The Sea-Wave (8 page)

M
y dad watches the news and reads the newspaper at the same time. If something on TV really interests him, he lowers his newspaper for a minute, then goes back to reading. One night, my dad lowered his newspaper, then he folded it up and set it on his lap. This made me curious so I set down
David Copperfield.

There was a wheelchair girl on TV wearing a birthday hat. It was just some fuzzy old footage. Then they showed an older man in handcuffs being taken into the court house. Her father. He'd smothered her. He claimed she was suffering and didn't want to be alive so he euthanized her. He was just a farmer, he said, not a criminal. His daughter wanted to die, she didn't tell him this, she couldn't communicate, but he just knew it. She had to take morphine, so he gave her all of it.

They showed the footage of the girl again. She was thin and opened her mouth a lot. She looked like me. Someone, probably her mother, held a cake in front of her, then blew the candles out for her. The girl just kept opening and closing her mouth. I couldn't tell if she looked happy or sad.

I looked over at my dad and he turned his head away from me quickly and picked up his newspaper. Then he disappeared inside it.

T
here's this wheeler Lurleen who despite her name is a lot more popular than me. Popular kids will sometimes talk to her if no one else is looking. Normal kids will push her if she's lagging behind. I'm late for class every day.

I sometimes want someone to push me but at the same time I know I'd be offended if they did. I'm independent and I'm not pathetic but that's different from being a tree or a statue. Pushing a wheeler isn't just helping them, it's saying that despite being the way you are I recognize you, that what all those spokes are sticking out of is clearly human. People don't realize how much that means.

Even though the old man stole me . . . Part of me feels grateful. He hasn't hurt me, he's scared me a lot. It's more attention than I've gotten in a long time. His stories are weird but like being read to. I've gotten used to falling asleep while he's talking, even though I'm never sure . . .

If I'll ever wake up again.

Y
ou will never understand me. Don't even pretend to understand me. The best you can do is sit in an armchair too long till your legs go numb. Not being able to walk is the least part of being a wheeler. The chair is just furniture. It doesn't matter.

There's a thought cloud around me, of my own thoughts and other people's thoughts. There's what I think about me, and what I want to think, and what people think about me, and what they tell me they think. It's all different, it mixes together. It's a head storm, and all that blowing storming is what makes me a pretty complicated kid.
I
have trouble understanding me. So you better, too.

I
guess I hate myself. I'm a snob because I hate myself. Being an advanced reader makes me pretty superior. Reading
David Copperfield
. If I liked myself I'd like other people and I wouldn't gaze down from my wheelchair like it was Castle Dracula.

I'd make a good writer. Most writers are snobs and failures. My cousin the writer is a snob and a failure. No one in my family hears of her books or reads them. She calls them goons, and swings her cape over her shoulder. She tilts her head even higher. She looks at the ceiling and walks into the wall. Even I hate her.

Most wheelers have high self-esteem. They can't help it because they're buried in shit. You're just so heroic, soldierly, unique. You have to mentally get out of your wheelchair and look down from the chandelier at you and your wheelchair covered in shit. Then you'll understand you aren't brave and so great because your legs don't work and you're pasted to a stupid chair. You're just a dumb metallic kid and your family steps into you like a mine car and rides you down to hell. They get to die then but you sit there in fire and suffer.

I'm a twelve-year-old kid.

Shit.

T
he old man gave me some cheese from his pocket. I don't generally eat cheese because it makes me constipated. Usually once a month I have a bowel crisis and my parents take me to St. James. This one time when he saw me coming, the fat orderly, he rolled his eyes and turned to the nurses and said: “Oh great, it's the constipated broccoli kid.” Then the nurses all laughed. I could've died right there, so easily.

The cheese was covered in both mould and pocket fuzz. I ate it anyway. I was starving to death.

I
t's beautiful out, today. It's crisp but it's sunny. I'm still wondering about that skeleton. I couldn't tell because the old man didn't stop but it looked like a femur and a ribcage.

A girl from town went missing. Caitlyn something. People formed search parties and looked for days but never found her. I always wondered what happened to her. It haunted me because she was my age.

Coyote or fox bones, probably.

The old man is curled up on the grass now, napping. He twitches a lot in his sleep. My aunt had a cat that slept in a vase and meowed to get out. Cats are perfect creatures, she'd say, as she shook it out of the vase like ketchup.

God, I feel so agitated.

W
e used to have a maid, Rachel. I wasn't sure why I initially hated her, but I think it's because a maid is someone you pay to do the things you really should be doing yourself, and it makes you feel bad about yourself, so you treat them badly. I couldn't really treat her badly, but my parents treated her like shit. She looked forward to cleaning my room, I think, because I was usually in it, and my parents acted differently when I was around. Like if they raised their voices a thunderbolt might split me in half, and then they'd have
two
wheelchair daughters.

All I ever really wanted was for them to treat me like a real kid. To yell at me, punish me. When I looked at my dad with eyes that said: “
Dad
,” he looked back with eyes that said: “May I help you to your room?” Or: “Can I be of any assistance?” Like I was a visiting aunt from Montana.

Rachel teased me and scolded me. I didn't like it at the time, I wasn't used to it, but thinking back . . .

She read to me a few times. I'm a great reader, but some books are a challenge to hold open. Once I was reading, she was dusting something, I was really struggling with the binding, and she just snatched the book out of my hands and finished the chapter out loud. I was preparing to have a fit, but then surprisingly I liked listening. I missed it. She read to me a few more times, after that. Reading is a kind of love your parents give you and when they stop giving it there's just not as much love. It's like that with a lot of things, I guess. People really hug their small kids a lot. There's a little less love every day.

Dad fired Rachel last year. Not because of anything she did or said, even though whenever anything went missing he blamed her, then didn't apologize when it turned up under the couch, or behind the potted plant. It was just the recession and everything.

I miss Rachel, I guess. It's not like she was my Pegotty or anything. But when I read
David Copperfield
now, I read it in her voice, it's her voice in my brain telling me the story.

She was probably my only friend.