“I don’t want to bleed all over your rug,” I said. My voice sounded strangely quiet. Something was making my chest feel tight. The throbbing pain in my calf. The beautiful house. The closeness of Will’s face. He had no scent, I realized. If I climbedto the top of a mountain at daybreak and stuck my nose into a newly formed cloud, it would have smelled like Will Langford.
“I’m not worried about the rug,” he said. He strode through the entry, and then we were in a big room that was a kitchen and living room in one. There was a stone fireplace with a couch and two gray armchairs surrounding it. Rosalie appeared with a towel that she spread across one of the armchairs. She gestured for Will to set me down and he did, gently. She rolled up my pants and wrapped another towel around my leg. With a third towel, she wiped the blood from my hands. I stared at her, unable to look away. Her white-blond hair was pulled into a high ponytail, revealing twin swirls of bright green stones that hung from her small earlobes.
Amir sat on the arm of my chair. “Are you okay?”
“Not really.” The truth was that I wavered between regret at having gotten us into this situation, and a sneaky delight that I had managed to get us inside the house after all.
Amir put his hand on my shoulder and didn’t move it when Will returned with a bucket of soapy water and a first aid kit. Rosalie unwound the towel, now stained with my blood, from my leg. The bleeding seemed to have slowed. Her dog was stationed beside her, his eyes pinned on me. When Rosalie pressed the soapy towel to the wound, I sucked in my breath.
“I’ll try to find some pain medicine,” Will said.
Rosalie put the towel back in the soapy water and then pressed it to the wound again. Her face was still, but her eyes flickered with thought.
I supposed that someone must have taken care of me likethis in my life—my father or my mother—but I had no memories of a moment like this one. I watched Rosalie, wanting to remember the experience. She wasn’t particularly gentle in her movements, but still, something that felt worrisomely close to weepiness trembled within me. I refused to let the feeling grow.
After a couple of minutes, she sat back and looked up at me. “I don’t really have any idea how to deal with a dog bite,” she said. The water turned pink when she returned the towel to it.
“If I had the choice,” I said, “I’d start by dealing with the dog that did the biting.”
Rosalie had blue eyes like her son, but hers were a steely version. “Is that so?” She tore open a bandage wrapper and pressed the bandage to my leg. I winced but was determined not to cry. Amir gave my shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. “And what punishment would you deal my Tiger?”
I closed my eyes, but it only seemed to make the pain sharpen. When I opened them, I saw that Rosalie had begun to stroke the dog’s head.
“InThe Accidental Tourist,” I said, “the biting dog is put into obedience classes. It’s not exactly punishment, but at least the behavior is addressed and not encouraged.” I glared pointedly at Rosalie’s elegant hand and when I did, she stopped petting her dog.
“You’ve read Anne Tyler?” She did not bother to hide her surprise. She stood and resituated herself in the other armchair. The dog moved with her, curling himself at her feet. At long last, he seemed to lose interest in me.
“That’s one of my mother’s favorite books,” Will said. I had not heard him return to the room.
I looked at Rosalie anew. How strange to have something as important as literary taste in common with this woman who outwardly could not have been more unlike me. As different as we were, we had read and gathered insight from the same thoughts, the same passages. I wondered if Rosalie had adored the romance between Macon and Muriel, how it seemed to rise from their grief like a wildflower from dirt, if she’d underlined the same passages that I—
“How old are you?” she asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“Sixteen.”
“Is that all?” She looked at Amir. “And you?”
“Sixteen.”
“You haven’t told us your name.”
“Amir.”
“Do you attend that little school down in Osha?”
“No. We’re homeschooled.”
Rosalie glanced back and forth between us, confused. “Both of you? Together?”
“Yes,” I said. “My father was Amir’s guardian. We’ve lived together since we were eight years old.”
“So Amir is your brother,” Will said.
“No,” Amir said.
He was not my brother. That was a role that belonged entirely to Bear in the way that a hive belonged to the bees that made it buzz with warning. Amir’s place in my life was so much greaterthan that of a brother. I’d never settled on the right word for him. He was like a piece of myself that lived outside of myself. We were attached in a way that, even if I had wanted to, I could not easily explain.
“My father was his guardian,” I repeated. “And now my father is dead, and my brother is our guardian. Amir is... We’re best friends.” It did not feel right to describe our connection this way; the phrase “best friends” was too common, too frivolous a phrase to encapsulate what we meant to each other. I regretted my choice of words the moment I spoke, though I told myself it was silly to feel so strongly. They were only words; they could not diminish us.
