I went back to my grandmother on the tenth anniversary of the accident. She was ninety-three by then, blind in one eye, her hands so gnarled with arthritis that she could no longer hold a suture needle. But she knew my footsteps. She always had.
“Not the way it used to,” I said. “Now it’s more like… hearing someone else’s story. A sad one. I feel sorry for the person in the story. But I’m not sure it’s me.”
She cried then. I had never seen my grandmother cry. The tears slid down the deep gullies of her face and dripped onto our joined hands. I felt them land on my cold left hand—and for one impossible moment, I felt warmth. Real warmth. As if the tears were filling some gap in my brekel body, some place where the wiring had come loose and the signal had been lost.