When she stops shouting, she’s panting as though she’s just been sprinting.
“So I can be off the pills for five to ten days, then, right? Before anything bad happens?”
That means my window is almost halfway closed. Is that enough time—to stay awake in class, to ace my midterms? To actually be the one who helps Serena with her homework instead of the other way around? To show Chirag—
Mom’s shout interrupts my train of thought. “That’s what you got from what I just said?”
“Mom, you don’t understand—” I hate the way my voice sounds. High-pitched. Childish. Desperate.
“No!” Mom counters. “Clearly you don’t understand. Don’t you care about all the doctors who fought to save your life after the accident? The doctors who stood in that OR for hours to perform the transplant—you’re going to throw all that hard work away?”
“It’s their hard work, not mine.”
“And what about your donor? The woman who died for you to have this face—how can you treat her sacrifice so cavalierly?”
“She died either way, whether I had the transplant or not.” Mom takes a shaky step backward, away from me, like she can’t believe I said that. Well, I can’t quite believe it either. I press my fingers into the corners of my eyes and take a breath, trying to regain control of this conversation. “You have no idea what this has been like for me—”
“Your body will adjust—”
“I don’t have time to wait for my body to adjust!” My voice rises with each syllable. So much for controlling myself. “Midterms are next week. If my grades keep slipping, I’ll never get into—”
I stop myself a heartbeat before I say the word Barnard. “Into college,” I finish finally. My grades have never been more important than they are right now. Before, Coach used to say that my skills on the track would get me in wherever I wanted to go. But no one wants someone for the things she used to be able to do. Doesn’t Mom understand that?
“I’m going to turn eighteen this summer, Mom. An adult. You’re going to have to start treating me like one.”
I brace myself for another onslaught of shouts. But instead, Mom releases her file and the pages flutter down to the floor slowly. She stops panting, and her voice is almost normal when she says, “Why don’t you read about what happened to the adults who made the decision you just made?” She spits the word adults like it’s a curse.
“Mom—”
She holds up her hand. “It’s not a choice between pills and no pills. Between migraines and staying up late to cram for your exams.” She closes her eyes like she can’t bear to look at me when she says, “Maisie, it’s a choice between life and death. But you’re right. You’re almost eighteen.” She opens her eyes. “So you choose. You choose. Life or death.”
She leaves the room before I can come up with a response. She walks normally now, so that I can barely hear her footsteps as she makes her way down the hall and into her own room. This time, she doesn’t slam her door shut.
Alone, I slide my sweater over my head and slip out of my jeans, leaving the day’s clothes in a pile on the floor, right on top of my mother’s articles and photographs. I don’t touch the scars on my side when I put on my pajamas. I avoid the mirror while I brush my teeth.
It’s after ten. I ought to have taken my pills more than two hours ago.
In bed later, when I lean over to turn off the light, one of the pictures my mother left behind stares back at me. Not a kidney or a heart, not something that goes inside of the body like the images she held up earlier. This is a hand. It’s black. Not, like, African-American black, but black-black. Green-black. Dying black. The fingertips are darkest. They don’t even look like fingertips but like burnt charcoal about to crumble into ash. In the center of the palm is an ugly red spot, as though the skin above it just disappeared to reveal the blood, tendons, and bone underneath.
Instead of turning off the light, I reach for the paper. The photo is part of an article she ripped out of a magazine about the world’s first hand transplant. The patient was from New Zealand, and claimed to have lost his hand in an industrial accident. His donor died in a motorcycle accident. The patient was happy with his new hand, or at least he said so in the beginning. Soon, he regained sensation in his fingertips; he could hold a phone, eat with a fork and knife.
But before long—like me—he came to hate his immunosuppressive regimen. The pills made him feel weak, he said, like he always had the flu.
When he stopped taking his medication, his doctors came to the conclusion that he was mentally disturbed. Only a crazy person would go off his meds, they said. They discovered that he’d lied about his injury. He hadn’t lost his hand in an industrial accident, but while he’d been in prison, serving time for fraud.
Soon, the hand became swollen and red and immobile. Eventually, it had to be amputated. The article doesn’t say what happened to him after that. The doctors concluded that he was just a bad candidate. A good candidate would have taken his pills no matter what the side effects. A good candidate wouldn’t have given up.
I was supposed to be a good candidate. The girl who never gave up, who finished every race she started, even those she didn’t have the slightest chance of winning.
I pick another article up off the floor and read that the long-term risks of immunosuppressive therapies are vast because you’re literally choosing to debilitate the very system that protects you from disease and infection. You’re trying to keep your immune system weak enough to accept the new parts—otherwise your body would treat the foreign tissue as a disease or infection that must be destroyed—while still hoping that your system will remain strong enough that you won’t get diabetes or cancer or the slew of other diseases you’re now highly susceptible to.
But without the regimen, death after a transplant is almost a certainty: The article states that a face transplant recipient in China died when he began using alternative medicine instead of taking his immunosuppressives.
I close my eyes. My stomach muscles are sore from running just a few yards this morning. At dinner with Chirag on Monday, our conversation was as stilted as my parents’ at the dinner table after a fight, even more awkward than it was when he took me to Bay Leaf back before school started. We discussed our classes and our teachers the same way my parents talked about work and their colleagues: carefully and clumsily, with long pauses and silences in between almost every sentence.
Before, sitting across from my parents, I’d sometimes want to shout You two made a baby together, took a honeymoon, built a home! Whatever happened to all that intimacy? I didn’t understand how it could just vanish into thin air, into nothing at all.
I drop the article to the floor and get out of bed. You choose, Mom said. Life or death. I walk toward my desk, toward the mess of pills Mom left behind. I organize them, dropping the correct pills back into their correct containers. All but one of each. One of each I place on my tongue, and this time I swallow.
Because I do want to live. For whatever that’s worth.
It’s raining. Unless it’s one of the drought years, winter is the rainy season in Northern California, when it’s easy to forget that we spend the summer months completely parched. Some days the rain never becomes anything more than a drizzle, and some days it just feels like the fog is a little bit thicker, slower to burn off. But some days, rain pounds down like a waterfall, ripping the remaining leaves from the trees, soaking the ground so that the earthworms crawl to the surface, so that tires are coated in slicks of red mud, so that clothes and hair and skin never feel dry. Every morning when Chirag picks me up before school, I run to his car feeling like the Wicked Witch of the West, scared she might melt in the rain.
Tonight, Mom knocks on my door. She doesn’t wait for a response before opening it.
“Mom!” I shout. “What if I had been changing or something?”
“I’ve seen you naked before.”
No, I think. You haven’t. Not since I’ve
been home from the hospital. Not since the scars on my left arm faded into little white stripes, like I’m a zebra or something.
“It’s time to go,” she says.
“It’s going to rain.”
“So?”
It was raining the day of my accident, I think but do not say.
“Maisie,” she says. “You’re not getting out of this. Nurse Culligan thinks it’s a good idea.”
“Since when is Nurse Culligan such an expert?”
Mom rolls her eyes. “We put a lot of work into this, Maisie,” she says. “You’re going.”
This started a few weeks ago, when Nurse Culligan called during dinner yet again and told my mother she thought I might benefit from some kind of support group for people who are recovering from what the nurse delicately referred to as “life-altering injuries.”
Mom says, “Even Dr. Boden thought it was a good idea. They recommend therapy for transplant patients and you haven’t been in therapy since you came home.”
Since you came home. It sounds like I might have been anywhere. On vacation. At summer camp. “Sure I have. I go to physical therapy twice a week.” The fingers in my left hand gripped a tennis ball for five whole minutes last Thursday.
“That’s not the same thing.”
I shrug. “Neither is a support group.”
“Would you prefer to go to a psychologist?” Mom asks. “Plenty of patients struggle emotionally after a surgery like yours.”
There aren’t exactly plenty of people who have had a surgery like mine. We’re a small, select group. In fact, it was almost impossible to find a support group for me in the first place. It turns out that most kids my age who need support need it for more normal sorts of problems: cancer, parents with addiction, eating disorders and peer pressure, that kind of thing. Eventually, Mom and Nurse Culligan had to ask Marnie for help. Marnie tried to find a group for teenagers, but apparently, most people make it further into adulthood before they’re horribly disfigured. Or maybe it’s just that injuries like mine are so rare that it’s hard enough to find twelve people within driving distance to sit around and talk about it, let alone twelve people the same age.
“It might make you feel better, knowing you’re not alone in your Depression,” Mom adds, emphasizing the final word like it begins with a capital D. She shoots a meaningful glance at my pill bottles as if to remind me of the harm I almost did. Doesn’t she understand that I didn’t stop taking the pills because I was, like, suicidal or something? I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I was trying to get my life back.
I didn’t want to die. I don’t want to die. And she should understand that by now because I haven’t missed a single dose since that Wednesday night. Although she doesn’t watch me take them anymore. She stayed true to her word: It’s my choice. But I suspect she sneaks in here and counts them when I’m not around.
Mom sighs at my silence and says, “It will be good for you, Maisie.”
“You don’t know that,” I mutter. The group Marnie finally suggested is for adults. I’ll be the youngest one there. Maybe they’ll take pity on me and let me keep quiet.
“I know that you’re still not sleeping through the night.”
I glance at the wall that separates my parents’ bedroom from my own. I thought I’d gotten a lot quieter. Quiet enough not to wake her.
“We’ll be there with you the whole time. Come on, Maisie, you spend half your free time reading about injuries. It’s time you gave the real thing a try.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I know you’re up here every night Googling face transplants and hand transplants, survivors of shark attacks and earthquakes. You’re not exactly subtle about it,” she adds, pointing to the books on my desk: one about carnival freak shows and another about the Elephant Man. I’m tempted to tell her that it’s partly her fault. She’s the one who left me alone with all those articles last month.
But instead, I say, “I get to see the real thing every time I look in a mirror, Mom.”
“And how often do you do that?”
In the car on the way to the support group, which is held in the basement of a local church, my parents argue. At first, I’d kind of hoped that my father was insisting that I didn’t have to go to this meeting if I didn’t want to. But much to my dismay, they still have a united front when it comes to me. Instead, they’re arguing about nonsense, just like they used to. My father didn’t make the bed this morning. I don’t think he’s made the bed once in their twenty-year marriage, but today, it seems, my mother has finally noticed.
By the time we get to the church, I’ve decided that I don’t want them to come inside with me after all.
“You can pick me up in an hour,” I say, opening the door and hurrying across the parking lot. Even rain is preferable to spending one more second inside that car with them. I don’t look back to see whether my parents are startled by my sudden enthusiasm.
My bag rattles like a maraca as I rush across the parking lot. I started carrying an extra dose of pills with me outside of school, just in case I get stuck in traffic, or the car runs out of gas, or, I suppose, I’m in some kind of terrible accident between points A and B.
The church is still decorated for Thanksgiving even though the holiday was more than two weeks ago: An overflowing plastic cornucopia is perched on a table just outside the entrance. There is a garland of lights in the shape of turkeys above the door, dripping with rain. The bulbs in at least half of the turkeys aren’t working.
Inside, it smells like mildew and pine needles—a result, I guess, of the towering redwoods that ring the parking lot. I haven’t actually been inside a church since I was five years old, when my parents sent me to Sunday school for nearly a full year before they decided that we weren’t religious after all.
I’m early. In the basement, a circle of plastic chairs is waiting to be filled with freaks like me. There’s a bulletin board covered in fliers. Apparently, this isn’t the only support group that meets down here. Looks like Monday nights are AA and Tuesdays are Al-Anon, and every other Sunday, there’s a group for cancer survivors. I look around, wondering just how much misery this room has soaked into its walls over the years. Fluorescent lights flicker on the ceiling, washing the chairs in wet yellow light.
I sit down and take One Hundred Years of Solitude out of my bag. Mr. Wolf’s class has long since moved on—we’re discussing Beloved now—but I keep reading the book over and over again, looking for anything I might have missed that day that I fell asleep.
I don’t look up from my book when the room begins to fill with footsteps and murmurs and the sound of chairs squeaking against the ground. The pattern on the tan linoleum floor reminds me of the hospital, though here I can see dust bunnies in the corners of the room. I guess a church basement doesn’t have to be cleaned as often as a hospital. I pretend to be so absorbed in my book that I don’t hear the tapping of crutches as someone limps across the room, the squeak of a wheelchair that needs oil, or even when someone asks if I’d like a cup of coffee. No one asks why I’m here; my reasons are written plainly across my face.
I still haven’t put my book down when a man sitting a few chairs down from me says, “Who’d like to start tonight?”
I close my book and look up. It’s a circle of despair. Directly across from me is an elderly woman with a glass eye who can’t stop blinking. Beside her is a man only a few years older than I am who’s missing both his legs so that he has to be strapped into his wheelchair, and beside him is a girl with a jagged scar running up her right arm and no left hand at all, not even a prosthetic.
“Car accident,” the person sitting to my left whispers.
“What?” I ask, turning.
And then I see a face that might be even worse than mine. Half of it—the right half—is perfectly normal. There’s stubble running across his cheek; his eye is big and round and bright hazel and it narrows when he smiles at me. But the other half is mangled, as thoug
h someone chewed it up and spat it out. His left eyelid is barely open, the left half of his mouth is turned downward into a perpetual frown, and his skin—it doesn’t even look like skin anymore.
I break my gaze, trying not to shudder. Just because I’m deformed myself doesn’t mean I’m not still shocked by deformities.
“Cassie was in a car accident,” he says, nodding in the direction of the girl across from us. He leans close, speaking softly. I’m tempted to back away but stop myself. He holds out his hand. “I’m Adam. You’re Maisie, right?”
“How do you know that?”
“Marnie told me to look out for you.” His strange, crooked face lights up somehow when he says Marnie’s name. He has a crush on her, I realize, almost smiling. A big crush. An obviously hopeless crush.
“She your physical therapist, too?” I ask as I shake his hand. He nods. Like mine, his right hand is unmarred. His left hand is nearly as mangled as the left side of his face.
“Hey, Clyde!” he calls out suddenly, startling me so that I drop his hand like it’s hot. The man who asked us who’d like to start tonight looks our way. He has a prosthetic right arm. I wonder if his name is on a list somewhere, a potential recipient for an arm transplant. I lace the fingers of my hands through each other, like I’m scared someone might take them away. “We got a new kid. Maisie.”
“Hi, Maisie,” everyone choruses, just like they do at AA meetings in the movies. No one stares at me the way they do at school, taking in my face like I’m an animal at the zoo. No one flashes me a heart-attack smile, either, or tries to avoid looking at me altogether. They don’t observe me with laser focus like my mother, or study my features like my doctors.
“Way to put the poor girl on the spot, Adam,” Clyde answers, but he’s smiling. How anyone can smile in a room filled with this much loss is beyond me. He crosses the circle and uses his left hand to shake my right.
Faceless Page 16