The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

other people and their avarice—he spit the word in a way that frightened me—shadowed him at every turn.

      Not long after my terrible mistake with Leo, my brother was one day speckled with an angry red rash. For two days and a night between he cried so hard I thought he would explode. The doctor came with a Vapo-Cresolene lamp that Daddy kept lit day and night. The lamp didn’t do anything but tear our throats with the smell and make everyone’s eyes sting. Poor Leo must have hardly been able to breathe right under it.

      Although he’d made attempts at talking and could almost sit up on his own, when his fever broke, he made only sad little squawks of dismay, a sound like a bird trapped in the eaves. He spooked me. If I could hold him like I had before, I would have gladly shared some of my already oversized height and heft, but Momma banned me from getting near him.

      Even from my station at the doorway I could see how he kept his neck bent like he had a crick in it. I couldn’t tell anyone what I knew about the reason for his sickness. I tried once, twice, but the words gagged me until I nearly blacked out from regret.

      The doused lamp went into the barn, where it hung blindly from a nail. The light was gone from Leo’s eyes. His arms and legs flopped, and I cursed myself for ever having let myself think of him as a doll. Momma said that because of his fever, Leo’s mind would never grow up.

      My love had done this to him. Sick and silent with guilt, I held Leo’s head up with my arm when Momma left the room, and I begged his forgiveness. He and I both knew that if he were ever going to be a regular child again, the responsibility would be mine. I leaned over him and brought my face close to his. His gray eyes didn’t fix on anything.

      “Leo,” I whispered.

      My voice sounded like a branch scraping rusted metal. No nursery songs came to mind, so I tried hymns. They were all about death and leaving this world, so I quit, with him so close to having done that very thing.

      “Look in my eyes,” I said.

      Leo smacked his lips but didn’t look at anything.

      “Leo,” I said, low and slow in a voice that didn’t sound like mine, or our mother’s, or our father’s.

      His body jerked. I jumped back, then eased myself close again. I waved a hand over his eyes. He followed it. Maybe he could only see close up. I held my breath and half-lidded my eyes. His gaze drifted away as my hand made a full transit across his face, my palm like a full moon.

      “Leo,” I said. “Help me fix you. We’ve got to finish before Momma or someone comes in.”

      He opened his mouth like he was about to squawk. Now or never. Leo watching and seeing, Leo talking, that was my due to him, a payment that would make everything right again.

      “Look at my hand, little boy,” I said, my palm inches from his nose. Leo’s eyes wandered. Nothing would come of this. My brother would be broken forever. He stiffened and tried to push himself over with the little strength he had. I didn’t want him to roll over, not yet, and he knew it. He gave up trying to change position and returned his sight to my palm. I drew my hand back slowly, thrilled to see him follow my motion. When my hand was before my face, I drew my hand away, and let his gaze settle on mine.

      I saw my brother. My brother saw me. And he smiled.

      Our parents wept when I showed them what he could do.

      “He can watch me move, Momma,” I said, after I’d called her in to show how he watched my hand. He and I did our trick a half-dozen times, and instead of tiring, he made a sound that I knew was a laugh.

      Momma wiped her eyes on her sleeve and reached for Leo. His laughter had become a whistle in his throat.

      “Next time you handle him, watch that he doesn’t choke,” she said.

      She spanked him between the shoulders, and when he’d quit whistling, she lay her hand, gentle, on my cheek.

      When she told Daddy, his smile was crooked, a broken window shade.

      Leo and I grew into opposites. He was delicate, I was ungainly. At fourteen, I walked like a dray horse, according to my mother. Leo was eight. We could look each other straight in the eye and know right away what the other was thinking. His walk was tentative. He supported himself with his hands against a wall. His legs gave in more often than not. To an observer, Leo would be the weak one and me the strong, but they would have it backward. I was weak inside.

      Without Leo whole, I would never be enough. Our parents looked at him and saw an empty space shaped like the man he could never be.

CHAPTER TWO

       Tennessee: July 1862

      WILL WAS NINETEEN THE FIRST TIME HE GAMBLED. Almost all the soldiers did, waiting for a skirmish. Short on pay, Bill Lee and Harmony played every chance they could. They bet buttons or stones when they had to, laying out IOUs worn and bent at the edges like a tomcat’s ear as collateral for the day when the paymaster’s leather folder would be full.

      “Seven,” Bill Lee said.

      Will watched them play.

      He had been sitting on a stump, cleaning his Winchester with a cotton rag. His grey wool cap lay on a different rag he kept for the purpose of protecting the hat’s rim from dirt. His blond hair was filthy. He hadn’t had a decent wash in a long time. His scalp itched.

      “Can’t make seven on your come-out throw,” Harmony scolded Bill Lee.

      “Go on and watch me, asshole,” Bill Lee said. His heels were in the dirt, the dice curled in his fingers. Bill Lee always seemed to watch everything closely, as if the world held a secret code that he would find if he peered close enough. He’d have made a lousy devotee: Will had known him to bird-whistle a warning call when he saw movement in a distant tree line.

      Bill Lee shook his loose fist and rolled two dice onto a plank. The ivory squares, yellowed like old molars, rattled across the surface, the first one rolling head over heels and landing with the four side up. The second die followed, a lagging twin, until it stopped near the raw edge of the plank. Three up. Seven.

      “Owes me again,” Bill Lee said, not bothering to look at Harmony. Bill Lee took a cone of notepaper from somewhere in his jacket, unrolled it, and jotted a note with a pencil stub. “Asshole,” Harmony said.

      Will finished cleaning his rifle. Needing something to do while he studied the craps game, he had cleaned it twice. He set the weapon down beside his hat and wiped his greasy palms on his trousers, stiff with sweat and smoke.

      “Y’all interested in showing a man the game?” Will inquired. “Not much for gambling, but I figure I might could play and keep busy.”

      Bill Lee and Harmony, each in a throwing crouch level to Will’s knees, looked up at him, a silent duet. Although they’d been side by side for months, the men formally introduced themselves.

      “Harmony Any Last Name’s as Good as Another, Knoxville, Tennessee.” Harmony was red-headed, thin, and hard-muscled like a whip.

      Will shook Harmony No Last Name’s hand. The fellow held on an extra second, a salesman’s grip.

      “William Hurst, Tennessee,” he answered, turning to Bill Lee.

      “William Lee Borden. My ma calls me Billy, but I spell it like two names.” He grinned in an ear-to-ear little boy’s smile, a beam of sunlight. Like Will, he was blond, but had stayed nearly a tow head although he looked to be near thirty. His eyebrows were white-blond, and his lashes, too. Bill Lee had a roll of fat around his waist even after months in camp, and Will wondered if the man hadn’t stashed some chow in his rucksack and secretly nibbled away on jerky or chunks of dried apple when no one was looking. Will’s stomach pinched.

      “Set down here and we’ll get a game on. Learn while