“Dad, please. What’s wrong with me?” My question sounds absurd: Wha wron wit ma? I repeat the question, struggling to make the words sound clear. They’ll never tell me if I sound like a toddler.
It can’t be that bad. I’m not the kind of person really bad things happen to. Not particularly good things, either. I’m just a normal girl. I’m not the most popular, but I’m not the biggest nerd either. I have a boyfriend, but it’s not like he’s the captain of the football team and I’m homecoming queen. I’ve had the same best friend since first grade. My parents fight, but everyone’s parents fight. I’m just normal.
And it can’t be that bad because I’m not in any pain. Nothing hurts. I try lifting my right arm; it feels fine. But when I try to lift my left arm, I discover that something is holding it in place.
Finally, Mom says, “The doctor will be here in just a second. Your father went to ask for him the minute you woke up.”
“Why can’t I move my left arm?”
“It’s all wrapped up in bandages, baby. You suffered second-degree burns on your left arm and torso.”
I exhale. Second-degree burns. That’s not so bad, I think. Can’t people get second-degree burns from just staying in the sun too long? I’m going to be okay. The string of panic loosens; my heart slows. I take a deep breath.
Footsteps again. Then a face I’ve never seen before is hovering above mine. But when he speaks I recognize his voice. He’s the one who said I’d be a little fuzzy for a while.
“Second-degree burns aren’t that bad, right?” I ask immediately.
He ignores my question. Or maybe he didn’t understand it. How will I get answers if I can’t make myself be heard? Beneath my bandages, I feel hot. I fight the urge to yank at them like a too-tight collar.
“Maisie, my name is Dr. Cohen. I’ve been handling your case since you were brought in.”
Something about the way he says since you were brought in gives away the fact that I’ve been here a long time. My father’s words come back to me.
“What did my dad mean when he said that I hadn’t had anything to drink for nearly a month?” It takes me a while to ask such a long question. I have to hold each word in my mouth before it can get out.
Dr. Cohen blinks, hesitating. He looks away for a second, to my parents maybe. He nods. His dark brown eyes remind me of Chirag’s, though his aren’t quite so deep, not quite so liquidy. In the right light, Chirag’s eyes look like cups of black coffee.
“You’ve been getting all the fluids you need from your IV,” Dr. Cohen says. He sounds positively cheerful about it, as though getting fluids from a needle is a much more convenient way to stay hydrated than, say, drinking.
“Have I been in a coma or something?” I ask slowly.
“Something like that,” Dr. Cohen says. “Though not a coma like you’d think of it.”
What is that supposed to mean, I think but do not say. I’ve never actually thought of a coma one way or another before.
“We induced your coma,” he says carefully.
Suddenly, I wish it was my mother’s face and not Dr. Cohen’s that I was looking at, no matter how frightened she looks. In fact, for the first time in a long time—maybe for the first time ever—I wish I were sitting on my mother’s lap, wish she was rocking me back and forth and saying things like It’s gonna be okay, baby and Nothing to worry about, just a scratch or two.
“Why?” I ask finally.
“With your injuries—Maisie, you were burned very badly.” His face is serious, his mouth settling into a perfectly straight line in between sentences. “Your injuries were so severe that we thought it would be best to keep you in a coma until we could manage your pain. Your body needed the time to recover.”
That doesn’t sound so bad. I must be almost fixed, then, if they’ve decided it’s time for me to wake up. I must have slept through the worst of it.
“For how long?” I ask.
“A few weeks,” Dr. Cohen answers.
A few weeks? A few weeks! I know I shouldn’t be surprised—Dad said it had almost been a month—but seriously, who do these doctors think they are, the bad fairy in Sleeping Beauty?
I close my eyes, trying to imagine everything I must have missed. Prom, for starters. It was scheduled for three weeks before the end of the school year. Serena and I were going to get ready together. She was going to do my hair for me, since I never have the patience to do anything but pull it into a ponytail. She was going to be ready with her camera when Chirag picked me up, to catch a picture of what his face looked like when he first saw me in my dress. We weren’t going to sit out a single dance all night.
Has the school year ended yet? Don’t they know I can’t miss my final exams? I have papers to write. Races to run. Am I going to have to repeat my junior year? How am I going to get into Berkeley with something like that on my record?
Summer school. I can go to summer school. Plenty of kids do. And the doctors will put a note on my file explaining that I wasn’t a delinquent or something, I just had an accident.
“When can I go home?” I ask, though I say it too fast and it sounds like Whe cah ah ga ho? I say it again, slower this time.
Dr. Cohen blinks again. “Maisie, I’m afraid you’re going to be with us for quite some time yet.”
“But why? For a few second-degree burns?”
Even as I ask the question, I know that there’s something more, something they haven’t told me yet. Suddenly, I’m certain that something very bad has happened to me. I can hear it in the timbre of my mother’s voice and I can see it in the rehearsed smile that’s plastered on Dr. Cohen’s face. The panic is setting in again. My heart is beating faster. Sweat pools at the nape of my neck.
They don’t put you in a coma for a few second-degree burns.
My mother’s voice rings out, clear as a bell: “Maisie. It wasn’t just your left side that got burned.”
It was my face. Electrical burns to my face from the wires the tree branch brought down. They tell me the story, piece by piece. I don’t remember anything after the sparks that looked like fireworks, so I listen as though I’m hearing about something that happened to someone else.
“The Smiths called 911,” Dad says. The Smiths live three houses down from us.
“Evan Blake ran out with a fire extinguisher and tried to spray the flames away,” Mom adds. Evan Blake lives in the house to the left of ours. He and Dad sometimes go fishing together. I wonder if my parents saw Evan running toward my burning body with the extinguisher or if they put the pieces together later, when they saw Evan standing there, red can in hand, my body covered in foam.
Mom says that by the time the ambulance showed up, the tree was smoldering and smoke was still rising from my body. I was unconscious; whether from smoke inhalation or from shock, they didn’t know. They weren’t sure I was going to survive, but by some miracle I pulled through.
Isn’t that wonderful, Dr. Cohen says, by some miracle.
I thought doctors didn’t believe in miracles. I thought they were scientists. Chirag isn’t even a doctor yet—he wants to be someday—but he would never call what happened to me a miracle. Instead, he would explain the science behind my survival.
I wish Chirag were here instead of Dr. Cohen. Unlike Dr. Cohen, Chirag would never tell me I should be thankful. I want not just the Chirag of right now—the high school track star who would hold my hand and kiss my knuckles—but I also want Chirag as he’ll be twenty years from now, the man with all the medical expertise required to explain my condition. I close my eyes and picture Chirag in a long white coat when Dr. Cohen says again, “Do you know just how lucky you are?”
A few hours after I wake up, the pain sets in. Apparently, whatever drugs they’d given me to ease the transition are wearing off.
I gasp when I feel it. I might not remember what it felt like to burn—maybe my body went into shock immediately so that I didn’t actually feel it at all—but it can’t have been worse than this.
I didn’t know pain like this existed. Dr. Cohen says that the body can’t actually remember pain. It’s what allows women to have more than one child, he adds with a wry smile. I wouldn’t have laughed at such a lame joke under even the best of circumstances, and at the moment it’s hard to imagine that I’ll ever laugh again.
Anyway, I don’t believe him. He’s never been in pain like this. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I will never forget this: the sensation on my side, like a million needles are digging in all at once; my left hand, screaming in protest when I try to move it even the slightest bit. Tears blur my vision, but it hurts too much to cry. Crying doesn’t seem like enough for what I’m feeling. My god, if this is what they woke me up to feel, what must it have been like when they put me into the coma?
I hear Dr. Cohen ordering morphine, hear the click of a needle being fitted into my IV. I always thought only old people, dying people, got morphine. But apparently they give it to people like me, too.
And then, as suddenly as it came, the pain stops. I gasp again, this time with relief.
The world is strange enough with such a limited field of vision—filled with voices that I don’t recognize, no faces to attach them to—but over the next few days, I discover that it’s even weirder through the hazy veil of painkillers. It feels like I’m walking through cotton. Not that I’m walking through anything at all: I haven’t left my bed since I woke up.
The first time a nurse comes in to rub salve onto the second-degree burns on my left arm and my side, I don’t even realize what’s happening until she’s pulled back the already meager covers and exposed my broken body for the world to see. Since I can’t see anything but what’s directly above me, I don’t know if my parents are in the room. I wonder how many times they’ve seen me undressed since all this happened, how many people have seen me naked. I wonder exactly what’s left for them to see.
I’m mortified. I was the kind of girl who hated changing in the locker room in front of my friends and teammates. And those were people who knew me well, people who were exposing themselves, too.
I’m aware of the nurse’s touch, but it feels far away, like something that happened hours ago. A chill runs up my spine and I try to shudder, but my body won’t cooperate.
I always thought salve was supposed to be soothing, but it’s actually something that aches and burns and stings. With my right hand, I squeeze the button that’s supposed to send morphine down my IV and into my veins, but I don’t think there’s a painkiller on the planet strong enough to make this go away. I try to concentrate hard on something else, just like I do when I run. While they change my bandages, I close my eyes and imagine that I didn’t miss the prom after all; I picture myself in my dress, slow-dancing with Chirag. Every day, I pick a different song, and in my imagination, it plays on an endless loop until the pain subsides. I imagine that it’s Chirag’s arms around me instead of the nurses’. When they rub the salve into my burns, I imagine that it’s Chirag running his hands up and down my back. When it stings so much that I have to grit my teeth to keep from shouting, I imagine that Chirag’s mouth is pressed against mine in a long, sweet kiss. My lips, apparently, received only first-degree burns that had mostly healed by the time they woke me from the coma. Beyond being terribly chapped from so much time without drinking water or gliding on lip balm, they’re fine.
Physical therapists come into my room to move my limbs around so that I don’t get bedsores and my joints don’t stiffen. Doctors come into my room when they think I’m sleeping, a gaggle of students trailing behind them. I listen as they drone on about my special case.
I don’t feel special. I feel trapped. I want to disconnect all these tubes and wires, to jump out of this bed, slip on my sneakers, sprint into the hallway, down the stairs, and out the door. When I sleep, I dream of running around the track behind our school, of winning every race I enter, of beating Chirag when we race to the tree stump. In my dreams, I feel the wind on my face.
It’s when I sleep that they change the mask. They never go near my face when I’m awake.
Apparently, electrical fires burn hotter and faster than regular fires. Apparently, they’re able to blaze even in the rain. They tell me the fire was so hot it burned blue. And eventually, they tell me that the burns on the left side of my face are not second degree. When I ask if they’re third-degree burns they say no, but they don’t call them fourth-degree burns either. I tell myself that they can’t be that bad because my face actually doesn’t hurt as much as my side.
Every day, I ask someone—a doctor, a nurse, my parents—When will I get these bandages off my face? When will I be healed? I never get a straight answer, and every time someone avoids the question, the string of panic around my rib cage tightens, until I think that the real miracle is the fact that my ribs haven’t split in two. I ask if Serena and Chirag have visited, but they say only immediate family is allowed. I’m still not out of the woods. My mother promises to call and tell them that I miss them. My words are still so muffled that they wouldn’t be able to understand me if I called myself. Anyway, cell phones aren’t allowed in this part of the hospital.
It’s my father who finally tells me the truth. I wake up in the middle of the night and for once, there’s only one person in the room with me, instead of an army of doctors and interns and who knows who else. I recognize the sound of his breathing. I can hear the scratch of his pencil against paper so I know he’s not asleep. He’s probably doing a crossword puzzle.
“Daddy?” I say into the darkness.
“I’m here, sweetheart,” he answers. His chair squeaks against the linoleum. He’s pulling it to sit along my right side. He takes my hand in his. His palms are hot and clammy, like he’s nervous about something. He stays sitting down instead of standing with his face above mine, so I can’t see him.
For what feels like the millionth time, I ask, “When will these bandages come off? When will I be healed?” I’ve gotten much better at speaking with this mask on, but the words still come slowly.
Dad doesn’t say anything for so long that I think he might have fallen asleep. But finally, he says, “Your face won’t ever heal.”
That doesn’t make any sense. Everything heals eventually, right? If my face isn’t going to heal, then what am I doing here, in the hospital? My seventh-grade science teacher taught us about if, then statements, and I always liked how undeniably logical they were. So I ask my father the most undeniably logical question:
“If I’m never going to heal, then I’m dying, right?” The words struggle to make their way around the lump in my throat.
“No, sweetheart. It’s just these burns—”
“I know,” I say, the words coming out stiffly from beneath my bandages. “I’ve heard it a dozen times already. They’re so severe. More severe than the burns on my side. Do I need a skin graft, is that it?” We read about them in biology class my freshman year. In cases of third-degree burns, they take the undamaged skin from one part of your body and stretch it over the burned part.
My father squeezes my hand in his. “Your face is more than just burned. It’s—” He pauses. Takes a deep breath. When he speaks, his voice is shaking. “Part of it is destroyed.”
Destroyed. The word sounds out of place here, in a hospital. Destroyed is what happens to villages in the path of tsunamis. To buildings when bombs drop. To ships that sink to the bottom of the sea. Destroyed isn’t something that happens to a thing as small as a single person’s face.
Dad continues, “Your nose, your left cheek, most of your chin. The tissue was killed in the fire.”
Destroyed. Killed. It’s like I’ve never heard the words before. I have no idea what he means. How can parts of a person’s face die?
“The dead skin, the muscle, the bone—the doctors had to remove it.” That must have been when they put me into the coma. They wouldn’t have been able to manage the pain any other way. “Now your face is wrapped in a special kind of antiseptic gauze,
a kind of temporary substitute—”
“Part of my face is gone?” I interrupt. How is that possible? What exactly is the gauze wrapped around?
My father doesn’t say anything. His breathing is ragged. He’s crying. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father cry. Of course, I’m still not seeing it. I’m just hearing it.
Electrical fires burn hotter and faster than regular fires. How strange to think that as the fire grew hotter, it turned blue. Blue is the color of the cold bay, the cool afternoon sky, the color of freezing lips and fingertips. I can’t imagine a hot kind of blue.
I think it might be easier to make sense of what my father’s saying if I could just remember what it was like to catch fire, but my mind is blank. Maybe I’d already lost consciousness by the time it happened. Or maybe that’s something your brain does for you; induces a sort of selective amnesia so that you can’t remember the most terrifying moment of your life. But I wish I could remember something. Because right now, nothing my father is saying sounds true. None of it sounds like something that happened to me.
“My face—my nose, my cheek, my chin—they just melted off in the fire, is that what you’re saying?” I close my eyes and try to imagine it, an enormous jagged C curving around the left side of my face. It looks like something from a movie, a fairy tale, a horror story.
“Yes,” he says hoarsely. “Kind of.” The chair squeaks against the linoleum again. He’s standing up. “I’ll get you a tissue.”
“What for?”
“You’re crying.” I felt the lump in my throat, but I didn’t feel tears, and I guess I didn’t feel my nose running because I no longer have a nose to run.
Oh god. I no longer have a nose. The lump in my throat rises until I think it will choke me.
Now he does come into my line of sight, carefully pressing a tissue into my eyes. I didn’t feel the tears sneaking beneath my bandages to stream down my face, and I don’t feel the pressure of his touch now.
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