Faceless

by Alyssa Sheinmel

  The ache in my muscles shifts. It hurts, but it’s a sweet ache, familiar and warm.

  I think it’s called muscle memory. Like how riding a bike is supposed to come back to you after decades off two-wheels. Instead of No, Maisie, every step is punctuated by my body silently insisting: I remember, I remember. I’m not going fast, but I can feel the muscles in my legs waking up, tightening as I climb the hill, shaking beneath my skin. I can feel the breeze on my face, taste the air in my throat. I remember, I remember. I drop my head and pick up speed, studying the ground beneath my feet: the moist concrete, the gravel and the dirt filling in all the cracks.

  I remember, I remember.

  A new girl joined Group about a month ago. Amy. Amy lost both her legs in a car accident—one just below the knee, the other up by her pelvis. She’s learning to walk with prosthetics and crutches.

  Amy is beautiful. Like stop-on-the-street-and-stare kind of beautiful. The skin on her face is dewy and glowing, but the first time she spoke up in Group, she cried almost nonstop, sobbing that no one would ever want her now, asking all the questions it took me so long to work up the nerve to ask: Do you have a boyfriend? Did he want you after your accident?

  Later, I told Adam that I kind of hated Amy. When she’s sitting down, you can’t even tell she’s injured. Adam laughed, but he also suggested that there might come a time when I’d be grateful that my injuries were nothing like hers, despite her perfect face.

  And Adam was right yet again, because right now, I can’t stop thinking about the fact that Amy will never be able to run, not with her own legs, not like this.

  I remember, I remember. I remember, I remember.

  “What do you remember?” Adam asks suddenly, slowing down so that we’re running side by side.

  I shake my head, panting. “I didn’t realize I was saying it out loud.”

  “What do you remember?” he repeats.

  “This,” I answer. “Running. I used to do it on mornings like this, in the fog.”

  I shake my head. I thought letting go of running was an important step on the way to acceptance. With each footfall, I wonder if I’m taking a step forward or back. I look down and see that my sports bra isn’t black, like I thought, but navy blue. For the first time in months, I’m not wearing a stitch of black.

  This feels like going forward.

  “You were out running the morning of your accident, right?”

  “Jeez, Marnie didn’t keep much to herself, did she?” It’s hard to talk, breathing this hard.

  Adam shakes his head. “Not Marnie this time. It was on the news. ‘Local girl burned in electrical fire.’ They didn’t release your name or anything, but after we met I figured it must have been you.”

  “Oh.” I nod. Chirag had mentioned something about that, too.

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So was it like this that morning?”

  I used to make fun of people jogging along with their friends, too busy talking to realize that their form was all wrong, going so slowly that their heart rates were barely elevated while I zipped past. Today, I don’t care that I’m going every bit as slowly as those people I used to mock. Adam and I aren’t racing like Chirag and I used to. Today, it’s a win simply because I’m running.

  “The fog wasn’t this thick. Then it started to rain halfway through my run. And then—” I stop talking and look down, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, savoring the instant of weightlessness in between my steps.

  “And then?” Adam prompts.

  I shrug, panting heavily. “Thunder. Lightning. I’m sure they covered it on the news.”

  “But I want to know what you remember.”

  I stop, and so does Adam. The trees tower above us, and beyond them, the bay stretches out. I take a deep breath, tasting bark and salt water.

  “I don’t … I don’t remember much,” I say. “When I was still in the hospital, I thought maybe that was some kind of trick my brain played on me, like the same way the doctors induced my coma to get me through the pain, my brain induced some kind of amnesia so that I wouldn’t remember the trauma.”

  I pause. “Sometimes I remember the smell. The burning smell.” Even though I’m sweating, I shiver. “The neighborhood must have reeked for weeks.”

  Adam nods, but he doesn’t say anything. I close my eyes. Before my accident I never knew what fire sounded like, the enormous whoosh when it moves, like the ocean; a wave crashing and receding.

  “It was pretty,” I say finally, almost smiling. “The sparks looked like fireworks. I love fireworks.” There’s a bench on the side of the road, one of those lookouts where people stop to admire the view. Adam and I sit down and he hands me a water bottle. I take a long drink.

  “They told me later that I was on fire, but I don’t remember that. The last thing I remember is the sparks. I thought it looked like the Fourth of July. Chirag and I were going to watch the fireworks together.” I kick the ground. “Maybe this year, he’ll go with Alexis Smith.”

  “It’ll get easier, you know.”

  “I don’t understand why it’s this hard to begin with. We hadn’t been close for months, not since my accident. And I’m the one who broke up with him. I wanted this.”

  “You didn’t want it, Maisie,” Adam corrects gently. “Nobody wants this.”

  I nod. At Group this week, I finally said my biggest fear out loud: I’m scared that no one will ever want me again. Everyone in the circle nodded. No one told me that I was worried about nothing; nobody tried to convince me that I was still beautiful on the inside. Adam didn’t insist that if he could get a girl like Marnie, any of us could get anyone. Instead, Maureen took my hand in hers and agreed that it was a terrifying thing, to be alone.

  “You wanna hear a secret?” I ask suddenly, and Adam nods. “I almost broke up with Chirag last year. Before all this.”

  “I thought he was the perfect boyfriend,” Adam says, mock scandalized.

  “So did I!” I agree, laughing. “Serena had to remind me. He used to drive me crazy. But after we’d been dating for a month or so, I guess I got sick of his seriousness and his movies, and I was going to end it.”

  “His movies?”

  “He used to make me watch all his favorite sci-fi movies. And that was fine. I liked a lot of them, but mostly, I just liked experiencing the things he loved with him. Liked that he wanted to share them with me. But he never wanted to watch any of my favorite movies with me and that made me nuts.”

  “So why didn’t you break up with him?”

  I shrug. “I loved him. I mean, I was falling in love with him then, I guess. I just … I think I forgot that we were never perfect. Even before this,” I add, gesturing to my face.

  “It’s not unusual to idealize our lives before.”

  “Another trick our brains play on us.” I pass the water back to Adam. He has to concentrate to get his lips to curl around the lip of the bottle.

  “What do you remember?” I ask suddenly. “From the day you were burned?”

  Adam doesn’t hesitate. “The heat. I mean, it was the desert and we were loaded down with all this equipment, with helmets, with boots. It was so hot. And then I just took one step too far, and there was a sound like nothing I’d ever heard before. Did you know I lost seventy percent of my hearing in my left ear?”

  I shake my head.

  “Acoustics are lost on me now,” Adam says, and I think about all those injuries I’d wanted to understand. The wedding pictures of the surfer whose arm was bitten off by a shark, the snowboarder who went back to competition after a traumatic brain injury. On the news last night, the last story was about runners in the Paralympics. I swear my mother turned the volume up on that story to make sure I heard it. She didn’t know that I already know all about the Paralympics, thanks to Michael from Group.

  I tighten my ponytail and sigh. “Man, my mother would do backflips if I were more like you.”

  “W
hat do you mean?”

  “You’re the person she wanted me to be. You have it so together, like you’re my freakin’ spirit guide through this journey, or whatever it’s supposed to be.”

  Adam laughs so loud that I jump out of my skin. “Are you kidding?”

  “I’m serious,” I insist, punching his arm. “You were probably so polite to your doctors. You never sat around thinking: Why did this happen to me? It isn’t fair!” I shrug. “Things like that.”

  “Of course I did. When I first got home, I spent a lot of time shouting at the heavens.” Adam tilts his head skyward. “You know: Why me? Why me? You might have trouble believing this, but I was kind of a jerk in high school. Everything had always come so easily to me: girls, sports, grades. All those things seemed so important before I enlisted.”

  I shake my head. It’s impossible to imagine Adam like that.

  Adam takes a deep breath. “I never told anyone this. Not Group. Not even Marnie. For a long time, I wished I’d died. Wished I hadn’t been some miracle survival story. I thought it would be better to be gone than to live like this.” He runs his fingers through his hair, and I see the smallest of burns on his scalp, bald patches that are normally covered by the longer strands from above. “But I never told anyone how I felt. How could I? Some of my friends died over there. Some of them died that day, from that same explosion. And even some of the guys who made it back home … some of them were in a lot worse shape than I was, inside and out, you know?”

  I lean back against the bench, genuinely surprised that Adam wasn’t always as wise as he is now.

  “What happened that changed things?”

  Sheepishly, Adam says, “I broke my brother’s nose.” He looks so serious that I burst out laughing.

  “It’s true,” he insists. “I picked a fight and we got into it the way we used to when we were kids. He was careful to keep his punches on my right side, though,” he adds, laughing. “My mom watched for a few minutes, letting us rip into each other, before she literally came between us.”

  “What took her so long?”

  “I think she knew I’d been itching for a fight for months. Guess she thought that after everything my face had been through, my brother’s face could take a few punches for my sake. And afterward, when she yelled at us and our dad tossed us steaks to hold over our black eyes—I don’t know. I can’t explain it. For months, people had been saying what would my lost friends give—what would their loved ones give—to be in my shoes, you know?” I nod. Adam continues, “I needed time to understand that myself. People said it every day but it didn’t make any difference to me until I really felt it on my own.”

  A lump rises in my throat. “I know I should feel lucky. That’s what everyone says—the doctors, the nurses, my parents. I’m such a lucky girl. My donor—” I shake my head.

  “The doctors, the nurses, your parents—they don’t have to live in there.” He presses two fingers to my forehead. “They don’t understand that this isn’t some switch we can flip. It’s more like …”

  “A dimmer switch,” I suggest, and Adam laughs.

  “Yes, perfect! I’m going to steal that line next time I have a speaking engagement.”

  “I expect a deposit in my checking account every time you say it.”

  Adam nods. “Fair enough. But seriously, you’re right. We come out of the darkness slowly. It takes a long time to feel lucky after something like this happens to you.”

  “I don’t feel lucky,” I whisper. “I don’t even remember what it’s like to feel lucky.” I run my fingers along my thighs, tracing the seams of my leggings. “The old Maisie was lucky.”

  “The old Maisie?”

  I nod. “You know, the girl I was before the accident. I told you, I’ve been trying to figure out who this new Maisie is. Maisie 2.0.”

  “Maisie 2.0?” Adam echoes. “What are you, a computer program?”

  “It’s not funny!” I say adamantly. “I’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  “I’m sure you have,” Adam says, but he’s struggling not to laugh.

  “I’ve been trying to, I don’t know, cultivate a new personality, in opposition to my old one. Like, if the old Maisie was on the track team, then the new Maisie would have to try yoga. If the old Maisie woke up early, the new Maisie would learn to sleep past noon. If the old Maisie had a boyfriend, the new Maisie would be perpetually single.”

  “Those aren’t personality traits, Maisie. Those are just things you do.”

  I wiggle my toes inside my sneakers, stretch my arms overhead, releasing the ache in my muscles. “I thought the new Maisie couldn’t be a runner. I thought it was progress, that I’d accepted that about her.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I think she’s the kind of runner who needs to take a rest after a half a mile. Which the old Maisie would have totally laughed at.”

  Adam shakes his head. “How do you know what the old Maisie would have done, if she were here? The old Maisie wouldn’t be here right now. She would never have met me.”

  Adam stands and so do I. “Look,” he begins, “I’m not saying that what happened to us didn’t change us. There is definitely a before and an after and a whole slew of changes in between. But you can’t figure out who you are by taking inventory.”

  “But so much is different now. Not just my face.”

  “Yes,” Adam concedes, “you’re different. You’ve gone through a lot this past year and these kinds of experiences leave all sorts of scars behind. But like you said, it’s a dimmer, not a switch. Your life will continue to shift and change the more time that goes by—which, by the way, it would have whether you’d been burned or not. The bottom line is that right now, in this moment, you’re this Maisie. The girl standing in front of me. And instead of wondering what the old Maisie would have done or how the new Maisie should feel, just ask yourself two questions: What do you want? What will you do?”

  I take a deep breath, filling my lungs with heavy cold air, and press my feet into the ground, imagining that I can feel the wet asphalt under the rubber of my sneakers. Maybe I’ll never run the way I used to, but I can run. And I will, today at least.

  I look at Adam and grin. “This Maisie is going to race you back home.” I take off down the hill. I might not be able to win as often as I used to, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enter a race once in a while.

  Later, I leave the lights on when I look in the mirror. My cheeks are rosy around my scars, still flushed from my morning run.

  I can’t remember the last time we went shopping together!” Serena squeals the next afternoon. I promised to help her find a prom dress, so here I am, my arms laden with about a hundred pounds of organza and taffeta that Serena just has to try on.

  “I was too busy avoiding reflective surfaces to risk stepping foot inside a department store,” I answer, and Serena laughs her great big laugh. There are mirrors around every corner of the store, and the lighting is bright and unforgiving. Glimpses of me are everywhere.

  This morning, I found a black ribbon in the closet where Mom keeps all of our Christmas detritus. I tied it around my wrist like a bracelet, a tiny symbol that I’m still mourning. I finger it now, playing with the frayed edges.

  In the dressing room, there are mirrors on all four walls. I see my face from more angles than ever before. From the right side, with no scars running up my neck, my face looks almost normal, like maybe I was born with this chin and these cheeks. The scar under my chin, where they attached the chin to my neck, has nearly disappeared altogether.

  I can’t stop looking.

  I’m so distracted that when Serena—inspecting herself in yet another perfect dress—says, “You can go by yourself, you know. I am,” it takes me a second to realize what she’s talking about.

  Oh, right. Prom.

  “That’s different. You’re going by yourself because you couldn’t decide which boy to say yes to.” Serena got asked four times by four boys, and I’m sure there w
ere dozens more who couldn’t work up the nerve to ask her. Date or no date, she’ll be on someone’s arm all night if she wants to be.

  “It wasn’t that I couldn’t decide which boy to say yes to,” Serena insists as she pays for her dress—gauzy and nearly transparent, with champagne-colored sequins down the back—“it was that I couldn’t decide which boy to say no to.”

  Serena swings her shopping bag back and forth as we walk through the store. If I go to Barnard next year, I will miss her so much.

  “I’m lucky that dress was on sale,” she adds suddenly. “Otherwise it would have been way out of my budget. I mean, I’ve been making extra money babysitting ever since my dad got laid off, but—”

  “Your dad got laid off?” I interrupt.

  Without looking at me, Serena nods.

  “When?”

  “A few months ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She shrugs. “I didn’t want to—I don’t know. You’d just broken up with Chirag and you were still so tired all the time. It’s not like you had any energy left over to worry about my problems.”

  At once, I’m aware of another string around my rib cage, a string that’s been there all along but that I’ve never actually felt before because it’s never been pulled quite so tight. This is the string that links me with Serena: This string keeps all of our shared memories, from our first game of hide-and-seek to each of our first kisses. It’s soft as silk and loose as a pair of perfect jeans because it’s always just been there; even with everything that’s happened, even when I imagined moving away and finding a new best friend, this string has never threatened to snap, not once, not even close. Because Serena and I have always been best friends, and Serena at least never doubted, not for a second, that we always would be.

  Until now.

  “I’m really sorry,” I begin.

  “For what?” Serena asks absently. She walks toward another rack of clothes, even though she’s already bought her dress and isn’t the least bit interested in any others.

  “I haven’t been a good friend since I got home.”