Permanent Marker

by Aimee Ross

  No one was home now: The kids were in school, Kenny was at work, and we were intruders.

  I wanted our visit to go unnoticed, but I knew that anything I took would disturb its physical environment and whatever normalcy was still intact for the children. Mom’s “stuff” was there, and for them, that’s where it belonged. If my “stuff” never left, I would eventually come home.

  But it didn’t feel like home any longer.

  We left the beige curtains in the front picture window and at the back sliding door—the curtains Mom and Dad had bought us as a housewarming gift—drawn, and we didn’t turn on any lights. There was no need in the bright afternoon light, but it added to the furtive feel of this “robbery.”

  I ignored Bear, who followed at my feet as I zipped through the house, thinking she was too old, too deaf, and too blind to know I was here, but she did. We had rescued the poofy little schipperke ten years ago, and though she was most attached to Jerrica, she thought of me as her second master. She kept up with me all through the house, but I didn’t acknowledge her. I didn’t reach down and pet her once. I couldn’t.

  I fled from room to room, collecting things that were mine and handing them off to whomever was closer, Mom or Dad. What I needed for everyday living. Anything decorative I wanted. I moved from the walk-in closet to the bathroom cabinets to the bedroom dresser, passing items off to my mother or father to load into their silver Honda Pilot. All my clothes. Makeup. The blow dryer and flat iron. The framed 8-by-10 of Ricky Martin. My jewelry box. My Mickey Mouse trophy from DisneyHAND. Books. I focused on guarding against emotion, aware and afraid that if feelings bubbled up, I could collapse in tears or worse: chest pains.

  Don’t risk the stress. Keep your heart safe. Flee the guilt. The quicker, the better. If you forget something, the kids can bring it later.

  I moved to the living room’s front closet and retrieved my jackets and coats. I turned and looked at my living room furniture. The barn-siding tables Kenny had made for me for Christmas one year. The new couch and loveseat we had purchased in the fall. I started to feel dizzy. I wondered who would get what. I would fight about it with him later. I looked up at the family portrait on the wall over the TV, taken eight years before. Things seemed easier then, before tearing apart my family. I consciously looked away and grabbed framed photos, wall art, and candles. But not the family photo. I couldn’t.

  Should I check the basement? No, there was nothing of mine in Jerrica’s room, and I didn’t need high school memorabilia or old photo albums right now.

  What about the other kids’ rooms? Should I peek in? Natalie’s across from Connor’s. Newly painted chalkboard walls with Natalie’s friends’ graffiti greeted my glance, surrounding a teenaged mess. I turned, opened Connor’s door, and made sure I had left nothing in the army camo-covered bottom bunk. The pillows smelled like him.

  Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it . . .

  I had to get out before I broke down, and I hadn’t even been away an entire week yet. Coming here was harder than I thought it would be.

  A last look around, a final stop in the kitchen. No dishes or crock pot or wine rack. No time—just go.

  The rectangular oak island in the center of the kitchen caught my eye then. Inside, below the green marble top, important papers and files: birth certificates, immunization records, social security cards of our three babies, tax records, the certificate of marriage. Something flashed through my mind about needing past years’ tax filings for divorce paperwork, and I reached in to pull the folders out from among the discarded bills and bank statements, evidence of our recent bankruptcy. Maybe these important things should stay under the roof where the children lived. I set them down, wavering. Then I snatched them up to take. I was the mom, after all. The responsible person of the family.

  Family. What family? There was no family now. I had destroyed it, and I wondered if my children would ever forgive me. The children. Three people I love more than life itself.

  What would Jerrica, Natalie, and Connor think when they got home from school? How would they feel actually seeing what I had taken, knowing I was really gone? Would they feel like I had abandoned them? And what was their father saying without me around? Could they really understand that I had to leave?

  Maybe I was being selfish, sacrificing the last eighteen years to find some sort of happiness I hadn’t felt in a long time. All I knew was that anger and boredom had come to control me, the woman who had lost herself. The old, happier me had been lingering for some time, quietly tugging at my shirt sleeve because she knew not to interrupt.

  But she did anyway.

  I climbed into the back seat of Dad’s Honda, the last one out of the house. Both Mom and Dad turned around to look at me.

  “Did you get everything you needed, Aim?” Dad asked.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Mom questioned.

  “Yes and yes,” I said, turning my face from them to look out the window. I didn’t want them to see my eyes filling with tears or have them tell me I was doing the right thing. I didn’t want to share this horrible, terrifying moment with them any more than I already had. And I certainly didn’t want to talk.

  Dad backed the Pilot out of the driveway onto the street and pulled away from the curb, and I stared straight ahead. I just had to keep looking forward.

  Two Weeks after the Accident

  “Ms. Young?”

  It was yet another doctor, but this time, in the middle of the afternoon. Visits by doctors at any time of the other than morning rounds were not good. It meant they couldn’t wait until the next day to let you know whatever it was they found.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve just read your morning X-rays, and you have a chip fracture in your right wrist,” she said.

  My wrist had been hurting, but a nurse’s quick assessment had turned up nothing. When I complained to doctors on morning rounds about it, they explained that immediately after the accident, I was assessed for major injuries only. It was possible for minor injuries to go unnoticed, particularly when the patient was not coherent enough to express pain.

  So to make sure nothing had been missed, they sent me off to be X-rayed, Jerrica and Natalie by my side.

  That was a couple of hours ago.

  “Another broken bone?”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “No, not a broken bone, a fracture, a crack, and in this case, a chip,” she explained.

  That didn’t make it sound any better. Brian and I already had counted eighteen fractures in my body, and now there was one more.

  Nineteen fractures. Almost ten times the number of fractured bones an average person experiences in her lifetime.

  Before the accident, I’d had only one broken bone, of which I’d been vocally proud. My prideful words reminded me of being a child bragging about never having been stung by a bee. No sooner had I boasted than I stepped on a live nest, the stings too numerous to count.

  “But I’ve been doing physical therapy every day, and I’ve been putting weight on it. What will I do now?” I could hear myself whining.

  My right arm was the only means of freedom I had. I used it to eat, to move myself around in bed, to grab what I needed, to help with the bed pan, even to blow dry my hair (the couple times it had been washed, that is). I didn’t want the one thing allowing mobility to be taken away. I almost wished I’d never complained in the first place.

  “You really shouldn’t use it at all,” the doctor said. “It has to heal.”

  Oh, no. I had to fight this. The worst that could happen was that she would ignore my pleas, and I would have another cast. (And bad hair.)

  “But I’ve been using it for a week, and it hasn’t really hurt. It’s the only way I can really move my body around right now!”

  “Hmm
mm,” she said, eyeing my wrist again. “There’s no swelling, and it has been two weeks since the accident. If I put a splint on it that you can remove, do you promise to at least keep it on during physical therapy?”

  “Of course!”

  I was almost giddy with excitement—over retaining the freedom to put pressure on another fractured bone.

  My world was small right now, my movement limited. I didn’t need another obstacle when I already had so many to overcome.

  It was a small victory, but it was still a win. And I had impressed myself with my own assertiveness. If there was one thing I was learning in here, it was that if I didn’t speak up for myself, no one would. No one else knew how it felt to be lying where I was.

  “Since you’re here, can you take a look at the cast on my leg? It’s so heavy, I can barely move it.”

  She lifted my leg to see how it was fitted.

  “I don’t see why it can’t be changed, but let me ask,” she said and smiled.

  I liked her. She listened to me.

  Later when the cast was cut off, I saw what I hadn’t imagined was beneath: an extremely hairy, bruised and scraped leg from the knee down, and a very swollen, black-and-blue-all-over foot.

  A lengthy, jagged scar marked the middle of my foot where the bones had come through. There was also a wire sticking out of my foot which fascinated me, because I had not felt it under the thick, dense cast.

  My leg was placed in an open-front, molded plastic brace that enclosed the back of my knee down to the tips of my toes, curving to cup the sole of my foot. Cushioned and blue in color, the new cast was held in place with nothing more than an Ace Bandage wrapped around the length of it. The nurse assured me that even though I had a broken ankle, this lighter cast would still provide necessary stability.

  “Besides, you really aren’t up and moving around that much,” he said.

  Which I knew, of course.

  But what a difference the new cast made: from a back-straining cement block to a cottony-light cloud. I could finally lift my leg without feeling like I was going to tear a thigh muscle in the process.

  • • •

  I heard her arrive, moaning so loudly I wanted earplugs. It seemed as if all hell had broken loose in my previously quiet, sterile environment.

  Nurses pulled the curtain around my bed for rest and privacy, but that thin, flimsy, plaid room-divider was a joke. I lay in my bed at the back of the room, trying to mind my own business, but I overheard most everything through that pseudo-curtain of privacy.

  When the nurse asked her what had happened, the patient’s words came out swollen and muddled. Something was wrong with her mouth or jaw. I tuned into her language as if she had a foreign accent and found out her face had been cut so severely by the breaking glass of the car’s windows that it was affecting her speech. She cried, moaning between words, begging for pain medication the nurse said she couldn’t have yet.

  She claimed her boyfriend had tried to kill her: they were riding in a car she was driving when he became furious with her, told her he should just kill her, and then yanked the steering wheel. The car rolled several times, and neither of them was wearing a seatbelt.

  I felt my own jaw drop in horror. The nurse’s silence said that she was as incredulous as I. I continued to listen intently, while the nurse asked the appropriate questions.

  The woman’s boyfriend, uninjured in the wreck, left her and the car at the scene of the accident. He walked away from her, leaving her lying in the mud by the car’s tire.

  Her story startled me and shook my sense of safety.

  The injured woman’s parents and toddler son came into the room, and I heard them request that the boyfriend not be allowed to visit. The hospital, however, could only keep all visitors from coming in or none, because it was too hard to stop just one person.

  I was unnerved, stunned that the possibility existed for him to come into “our” room after trying to kill her.

  The injured woman assured her parents that he wouldn’t show up anyway, and soon they said their goodbyes and left.

  We were all alone.

  “Hey! You over there! Call the nurse in here!” she bellowed.

  I froze.

  We were each assigned our own nurse; there wasn’t one assigned to the room. I had been here long enough to know that much.

  “There’s a big button to push on the side of your bed,” I answered meekly.

  “I realize that,” she snarled. “It won’t work!”

  I called my nurse. I could tell she wasn’t happy about needing to fetch my roommate’s nurse, but she did it. I was embarrassed and apologetic. After almost two weeks here, I knew how hard the trauma floor nurses worked taking care of so many patients.

  My roommate moaned and wailed waiting for her nurse to arrive, after which she begged and cried for more pain meds. She must have gotten them, because she quieted some.

  Her nurse left and we were alone again.

  Then, her bedside phone rang. I heard her muffled, low “Hello?” Then the sounds of her crying. It was him. It was her boyfriend.

  “You tried to kill me!” she screamed through swollen lips.

  It got quiet as she listened to what he had to say.

  Then she said she loved him and that she wanted him here.

  Was she crazy?

  I was stuck in a bed, unable to walk, barely able to move, and fresh off my own trauma, and she was inviting someone who wanted her dead to come to “our” room. What if he came to see her, they got into a fight, and I was the witness who needed silenced?

  My newly healed heart fluttered in fear. I wanted out of that room.

  I texted my mother—I didn’t call, because I didn’t want my roommate to hear. Mom had been my advocate thus far, a constantly present force in the hospital every day. I was sure that once I explained the situation, she would take care of it.

  I waited for her response text, which seemed to take forever. I knew she had gone out to eat with my uncle, but I also knew she would keep her phone nearby just for me. Her text back was nonchalant, not worried, an “Oh, wow” response. I wished I could call her, but I didn’t dare take the chance.

  Wait a minute. I was the only person who knew how I felt. My safety and peace of mind were being threatened after living through the most horrific trauma of my life. I was a grown woman who had also survived a heart attack. And I was entitled to be assured I would not die in a hospital room by the hands of some stranger’s maniacal boyfriend.

  I had to take control, because this time I could. This time I could get away from another young man’s poor decision-making. I needed to talk to my nurse.

  When she appeared, I motioned her closer there behind the curtain. She understood, moved to my side, and leaned down.

  “I don’t want anyone to hear,” I whispered before explaining my fears.

  “I don’t blame you,” she whispered back. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She pulled the curtain back to take my vitals, long enough for me to see my roommate being wheeled out of the room for X-rays: she was young, her hair a ratted mess, and her face looked as if Dr. Frankenstein himself had sewn it back together.

  Within minutes, the nursing supervisor came in to let me know they were moving me to another room.

  I had asserted myself when it mattered, spoken up for myself without someone else’s help, and it had worked.

  Phew.

  • • •

  “We’re calling you Humpty Dumpty, you know.”

  His name was Dr. Peterson, and he was the orthopedic surgeon who had performed three surgeries on me in the days just after the accident. He wasn’t surrounded by a team—a pleasant surprise—and I could tell from his handshake that he was kind.

  “You are?”


  “Yes,” he replied. “We had to put you back together.”

  He said it without humor or irony, but then he smiled.

  Humpty Dumpty. The riddle turned nursery rhyme. Just my luck. All this time I had wanted to be a perfect princess, and instead I was being compared to an irreparable egg that had fallen from a wall.

  I guess it fit. I had shattered, too, my body’s framework in pieces. But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were able to put me back together again. At least physically. And here he was, finally, representing the troops.

  I had been wondering when I would meet him—Mom had spoken so highly of him and his care these past couple of weeks—and I could see why. In addition to his gentle demeanor, he looked like Harrison Ford. Hmmmm. Indiana Jones was not quite my version of Prince Charming, but he was still a modern-day hero. And he had saved my life.

  Dr. Peterson spent the next several minutes gently explaining the repairs he had made to the breaks of my body, where they were located, and what different pieces of metal were holding them in place.

  As he came around the bed to leave, he stood at the edge and looked down at me.

  “I know this may be hard to believe, Aimee, but a year from now, I will have you ninety percent back to normal.”

  My eyes filled with tears. I nodded in understanding.

  “Thank you.”

  And then he left.

  A whole year to recover. Three hundred and sixty-five days. A lot could happen in a year. My life had fallen apart in just five months. And now, it would take a year to heal. Even then, he promised only that I would be ninety percent back to normal.

  Just a week ago, another doctor had told me they thought I would make it, and now I knew I would never be one hundred percent normal again. But it didn’t matter.

  I didn’t know what normal was anymore.

  • • •

  Mom would be helping me transition from patient to independence, staying with me as my live-in nurse when I returned home from the hospital, for as long as it might take. As long as I needed.