“Tell us about yourself, honey,” Clyde says kindly. He sits back down in his chair.
“I was really just going to—” I pause. I can’t tell the truth: I was planning to sit quietly and read my book while you all told your sob stories. Finally, I mumble, “I thought maybe for my first day I could just observe or something.” With my right fingertips, I trace the bumps of the scars on my left hand.
“Scaredy-cat,” Adam says, poking me in the side—my left side, right on top of my stripey scars. I shift in my seat, hoping he couldn’t feel them through my sweater. Turning to the group, he adds, “Okay, then, I’ll start today, since Maisie isn’t ready yet. I’m Adam.”
“Hi, Adam,” everyone but me says.
“Well,” Adam continues, “as most of you know, I served in the Middle East last year.”
“Such a long way to go for a brand-new tattoo,” the man with no legs interrupts mock-seriously, pointing at Adam’s face. I wait for Adam to stand up and shout; I expect Clyde to scold him for making a joke in what’s supposed to be a safe space. But instead, Clyde is laughing, and Adam is laughing, and then the whole room is laughing. I remember the night Chirag took me to Bay Leaf, his stony face when I attempted to make a joke about what had happened to me.
“Yeah, Michael,” Adam agrees, chuckling. Later, I’ll learn that Michael is a veteran, too. “I wanted something to remember the experience by.” But then his voice turns serious and soft as he talks about the RPG that flew overhead, the explosion that followed. I can tell he’s shared all of this before, though it doesn’t sound like the kind of story you ever get used to telling.
Adam’s burns were less severe than mine. He doesn’t say so, but I can guess that some of them were second degree; the scarring on his face and down his left arm almost matches the marks on my left side. But he also has skin grafts where the burns must have been third degree. His face was mutilated, not destroyed like mine.
I guess his fire just didn’t burn as hot.
After Adam, Cassie speaks. And then the woman with the glass eye, whose name is Maureen. I know I should be listening, but I can’t help thinking about a game that Serena and I used to play called Would You Rather. It’s supposed to be kind of dirty and sexy—and it was when Serena was the one asking the questions—but when it was my turn, it always turned kind of depressing. Would you rather lose your hearing or your sight? (I said hearing, Serena said sight.) Would you rather have no hair or no teeth? (Hair, we both agreed, but only after a long discussion about hats and wigs and headscarves.) Would you rather lose your mind or your parents?
This room is a veritable treasure trove of Would You Rather scenarios: Would you rather have no legs or no eye? Would you rather have no arm or no face?
Someone is saying my name, pulling me out of my thoughts. I look up and see Clyde standing over me. “I know you’re not ready to share with us, Maisie,” he says, “and that’s okay. But maybe you could just tell us how you were injured?”
Marnie wasn’t wrong: I’m definitely the youngest one here. Even though Clyde looks nothing like a teacher, it feels like this is a classroom and I’ve just been asked a question I don’t quite know the answer to. “Lightning struck a tree near my house. The tree tore down some wires and there was a fire.”
“An electrical fire,” Adam breaks in. “Totally destroyed part of her face.” I guess Marnie isn’t bound by patient confidentiality rules the way doctors are.
To my surprise, I want to be the one telling my story. I don’t want some stranger sharing the details for me. “I had second-degree burns all down my left arm and side, but my nose, cheeks, and chin burned off.” I pause, waiting for someone in the room to gasp, or cringe, or at the very least look away, but no one does. “So a few months after my accident, they performed a partial face transplant.”
The faces in the circle nod and smile, taking it in like it’s nothing they haven’t heard before.
When the group breaks up, Adam leans over me. “Want to grab a cup of coffee?” he asks. He’s tall, taller than I noticed before. Probably six foot one, at least. It should make him look even more like a monster—this enormous man with the disfigured face—but somehow, it has the opposite effect. Despite his height, he moves gracefully, the tiniest bit of a strut in his walk, a relic of the confidence he must have had before he was ruined. You can tell—looking at the right side of his face—that he was handsome, before.
I shake my head. “My parents are waiting for me. I need to be home by eight, to take my pills.” My bag rattles as I lift it off the floor, reminding me of the extra dose inside. It never occurred to me to use it for something frivolous, like grabbing a cup of coffee with someone I barely know.
I yawn, my eyelids growing heavy.
“Am I that boring?” Adam asks.
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s not you. It’s the—” I hold up my bag in front of me, like he has any idea what’s inside of it.
“Antirejection drugs, huh? They’re brutal. Marnie told me.”
I never realized what a big mouth Marnie has.
“I know,” Adam laughs. “Marnie can be a real talker sometimes.”
“What?” I didn’t say that out loud, right? That Marnie had a big mouth? That was just that one time with Ellen, right?
“No point in being polite here,” Adam explains. “Call Marnie a big-mouth, a pain, a jerk, whatever you need to. This is where we get it all out.”
“I don’t think I would ever call Marnie a jerk.”
“Seriously? Because sometimes, when she’s working my left side so hard that I can’t even see straight, that’s probably the kindest of the choice words I have for her.”
“You have a point there,” I say drily.
“Anyway, you’re not the only one in here on immunosuppressives.” Adam nods across the room at the woman with the glass eye, Maureen. “Kidney transplant.”
“I thought she was here because of her eye.”
“That, too.” Adam shrugs, like it’s no big deal, like people have multiple life-changing events all the time, like human beings are equipped to handle that much tragedy. “Anyway, maybe next time for the coffee.” He smiles as he slips on his raincoat. Next time.
The old Maisie would have hated coming here, would have hated being around all this sickness, all this hurt. She’d have run away as fast as her legs could carry her. But this Maisie’s legs can’t carry her all that fast anymore.
Coach used to have nicknames for everyone on the team. She called me Fish because she said I was a fish out of water, the most competitive member of the team—not exactly the picture of a laid-back California girl. All my teachers noticed my competitiveness, actually. In the comments section of every report card, there was always some note: Maisie is bright and talented, but her competitive nature limits her ability to excel on group projects, or Maisie is a wonderful student, but class debates bring out her competitive side. I think back to Chirag’s and my first interaction, debating over Hemingway. Was I trying to beat him at literary analysis?
Well, that was the old Maisie. Eric was right when he said she was gone. I glance around the room, at all these tragic figures pulling on their coats, shaking out their umbrellas.
No one here knew the old Maisie. Here, among all these strangers, I can give being someone else a try. A new Maisie. Maisie 2.0.
My parents are still fighting about their bed in the car on the way home. It’s almost impressive that they’ve managed to talk about pillows and sheets for so long, in the time that three people in the support group shared their stories, plus me. By the time we put up our Christmas tree, Dad is sleeping in the den again. I guess if you don’t share a room, you don’t have to fight over whose turn it is to make the bed. Not that they don’t find plenty of other things to argue about.
In the backseat, I finger my bag, listening to my pills clicking and clacking inside. I chose to take them. I chose life. So why does it feel like I gave up, gave in, accepted defeat, failed?
&n
bsp; I close my eyes and make a mental list. Old Maisie: Competitive. Straight-A student. Runner. Morning person. Cool girlfriend. Goody two-shoes (according to Serena). Parents on the verge of a divorce. And—even though I’d never have admitted it then—pretty.
New Maisie: Tired all the time. Bad girlfriend. (Not a girlfriend at all, really.) Grades slipping. Shy. Loser. Jokes mostly fall flat. Parents still fighting. Afraid to drive. Ugly.
How come pretty girls aren’t supposed to admit that they’re pretty but I don’t feel any guilt acknowledging that I’m ugly now? There must be some kind of feminist argument to be made there, but thanks to my immunosuppressives, I’m far too tired to try to figure out what it is.
I sigh. Maisie 2.0 sucks. The original Maisie would have kicked her butt. I may have chosen life, but I have no idea how to live it like this.
Group—that’s what everyone calls it, just Group—meets every Wednesday at six, and when my parents are both working late one evening, Chirag drives me. I watch him out of the corner of my eye, his long graceful fingers wrapped around the steering wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock, his coffee-colored eyes focused on the wet road in front of us. I look away before he can see me staring.
Back in September, Mom could have asked Serena to drive me to school, could have recruited my best friend to carpool me to PT instead of my boyfriend. But Serena is always late and much as she loves me, Serena would never be able to sacrifice her senior year to play nurse.
My mother knew that Chirag was the one we could count on. Knew he was a good guy, just like Eric said.
The windshield wipers wave back and forth with a steady hum. The church is covered in brightly colored lights now. There’s even an inflatable Santa Claus beside an illuminated nativity scene. Christmas is just a few days away.
Chirag puts the car in park and takes off his seat belt, like he’s planning on getting out of the car with me.
Quickly, I say, “You don’t have to walk me inside or anything.”
In Group, Maisie 2.0 is starting out slow. For the past couple of weeks, she’s just listened to everyone else’s stories, like maybe she thinks she can soak up their well-adjustedness through osmosis or something.
The old Maisie wouldn’t have been scared to speak, but then she’d never have had to ask the questions that run on constant repeat in Maisie 2.0’s head: Does anyone else avoid mirrors? Does anyone else hate the drugs that are keeping them alive? Do any of you really believe that you’re still lovable (ugh, just the word makes me cringe) even now, looking the way you do? The way we do.
“I thought I might—” Chirag looks shy. “I was wondering if I could sit in. Maybe see what you talk about in there.”
I don’t talk about anything at all, and I certainly wouldn’t talk in front of you.
I shake my head. “It’s not that kind of group. Everyone in there is injured.” No one in there is like you. In that room, Chirag would be the freak, the one the rest of us wouldn’t be able to stop staring at.
“I know everyone’s injured,” Chirag says softly.
“Well, then why did you think you should come inside?” I snap.
Chirag looks so hurt that I almost apologize. But if I say I’m sorry, he might think he can come in after all, and that’s the last thing I want. It’s bad enough that he has to see me all the time. He shouldn’t have to endure a whole room full of ruined people.
“Pick me up in an hour,” I say finally, like he’s nothing more than a cabdriver. I get out of the car without saying good-bye.
I walk into the church slowly, breathing in its already familiar musty odor as I take the steps down to the basement. Tonight, when Clyde asks if anyone wants to start, I raise my hand. Everyone’s gaze swings in my direction, though no one looks surprised. Maybe they all know I have this perfect boy waiting for me in the parking lot. Maybe they all know that I need them to tell me how to let him go.
I know that some members of the group are married. Maureen was still married when she lost her eye, and she and her husband stayed married afterward, until the day he passed away. Clyde wears a wedding ring.
And Michael—the man who lost his legs—has a girlfriend who picks him up most nights. “Can I ask you something?” I begin, shifting in my seat to face him.
Michael rarely talks about his girlfriend. Most nights, he talks about skiing. He’s a Paralympian; he speeds down snow-covered mountains sitting in one of those chairs balanced on a single ski with poles in each hand. He’s flying off for some competition in Tignes, France, next week; tonight will actually be his last meeting for a while. He drums his fingers against what remains of his left leg—cut off halfway up his thigh, unlike his right, which is completely gone—like he has all this pent-up energy he’s just waiting to release.
I take a deep breath and ask, “Did you start dating your girlfriend before you lost your legs, or after?”
“Both,” he answers. He fidgets with the fingerless leather gloves he wears to make pushing his wheelchair easier on his hands.
“What do you mean?”
“She was my girlfriend before I got injured, and when I came home it was a disaster. I couldn’t handle it when she tried to touch me. I got angry when she had the nerve to so much as look at my injuries.”
I nod. “So she broke up with you? Because you were being such a jerk to her?”
He shakes his head. “I think I could have gone on being a jerk to her forever and she’d have taken it.”
I sigh, leaning back against my chair. “Because no one wants to be the person who breaks up with someone like us, right?”
Michael shakes his head. “No,” he says firmly. “Because she loved me.”
I bite my lip. I don’t know what to say in response to that.
“I actually tried to break up with her before I was deployed. I thought I was so strong—you know, I’d rather you hate me now than have to mourn me later.”
“What happened?”
He shrugs. “She said whatever happened, we’d cross that bridge when the time came.” Michael continues, “But then when the time came, neither of us could quite cross that bridge, you know? So finally, my mom broke up with her for me.”
“Your mom?” I echo. I can’t think of anything more mortifying. Michael laughs.
“Yeah. She saw how I was treating Julie and she hated every minute of it. We were running on fumes, you know?”
I nod, thinking of dinner with Chirag in Sausalito, when I tried and failed to duplicate what Chirag and I had been before. But then, fumes aren’t the worst thing in the world. I inhale, imagining Chirag’s smell.
Michael continues, “So one night, Mom told Julie to get out and not to come back, not to call, not to text. She said that I needed some time on my own to recover—and so did Julie.”
“Wow. Your mom sounds tough.”
“Yeah,” Michael agrees. “Tough enough to say the things I couldn’t. The things I should have, from day one.”
“But you got back together?”
“A couple years later.”
“A couple of years?” Even though the whole group is watching us, it feels like a private conversation. “Didn’t you miss her?”
“Of course. But the thing is, I missed her even before we broke up. I was so much not myself that we weren’t ourselves, either. Our relationship didn’t even resemble what it had been before.”
I nod. Sometimes I think that the only time I don’t miss Chirag is when I’m in bed alone at night, imagining he’s there with me, picturing us dancing at prom. Daydreaming of the way things used to be.
“And now?” I prompt.
Michael shrugs. “It’s still different. We had to get to know each other on these new terms. Lucky for us, we each fell in love with the people we’d become.”
Michael smiles, his love for Julie written plainly across his face. I look away, wincing. The look on my face never communicates anything but damaged anymore, like I’m wearing an enormous OUT OF ORDER sign.
“I was scared,” Michael answers. “Who was going to want me? Who would want what I was now? Wasn’t I better off hanging on to the person who’d wanted me before, who still remembered what I’d been like before—who still loved who I’d been before?”
Across the room, someone whistles in agreement: Clyde. Michael continues, “I knew I was never going to be that guy again. But I just couldn’t let her go like I should—I don’t know. It felt—”
“It felt like losing that guy all over again,” I supply. “Severing your last tie to the person you’d been before.”
Michael nods. I rub my neck with my good hand.
After a few seconds of silence, Clyde says, “Okay, who wants to go next?”
After Group, Adam walks me out. I Googled him the other day, the same way I Googled the surfer who lost her arm, the snowboarder with the traumatic brain injury, the Elephant Man. There were plenty of articles about Adam Robert Rosoff, hometown hero—star of his high school’s soccer team, honors student, homecoming king—back from the war. Now he gives motivational speeches to troubled youth. He’s exactly the kind of person Nurse Culligan was hoping for when she suggested that special assembly. The kind of patient my mother wanted me to be. That special person who becomes even stronger after having been maimed, who talks about it bravely instead of wishing that everyone would just ignore it.
As always, Adam asks me for coffee.
“I can’t,” I answer, as always.
“Right, your parents are waiting.”
Clutching my umbrella, I shake my head. “Not my parents tonight.”
“Who, then? Your boyfriend?”
I nod. Saying the word yes out loud feels like it would be a lie. Adam pulls his hood up over his face in the rain, casting his scars into shadow. “So that’s why you were interrogating Michael tonight, huh?”
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