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  Made a new bookmark for Out on a Limb that says WE SHIRLEY MISSED YOU!

  Arranged the alphabet magnets on the fridge to spell OUT ON A CRESCENT: THE JIM RYAN STORY (new working title).

  Combed Wedge and fluffed his bangs.

  We finish our ice cream sandwiches in tandem. For once I am as fast as she is. Three bites it took. Let’s go to the airport!

  She looks at her watch. We have five hours.

  Five hours! But we have to go early for a Bite-to-Eatery.

  Verlaine points out that we just had a bite-to-eatery. You’ve got ice cream here, she says. I wipe my mouth with a Lionel de Tigrel article. This is something else I’ve been doing for my dad. Using his arch-enemy as a napkin. I’m sure he’ll be pleased.

  She says she has a few things to do at the Before Building, then we’ll go to the airport. Okay.

  Okay. I guess.

  And so we hop in the Lada and the whole way to the university I keep my head out the window. The sky is bright blue.

  What are you doing.

  Keeping an eye out.

  He won’t be here for hours, Audray.

  What about a tailwind.

  What do you know about tailwinds.

  I know about tailwinds.

  It is far more likely that he’ll be late, she says.

  Which words are like a knife to my heart. I sink back in my cardboard seat.

  She glances at me. I didn’t mean that, she says.

  Verlaine usually takes me with her on her rounds. I fill up water bottles and have a chat with my dad’s cauliflower brain. But today she says that if I want her to hurry I should wait in her office. I tend to slow her down, she says.

  That is a bit insulting, but okay. Today I am all about hurrying. Hurry, hurry.

  I sit in her chair and roll around the office. I flip through her calendar and find today’s date. She hasn’t circled it. I draw a tiny picture of a plane with my dad inside, waving.

  Time marches on. My legs start to hurt. Where is she.

  Her car keys are on the desk.

  Now here is the thing. Even if I wanted to go find her and tell her to hurry up, I couldn’t, because you need a special key to get into the animal part of the building, and she has that key with her. What if she has forgotten all about me and my dad. What if one of the pigeons has escaped and she has to spend hours trying to catch it.

  I crouch down. Get up. Grab the keys. Run. It feels good to run. Smack, smack go my sneakers on the shiny floor. Up the stairs. Outside, I head for the Lada. Then stop. Look up. There’s a plane overhead. Is my dad in that plane. Dad! I wave hugely.

  I jump in the Lada and put the key in the ignition. Turn the key. The car jumps up in the air. All four tires leave the ground. Which scares the bejesus out of me. Holy Lada calm down. I do this a couple of times. The car keeps jumping, but we aren’t moving forward. Why aren’t we moving forward.

  I slide down and put my feet on the pedals. Push, push, turn, turn.

  That’s when I see Verlaine coming out of the Before Building. Jaw set. Uh-oh.

  Turn the ignition. Turn, turn, turn.

  She lifts a hand to stop. I stop. I roll down my window.

  What in hell are you doing.

  I just saw my dad’s plane.

  Do you know how dangerous—

  My legs hurt, I tell her. They really really hurt.

  She opens the door. I look up at her from under my visor—because, oh yes, I am wearing my black velvet protective headgear. With hairnet. I am beautifully groomed.

  Why—

  From waiting.

  Get out.

  I get out and run around to the passenger’s side.

  Verlaine turns the ignition and the car doesn’t lurch, but it doesn’t start either. Well, she says. You’ve drained the battery.

  What battery! I didn’t touch a battery.

  She slumps. We’re stuck here for a while.

  Which is too much. I start to cry. But I saw my dad’s plane.

  She turns in her seat. What is this about, Audray. For a whole month you’ve been fine.

  Yes but I haven’t been.

  She puts a thumb on my cheek. Smears a tear. Your legs hurt from waiting, she says.

  I nod.

  She nods.

  We are late for my dad’s plane. He is already outside in a pale yellow shirt. His hair looks lighter. Verlaine pulls up to the curb.

  I jump out. I am swept up.

  Did the landing gear come down okay, I say into his neck.

  Yes.

  He hugs me for a long time. Verlaine puts the Lada’s hazards on. I hear her say, Mais c’est incroyable.

  Thank you for the note in my luggage.

  My dad seems different. His accent is stronger. But then, I am different too. I have a hard hat. And even when my hard hat is off, it is still on in spirit, because I have a tan line across my forehead and strap marks down my cheeks.

  Also, there is the hairnet.

  My dad doesn’t know what to make of my new hair accessory. He says, what, am I in the food industry now. Am I making Piety pies.

  Don’t you love how my hair is caught in a swirl, I ask. Well, sure.

  I ask him about Uncle Thoby. Is he off the limb.

  What.

  Is he off the limb.

  I am holding the fridge door open, pretending to look for cheese.

  Out on a Croissant, my dad pronounces slowly. The Jim Ryan Story.

  I peer over the edge of the door. It’s supposed to say crescent!

  You funny bunny.

  He is making a lot of phone calls. This is new. To Grandmother. To Uncle Thoby. He sits on the basement steps and talks on the phone for hours. Sometimes he half-closes the door so I can’t hear what he’s saying.

  His voice on the phone is soft and drippy. I want to kick him when I hear that voice. Sometimes I spring open the basement door and it whacks him on the back. Aha! I say, like I’ve caught him. But caught him doing what.

  He looks up at me. Gotta go, he says into the phone. The girl with the swirl is eavesdropping.

  Shirley MacLaine is back on the table but she’s falling a bit flat. She’s a doofus, I say one night.

  Doofus, says my dad, nodding.

  Do you know what a doofus is, I ask him.

  Of course.

  He says he has a biography of his own to tell me, the biography of Uncle Thoby, but he’s waiting till we’re finished with Out on a Limb.

  But why are we waiting. This is dumb. Clearly he is not enamoured of Shirley’s biography of Shirley. Clearly Uncle Thoby is not a doofus.

  That’s true, my dad says. He isn’t.

  Okay then. Shirley can hold up the window.

  When do I get to read about Jim Ryan, he asks.

  I hold up eight fingers.

  Eight days.

  No.

  Eight weeks.

  I shake my head. Eight is the number of words in Jim Ryan’s biography.

  Does that include the title.

  No comment.

  Here is something I have noticed about biographies: They all start off with a guy no one would write a biography about. All the odds are against this guy’s biography being written. But you know it has been written because you’re reading it. Or hearing it. So his luck is about to change. Plus, there are early signs that he’s special. There are early signs of his destiny. Watch for them.

  OFF WITH A LIMB: THE UNCLE THOBY STORY

  Uncle Thoby was a baggage handler at Heathrow Airport until one day, through no fault of his own, a plane’s cargo door closed on his arm and that arm was flown to Dublin by mistake.

  What!

  At first they didn’t realize the arm had gone to Dublin. Uncle Thoby was rushed into the airport and an ambulance was called. He was faint from the loss of blood, which his co-workers were attempting to staunch with a bathrobe from a nearby suitcase, but before passing out he asked after his arm. Go. Stop. My. Arm. Unfortunately, by the time his co-worker
s reached the tarmac, the plane had already departed. Imagine the surprise of the Irish baggage handlers.

  It was all a big debacle but not Uncle Thoby’s fault. The two metal rods that hold the cargo door open had snapped in two. Both of them. What are the chances. It was a mechanical failure. And yet, because Uncle Thoby had a history of clumsiness, his employers decided that he was responsible for his own amputation. Further, they would not be needing the services of a one-armed baggage handler in the future. He was dismissed without pay.

  Does Uncle Thoby have a history of clumsiness.

  Well, so what if he does. He’s been known to trip over a level threshold. And once he fell out of a moving car on the highway and broke his leg. Then he went sailing with that broken leg and fell overboard and almost drowned because the cast was so heavy. And once, when he had a cold, he tried to heat Vicks VapoRub on the stove, in order to produce a real “vapour,” forgetting that the vile stuff is made of grease, whereupon it splattered and burned his face. But was he to blame for the cargo door of a Boeing 727 slicing off his arm. Hardly.

  So now he was without an arm and in hospital. He had been in touch with Dublin airport authorities, but they had already taken certain “measures” with regards to his arm that prevented it being returned to him. What measures were those. Incineration. But what had he planned to do with his old arm anyway. It could not be reattached.

  Of course he knew it could not be reattached at this late stage—he had come to terms with that—but what distressed him was that he could not remember it. His old arm was all a blur. Had there been freckles. Yes. But in what constellations. He had never paid attention. There was a scar on his left hand from a misadventure on the Lopper (a roller coaster). He would never see that scar again. He had simply lost a whole section of himself.

  Nor was he experiencing the phantom limb syndrome so many amputees boast about. How he would have welcomed a phantom limb! But he had no sense that his arm still existed, here or in Dublin or anywhere. It was simply gone.

  He came to believe that the freckles on his lost arm had been a code to himself that he might have cracked if he had paid attention. But he had never paid attention. He spent a lot of time staring at his right arm and then staring at the space on the hospital bed where his left arm should have been.

  His old life was over. He would never handle baggage again. His co-workers visited and brought gifts—usually objects left behind on airplanes—and told amusing stories of air disasters to cheer him up. They expressed concern about his future. What would he do now, a one-armed baggage handler with no baggage to handle.

  They offered to raise money, through bake sales and other means, to pay for a new prosthetic arm, a top-of-the-line model, since the airline was refusing to pay damages.

  Uncle Thoby thought about this, and he thanked them very much, but he did not like the idea of a generic arm that wasn’t his attached to a shoulder that was.

  What.

  He didn’t like the idea of someone else’s invented arm pretending to be his own.

  Oh.

  I should have said earlier that Uncle Thoby’s arm was cut off here. (My dad makes a sawing motion above his left elbow.)

  Ouch. Yes, you should have.

  Okay. Uncle Thoby decided that he wanted to make his own prosthetic arm. He had heard that there were special camps where amputees could go to learn how to do this. Of course, people who attended such camps had to accept temporary prosthetics not of their own making while they made their own. You can’t make a new hand with one hand. You need two. And even then it is hard. You can’t expect to rebuild yourself overnight.

  But when an amputee leaves one of these camps after months, or sometimes years, they take with them an original limb of their own making. Now that is pretty special.

  So it was that the baggage handlers and airplane mechanics and aircraft groomers all rallied and contributed money to send Uncle Thoby to the Leg and Arm Reconstruction Camp in that piratical, picturesque town, made famous by the operetta: Penzance. So off Uncle Thoby went.

  Penzance was lovely by the sea. Uncle Thoby made slow progress on his arm. Naturally progress was slow. Imagine building your own arm from scratch, using one hand that belongs to you and another that doesn’t, and the one that doesn’t is stupid and unresponsive, more a piece of wood with some tweezers stuck on the end than a real hand and arm. And the arm you are painstakingly trying to build yourself with these imperfect tools must look like your original limb, must be electronically jiggered to perform all the movements of your original limb, must maintain a body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius. Etcetera. It boggles the mind.

  Not surprisingly some inmates get frustrated and give up. This happened to Uncle Thoby. He fell in with a shady Penzancian crowd not affiliated with the LARC who were all missing body parts and celebrating that fact. After a little spree in Penzance, Uncle Thoby returned to London and told everyone, including himself, that he was content to be a one-armed man.

  His friends from the airport were furious. Had they not baked cookies and auctioned off the contents of thousands of unclaimed bags so that Uncle Thoby might attend the LARC and be a two-armed man once more.

  Uncle Thoby apologized and scuffed his feet. The arm-making process was too hard. He didn’t have the technical skills.

  But surely the whole point of the LARC was to acquire those skills.

  Yes. But. He didn’t have the patience. It was hopeless.

  Bollocks, said his closest friend, an aircraft groomer. Whereupon she shoved him into her car, strapped him in tight (knowing he was prone to falling out of moving vehicles), and drove him back down to Penzance herself. He was not to give up, she said.

  They sat together on the LARC deck and he showed her what he had made so far. It was only a shell of what his future arm might be. It had no wires in it. But it was skin-coloured, and the aircraft groomer thought it was beautiful and he should keep going, even if it took years.

  She said, Someday you will lift baggage with that arm.

  Uncle Thoby smiled sadly. He knew this was not true. Or at least, he knew he would not lift baggage again in a professional capacity. However, maybe there were other things to be besides a baggage handler. Other lives that could be lived.

  Let us pause there.

  Was Uncle Thoby at the LARC when Grandfather died. Is that why he wasn’t at the funeral.

  My dad looks up from his cereal. Biographies are not usually discussed at the breakfast table. They are like dreams that way.

  Grognard Man nods.

  Why didn’t Grandmother pay for the camp.

  Grandmother didn’t know.

  Did you know.

  Only recently.

  Is that why you went to England.

  Wait for the end of the story.

  The arm he’s building sounds an awful lot like Luke Skywalker’s in The Empire Strikes Back.

  Does it.

  Remember how Darth Vader slices off Luke’s hand with the light sabre and the hand falls into outer space, lost forever.

  Vaguely.

  Vaguely!

  Uncle Thoby has finished his arm. It is a work of beauty. A masterpiece. So much so that it is indistinguishable from a real arm. With one exception. It is bigger than a real arm. Substantially bigger. But that is because of all the technology Uncle Thoby crammed into it. Because of all the hardware and wires, plus a heat generator.

  How much bigger.

  Well, big enough that when people see it they are sometimes afraid. They see a monster’s arm. And they think, Only a monster could be attached to an arm like that. All they see is the arm. It’s as if I looked at you and saw only your ponytail, sorry hairnet.

  That would be okay.

  No it wouldn’t. Because I wouldn’t bother to see the rest of you. And what if I had a fear of hairnets. Which I actually sort of do, by the way.

  Why!

  They’re spiderwebby. But anyway, my aversion to your hair might stop me knowing your true
story. And when people see Uncle Thoby’s arm, they don’t know his true story. They don’t know what he has suffered and lost and how hard it was for him to rebuild himself. They think a man with an arm like that couldn’t have a good biography of his own. They think he must be a thug in someone else’s.

  Poor Uncle Thoby. I would never think that.

  I hope not.

  Does the arm come off.

  I don’t know.

  All biographies have a big obstacle. But even though Uncle Thoby has overcome this big obstacle of losing his arm, this is not the big obstacle of his life. There is a bigger one to come. That is what I feel.

  Wait for the big obstacle.

  I find myself thinking about him all the time. It is like on TV when they want to show two things happening at once, so they split the screen in two, an upstairs and a downstairs. I am in the downstairs part, riding Rambo, being tucked into bed by my dad, while in the upper part Uncle Thoby is working on his arm. He is clumsy and often hammers his right thumb by mistake (the temporary arm has various attachments, tweezers, hammer, etcetera) and then he curses a series of symbols (<£⅞%@#^). Or he is walking along a beach, one arm much bigger than the other, and people are staring, and he wants to go swimming more than anything but salt water isn’t good for the mechanism. Or he is helping to paint the deck at the LARC and some brown paint splatters on his new arm and he can’t get it off, and this small splatter is enough to make him cry. All his fellow LARCians gather round with their mismatched limbs in various stages of construction and say, Don’t worry, a little nail polish remover will take that right off. What is the matter.

  What is the matter. Where is his family, that is the matter. All he’s been through, and where are they.

  He looks at his new arm and there are freckles now.

  Instead of working on Jim Ryan’s biography, I work on my arms. I map out my freckles in a notebook so I will have a record. I even use a ruler and measure distances. When my dad sees what I’m doing, he says I need a protractor to measure angles. He shows me how to use a protractor.