After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away (3 page)

I was impressed with Maria: She had muscles. Arm and shoulder muscles compact and hard.

My leg muscles were hard from running.
Before the wreck
I’d tried to run every day, but
after the wreck
the thought of running was a joke.

“You go, girl! One hell of a girl.”

“Oh, sure.
One hell.
”

It hurt when I laughed, like shattered glass being shaken inside my chest.

Since I’d told my father I didn’t know him, didn’t want him to kiss me, I’d been feeling stronger. My eyesight was coming back, except when I got tired.

S L O W was how we walked, Maria and me. The hospital floor was like a city block you could walk around, turning each corner until you arrived back where you’d started.

In the blue
I’d been spared this. Leaning on Maria like some broke-back old thing, panting through my mouth. Trying not to see how strangers stared at me.

Wanting to say, “Think I look bad now? You should’ve seen me when they pulled me from the wreck.”

In the blue
no one ever looked at me with pity.

In the blue
the light was always soft. Out here everything was bright-glaring and felt like sandpaper.

“Try not to breathe through your mouth, Jenna. Let’s rest for a minute. Deep breaths now. C’mon!”

Mom used to say, “I wish you weren’t an only child.”

I wanted to tell Maria I loved her. I wanted to ask Maria to be my friend not just for now but always.

Except I remembered:
After the wreck
I wasn’t going to like anybody ever again.

Why? Because they fly away and leave you alone.

Too risky.

Such a feeling of sadness came over me. I couldn’t love Maria anyway, that was ridiculous. Couldn’t return to the track team even as the weakest runner, that was more ridiculous.

I’d almost made it back to my room, but my legs became weak, and I had to sit in the wheelchair. My face was flushed, I could feel blood vessels pounding inside my ugly shaved head. Maria was going on about how well I’d done, how each day I was definitely improving, the gold cross winked just above the V-neck of her white uniform, and I heard myself say, “You don’t have to be nice to me, Maria. Unless it’s your job.”

10

People came to visit. Now that I was out of intensive care.

Now that I wasn’t so freaky-awful to look at. So piteous.

Girl friends. A few guys. Some of my teachers. Meghan Ryder, the girls’ track team coach.

Bringing me hurt-girl gifts: flowers, candy, stuffed animals, paperback books in balloon colors.

Lots of relatives. (From Mom’s side of the family mostly.)

Ms. Ryder gripped my hand in her superstrong hand. She smiled so you could see the strain in her cheeks like rubber being stretched. On the track team we’d speculated on how old Meghan Ryder was, some of us thinking twenty-five? -six?—and some of us thinking older, like thirty?—and seeing Ms. Ryder trying to smile at me now and the puckers at the sides of her eyes, I had to think older. She told me in a bright, forced voice that I’d be walking again, I’d be running again, she was sure.

Physiotherapy, Ms. Ryder said.

Physiotherapy is the secret. Works miracles.

Smile smile!
My mouth got tired from the strain. Maybe it wasn’t my mouth but my visitors’ mouths. Maybe I got tired from watching their mouths. Maybe I got tired from seeing their pitying eyes.

Aunt Caroline saw. Aunt Caroline seemed to be in charge. When she saw that I was becoming tired, she asked my visitors to leave.

Sometimes I just shut my eyes. Tuned them out. A guy from my English class, we were kind of friends, not boyfriend/girlfriend, but I guess I had a crush on him, there he was visiting me in the hospital nervous and not knowing what to say, and I wasn’t going to help him, I shut my eyes, suddenly seeing the snow geese high in the sky disappearing
into the blue
and I was desperate to join them.

When I opened my eyes, it was later. A nurse’s aide was informing me: time to draw blood.

In the blue
was my happiest time.
In the blue
was waiting when I shut my eyes.

“…try to stay awake, honey? Dr. Currin says…”

Aunt Caroline was Mom’s good friend. Not just her sister. The two of them laughing together saying how, growing up, they’d had to form an alliance against their oldest sister, Katie: The Bossy One.

I was confused, not remembering clearly where my aunt lived. Mom and I had visited her…. In New Hampshire, a hilly drive. Rivers, bridges. Lakes. A long skinny lake that on maps looks vertical. She was staying in our house now, she said. So that she could visit me in the hospital every day. So that she could “oversee” things. Sitting beside my bed, sometimes just holding my hand, and we didn’t talk and there was a feeling of Mom coming into the room breathless and surprised-smiling, seeing Aunt Caroline and me together, saying to my aunt,
Oh, Carrie, how’d you get here before me!

Uncle Dwight came to see me. My little cousins Becky and Mikey.

Aunt Caroline held my hand. Aunt Caroline wiped mucus from my nose.

“We’ll take care of you, Jenna. If you really don’t want to live with your father.”

In the blue
there wasn’t Dad.

In the blue
there wasn’t Aunt Caroline either.

11

Tell us what you remember, Jenna.

What happened on the Tappan Zee Bridge, Jenna?

Jenna, try. There are no other witnesses…

(No other witnesses! In this way I learned that the driver of the truck had not survived.)

There were skid marks from your mother’s car in both lanes. Before the car struck the right-lane railing, then careened over into the left lane and that railing. And…

The truck’s tires were skidding for at least thirty feet before impact. We estimate that the driver was over the speed limit by approximately fifteen miles an hour when he began to brake….

(What kind of truck was it? I wonder. One of those big ugly rigs or something small like a delivery truck? I hadn’t seen the truck coming. I don’t think so. Hadn’t seen the driver through the windshield. I was not going to ask his name, anything about him.)

…any of it? Any information you can provide, Jenna. To aid us in our investigation. The question is why…

…why the car driven by your mother suddenly swerved into the railing to the right. Why did your mother suddenly lose control of her vehicle at the approximate midpoint of the bridge…?

(Lose control! Mom did not lose control! Fuck you, I hate you both.)

We don’t want to upset you further, Jenna. You’ve been through a terrible ordeal and you’ve been a very brave girl, but until the investigation is satisfactorily completed the insurance claims can’t be processed. The medical examiner has theorized…

If you could remember, Jenna! You are the only surviving witness to this terrible accident.

(No. There is no witness. No witness who survived.)

12

But I saw it. It was there. I saw.

I would not ask the investigators. I would not ask the investigators a single question. A pale chill mist like a fog had entered my brain. I was so exhausted, I was a raggedy old thrown-away cloth doll. I was not to blame, I had already forgotten why it might have been that I was to blame. I would not think of it. My head ached too much to think of it. My eyes ached from the blinding sun. My skin ached from the lacerations, the stitches. I had already forgotten the baby deer. Or had it been a dog? I don’t remember, maybe it had been a dog. A shadow shape like a deer, or a dog. In the lane ahead. A goose that had suddenly fluttered down out of a V formation of geese flying noisily above…I had already forgotten, I wasn’t to blame. I would not remember crying,
Mom! Watch out!

And all that followed then.

I would not! And nobody would know.

I would not ask the investigators if anything had been found in the wreckage because I already knew the answer since they had not said anything about finding the body of any creature in the rubble.

Not a baby deer, not a dog, not a goose. Not a thing.

13

“Jenna, I thought you knew? It’s Demerol.”

“Demerol—what?”

“To control your pain. It drips into your veins through this tube. It’s an analgesic, a painkiller.”

I was shocked. I guess I was pretty stupid, to be shocked.

Not to have known what anybody would know:
In the blue
was a damn drug high.

Maria explained that Demerol was one of the “opiate derivatives,” and I was being taken off of it, gradually. As my pain and discomfort lessened, Dr. Currin was cutting back on my prescription, which was why I’d been having trouble sleeping lately.

“The prescription has to be cut back gradually so that you don’t have a reaction, Jenna. But it can’t continue, because you’d become addicted. That’s the danger with opiate derivatives and why doctors have to be really careful prescribing them.”

I was still trying to comprehend this.
In the blue
had been just some neurochemical in my brain?
In the blue
, where I could fly and float and try to find Mom, where I could explain to Mom that truly I’d seen something on the bridge, truly I’d had a reason to scream and clutch at the steering wheel as (maybe) I had, where Mom and I could be together—
in the blue
didn’t exist?

Maria was saying, “It’s a drug that can be misused. Like all psychotropic drugs. Like heroin and cocaine. When you’re around these drugs you appreciate their power, and if you’re smart, you don’t want to try them, not ever.”

I tried to laugh. I was feeling really sick and scared.

Maria went on sounding like a school nurse, saying how nobody should experiment with these drugs because even if you don’t become addicted immediately, you start to compare how you feel with the rest of your life: “And nothing will ever be so good again.”

There was something wistful in Maria’s voice. I had to wonder how much she knew from personal experience.

Now that I was going off Demerol, I began to feel the difference.

In the raw
was how the world felt now. My feelings were raw, my thoughts were raw and hurtful like knife blades. Everything was becoming sharp edges and loud noises to make me flinch, and lights were so bright, I saw more than I wished to see everywhere I looked. And pain, more pain in my muscles, joints, bones, and brain.

In the blue
had been my place to hide, now
in the raw
there was nowhere to hide.

14

Nowhere to hide! Aunt Caroline was surprised, the angry tears leaking from my eyes.

Asked me why, and I said I want to go home.

Want to go home
now
.

“…my own room! I have my own room in my own house and I hate this room, I hate this bed, I hate this place, Mom and I have our own house
I want to go home
.”

Quickly Aunt Caroline took my hand, which was balled into a fist, and pried the fingers open, and slid her fingers through mine, and gripped my hand, tight.

“Oh, Jenna. I know.”

15

Good news: In three days I would be discharged from Tarrytown General Hospital.

Not-so-good-news: In three days I would be checked into the Tarrytown Rehabilitation Clinic to continue my physical therapy.

“…will have to be practical, Jenna. You understand the house will have to be sold.”

Aunt Katie, grimly satisfied. I hated it that the corners of Aunt Katie’s eyes crinkled the way Mom’s had. That her eyes, which were not beautiful eyes, were yet the same pale blue flecked with hazel that Mom’s beautiful eyes had been.

And there was Aunt Caroline. Her hair was dark blond, streaked wheat, Mom’s color before it had begun to go gray.

The three-bedroom Cape Cod clapboard house on Hillsdale Street, Tarrytown, New York. Two blocks inland from the Hudson River. This property, which constituted most of the estate of Lisbeth Abbott, would have to be sold quickly, I was told.

Aunt Katie’s husband explained. I avoided calling him Uncle Daniel whenever I could. The man was a tax lawyer, and his eyes glistened with interest only when talk was of money.

But Mom and I live there. That’s where Mom and I live.

I was feeling pretty shitty, not in a cooperative mood. I hadn’t been a good sport about having my thigh stuck that morning by a clumsy nurse’s aide trying to draw blood for the 5,000th blood test. I was
in the raw
big-time now. My voice sounded like sandpaper rubbed against sandpaper. I said that I intended to return to that house, and both my aunts protested I couldn’t be serious, I was only fifteen! A minor, not an adult.

Also, the property was “heavily” mortgaged.

Also, money was “badly needed” for hospital and medical expenses. And more, for the rehabilitation clinic. My mother’s medical insurance wouldn’t cover everything. And the insurance on her life, naming me the beneficiary, was not a very large sum.

I didn’t want to hear this! It was like they were criticizing Mom, when she wasn’t here to defend herself.

Patiently it was explained to me: My father was my legal guardian.

It was explained to me: So long as I was a minor, I had to do what my father wished.

“Well, I won’t. Nobody can make me.”

Aunt Caroline said, pleading, “Jenna, don’t be ridiculous. Your father has custody of you, now.”

“He does
not
. He doesn’t love me.”

My voice was hot, sullen, whiny. I sounded about ten years old.

“Of course he loves you, Jenna. You mustn’t think—”

“He doesn’t even know me. Not
me
.”

How could they disagree with this? It was an obvious fact.

The adults exchanged glances with one another. Poor Jenna!