Blank

by Trina St. Jean

  “Well,” I say, “here I am.”

  He looks me over carefully, as though he’s having a hard time believing I’m really sitting there talking to him.

  “I wish,” he says, so softly it’s almost a whisper, “I wish this hadn’t happened. I wish—”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I interrupt. “I’m as good as new. Even got a cool haircut.”

  The intensity in his gray-blue eyes, the same color and shape as the Girl’s, is startling. As we look at each other, the room so quiet I can hear my own breathing, the weight of everything that’s been happening to me—the medical tests and jargon, rehab, the Man and Woman with all their photos—presses down on me suddenly. The air feels hot and stuffy, and I can’t take it—one more heavy moment and I will come undone. I let out a long breath.

  “Do you think,” I say slowly, unsure of the right words to convince a ten-year-old, “we can pretend none of that ever happened? Maybe agree not to talk about it? You know, just hang out?”

  The Boy bites his bottom lip, his hands clenched tightly on the handle of the gift bag. He’s struggling to keep his composure—it shows on his face—but I’m not in any state to guess what’s going through his mind.

  “And can I have my gift already?” I say.

  It takes a few seconds, but then the tiniest sliver of a smile grows, until his face is transformed by a huge grin. He looks as relieved as I feel. “It’s a deal,” he says, handing me the gift bag.

  I reach into the tissue paper, and my fingers find something strangely lumpy. I pull it out and turn it over in my hands. It’s a kind of rock, the color of caramel, only it has these ridges all around it, like a flower burst into bloom.

  “Do you like it?” Stephen says.

  I nod. I have no idea what it is, but maybe I’m supposed to.

  He sits beside me on the bed. “It’s a sand rose. All the way from the Sahara desert. I didn’t go there to get it, of course.” He grins. “I bought it in a rock shop.”

  “It’s nice,” I say.

  He glances at me to check if I understand the meaning of his gift. When he sees that I don’t, though, he doesn’t seem disappointed.

  “Sometimes,” he explains, “we go on adventures. One of our favorites is the Sahara caravan. We ride pretend camels and eat our lunch in blanket tents that we make in the living room. We even have a real dried-up scorpion.”

  An image flashes in my mind of a room transformed into a massive, colorful tent. I can’t tell if it’s a real memory or only my imagination, but I feel a tingle down my spine.

  He points at the rock. “It’s a kind of crystal that forms in the desert, from the evaporation of a salt basin or erosion from the wind. It’s supposed to bring good luck.”

  I run my fingers over the ridges that form the petals. That a clump of tiny sand and salt granules could come together and form something so beautiful, so complex, amazes me. I put it on my bedside table.

  “Thanks,” I say. “It’s cool.”

  We share a silence.

  “This is great,” he says. “That you’re getting back to normal.”

  A jolt goes through me. Normal? If this is normal, I’m doomed. “You really think so?”

  He shoots a look at the door, realizing he’s said something he shouldn’t have. “You don’t remember the last time I was here to see you?”

  The question irritates me, but he’s only a kid, so I let it go. “I have issues with that, apparently.”

  He looks at me intently for a few seconds, then sucks in his breath. “I was here with Mom and Dad the night you came out of the coma. But you were”—he pauses, chewing his bottom lip—“nuts. You acted like you were drunk or something. You could barely walk, and you didn’t make any sense when you talked. You even punched Mom.”

  I actually hit the Woman? You’d think I’d remember something like that. Strangely, though, that’s not the part that bothers me. It dawns on me that everyone knows more about me than I do.

  “Did I hit her hard?”

  Stephen shakes his head, his hair falling forward. “Nah. No offense, but it was kind of a girly punch. Dad jumped in and stopped you. The nurses did have to tie you to the bed after though. And Mom and Dad didn’t let me come back and see you until today.”

  Tie me to the bed? Like some kind of raving lunatic? I’m nauseated all of a sudden, and I stand up, gripping the bed railing.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I say, but it’s too late. The vomit rises in my throat, and all I can do when it comes gushing out is open my hand and try to catch it.

  Stephen leaps from the bed, eyes wide, and clutches at the box of Kleenex on my nightstand. The box tumbles to the floor, and he scrambles to pull out a handful of tissues. When he hands them to me, he can’t look me in the eye.

  “Man, Jess,” he says, “that’s gross!”

  I laugh, my nose making a snorting noise that makes me laugh again. “Yeah,” I answer, “it is.”

  He laughs too, but there’s a nervous edge to it. My sister, he must be thinking, is completely hopeless.

  Mother walks in and calls for someone to deal with my mess while I wash up in the bathroom. Once Mother and Little Man are gone, I stretch out on the bed and pull the covers over my head. I close my eyes, and the golden sands of the Sahara stretch out before me in every direction. The orange ball of a sun hovers over the horizon, and sand dunes cast rippled shadows. Stephen appears by my side, and when he turns toward me he gives me a long, slow wink.

  Squeezing Water from a Stone

  So what do I remember?

  I decide to work on that. The halls are quiet and I am alone in my room; my lunch tray is gone. I crank up my bed, lean back, pull the blankets up to my chin and close my eyes tight.

  I was an honor student in school, I’ve been told. So I’m not a moron, or at least I wasn’t. A little effort, and I should be able to get my brain to cooperate. Deep breaths. I listen to my breathing, trying to block out the sounds of squeaking nurses’ shoes and carts in the hallway. You can do this, I tell myself. You can find yourself again.

  I start by going over the few moments I remember in the first days after waking up from my Big Sleep.

  Sitting up, head pounding and room spinning. A glass of water. Chugging it down so fast I nearly choke, my head as heavy as concrete. “Wow,” a soft voice says. “Call her parents.”

  A nurse with a gap between her front teeth offering me a huge blue pill in her outstretched palm. “Come on now,” she says. “Don’t fight me on this one.”

  The Woman—my mother—leaning forward in the armchair to rest her head on the edge of my bed, a shudder going though her body.

  The Girl in the Mirror, staring back at me with scared eyes. I stick my tongue out at her, and she does it back.

  I flip onto my side, open my eyes and stare at the beige wall. These memories are not what I am after. They don’t matter. It’s the ones before I came to this place, the ones before Ramses decided my skull was a toy for his amusement, that I need to get to somehow. I bury my face deeper into the pillow and pull the blankets over my head. I imagine the white of the sheet as a movie screen, waiting for my mind to project its images. The warmth of my breath bounces back at me, and my eyes grow heavy, but I keep them half open and let the fragments slip into my mind.

  A loud siren, and a rumbling feeling under my back. Someone squeezes my hand and tells me to hang on. “I’m sorry,” I try to say, but something covers my mouth and no one hears me.

  On my back again, a feeling like I am floating. Distorted voices come from above, and a force pulls at me, tugging me down deeper. I try to scream, to tell the voices I am here, to save me, but it is stronger than I am. I let it take me.

  “Please don’t leave us,” the voice says. “You’ve got to fight, Jessica.” A warm hand caresses my cheek.

  I hold my gaze on the sheet, barely blinking, and will more memories to come. But it’s no use. That’s it, that’s all, folks. A headache builds in my
temples. I turn onto my back, lower the blankets and glare at the ceiling tiles.

  Why did this happen? Why did a supposedly domesticated bison bull decide, on one spring day like any other, to go after me in a two-thousand-pound rage? Am I such a total loser that God or the universe or whoever decides such things considered my life so useless it should be erased in one fell swoop?

  Panic—or maybe terror—grips me so suddenly that I sit up, clutching at the sheets. I bite my tongue hard to keep myself from screaming, but I can’t fight the energy surging through my arms and legs. I punch at the bed, rip the sheets, kick the bedside table. A mug the Woman must have left after her afternoon tea smashes to the floor. My body is shaking, and the feeling isn’t gone yet, so I spring out of bed and stomp on the pieces of mug. I feel pain through my fuzzy socks, but the crunching sound is soothing somehow. I jump harder. A shard of porcelain jabs into my heel, and I yelp but can’t seem to stop. I am about to pounce again when I hear a voice at the doorway.

  “Jessica.” I ignore the voice, leap anyway, but it interrupts my fun again. “Jessica!”

  I swing around and see a nurse standing there, a tiny lady with a tight ponytail. Her hands are firmly on her hips, and I laugh the loud and obnoxious guffaw of a madwoman. And just how are you going to stop me? I’m thinking, but then through the door steps another nurse, about a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the first. They move toward me in unison, and I let out a scream that sounds like it comes from an animal.

  I can’t remember, and I can’t love. But I am very good at getting pissed off.

  Step by Step

  Put one foot in front of the other.

  Sounds easy enough. To a fully functional human being, that is. I observe my bare feet, the flakes of metallic-blue polish remaining on my nails (pre-coma, because I don’t remember painting them), and will them to move carefully and deliberately. They’re tender where I stomped on the broken mug, but that’s a minor irritant compared to the challenge of getting my feet to follow my commands. Sure, I can walk to the bathroom and down the hall, but I am not as precise and quick as I should be, and they are making me practice with Ruby, the rehab lady.

  Ruby must have read a lot of books on how to encourage the brain-damaged, because she never stops saying nice things, no matter how much I suck. “Good job!” “Keep trying!” “You’re almost there!” “You rock.” I bet I’d get an Olympic medal if I could actually walk in a line that even resembled straight, instead of this invisible zigzag trail I follow through the rehab room.

  “Don’t worry,” Ruby says. “Your brain and legs need to relearn how to communicate with each other, but it’s going amazingly well. You’ll be running circles around me in no time.”

  So we try again. And again and again. I stand at attention, try to buy into her praise and follow her lead. We stand on one foot, we touch our toes, we touch our noses, and we play Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. Next it’s Simon Says.

  “When will I be ready for dodgeball?” I ask. Her face falls, and she struggles to find a way to let me down gently until she sees my smirk. She cracks up.

  “You’re a nut,” she says, throwing one of my balled-up socks at me.

  “Well, at least they didn’t have to tie me to the bed today,” I say.

  I don’t get a laugh with that one.

  Back in my room, I stand and study the parking lot outside my window. It’s windy, and swirls of dust dance around the cars. When I turn around, Super Doc is leaning against the doorframe.

  “Rough day yesterday, I hear,” he says.

  My throat tightens. What did the nurses tell him? Psychotic episode, or maybe severe mental breakdown involving mutilated bedsheets and a smashed piece of china?

  “Got a little frustrated,” I say.

  He walks across the room and settles into the chair. “Did the medication help?”

  “Uh-huh. Knocked me right out.”

  He nods. “Anger issues are pretty common after brain trauma,” he says. “You’re facing a lot of challenges, plus chemical changes in your brain can affect internal impulse control. I’ll be sending someone over to help you with that. Her name is Dr. Kirschbaum.”

  I nod. I can’t imagine what she can do to get me to chill out, but there is no saying no to Super Doc. It would feel like saying no to God.

  “Until then,” he says, “have you tried counting to ten?”

  Counting? That’s something you’d say to a preschooler having a tantrum over candy. I shake my head.

  “It sounds too simple, but it helps. Gives your body a bit of time to come down from the adrenaline rush. Take deep breaths too. Works for me.” It’s hard to picture Super Doc ever coming undone, but I’ll take his word for it.

  When he stands up, he puts his hand on my arm. “Other than that, how are you feeling? How are the headaches?”

  “Not so bad,” I say. “I can take it.”

  “Good attitude. See you soon then.” On his way out, he stops and looks at the bulletin board again. “Any of this seem familiar?”

  All I can do is shrug. I don’t want to give an answer that is too pessimistic, or he might give up on me. “Now that I’ve been staring at them for days, I can’t tell.”

  He nods. “Give it time, Jessica,” he says. “These things don’t happen overnight.”

  Trivial

  Late afternoon. The Parents have not yet arrived, and the walls of my room are closing in on me. My head aches, partly because of the whack to my skull but also because of boredom. The only things in the room with any color, any evidence of the real world, are the photos on the bulletin board. Looking at them, though, only makes my temples throb more.

  I place my hand on the phone and think about calling someone. But who, and what would I say? Hi, remember me? I don’t.

  I need to get out. I take careful steps through the doorway and glance down the hall. The coast is clear. There’s a TV lounge at the end of the wing that’s always empty when I walk by on the way to rehab, so I shuffle my way over to it, one foot in front of another. Mighty fine walking for a little brain-dead girl.

  But when I step into the lounge, a crowd is sitting on the couch. I freeze in the doorway. A girl with dark-purple hair and two nose rings looks up at me, then nods hello before turning back to the TV. I wonder how crazy it would look if I hightailed it back to my room. Nose Ring girl glances at me again; I must look like a deer caught in the headlights, because she gestures to the empty armchair in the corner.

  I sit down quickly and turn toward the TV. Ridiculous, I know, but my heart is pounding. Not only did I lose my past, but it seems I lost all my social skills too.

  Jeopardy! is on, and a lanky boy with a neck brace sitting next to Nose Ring girl mutters, “Alvin” in response to the square that says, Theodore, Simon & he formed the famous musical trio. The contestant says the same. Alex Trebek declares, “Yes, that’s correct for $200!” and the neck-brace guy high-fives a chubby boy next to him. Nose Ring girl rolls her eyes at me.

  “Doorknob over here thinks he’s a genius,” she says. Brace guy flips her the finger before turning back to the TV. And on it goes. Brace guy answers questions, and sometimes he’s right. Chubby boy cheers him on; Nose Ring girl makes sarcastic comments. When the show is over, they all stand up and stretch.

  “Well, that was a slice,” Nose Ring girl says to me. Then they are gone, and I am alone in the lounge, watching a woman squirt stain remover on her son’s soccer clothes. From her smile, it looks like it’s the most exciting part of her day. And sadly, being in this lounge was the best part of mine.

  She Calls

  It’s 3:37 AM. The blanket feels stiff and scratchy against my cheek, and my stomach growls. I click on the lamp and swing my legs over the edge of the bed. I wonder what Jessica did when she couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night.

  I don’t have to go to the bathroom, but my feet make their way across the room. Once inside, I click on the light. There she is, waiting for me. Th
e Girl in the Mirror.

  “Me,” I whisper. Her lips move in unison with mine.

  Though she is a stranger, she is becoming a familiar one. Like someone you see every day in passing, on the bus or walking their dog in the neighborhood. The details of her face are no longer new and interesting. Now that I have studied every line and curve and freckle over and over, I have progressed to taking in the whole of her—the way she looks back at me, the first impression she must give. Is she pretty? I decide that, yes, she is. She may not exactly turn heads, but she has a pleasant-enough face.

  I imagine that I am meeting a boy for the first time and stretch my mouth into a smile.

  “Hello,” I whisper, “my name is Jessica. But you can call me Jessie.” Surprisingly, my cheeks flush to a soft pink. Jessie must be a shy person.

  I stand there a few more minutes, staring at the reflection in front of me. My feet are cold on the tile floor, and finally I click the light off and make my way back to the bed. I pull the blankets over my head and listen to my breathing. She is shy, I repeat in my head. I am shy. I close my eyes and a shiver goes through me, but I’m not cold.

  I have to get to know her again. “Goodnight, Girl,” I whisper.

  It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an I

  I’ve just woken up from my second siesta of the day when the curtain swishes open. A woman with long black hair and café-au-lait skin steps up to my bed.

  “My name is Dr. Kirschbaum, but everyone calls me Dr. K.,” she says. “I’m a neuropsychologist.” She shakes my hand, then fans her face with her hand. “I can’t believe how hot it is, for spring. An absolute furnace. My makeup must have melted all over my face.”