The Bullet Read online

  He inspected the X-ray again. “No, not worth the risk. The bullet’s right up against your spinal cord. Major blood vessels all around it. You don’t want it to move.”

  I swallowed. The room felt as if it were closing in.

  “May I?” He placed his hand on my neck. Prodded gently up and down. “There’s no bump. No subcutaneous scar tissue that I can feel. Where was the entrance wound?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe around here?” His fingers inched higher, kneading the base of my scalp.

  “I said, I don’t know. I didn’t know it was there in the first place.”

  “So you don’t know how long it’s been in there?”

  “No idea. I have no idea. I don’t know what to say.”

  His eyes narrowed. “It’s awfully . . . unusual. Getting shot would seem to be a memorable event. Getting shot in the neck, especially so.”

  “I agree. What’s your point?”

  “Just that—forgive me, how to put this?—I’m finding it hard to believe you really had no idea you’ve been walking around with a bullet in your neck.”

  I glared at him. “Well, that makes two of us then. Two of us who think that this”—I rapped my fingers against the flatscreen—“that this here makes absolutely no sense.”

  • • •

  “WELL, I DON’T know a damn thing about guns. Or ammunition. But that’s sure as hell no surgical clip that got dropped.”

  Will Zartman and I were sitting side by side in his office, our eyes glued to the image of my neck on his desktop computer screen. He was youngish for a doctor, not much older than me. I didn’t know him well. But I felt comforted by his reaction. He seemed as bewildered as I was, unsure whether the appropriate response was to panic and race to the emergency room, or to giggle at the absurdity of the situation.

  “You’re saying you really didn’t know it was there?”

  I was getting the feeling that I would be hearing this question a lot. “No, I really didn’t.”

  “And you’ve never felt any pain? Any stiffness turning your neck, any tingling?”

  “Well . . .” I lifted my right hand and gingerly flexed it up and down. “You know about the wrist. I don’t know if it’s related.”

  “No, me neither.” He turned back to the screen. “I suppose the question is going to be, do we try to remove the bullet? I can think of all sorts of risks involved with that. On the other hand, I can think of all sorts of risks involved with leaving it in there. Lead poisoning, for one.” He scribbled something on a notepad. “I think the next step is for you to see a neurosurgeon. Meanwhile, let me take a look.”

  He brushed the dark waves of hair off my neck and leaned close. “There’s no scar.”

  “I know.”

  “And I know I already asked, but you’ve never had surgery? Anywhere above the waist?”

  “No. I’ve never had any surgery, period. Not that I can think of. And I’ll answer what’s probably your next question: no, I’ve never been shot, either. As your radiologist friend was kind enough to point out, that would tend to be a memorable event in one’s life.”

  Dr. Zartman took a deep breath and sat back. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, bullets don’t appear out of thin air. Somehow this one found its way to the middle of your neck. You really don’t know how?”

  “You can keep asking. The answer’s still no.”

  “What do your parents say?”

  “They—” I hesitated. “They don’t seem to know.”

  He must have heard something in my voice because he looked up. “What do you mean, they ‘don’t seem’ to know?”

  “Well, I did mention it to them last night. That the MRI had picked up something that looked like a bullet. It seemed so ludicrous. Their reaction was—I guess it was a little strange.”

  “How so?”

  I thought for a moment, trying to capture the right word. “Uneasy. They seemed uneasy. But that’s normal, right?” I felt suddenly protective. “It would be normal for parents to feel uneasy when their daughter is in pain and is forced to undergo medical tests, and then tells them she got weird results. I mean, how would your mom and dad react if you told them you might have a bullet in your neck?”

  He nodded. “Point taken. Still. Someone has to know what happened. You should talk to them again.”

  • • •

  I drove to my parents’ house filled with trepidation.

  The conversation I was about to have with them could go either of two ways, as I saw it. It was possible—probable, surely—that they knew nothing. But this was small comfort. After all, there was a bullet in my neck. If my parents didn’t know how it got there, who would?

  The even more disturbing possibility was that they did know something. I remembered how my dad’s hand had trembled at dinner. How my mother had chased peas around her plate, refusing to meet my eyes. There could be no good-news story, no happy version of how a bullet had wedged itself inside my neck. But how terrible could it be? Whatever had happened, I appeared to have suffered no lasting harm. So why would they not have dared to tell me?

  The only even remotely plausible explanation I could conjure up involved my brothers. Today they’re both respectably married pillars of the country-club set. Six kids between them, plus mortgages and stock portfolios and regular tee times—all the trappings of middle-class middle age. But as boys, they had been wild. To this day, our across-the-street neighbor won’t speak to them; she has nursed a grudge for thirty-five years. That’s how long it’s been since they shot out her bedroom window. I was a toddler at the time, so I have no memory of the episode. But as my brothers tell it, one of our uncles had unwisely given them BB guns for Christmas. They were both rotten shots, and they had been trying to improve through target practice on a squirrel living in the magnolia tree outside their window. (According to the version of the story that has descended through family lore, their aim got better, they eventually shot the squirrel, and left it—supposedly as a token of ­contrition—­on our neighbor’s front-door mat. Perhaps she was shrewd to have stayed out of their way all these years.) But—to return to the question at hand—was it possible that they had shot me, too? Back when I was too small to remember?

  Unlikely. If they hadn’t gotten away with shooting out a neighbor’s window, they would never have gotten away with shooting their sister. It would have become family legend, the kind of story that gets retold and embellished upon at wedding-rehearsal dinners and fortieth-­birthday parties. There’s no way I wouldn’t have known. And then there was the bullet itself. I probably knew even less than Dr. Zartman about guns and ammo, but the slug in my neck looked a lot bigger and more lethal than what you would load into a child’s gun.

  Driving toward Cleveland Park, I kept stopping to look at it. The radiologist had e-mailed a JPEG version of my X-ray. At every traffic light, I braked the car and stared at my phone. You could zoom in until the bullet filled the entire screen. Then zoom back out, until it was just a tiny white light nestled between slivers of gray vertebrae.

  It was late afternoon when I pulled into the driveway. Daylight was fading. I locked the car and entered my parents’ home in my usual way: a perfunctory knock, even as I turned my key in the door.

  My father was sitting at the kitchen table, bent over a crossword puzzle. His beagle, Hunt, ignored me as usual. But Dad’s face brightened. “Caroline! I was hoping you would swing by. What’s a seven-letter synonym for—”

  “Dad.” My voice caught. I didn’t know how to ask him. Instead I held out my phone, let him glimpse the e-mailed image of the X-ray.

  His eyes told me what I needed to know. “Oh, sweet Jesus. Darling girl. We didn’t know it was still there.”

  Four

  * * *

  You’re thinking that I don’t seem appropriately distressed, aren’t you?
That a woman who has just learned she is walking around with a bullet in her neck, that she has perhaps been shot, would be a bit more hysterical.

  Well, here you go.

  Standing there in the kitchen, my father fussing over me (“Darling, please sit down. Let me make tea—”), I lost it.

  “What do you mean, you didn’t know it was still there?” I screeched. “What did you know? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We didn’t—we just—we assumed that they removed it. We never thought to ask.”

  “Never thought to ask who? What are you talking about?” I half picked up one of the chairs and slammed it down hard against the table. “Dad? What are you saying?”

  I am not prone to outbursts, not a volatile person. But my father’s evasiveness felt more alarming than the images from the X-ray and the MRI. They had seemed unreal, like props in a strange dream from which I was surely about to wake. Whereas my father . . . I had come here expecting him to dismiss the whole situation as risible. I had expected to share a good laugh, then have him solve the mystery of how my X-ray had gotten mixed up with someone else’s, some poor soul walking around with (cue laugh track!) a bullet in her neck.

  Instead he was fumbling with his phone keypad, mumbling about calling my mother.

  “Dad—”

  He held his finger up, signaling me to wait. “Frannie, Caroline’s here. Come home, please. . . . Mm-hmm. Yes.” He hung up. “She’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

  “Dad, whatever it is, please just tell me.”

  “You know what? To hell with tea.” He pulled two glasses from a cabinet and a bottle of Scotch from beside the fridge.

  “I don’t want whisky!” I swatted the bottle away. “I want you to tell me what’s going on. How could you have known—”

  “Drink,” he ordered, and wrapped my fingers back around the glass. His hand shook as he poured. “It’ll calm you down. I’m sorry this has come as such a shock. As soon as Mom gets here . . . I suppose we should call your brothers, too.”

  “Why? Was it them?”

  “Was it who?”

  “Martin and Tony. Is that who shot me?”

  He looked confused.

  “With their old BB guns. Like the squirrel?”

  A surprised smile passed over his face. “No. It wasn’t your brothers. Though Lord help us, they probably tried.” The smile faded and his eyes turned serious again. “You really don’t remember? Not anything?”

  “What should I remember?”

  “From when you were little.”

  I shook my head, waited.

  “We always wondered. Never wanted to ask. They told us to let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Dad. You’re scaring me.”

  “Please don’t judge us too harshly, Caroline. We love you. We always will. No matter what, you are our daughter.”

  I stared at him. Those were the most frightening words I’d heard yet.

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER, my family was assembled in the living room.

  Allow me to make the introductions:

  You’ve already met my mother, Frannie Cashion. Attractive, lively. Busy with the Flower Guild at church, and with bossing around her daughters-in-law and their ever-expanding broods of children.

  My father, Thomas Cashion. He’s retired from practicing law, but he still consults occasionally and has developed a new, rather tiresome addiction to crosswords. He also runs three miles daily, which he claims is the best defense against my mother’s onslaught of casseroles.

  My middle brother, Anthony. He’s a lawyer like Dad. The loudest and most obnoxious of us three kids. Now he was playing true to form, stomping around complaining that there was never beer in the house, and that this family powwow better not take longer than an hour, because he had dinner reservations at Rasika at eight, and did we know how hard those were to get?

  As usual, my oldest brother, Martin, told him to shut up. Martin works in finance. Real estate investment banking. He has repeatedly tried to explain what he does, but my eyes always glaze over when he launches into the benefits of maximizing liquidity through joint-venture recapitalization and tax-syndication equity. Are you still speaking English? I want to ask. A similarly glazed expression creeps over his face when I prattle on about how you can’t read Balzac without applying Roland Barthes’s semiotic code and accepting the plurality of the text. It’s safe to say we have different interests. Fortunately, Martin and I really like each other.

  Now he plunked himself down next to me on the sofa. “Sis? You okay? You look like hell.”

  “Martin, please.” My mother.

  “Fine, but seriously, what’s up? Why the sudden summit? And why isn’t Sis talking?”

  I stared pointedly at my father, waiting for him to speak.

  He cleared his throat. “Your sister got some news today.” Dad’s voice was low, soothing. The voice he must have cultivated to command respect in the courtroom. I rarely heard him use it at home. “It’s news she wasn’t expecting, and that frankly your mother and I weren’t expecting. And it leads to some questions, and to a conversation best had as a family.”

  My mother nodded. Martin leaned forward, frowning. Even Tony stopped pacing and sat down.

  “Caroline got an X-ray today. And it revealed”—Dad patted his neck—“it revealed right here—”

  “It revealed this,” I snapped, and held my phone out to Martin. He examined the photo, used his fingers to zoom in and out a few times.

  “What is it?”

  “My neck.”

  He drew the screen closer to his face and squinted. “Your neck?”

  Tony leaned over and grabbed the phone. “But what’s that?” He pointed toward the lower left corner of the screen.

  “That would appear to be a bullet.”

  Both my brothers looked up at me as if I were insane.

  Dad attempted to regain control of the conversation. “It is a bullet.” He swooped down and took the phone. “And I’m sorry, we are so sorry”—he gestured at my mom—“that you’re finding out this way. We didn’t know it was there. But we did know . . .” He took a deep breath. “We did know that you were shot. When you were three years old.”

  Silence. Then Tony spoke. “Where? How?”

  My mother crossed the room, knelt in front of me, and took my hands. “Before you came to us. Before you came to be our beautiful angel girl.” A tear slid down her cheek.

  I still didn’t understand. “Before I came to you? What are you talking about—before I came to you? Dad said, when I was three. I’d been here for three years.”

  “Ohhh.” Martin exhaled the word slowly. “Was that why, Mom?”

  She ignored him, kept her eyes fixed on mine. “We adopted you, Caroline. Your parents had—had died. We promised to love you and raise you as our own. And we have. We do.” She squeezed my hands tightly. “You’ll have so many questions, I know. We’ll do our best to answer them. But you need to understand: within this room, within this family, nothing changes. Nothing. You are our daughter. You are their sister. Period.”

  She shot my brothers a fierce look that meant Say something.

  Martin cleared his throat and shifted awkwardly on the sofa to face me. “Right. Absolutely. Nothing changes.” He glanced at Tony for support.

  “Sure, right.” Tony sat blinking incredulously. “I haven’t thought about all this in ages, to be honest. We were so little when you came. But, Mom and Dad, I have to say, this is a hell of a way to break it to Sis—”

  “You knew?” I stared at him. “And you?” I turned to Martin.

  Of course they had. I quickly did the math. Tony would have been seven, Martin already nine, when I arrived.

  Does it sound strange to say that at that precise moment this felt like the more painful betrayal? Not the shock of learn
ing—at thirty-­seven—that I was adopted, that I was not and had never been who I’d thought I was. But that my brothers had known and kept it from me. They had kept a secret from me, kept it so long they had nearly forgotten it themselves. Then again—Jesus—they were not really my brothers.

  I began to shake.

  My father reached for me.

  But I was lurching backward, scrambling over the top of the sofa, then running, desperate to get out of that room.

  • • •

  I SPENT THE next two hours locked in my old bathroom. I threw up, then sat shivering on the edge of the bathtub, a towel wrapped around my shoulders.

  From downstairs I could hear noises, footsteps as people moved from room to room. I imagined my mother crying, and my brothers calling home to their wives, explaining that a family crisis was under way and they would be late. Actually, that was an interesting point—did their wives know about my history? Did everyone in this family know except me?

  I searched my memory. Nothing stood out. My childhood had felt normal, or as normal as I suppose anyone’s ever does. I did think now to question the lack of baby pictures. Above the fireplace in the room I had just fled stood a row of silver frames, snapshots of family milestones. My parents’ wedding picture, my brothers’ weddings, a triple frame to hold portraits of each of my brothers and me at our respective college graduations. On the left side of the mantel, Anthony and Martin were both displayed as plump, bald babies in christening gowns. My mother had brushed me off when I’d asked where my own baby photo was: “Third-child syndrome. I was too busy chasing your brothers to snap pictures of you.”

  Now I felt like an idiot.

  Outside the bathroom door someone moved, and then came a knock.

  “Feel like talking?”

  Martin. I frowned at the door.

  He stood there a minute, then tried again. “Sis?” The door handle rattled. The lock held. I heard him lean against the door and slide heavily down to sit on the floor of the upstairs landing.