Dancing on the Edge (16 page)

She used incense and wore robes and saw auras. She could go into a trance—
People see what they want to see and don't see what they don't want to see
. No! She could contact the dead. She had Rasmus, her spirit guide—
How do you know?
—
It's all illusions, magic tricks
. No! I slammed my miracle notebook shut. I remembered the day in Grandaddy Opal's room. He showed me a book, a science book, a book of facts. It said there were black holes and wormholes and that space and time could bend in on themselves in a black hole. It said it. It is the truth. It was all true. It had to be true. I climbed on my bed and faced the shelf of wig heads. “It's true. It's all true,” I said to the heads. “You
can
contact the dead. Gigi can. Gigi does. She contacted Mama that night. Mama told us Dane melted. No—Mama told us Dane was gone, and—and Gigi said he melted. But I saw it. He was gone. He did melt. See? See, it's true. It's all real. And I created love potions. They were real. They worked. It was real. I'm real!”

The wig heads just stayed there lined up on the shelves, the backs of their heads to me. They didn't believe me. I knew they didn't. I jumped off the bed. “I'll prove it. I'll show you—stupid wig heads!”

I ran barefoot out to the garage. I had to make several trips to get all the candle bottles. I pulled them out of the bags and set them up all over the room, leaving a space in the center for me. I lit the candles and stood among them in Dane's bathrobe and waited to melt.

“Come on, melt!”

I waited. I didn't even feel warm. How was I going to melt if I didn't get warm? I moved the candle bottles in closer together, closer to me. The wig heads were waiting. Everyone was. The kids at school, Gigi, Grandaddy Opal, Aunt Casey. They were waiting for me to prove myself, prove I was real.

I bent my knees so that the bottom of Dane's bathrobe hovered just above the flames of the bottles surrounding me. I waited. Yes, I was getting warmer. I closed my eyes and bent my knees just a little bit further.

 

 

 

 

“
The Truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.”

—E
MILY
D
ICKINSON

I
DON'T REMEMBER
much about my stay in the hospital, not those early days, at least. I don't remember how I got there. All I remember is sitting in a silver tub of water with my legs floating up at me like a couple of dead fish. I felt like a fish. I remember that, thinking I was a slice of haddock or cod. Gigi used to cook a lot of fish, white slabs of it on a platter with their shiny pink and silver backs. She would dredge each slab through her special egg and flour mixtures and fry them up crisp the way Dane liked it. My legs were frying. That's what it felt like. As if every day someone were dropping them into the deep fat and frying them up crisp. The doctor said I had second- and third-degree burns. I remember nodding when he said it. I remember sitting in that silver tub, staring down at my legs and thinking,
Yes, my legs are all burned up
, but I couldn't remember how they got that way, what had happened.

The nurses didn't like me to see the burns. They said I was already too traumatized and it was affecting the rate of healing. They wanted me to scream out in pain, but I didn't scream.

I learned that bits of rayon material had burned into some of the deeper wounds. The doctors rolled me into surgery to remove those bits and apply skin grafts. Then they put goop and dressings on my legs, and bulky pressure bandages on the grafts, and strung my legs up in the air so they would heal.

Gigi came to see me after my skin-grafting surgery. I pretended to be asleep. She took charge. She told the nurses what to do, ordering more fluids and painkillers even while I slept. She asked the doctors when I'd be able to leave and told them I could leave sooner. She had a place she could take me for healing. I'd heal faster with her, she said.

Aunt Casey came a lot, three times a day. I'd never seen her so often. She'd stare down at me with her red and swollen eyes, searching my eyes, my face, for some kind of answer. She'd talk to me, her voice tight, constricted. She asked how I was doing, if I needed anything. She told me I could scream if the pain got to be too much. It would be all right to scream, she said, just like the nurses, but I didn't scream. I didn't speak. I don't know why. I just lost the desire. I didn't speak to anyone.

They had a TV in my room. I had to share it with the patient in the bed next to me, a girl who had been thrown through the windshield of her car. She didn't watch TV. She always had too many people around her bed, talking with her, laughing.

The nurses didn't know that I had never seen a whole television show. They warned me that most of the shows were already in reruns for the season, but it was all new to me.

Miss Emmaline came once when Aunt Casey was in the room and said in a voice the whole floor could hear that Grandaddy Opal couldn't come because he was feeling a little under the weather himself. She said for me not to worry, that he would be better real soon and he couldn't wait to see his girl. Then she and Aunt Casey went out into the hallway to whisper, but Miss Emmaline wasn't good at whispering.

I heard her say that Grandaddy Opal was back in the hospital—third time in four months. She said they thought the bypass surgery had gone well but he wasn't recovering the way he should have. Then Aunt Casey spoke and I didn't hear what she said, but I understood anyway. Needing people too much just drove them away. Loving someone did something to their hearts. My need for Grandaddy Opal was too much and it gave him a heart attack. I was killing him. I drifted off to sleep and Miss Emmaline was gone when I woke up. I remembered what she had said about Grandaddy Opal, and I decided I wouldn't need him anymore. I couldn't think about him anymore.

I remember Uncle Toole coming to see me and he didn't know what to do besides stand there and change the channels on the television.

I started getting better. The nurses removed the pressure bandages. The oozing had stopped and they changed my dressings on the milder burns less frequently. I was down to taking painkillers only twice a day. I thought I'd be leaving soon.

Then a man came to see me. He was tall. He had to duck to walk through the door. His legs were so long they didn't look as if they had been attached to his body correctly; his feet turned in slightly when he walked and his joints looked loose, as if he could stick his foot behind his head if he wanted to. He had on jeans with a shirt and tie and wore running shoes. He loped over to my bed and took my hand and shook it.

“Hi, Miracle, I'm Dr. DeAngelis. Mind if I sit down?”

He leaned forward over, me, waiting for an answer. I stared at his hands. They were large and wide and hairy. He wore a wedding band.

“Yes, I heard you're not speaking. I don't know if you mind if I sit down or not, so since I want to stay, I'll have a seat.”

He pulled up a chair, sat down, and propped his long feet up on the end of my bed.

“I know your aunt Casey. I lectured at the university last month. She was there. Very intelligent. Very nice.”

He paused and studied me a few seconds. He was watching my hands. I tucked them under the covers.

“I saw pictures of your legs. They're healing quite nicely, but there's a lot of scarring, isn't there? Maybe down the road a little you can have a plastic surgeon help you with those scars.” He took his feet off the bed and leaned forward so his head was near my shoulder. “I'm a doctor of scars, too, Miracle, only they're the kind of scars you can't see. They're inside you. I'm going to help you, if you'll let me. You see those wounds you have inside, they haven't healed quite as nicely as your legs.” He sat back in his seat, and I stared at the cup of water on the tray beside my bed.

“In a couple of days you're going to be transferred to another building called The Cedars, although I don't know why, there are no cedar trees. But I think you'll like it lots better. You don't have to stay in bed all day. You'll have things to do. You'll take classes and catch up on your schoolwork, and there'll be group therapy sessions where you'll be with other teens with similar problems . . .”

I looked up.

“Oh, you don't think anyone else has problems like yours. Well, that's what's so nice about group. You discover you're not alone. There are people out there who have the same feelings you do. You'll get to share your feelings. Maybe what you have to share will help somebody else. Maybe you'll hear things that will help you and those scars will start to melt away.”

He paused again, letting his information sink in. His voice was soft for a man. Not like a woman's, just soft, as if he didn't want to disturb anyone. And he had an accent. He was from New York or New Jersey. My dance teacher, Susan, was from New York.

He touched my shoulder, cupped it in his big hand. “You'll visit with me several times a week as well. I'm looking forward to getting to know you better, Miracle. We'll talk, maybe play some games, draw some pictures, that sort of thing. And I'll have some sessions with your aunt and perhaps some of your other family members.”

I started to shiver.

Dr. DeAngelis squeezed my shoulder. “It'll be all right, Miracle. No surprises. I'm here today so you'll know what's going to happen. It may be scary, even painful at times, tearing through all that old scar tissue, I won't kid you, but I and the staff, we're all there for you. We're there to help you.”

He stood up and patted my head. I pulled away. “I'll see you in a few days. If you have any questions or want to talk to me before then you just let them know and I'll come over as soon as I can.”

I watched him walk away, ducking back through the door. I stopped shivering when I heard the sound of his running shoes at the far end of the hall.

A
UNT
C
ASEY
stood by my bed and picked at her fingernail polish the next time she came to see me. Her eyes were clear, but they kept moving while she talked to me, glancing at the windows, the walls, my legs, the floor, anything but me. She said she wanted to explain about seeing Dr. DeAngelis, about staying in the hospital.

“I know it's . . . weird . . . you know, talking to a stranger and all. I mean, no one in the family's ever done that—talked about problems with a stranger, I don't think. We don't even talk to each other . . . really . . . so talking with a stranger . . . I know, it's weird.” Aunt Casey stopped picking at her nail polish and rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if she were cold.

“At work, clients talk to me all the time—you know? They tell me all kinds of personal stuff while I'm doing their hair, even if it's their first time in. But it's weird being on the other side, being the one who's doing the talking, taking someone else's advice. But Miracle”—Aunt Casey glanced at my shoulders—“this family's got too many secrets. We need help sorting it all out, the secrets, and . . . and problems. In my textbooks there are all these case studies, I mean really strange cases, like a man who can't find his head and this lady who thinks she's a circus horse, and you know, they get cured! They go home and lead normal healthy lives. All these wacko cases, so just think how easy it'll be for us. So . . . so, it's not a bad thing. I mean, you didn't do anything bad. It's not a punishment or anything. I'm not . . . I'm just wanting to help you.” Aunt Casey frowned, her gaze settling on my bedcovers. “It's the right thing to do.” She nodded. “It's the right thing to do.”

 

T
HE NEXT DAY
was moving day. I was going to another wing of the hospital, a locked wing they called the yellow unit. Aunt Casey said she'd go with me and planned to come by at two-thirty in the afternoon. At two-fifteen, Gigi showed up with a hospital attendant who was holding the back of an empty wheelchair.

Gigi bustled into the room. “Come on,” she said, gesturing to the chair. “Hop in, it's time to go.”

“But what about Aunt Casey, wasn't she . . .”

Gigi waved her hand. “That's all changed. Now hop in the chair, you've got to leave here riding one of these so you don't fall and sue the hospital. Come on. Come on.”

I shuffled to the chair, with Gigi beckoning to me the whole time, urging me to hurry.

“Good, good,” she said when I was finally in the seat and the orderly was rolling me out the door. We rode the elevator to the main level and then they wheeled me down the corridor to the exit. That's when we ran into Aunt Casey.

“Where are you going?” Aunt Casey said, blocking the exit, her hands on her hips.

Gigi stepped in front of my chair so that I was looking at the back of her robe. “We're going home, what do you think? Now get out of the way.”

“She's not going home,” Aunt Casey said. “It's already been arranged.”

“Well, unarrange it. How can you think of locking Miracle up in a cage and letting her be electrocuted?”

“Gigi!” Aunt Casey leaned sideways beyond Gigi's body and said to me, “It's not like that at all.” Then to Gigi she said, “Stop trying to scare her. She needs help. We
all
do.”

“That's right, and I can cure her in two days,” Gigi said, stepping around to the back of my chair and bumping the orderly out of the way so she could hold the chair herself. “She doesn't need some prying, nosy doctor getting into our business. All those silly questions he asked me. It's not his business, and I told him so.”

“Ah! That's what it is.” Aunt Casey nodded. “You're afraid she'll learn the truth. You're afraid . . .”

Gigi raised her voice. “You've never liked this family. Never! You never liked Miracle. You only stick around because you feel guilty. It's guilt. It's all your fault. I should think you wouldn't get within a hundred miles of a shrink. You want Miracle to learn the truth? I can tell her the truth.”