Kindred

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I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.

And I lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort and secu- rity I had not valued until it was gone. When the police released Kevin, he came to the hospital and stayed with me so that I would know I hadn’t lost him too.

But before he could come to me, I had to convince the police that he did not belong in jail. That took time. The police were shadows who appeared intermittently at my bedside to ask me questions I had to strug- gle to understand.

“How did you hurt your arm?” they asked. “Who hurt you?” My atten- tion was captured by the word they used: Hurt. As though I’d scratched my arm. Didn’t they think I knew it was gone?

“Accident,” I heard myself whisper. “It was an accident.”

They began asking me about Kevin. Their words seemed to blur together at first, and I paid little attention. After a while, though, I replayed them and suddenly realized that these men were trying to blame Kevin for “hurting” my arm.

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