Brother Odd

Justine.
        At the time, as much as I had desired the contact, I had spurned it. I had been right to do so.
        Stormy is my past, and she will be my future only after my life in this world is over, when time finishes and eternity begins. What is required of me now is patience and perseverance. The only way back is the way forward.
        I told myself to turn away, to wander farther onto the second floor. Instead I crossed the threshold and stood just inside the room.
        Drowned by her father at four, left for dead but still alive eight years later, the radiantly beautiful girl sat in bed, leaning against plump pillows, eyes closed.
        Her hands lay in her lap, both palms upturned, as though she waited to receive some gift.
        The voices of the wind were muffled but legion: chanting, snarling, hissing at the single window.
        The collection of plush-toy kittens watched me from the shelves near her bed.
        Annamarie and her wheelchair were gone. I had seen her in the recreation room, where behind the laughter of children, quiet Walter, who could not dress himself without assistance, played classical piano.
        The air seemed heavy, like the atmosphere between the first flash of lightning and the first peal of thunder, when the rain has formed miles above but has not yet reached the earth, when fat drops are descending by the millions, compressing the air below them as one last warning of their drenching approach.
        I stood in light-headed anticipation.
        Beyond the window, frenzies of driven snow chased down the day, and though obviously the wind still flogged the morning, its voices faded, and slowly a cone of silence settled upon the room.
        Justine opened her eyes. Although usually she looks through everything in this world, now she met my gaze.
        I became aware of a familiar fragrance. Peaches.
        When I worked as a short-order cook in Pico Mundo, before the world grew as dark as it is now, I washed my hair in a peach-scented shampoo that Stormy had given me. It effectively replaced the aromas of bacon and hamburgers and fried onions that lingered in my locks after a long shift at the griddle and grill.
        At first dubious about peach shampoo, I had suggested that a bacon-hamburgers-fried-onions scent ought to be appealing, ought to make the mouth water, and that most people had quasi-erotic reactions to the aromas of fried food.
        Stormy had said, "Listen, griddle boy, you're not as suave as Ronald McDonald, but you're cute enough to eat without smelling like a sandwich."
        As any red-blooded boy would have done, I thereafter used peach-scented shampoo every day.
        The fragrance that now rose in Room 32 was not of peaches but, more precisely, was of that particular peach shampoo, which I had not brought with me to St. Bart's.
        This was wrong. I knew that I should leave at once. The scent of peach shampoo immobilized me.
        The past cannot be redeemed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is.
        To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need.
        Nevertheless, I stood there, waiting, full of hope that was the wrong hope.
        Stormy is dead and does not belong in this world, and Justine is profoundly brain-damaged from prolonged oxygen deprivation and cannot speak. Yet the girl attempted to communicate, not on her own behalf but for another who had no voice at all this side of the grave.
        What came from Justine were not words but thick knots of sound that reflected the wrenched and buckled nature of her brain, eerily bringing to mind a desperate drowner struggling for air underwater, wretched sounds that were sodden and bloated and unbearably sad.
        An anguished no escaped me, and the girl at once stopped trying to speak.
        Justine's usually unexpressive features tightened into a look of frustration. Her gaze slid away from me, tracked left, tracked right, and then to the window.
        She suffered from a partial paralysis general in nature, though her left side was more profoundly affected than her right. With some effort, she raised her more useful arm from the bed. Her slender hand reached toward me, as