The Thing That Wasn't Glued

Maya held the new X-ray up to the kitchen window so the light came through it.

"There," she said. "That bright thing. That's the metal."

Soren leaned in. Grandma Edith's hip glowed white on the film, a smooth stem driven down into the dark shape of her thigh bone.

"What's holding it in?" he asked.

"Glue, probably," Maya said. "Some kind of bone cement."

Grandma Edith was in the next room with her foot up, telling Maya's dad about the hospital food. She had handed them the whole envelope of films and said, look at your old grandmother, full of titanium now, like a robot.

Soren pulled the new film closer. He found the edge where metal met bone and followed it with his finger.

"I don't see glue," he said.

"You can't see glue on an X-ray."

"You can see cement. The surgeon's brother is a dentist, Grandma said. The cement shows up gray. Look at the old films."

Maya pulled the old set out. Edith's hip from two years ago, before any of this. Worn down, the doctor had said, bone on bone. There was no gray line anywhere. Just bone, then the dark gap of the joint, then more bone.

"Okay," Maya said. "So no cement in the old one. There was nothing in there to cement."

"Right. So in the new one, where's the gray?"

They both looked. They held the film up to the window. They moved it so the light hit it sideways.

There was no gray. The white metal stem sat against the bone with nothing between them at all.

"Maybe she's a special case," Maya said. But she said it the way she said things she didn't believe.

Soren got out his notebook and drew the edge he was seeing. The metal line. The bone line. Touching. He drew them touching and then sat looking at the two lines on the page.

"What if it isn't glued," he said. "What if the bone just grew onto it."

Maya put the film down.

"Bone doesn't grow onto metal," she said. "Bone grows onto bone. Metal is the thing you screw in. Like a shelf bracket."

"A shelf bracket falls out of the wall eventually."

"That's my point."

"That's my point too," Soren said. "Hers won't. The doctor told Grandma it gets stronger. Stronger after. A shelf bracket doesn't get stronger after."

Maya went quiet. Then she walked into the front room.

"Grandma. Does your hip hurt where the metal is?"

Edith laughed. "It will for a while, sweetheart. But the doctor says the good part takes months. The bone has to take hold of it."

"Take hold of it," Maya repeated.

"He used a funny word. Inte-something. He said by Christmas I won't be able to tell where I end and the metal starts." Edith wiggled her toes. "Imagine that."

Maya came back to the table fast.

"Take hold of it," she said again. "She said the bone takes hold of it. Soren, that's not screwing it in. That's the bone doing something. The bone is doing the work."

"How," Soren said. Not arguing. Wanting it.

"I don't know. But you were right. It's not glued." She picked the new film back up. "It's growing."

Maya's dad was at the counter on his phone. He was a contractor. He spent all day fastening things to other things.

"Dad. If you bolt steel to a wood beam, does the wood ever grow onto the steel?"

He didn't look up. "Wood's dead, kiddo. Dead stuff doesn't grow onto anything. That's why you need bolts."

Maya looked at Soren. Soren looked at Maya.

"Bone isn't dead," Soren said quietly.

"Bone is alive," Maya said. "It's full of cells. It heals. If you break it, it knits back. It's the only part of the bracket that's alive."

Soren was writing fast now. "So the cells reach the metal. And the metal is so right, somehow, that they don't stop. They don't treat it like a foreign thing to wall off. They settle on it. They lay bone down right onto the surface."

"What's so right about it," Maya said. "Why titanium. Why not the steel in Dad's bolts."

They didn't know. They sat with not knowing.

Maya picked up a spoon from the table and turned it over. Stainless steel. She looked at her own reflection, stretched and curved.

"Metals get a skin," she said slowly. "When they meet air. Iron gets rust, the bad kind, flaky. But some metals get a skin that's tight. Aluminum does. Dad's ladder doesn't rust, he says, because it seals itself."

"Titanium oxide," Soren said. He'd read it somewhere once and it surfaced now. "The skin on titanium. The oxide layer."

"So the cells aren't touching titanium at all," Maya said. "They're touching the skin it grows when it meets the air. And the skin is something the cells like. Something they'll build on."

Soren stopped writing.

"It's not the metal," he said. "It's the surface the metal makes by itself. The part that isn't even there until you take it out of the box."

Maya held the new film to the window one more time. The white stem. The bone pressed against it with no line between, no gray, no glue. A place where her grandmother stopped being her grandmother and started being metal, except there was no place, because the bone had already crossed over and made it all one thing.

"By Christmas," Maya said, "she won't be able to find the edge."

In the front room, Edith wiggled her toes again, slow, testing, feeling for the seam that was already disappearing inside her.