Making Faces (19 page)

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.

A small whiteboard was mounted just outside
the bakery door in the hallway that led to Mr. Morgan's office and
the employee break-room. It had been there forever, and it had
never had anything written on it, as far as Fern could tell. Maybe
Elliott Young had thought it would make a good place to write
schedules or reminders, but he’d never gotten around to it. Fern
decided it would be perfect. She wouldn't be able to put anything
too suggestive there . . . but suggestive wasn't really her style,
after all. If she wrote on the board at about eight o'clock, after
the bakery was officially closed for the night and before Ambrose
arrived to start his preparations in the kitchen, he would be the
only one to see what was written on the board. And he could erase
it if he didn't want anyone else to see it.