.
“Has Mom?”
“No.”
“She still doesn't like to look at me, even all bandaged up.”
“It hurts her.”
“No. It scares her.”
Elliott looked at his son, at the gauze-wrapped face. Ambrose had seen himself in the bandages and he tried to picture himself from his father's perspective. There wasn't much to see. Even Ambrose’s right eye was swathed. His left eye looked almost alien in the sea of white, like a Halloween mummy with removable parts. He sounded like one too–his mouth was wired shut, forcing him to mumble through his teeth, but Elliott understood him if he listened closely enough.
“She's not afraid of you, Ambrose,” Elliott said lightly, trying to smile.
“Yes she is. Being ugly scares her more than anything else.” Ambrose closed his eye, shutting out his father's haggard face and the room around him. When he wasn't in pain he was in a fog from the painkillers. The fog was a relief, but it frightened him too, because lurking in the fog was reality. And reality was a monster with gleaming red eyes and long arms that pulled him toward the yawning black hole that made up its body. His friends had been devoured by that hole. He thought he remembered their screams and the smell of flesh burning, but he wondered if it was just his mind filling in the blanks between then and now. So much had changed that his life was as unrecognizable as his face.
“What scares you the most, son?” his father asked quietly.
Ambrose wanted to laugh. He wasn't afraid of anything. Not anymore. “Not a damn thing, Dad. I used to be afraid of going to hell. But now that I'm here, hell doesn't seem so bad.” Ambrose's voice had become slurred and he felt himself slipping away. But he needed to ask one more question.
“My right eye . . . it's done . . . isn't it? I'm not going to see again.”
“No, son. The doc says no.”
“Huh. Well. That's good I guess.” Ambrose knew he wasn't making sense, but he was too far gone to explain himself. In the back of his mind, he thought it only fair that if his friends had lost their lives, he should lose something as well.
“My ear's gone, too.”
“Yeah. It is.” Elliott's voice sounded far off.
Ambrose slept for a while, and when he awoke his dad no longer sat in the chair beside his bed. He didn't leave often. He must be finding something to eat or getting some sleep. The little window in his hospital room looked out on a black night. It must be late. The hospital slumbered, though it was never completely quiet on his floor. Ambrose levered himself up, and before he could let himself reconsider, he started unraveling the long layers of gauze from his face. Round and round, one after the other, making a pile of medicine-stained bandages on his lap. When he pulled the last one free, he staggered from his bed, holding onto the rolling rack that held the bags of antibiotics, fluids and painkillers they were pumping into his body. He'd been up a few times and knew he could walk. His body was virtually unscathed. Just some shrapnel in his right shoulder and thigh. Not even a broken bone.
There wasn't a mirror in the room. There wasn't a mirror in the bathroom. But the window, with its thin blinds, would work almost as well. Ambrose reached for it, pushing the blinds upward with his left hand, clinging to the metal pole with his right, freeing the glass so he could stare at his face for the first time. At first he couldn't see anything but the dim streetlights far below. The room was too dark to reflect his image off the glass.
Then Elliott walked through the door and saw his son standing at the window, clenching the blinds like he wanted to rip them from the wall.
“Ambrose?” His voice rose in dismay. And then he flipped on the light. Ambrose stared and Elliott froze, realizing instantly what he had done.
Three faces stared back at Ambrose from the glass. He registered his father's face first, a mask of despair just behind his right shoulder, and then he saw his own face, gaunt and swollen, but still recognizable. But merged with the recognizable half of his reflection was a pulpy, misshapen mess of ruined skin, Frankenstein stitching, and missing parts–someone Ambrose didn't know at all.
When Fern told Bailey she had seen Ambrose, Bailey's eyes grew wide with excitement.
“He was running? That's good news! He’s refused to see everybody, as far as I know. That's definite progress. How did he look?”
“At first I couldn't see any change,” Fern answered honestly.
Bailey's look grew pensive. “And?” he pressed.
“One side of his face is very scarred,” she said softly. “I only saw it for a second. Then he just turned and started running again.”
Bailey nodded. “But he was running,” he repeated. “That's very good news.”
But good news or not, a month passed and then one more and Fern didn't see Ambrose again. She kept her eyes peeled as she pedaled home from work each night, hoping to see him running up and down the darkened streets, but she never did.
Imagine her surprise then, when one night she stayed later than usual at the store and caught sight of him behind the swinging bakery doors. He must have seen her too, because he ducked out of sight immediately and Fern was left gaping in the hallway.
Ambrose had worked in the bakery with his father all through high school. It was a family business after all, started by Elliott's grandfather almost eighty years before when he partnered with John Jolley, the original owner of the town's only grocery store.
Fern had always liked the contradiction of big, strong Ambrose Young working in a kitchen. In high school, he'd worked during the summers and on the weekends when he wasn't wrestling. But the night shift, the shift when the majority of the baking was done, was the kind of job where he wouldn't ever be seen if he chose not to be, working from 10:00 when the store was just closing, until 6:00 am, an hour before it opened again. The hours obviously suited him just fine. Fern wondered how long he had been back at the bakery and how many nights she'd barely missed him or just not realized he was there at all.
The next night the registers were off and Fern couldn't seem to get the books to balance. At midnight, as she was finally finishing up, the aroma of wonderful things started to curl from the bakery, wafting around the corner to the little office where she labored. She logged out of the computer and crept down the hallway, positioning herself so that she could see through the swinging doors that led into the kitchen. Ambrose had his back to her, his plain white T-shirt and jeans were partially covered by a white apron, Young's Bakery splashed across in bright red print. Elliott Young had worn the same apron for as long as Fern could remember. But somehow on Ambrose it looked totally different.
Fern could see now that his long hair had not grown back. She had half expected to see it brushing his shoulders. From what she could see, he had no hair whatsoever. His head was covered with a red bandana tied tightly in the back like he had just climbed off a Harley and decided to whip up a batch of brownies. Fern giggled to herself at the mental image of a biker making brownies, and winced when the giggle was louder than she’d intended. Ambrose turned, giving her a view of the right side of his face, a view she'd only seen briefly in the dark. Fern darted back around the corner, worried that he would hear her and misunderstand her laughter, but after a minute couldn't resist moving back where she could watch him while he worked.
His radio was turned up loud enough to drown out the canned music that played all day, every day, at Jolley's market. His mouth moved with the lyrics, and for a minute Fern watched his lips in fascination. The skin on the right side of his face was rippled, the way the sand looks when the wind blows across it and creates waves. Where there weren't ripples there were pock marks and the right side of his face and neck was spotted with black marks, like a prankster had taken a felt tip marker to his cheek while he slept. As she watched, he reached a hand to his face and rubbed at the marks that marred his skin, scratching as if they bothered him.
A long, thick scar ran from the corner of his mouth and up the side of his face, disappearing into the bandana on his head. His right eye was glassy and fixed, and a scar ran vertically through his eyelid, extending above his eye through his eyebrow and below his eye in a straight line with his nose intersecting the scar that started at the corner of his mouth.
Ambrose was still imposing, tall and straight, and his wide shoulders and long arms were still corded with muscles. But he was leaner, even leaner than he'd been during wrestling season, when the boys were so lean their cheeks were hollow and their eyes sunken in their faces. He'd been running the night Fern had first seen him. She wondered briefly if he was trying to get back in shape, and if so . . . why? Fern didn't love exercise, so it was hard to imagine him running for the joy of it, although she was sure that was a possibility. Her idea of exercise was to turn on the radio and dance around her room, shaking her little body until she worked up a good sweat. It had served her well enough. She definitely wasn't fat.
Fern wished she dared approach him, dared talk to him. But she didn't know how. Didn't know if he would want her to, so she stayed hidden for several moments more before she made her way to the exit and headed for home.