Space

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  Now, instead of ambulance attendants, there were nurses. They looked scared, and suddenly I was, too. When one of them told another to cut my shirt off, I started to cry. It was a bright green Hang Ten shirt from Ron Jon’s Surf Shop on Cocoa Beach. I had begged for months to convince my mother to take me there to buy it, and I had worn nothing else since. My mother had already washed it twice that week. I asked the nurse to let me sit up so she could pull it off over my head, but she ignored me. I heard the curved scissors cut through the cloth.

  I was so upset I made the mistake of taking a deep breath, or trying to. The pain made everything in the room go black for a second, like when you flicked off the TV then turned it right back on. “Please,” I said, “give me something to kill the pain.” This seemed like a line from a movie or TV, and it embarrassed me to say it, but once I started I couldn’t seem to stop. “Something to kill the pain.” I saw the stricken look on my mother’s face, on my father’s, and I wanted to shut up but I didn’t. “Please …”

  A doctor leaned over me, put his hand on my forehead, and brushed back my hair, which was full of sand from the Mizes’ backyard. He had a dark tan and a beard like a sultan. “Jesse,” he said, looking at my chart. “Glad to meet you. I’m Dr. Barsamian.” I nodded as best I could. “Listen, my Jewel, we can’t give you anything for the pain until we’re sure you don’t have a concussion. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. He unstrapped the back board but left it in place under me on the table.

  “I don’t want to move you any more than we have to, so I’ve sent for a portable X-ray machine, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He patted my head. “Good girl,” he said.

  The X-ray woman shooed everyone else out of the room and put on a lead apron. She inched the cold X-ray film under my back. “Take a deep breath,” she said. I took a shallow one. “Let it out. Stop breeeaaathing.” The machine hummed, and then the woman came forward to replace the film and we did it again. My head, my neck, my back, my legs.

  I lay there worrying, thinking about how this fall changed the future, my mental list of what’s next. I almost certainly would not have to go to school tomorrow. Even if Mr. Martin talked to my mother about my missing math homework, she would not get mad at me, not after this. That much was obvious. Did this also mean I would not get to play Mary Mary Quite Contrary in the spring PTA play? I had just been cast in this small part, and my mother had already bought yards of flowered gingham to sew for my costume. Carol was to play Cinderella. The kids in these plays got excused from a lot of classes. I’d tried out for the Christmas play, but my teachers said they thought it would be too distracting. Getting okayed for this one seemed like a good sign. Even as I worried, I realized these were not very big things to be worrying about, but maybe the mind works that way. You die and your last thought is, I guess we won’t be going to Howard Johnson’s for all-u-can-eat clams.

  I lost track of what was going on. Dr. Barsamian came back and ran a spiked wheel, like the one my mother used to mark dress patterns, up and down the inside of my foot. Can you feel that, Jesse? That? I could. At some point I got moved from emergency into a room for the night. A sign over the bed said PATIENT MUST BE FLAT ON BACK AT ALL TIMES.

  Dr. Barsamian wanted me near the nurses’ station, and so I was not on the children’s ward. In spite of this, my roommate was a two-year-old girl. She had smashed her elbow falling from a dresser. Her mother explained to my mother that the thumb they had up in traction was the one she usually sucked. The girl screamed and screamed, looking at the thumb dangling unreachable above her. After a while, my father left, then my mother, and then the girl’s mother. The girl kept crying, her voice hoarser but just as loud.

  Even though I had finally been given a whole lot of codeine, I couldn’t sleep. I kept losing track of time, thinking: When was the last time I breathed? Panicking when I couldn’t remember. Each moment was like waking up from a very deep nap on a hot summer afternoon and having to fight to remember where you were and who you were. Then the next moment, it started all over again. The girl stopped crying for a while, then woke and started again.

  When I did start to drift off, I tried to turn on my side, which is how I usually slept, only to catch myself. Lying on my back, I felt vulnerable. I felt like I still couldn’t breathe. Sometime during the night I got sick, maybe from the codeine, maybe from the shock. It is pretty terrible to have to lie flat on your back and throw up. I was afraid I would choke. A big black nurse, Mrs. Moore, brought a little kidney-shaped pan for me to throw up in and held my head to the side while I did. Her palms on my forehead were cool and pink. The little girl was finally asleep, making restless, sucking sounds.

  10

  The next morning I found out I had collapsed a lung, broken a few ribs, and turned five of the vertebrae in my lower back into so much bone powder. But I was very lucky. Because of the way I fell, my spine was intact. Dr. Barsamian decided that, instead of putting me in a body cast, he would have me fitted for a back brace. This was something new and had never been done on such a young patient before. Talking to me about it, he was clearly excited.

  The man who came to fit me for the brace was also enthusiastic. It would be the smallest brace he’d ever made. My chest was only twenty-five inches around. After he took measurements, he asked me what color vinyl I wanted the pads to be. “Pink?” he suggested. I shook my head. “No, white,” he said. “White’s the ticket for a little lady like you.” After the first night, I was not in pain. My lung popped back into shape. My back never hurt at all. I had a hard time believing anything was wrong with me. I felt guilty, like I was faking it, like I had held the thermometer to the lightbulb and convinced my mother I had a fever too high to go to school. Maybe this was why, even when I needed to pee really badly, I didn’t like to call the nurse. My favorite nurse, Mrs. Moore, the one who held my head the first night, told me I had the wrong attitude. “Honey,” she said, shaking her head, “squeaky wheels get all the grease.”

  After it became clear I would be in the hospital for at least three weeks, my mother quit the teaching job she had only just gotten. Now the principal had to find a replacement for her, too. At first she sat in the chair next to my bed all day every day. I didn’t have much to say and, it turned out, neither did she. We tried not to look at each other, but there wasn’t much else to look at. I was uncomfortable realizing how uncomfortable we were. So I read or napped. She bought a needlework kit and sat stitching a pattern in green and yellow yarn. Though she used to make all our clothes when we were little, I had never seen my mother do anything even vaguely craftsy. After quitting her teaching job, it seemed like she didn’t know how to fill her time.

  After a while, she came only in the afternoons, each day a little later. I found myself listening for the sound of her heels clicking down the hall—the nurses all wore silent rubber soles. Her coming broke up the day, but mostly I wanted her to arrive, not to stay.

  In the evening, my father came and we watched TV. Watching TV was what I usually did with Dad, so this felt more normal than sitting all day with my mother. Sometimes Dad got Cokes from the machine in the visitors’ lounge. Then it was almost like a party.

  The one person I wanted to see, I couldn’t. Carol wasn’t allowed. The hospital rule was NO VISITORS UNDER 16. So at twelve, Carol wasn’t nearly old enough. Neither were David and Marly, my neighborhood friends, or my new school friends Mark Lish or Joanna Fosbleck. The closest they got was when my mother delivered a big brown envelope of letters from my fifth-grade classmates. Letticia Fuller, a shy black girl whose desk was near mine, had glued a seashell to her letter, and this made the envelope mysteriously heavy, made the letters impossible to keep in a stack. Sorry you fell from a tree, they said with few variations. So few, I suspected Miss Davis of writing this line on the board. Some of my classmates admitted, I am writing you because the teacher is making us. Not even Mark or Joanna had much original to say. Eddie Faubert, a boy who had never said
a word to me, was the most honest. He wrote, You sure must be stupid to fall out of a tree.

  At first, I was fed by IV. Clear liquid ran from a glass bottle down a tube into a needle that was stuck in my arm. The nurse told me the liquid was mostly just sugar water, and I imagined that it tasted like flat 7UP. After a few days I got to have Jell-O and real 7UP. After about a week, I got to eat soft foods like scrambled eggs and mashed potatoes. One night as a special treat, I got to eat my dinner on a gurney out in the hall by the nurses’ station. I was mostly moving my meal around on my plate when, over the intercom, a woman complained from her room.

  “Is this lamb? It says in my chart I can’t eat lamb,” she said. I had never had lamb, which was not one of the things my mother cooked, so it was a good thing she was not asking me.

  “It’s roast beef, Mrs. Wallace,” the nurse at the desk said.

  “Then how come it’s gray?”

  “Beats me,” the nurse said and snapped off the intercom.

  People started to send get-well gifts, and to keep them from sending stupid things, I made up a list of the Hardy Boy mysteries I didn’t have and gave that to my mother. Soon I had a complete set. Before I broke my back, I had read only a couple of Hardy Boys, ones that I’d inherited from Carol. When I first learned to read, I made a big point of fighting the school librarian’s restrictions on which books we could check out. I didn’t want to read picture books. Finally my father sent a note, and the librarian had to give in.

  Freed from the ABC shelves, I began to pick out books by their size alone, the fatter the better. I had read a book about a blind pony set out West on a butte and had no idea what that was or that it wasn’t pronounced but. I read Les Miserables and didn’t have any idea how to pronounce that. At some point, I don’t know exactly when, I found myself checking out fat books but not reading them. I would just keep them for a while and pretend I had read them. I told my father I’d read Moby Dick.

  In the hospital, though, I had to hold the book in the air over my head to read, and that ruled out anything heavy. So it was the perfect excuse for light reading like the Hardy Boys. I even read a Nancy Drew someone mistakenly bought for me. I disapproved of her. When she got into trouble she always had to be rescued by some boy.

  I developed a big crush on Joe, the younger Hardy Boy, though basically he was indistinguishable from Frank, the older brother, except for his blond hair. I especially liked in The Mystery of the Hidden Cove when Frank saw Joe unconscious on the rocks of the bay far below. I read that scene over and over. Maybe it was just that falling from a height was something Joe and I had in common, but I sensed something exciting about Joe’s blond prone body. At night, though, I sometimes dreamed about dark-haired, older Frank.

  After the first night, they had moved the little girl with the broken elbow out of my room. Her parents, sorry their daughter had kept me awake, brought me a Reader’s Digest condensed book that had both Heidi and Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates in it. Then I had a whole series of roommates, all adults. The best was a woman bus driver who could vomit a solid stream from her bed halfway across the room to the trash can. When the vomit hit the metal trash can, it sounded like a garage door being violently hosed down. The boys in my class would have loved it.

  The worst was a woman who complained endlessly all evening into the intercom, “I’ve got to have something to drink. The doctor said I could have something to drink,” while the nurses grew increasingly short.

  “You know Dr. Price says you can only have two ounces of alcohol a day, Mrs. Johnson, and you’ve had them.”

  “I’ve got to have …”

  Around midnight the head nurse came in with a can of beer. “Here,” she said, “don’t keep everybody up all night.”

  Then there was Regina Tipaleg. REGINA TIPALEG—the orderly rolled his eyes as he wrote it on her Styrofoam water pitcher with a black Magic Marker. He told me that Regina had had her stomach pumped for an overdose of barbiturates. “So don’t bug her,” he said.

  After a while, Regina’s mother came to visit her. “Forget it, Regina. He’s married.” Regina started crying.

  Then a coworker: “He wants to see you. You’ll have to see him sometime.” She kept crying.

  And then the man referred to. From the way he called her Regina and she called him Mr. Forrestal, I guessed he was her boss. He came in late in the morning, when visiting hours were almost over. “I’m sorry, Reg. You know I am, but there’s nothing I can do.” I waited for Regina to do something, throw her water pitcher, cry again, but she didn’t say a word. After he left, she turned on the TV.

  “Do you watch soaps?” she asked me. When I said no, she started explaining the show that was on. Who was who, who they were with, and who they used to be with. Behind all the on-screen coffee drinking was a whole hidden history of adulteries that had led to weeping, divorce, even suicide. “You can learn a lot watching soaps,” Regina said. She was right.

  One morning, Mrs. Moore was timing me while I breathed this medical fog from a respirator. “Seven minutes to go,” she was saying when the bed started to shake. “Oh, honey,” she said, “that’s the shot.” Since the Apollo 1 fire, all manned missions were on hold, so this was another unmanned Surveyor flight. Marly had told me her dad scratched her name on one of the circuits. Now Marly would be flying to the moon while I was flat on my back in bed.

  Mrs. Moore jumped up from the chair by my bed and opened the curtains. All I could see was the top of the flagpole and a rectangle of sky. The river was down there somewhere, but flat on my back I couldn’t see it. “There!” she said, pointing to the far corner of the window. “There!” I couldn’t see anything. The roar got louder and louder, even louder than it was at home. The glass in the window rattled. “Can you see it?” Mrs. Moore shouted. I started to pull off the respirator mask to say something, but Mrs. Moore shook her head, pointed to her watch. “Six more minutes.”

  AFTER TWO WEEKS, my back brace came, white vinyl and all. The brace man put it on me. The aluminum frame fit tightly around my back and across my chest and hips. He pulled the spring latch forward until it clicked into place. I had to wear it all the time. He showed me a tiny silver padlock to go with the latch. “You won’t need this, will you?” he said. “It’s adults you can’t trust, that you have to lock in.”

  Dr. Barsamian stopped by. He was very proud of me, of the way I was healing. “You’re gonna be famous, my Jewel,” he said, knocking on the front of my new aluminum chest. “I’m writing this up for a medical journal. I’ll send you a copy.”

  The day before I got out of the hospital, Mrs. Mize came to visit and brought me a book of crossword puzzles. “So why did you fall?” she said, after she was sitting in the chair next to my bed. “Were you doing something stupid?” I repeated what I seemed to remember, about the branch coming off in my hand. “David looked all over,” she said, looking at me very closely. “He found some little branches that you might have broken on your way down, but he didn’t find a big rotten one.”

  I could imagine David doing just this, his mother yelling at him from her bedroom window. “Maybe it fell on the other side of the fence,” I said. “By the highway.”

  She shook her head. “He looked there, too.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Maybe, even as I lay on the ground, I made up the part about the branch, to make myself seem less stupid, less wretchedly clumsy. I felt a hot wave of guilt. Mrs. Mize stood up to leave. “Think about it,” she said. “It could be important for the insurance.”

  When I told my mother what Mrs. Mize had said about the insurance, she frowned. “She can go to hell,” my mother said, and sounded like she meant it.

  On May Day, I got to go home. I went the same way I came, by ambulance. Even though it had been three weeks since I fell, I was still not allowed to sit or stand or even roll over, so getting into my parents’ car would have been tough. Mrs. Moore gave me the PATIENT MUST BE FLAT ON BACK AT ALL TIMES sign from over my bed to take
home with me. “Just a few more weeks,” she said. “Then you can throw darts at it.”

  When the ambulance pulled into the driveway, Carol was standing there dressed as Cinderella in pink-and-white satin, and next to her was David, Prince Charming in blue silk. I had forgotten all about the play, which it turned out was the next night. They were on their way to dress rehearsal. Carol told me Mom gave the fabric for my Mary Mary costume to Lori Barns, who was my size and who actually was Quite Contrary, a real pill. Looking up at her from the stretcher, I thought Carol looked odd and surprisingly short. David, too. It was not the fancy dress clothes. Their faces seemed soft, almost unformed. They used to look normal to me; now, after spending so much time with adults, they looked like children. Carol patted the side of the gurney. “See you later?” she said, as if she was not sure. I nodded, suddenly shy.

  Then I was back in my own room, only it was different. The furniture had been rearranged to make way for a hospital bed and a small black-and-white TV one of the neighbors had sent over. My mother fixed my favorite meal for dinner: fried chicken, cantaloupe, and blueberry muffins made from the kind of mix that had the little can of real blueberries in it. She knew it was my favorite because she asked me. I also listed my second and third favorite meals, so I could have these on subsequent nights. I couldn’t seem to chew the chicken, and when Dr. Barsamian stopped by to check on me the next day it turned out that, on top of everything else, I had broken my jaw. A hairline fracture. Overlooked until now.

  “I’m afraid, my Jewel, we have to keep that jaw from moving for a few weeks or else it will never heal.”

  “What if I promise not to talk?” I asked. “Even under torture?” Dr. Barsamian laughed, then wired my mouth shut.

  So when Carol came into the room to talk about her day at school, I could only nod. She would sit watching my TV for a while, then get bored and wander out. All this should have bothered me, being alone so much, not being able to talk to Carol or anyone, but mostly it was like I was still in the hospital. Only now I got all the milk shakes I wanted, along with anything else that would turn to liquid in a blender. I got to stay up as late as I wanted, and I did, watching TV right up until sign-off. So it was like being an only child or living alone.