Wrecked (4 page)

And the two of us, blue-lipped and drenched, worn out and determined, would yell over and over and over, wave after wave after wave, “Stop! We command you to stop!”

THEY LET ME SLEEP LATE ON MONDAY. I SLEEP HARDER AND
deeper than usual. When I wake up, I’m so groggy it takes a while for me to figure out that the heaviness in my blood and the dread in my chest are because two nights ago I killed somebody.
Cameron Polk is dead
. And Ellen. Jack.

My eye is killing me. I sit up in bed, peel off the spaghetti strainer, and reach for the eyedrops. It’s hard. I miss a few times with each bottle, and the liquid drips coldly down my cheek.

Things are clanging downstairs. Silverware drawer opening and closing, dishes dropped into the sink. I press the shield back into place, drag myself out of bed, and pull on jeans and a zip-up sweatshirt.

My parents are in the kitchen drinking coffee and wiping instant-oatmeal dust off the table.

“Don’t you have classes?” I ask my mother. I rub my left eye. It has tons of crust in the corners. Gross.

She reaches to hug me. “Never on Mondays.” She holds on for a long time, careful of my right eye. It’s strange but good, like when she held me in the hospital bed. It’s not that we don’t get along, so much as we’re not that close, I guess. The truth is, before yesterday I don’t remember the last time we touched. “Just office hours,” she’s saying now, sipping at her mug. “Which I’ve cancelled.”

She teaches Web design and computer skills at the community college. She always gets the highest marks on her student evaluation forms at the end of each semester. She has Jack or me look at them and give her the results because she says it’s only a matter of time before her luck changes and they all start to hate her.

I wander over to the kitchen table, near my father. “I thought Russell was incompetent.”

My dad works in finance. He invests other people’s money, and he has this male secretary who he doesn’t much like and who he thinks is going to accidentally bankrupt the clients and ruin us all forever.

“Russell is incompetent,” my father says. “Which is why I’m going to work.” He checks his watch. “In about five minutes. I just wanted to see you first.”

“Here I am,” I say. And then I want to cry, but my father doesn’t like crying, so I look away. Still sitting, he pulls me in by the waist and doesn’t say anything, which makes not crying harder.

“Why don’t you just fire Russell?” I ask into the air over his head. It’s an old question. It feels good to ask it, like everything’s normal, like today’s just another day. My father releases me.

“Because everybody’s incompetent,” he says. “And I’d rather deal with familiar idiocy than with unfamiliar idiocy.” It’s what he always answers, and it helps me pretend that my hands aren’t trembling and that I’m not sore all over and that I didn’t kill anyone.

“How does your eye feel?” my mother asks. Which begins to ruin my pretending.

“Like it has a toothache,” I tell her.

“We leave for the ophthalmologist in half an hour.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Then we’ll see if you can visit Ellen.” Now my legs are trembling a little too. I sit down and cross my legs and arms, try to hold everything still.

“Can I go wake up Jack?” I ask.

“No,” they both say, right at the same time.

Dr. Pluto is all business.

“Hyphema,” he tells me and my mom. He looks more like a football player than an ophthalmologist. His whole head is shaved, and he’s huge. When he puts my face in this vise, his hand palms my head the way I’d palm a tennis ball.

“Are you still here?” I ask the room. Because I can’t turn my head now.

“Behind you,” my mom says from behind me and to the left. I didn’t care if she came in or not. She wanted to, though.

First Dr. Pluto uses this machine to shine a vertical yellow light right at my eye.

“This is called a slit lamp,” he tells me, even though I didn’t ask. When he’s done with that, he puts a drop in my eye, tells me the next procedure won’t hurt, and fiddles with the vise a little.

“Does that feel okay?” he asks.

“I guess,” I say. I mean, my head is in a vise.

Now it’s a different machine. It moves closer and closer and closer, until it touches my eyeball really fast and there’s this beautiful bright blue light everywhere, and then it’s done.

“I’ll need to see her every day to monitor the pressure and to make certain there’s no rebleeding,” Dr. Pluto tells my mother while she helps me get the strainer back on. “A hyphema is really just blood in the anterior chamber. It’s a tear in the eye, probably from the air bag.”

My mom asks him something, but I stop paying attention.

The air bag. The smell of new plastic.
“Hooow looong, hoow hong, hoow loong …”
Screaming, stopped.

Ellen’s mom owns a women’s clothing store called Cinnamon Toast. According to the tags of speckled brown paper on each item, Cinnamon Toast specializes in flowing styles and natural fibers. Usually Mrs. Gerson is wearing something in flowing style and natural fiber, and today is the same as always. Muted green slacks and a pale lavender blouse. She reaches for my face as soon as I walk into the fifth-floor waiting room. She cups my cheeks in her palms.

“That thing is awful,” she tells me, meaning the shield, and she pulls me into lavender. “I’m so glad you’re all right.” She smells like Ellen’s house: lemons and perfume. It’s nice but embarrassing to be in her arms, so I ease away after a second.

“Are you all right?” Ellen’s father asks, holding me, straight armed, by the shoulders and staring at my face. Aching in my eye. Aching in my throat.

“Yeah,” I tell him. His eyes are swollen and bloodshot. “How’s Ellen?”

“Well,” Mrs. Gerson answers in this bright, fake voice. “She’s got a tube in her mouth to help her breathe, a tube in her chest to reinflate her lung, an IV for antibiotics, an IV for pain, a catheter to help her pass water, a cast on her leg, and nothing for her ribs. They’ll heal on their own.”

“A collapsed lung is bad, right?” I say. Mrs. Gerson’s attitude is confusing me. It doesn’t match Mr. Gerson’s face.

“She’s going to be fine, Anna,” Mrs. Gerson tells me. I see a nurse behind that long counter glance up and try to make eye contact with her, and I see her refuse to make eye contact back. That starts me shaking so hard both of the Gersons notice. Ellen’s mom takes my hands and rubs them.

“She’s going to be fine,” she says again, loud.

“I’m really sorry” My teeth are chattering again. My eye radiates ache through my head. “I’m really, really sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Mr. Gerson says. “They say there was a tree branch. Cameron must have swerved to avoid it.”

A tree branch. I hadn’t heard that yet. But if Cameron swerved to avoid a tree branch, couldn’t I have swerved to avoid Cameron? I start to think about the alcohol and how drunk I was at first, and then how drunk Ellen was.

“Ellen doesn’t have a drinking problem or anything,” I tell them. “I mean, sometimes this year she would get pretty drunk at a party, but only twice.” Oh my God. She’s going to kill me for telling them this.

“Okay,” her father says to me. His red eyes start welling up.

“We were always careful, though,” I go on. I can’t seem to
help myself. “We always were with each other, and we never drank with anybody we didn’t know.” Well. Almost never.

“Okay,” Mr. Gerson says again. His eyes are all wet, but he doesn’t cry.

He works for the same bank as my dad, only in some other area. Something higher up, I think. I don’t know. They don’t ever see each other at work. They have totally different responsibilities. And even though Mr. Gerson’s got some big job and isn’t a teller, I suddenly imagine how calm he’d be during a robbery. Some guy with a stocking over his head would be pointing the gun right at Mr. Gerson, and Mr. Gerson would just face him squarely, all steady.

“And she doesn’t do drugs or anything, and it’s not like she needs to drink when we go out. She doesn’t do it at every party.” Which, now that I hear myself saying it, might be sort of a lie.

“Okay,” Mr. Gerson says a third time.

“Don’t be mad at her,” I tell them. When I say that, Mrs. Gerson starts to nod, but then her face collapses like Ellen’s lung, and she’s crying, and seeing Mrs. Gerson afraid is almost as shocking as Cameron Polk being dead.

“It’s okay,” Mr. Gerson tells her. He turns from me to face her. “It’s okay”

He sounds like that policeman from the accident:
“Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.”
But it’s not okay. Nothing is okay.

The Gersons let me see her for ten minutes. They leave the room for five.

“I called you,” I tell Ellen. That whooshing sound would put me to sleep if it weren’t paired with all those tubes and things,
snaking right into her body or disappearing under the blanket. Today her left leg is over the covers. There’s a bright white cast from just above her knee all the way to her toes.

“I left a message. Actually, I left eight. Did you get them?” I know she didn’t because cell phones aren’t allowed in hospitals. There’s no phone in here. She can’t talk anyway, with that tube in her mouth.

Her hair is dirty. It looks like somebody brushed it, but it really needs a shampoo.

“Pretty soon it’s not going to be cell phones anymore,” I say. She makes a sound, and I lean forward to listen better, but then she stops. I notice this other machine. A squarish clear plastic box with water in it. The water is making all these bubbles. I can’t figure out what it’s for.

“It’s going to be these little chips that get implanted behind our ears. I read about it just now, while I was waiting to have my eye checked out. They didn’t have any
People
magazines, so I had to read
Scientific American
instead. Actually, I didn’t really read it. Mostly just the headline. Things are blurry up close with my right eye. But I’m allowed to use my left one. And TV is okay.”

Ellen opens her eyes, and I move to where it seems like they’re focusing, but by the time I adjust my position, they’re closed again.

“No school for a week,” I say. “I’m supposed to stay really still, and I have to wear this shield thing when I’m asleep and in a car.” Now she moans. Definitely a moan. She moves her head a little. “El?” I go. She’s still again. “I’m supposed to try not to sneeze,” I say. “If I sneeze, it might tear inside my eye again, and then everything gets worse. Only, once you have to sneeze, it’s impossible to stop yourself, you know?” She opens
her eyes and looks straight at me. “El?” She stays looking at me. “Hi, Ellen,” I tell her. I move closer. She keeps her eyes open for a second longer, and then she’s gone again.

“I was thinking I should send Cameron’s parents a letter or something,” I say, listening to the whooshing and watching the bubbles in that plastic box. “That’s what you think I should do, right?” I wait, and I hear the screaming, stopped, and try to shake it out of my mind. “My father is being slightly less of an asshole.” I walk nearer to her bed. I touch her cast, by the ankle. It’s hard and cold. “I’m going to write something on this,” I tell her. I look around for a pen. There’s one attached to a clipboard hanging from a peg on the door. I slip it off and think about what to write. I think and think and think, and I’m still thinking when the Gersons walk back in.

“I can’t think of anything to write,” I tell them when they see me at the edge of the bed with the ballpoint in my hand.

“How could you?” Mrs. Gerson says as if it’s an argument and she’s taking my side. She hands me a cup of coffee. I don’t really drink coffee, but I like the heat in my palms. “For God’s sake.”

My mom and I get lunch out after the hospital, and she keeps touching my hand or my arm or some part of me, which is still so different from our usual, and we don’t say a whole lot, which is the same as our usual, and she drives really, really slowly on the way home.

We don’t get back until about three. Jack is in the family room, watching TV. Not watching a movie on DVD. Watching an actual television show. I walk in, my chest hot and pounding, and then I notice Rob is here.

“Hi,” I say.

Rob nods. He’s not a big talker.

“Thanks for coming over, Robert,” my mother says, stopping in the family-room doorway. She stares at Jack, slides her palm along my arm, and then walks away.

“Why are you guys watching TV?” I ask. I can see the TV fine with my left eye. The throbbing is still pretty bad, though. It passes through my head like a steady wave.

Rob shrugs.

“You hate TV” I tell Jack. He picks up the remote and aims it at the screen. The TV goes black. Now my brother looks at me. I want to say things, but it’s hard with Rob here. He’s staring at my eye. He points to it and tilts his head.

“It’s called a shield,” I say.

“Why are your teeth chattering?” Rob asks next. His voice is really deep. I always forget how deep it is.

“They’re not chattering,” I lie, and then I clamp my jaw tight to stop them from doing it.

Jack’s still looking at me. I guess I’m going to have to ignore Rob.

“Jack,” I go. “I…”

He just looks.

“I didn’t have time. I mean … I didn’t even see her when …” Rob’s face is turning red. Jack’s face stays exactly the same. Why doesn’t Rob just leave?

“Jack,” I try again. But the words won’t come. Jack looks back at the still TV “I’m glad you’re okay,” he says. His voice is as blank as the screen.

• • •

Cameron was good for us. I didn’t get it then, but even from the first time I really met her, she helped Jack and me. It was just some school-day afternoon, right after they started going out. It wasn’t any big deal.

“Oh my God,” I yelled, throwing my hands over my ears. The kitchen looked like a war zone. “What happened?” Pots and pans and flour and chocolate splotches and bunched-up dishrags and eggshell slime all over the place. Plus the smell of something burned, and what looked like soil sprinkled all over the kitchen floor, and some horrendous, unbelievably earsplitting music.

“Hi!” Cameron called to me. She was on her knees trying to sweep up the soil with the edges of her hands. “I’m Cameron!” As if I didn’t know. “You must be Anna!”