I ask the boys to send me pictures, and then I build their faces.
They show me family portraits in parlors, hair slicked from severe center partings, and military snapshots in uniforms brown and crisp as paper packages. They come into my shop, and I lay paint upon their cheeks (or their arms, if they have no cheeks) until I match their skin tone, and snip pieces of their hair if they wish me to add a mustache.
Then I take plaster casts of the gashes and craters that were once their faces, so I may fill them with new ones.
But Alistair Webb did not have any photos. He sent only a thick package filled with pages of writing, and eight £10 notes.
“Dear Miss Everdeen,” the first page read, “my home was destroyed by a Zeppelin bomb in 1916. My face then encountered an HE shell in 1918. The war swept away all I once was, even my photos. I have heard your skill is incomparable. I therefore enclose all that is left of me: the stories that once made me whole.”
What followed was a catalog of a life in body parts. Each missing piece was given its own packet: ten pages on his left cheek, twenty on his nose, forty-two on his mouth.
It was early morning when I began, and the clay was cold. I kneaded it in my hands until it was soft and warm as skin. Then I pressed it against the wooden mannequin I keep for wounds so complete I cannot make a plaster cast. Under the strokes of my fingers, clay caked into my lifeline and heartline, his face took shape.
When I was eleven, a cricket ball hit me between the eyes, breaking my nose. The ball was wet, as it was raining, and smelled of leather and grass. My mother mopped the blood with her linen handkerchief—it smelled of lemons and carbolic soap—and sutured my wound with her sewing needle while my father held me down. Be sure, then, to make my nose crooked—in a leather and grass, lemon and rain sort of way.
With a flat blade, I shaped the planes; with a ribbon tool, I carved the nostrils; with my fingers, I blended and smoothed. I did not so much carve as grow it: bones and cartilage, skin and hair.
That first feature took six days. I kept my shop locked with a sign in the window.
My left ear is slightly larger than my right, and more deaf—this is the ear I’d press against the flared horn of our gramophone, feeling it quiver as the music poured out. Be sure you shape it with the molten gold of Enrico Caruso and the shimmering silver of Nellie Melba. It should remember, too, the sound of Ragtime: boots and heels two-stepping and cakewalking.
With a wire I shaved down the right ear, and began to hear a faint vibrato, thumping shoes and swishing skirts, percussive piano and crowing trumpets.
Time slipped too quickly between the shop and my flat; to keep it still, I slept at my desk. In the mornings, I woke with clay still warm in my hands.
My left cheek is more freckled than my right, because it faced the sun in the mornings when I read on the porch swing. It has a dimpled scar from a tree branch; be sure to show that the tree grew red apples, and stood before the kitchen window.
I felt the sun on my back, smelled the bark and leaves and ripe, red fruit.
My mouth speaks Italian from my father, sings tenor, loves the feel of fizzy sherbet, plays the trumpet, laughs staccato, and has known the kisses of twelve women.
It was warm against my lips.
My eye has seen the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, the ocean and the Black Sea; it never tires of reading Hardy, watching cricket, looking at the moon between apple tree branches, watching my father swing my mother to the “Dill Pickles Rag.” It is dark green, and my eyelashes are pale. I never cry.
With a single horsehair brush, I painted a tiny woman in a square of light I placed in the pupil’s center.
She has my face.
It has been eight months: Alistair Webb is seated in my fitting chair. I have written to tell him the work is finished.
He is a large man, with thick brown hair falling in waves over his forehead. He wears a clean linen bandage around his face; it obscures everything but one eye.
I know that eye. I have painted its double—so perfectly that one cannot tell them apart. I know the scar that lies between his eyebrows, shaped like the stitching of a cricket ball. I know everything that lies beneath.
Easily, as though it is not warm and soft and glowing with life, I take the mask from my desk and hold it up to him. His body jolts backward as though he’s been struck, but no sound comes from him. After all, I hold his mouth.
Very carefully, I unwind his bandage. Around and around I go, until the end of the cloth falls away, and I am left seeing, between a thick slice of forehead and a sliver of jaw… a hole.
A yawning absence. A life erased.
Alistair Webb is looking up at me; his green eye is wide and frightened.
Very slowly, I place my hands over his wound. My palms are along his jawline, my fingertips against his brows. And then I lean forward and place a kiss on the scar above his nose, and I close my eyes to remember because he may not let me do this again, he may walk out of my store forever, he may have a wife, she may be sitting at home by a window near an apple tree, waiting for his new mouth.
Then I place his mask upon his face.