Permanent Marker

by Aimee Ross

  “Until you can stand on your own and tell me to get out,” she told me.

  Just like that, it was decided. Just like moving into a hotel room after my heart attack was decided.

  But I didn’t argue. I didn’t even consider another option. Were there other options?

  Mom and Dad had packed their car and left in the late-night hours after finding out about the accident. Dad had to fly back to Kansas City for his job, but because Mom was an independent computer analyst consultant, she could work from anywhere.

  So she moved her office into my Loudonville apartment, the third place I’d moved to since leaving home. Mom already had been staying there, driving daily to Cleveland to visit me, check my progress, and keep watch over my care.

  This morning, she was perched in the ugly orange chair at the foot of my bed with her laptop open and on. She wanted to show me the photographs of my car after the accident. Dad had somehow tracked down the towing company in the days following and taken pictures.

  I wasn’t sure why she wanted me to see them now—so soon—but I would take a look. Maybe she thought it would help me to better understand what had happened to my body.

  I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

  My 2008 Saturn Aura, the color of “ocean mist,” crumpled up, mangled, and folded in where his red Mini Cooper had made impact just below the driver’s-side mirror at the wheel well. The windshield, lifting at the corners, shattered around its perimeter. The driver’s seat twisted back, angled the direction it had been jammed, steering-wheel airbag deployed and spattered with blood. More blood spatters all over the seats, dark stains against the gray cloth interior.

  I was shocked. Disgusted. And I didn’t know what to say.

  How had I survived?

  And what the hell was that kid thinking? I wanted answers—I didn’t care if he was dead.

  Hot, silent tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes. I was sickened looking at the photos of my broken car.

  Mom had to have known how I would react. She had to have known they would upset me. Still, I didn’t say anything. She was driving every day to be with me. She was taking care of my place. She was paying my bills. And she was probably dealing with her own form of grief. She had probably needed to share the photos with someone; I just wished it hadn’t been me. Not yet.

  When doctors arrived for rounds, I put the pictures out of my head. I didn’t want to think about them any longer. Three or four doctors surrounded me in my bed, alternating questions.

  How are you feeling today? How is your breathing? Have you been eating?

  Aside from their different nationalities, they were all young and male, they all wore white coats, and each had a clipboard and pen in his hands. They formed a single medical entity, none distinguishable from the others.

  After I answered their queries, I had questions of my own for them.

  “When will I be able to return to work?”

  “What do you do, Aimee?” one said.

  “I’m a high school English teacher.”

  “Well, it all depends on your continued recovery,” he said. “Fractured bones take at least six weeks, so you’re looking at a minimum of two months.”

  It was the middle of August now.

  “So I could possibly be back in school by October?”

  The doctors exchanged glances, raising eyebrows. I could tell they thought October was a bit too soon to return to work.

  I didn’t like the fact that I would be missing the beginning of the school year. Setting the tone for the semester was always an important part of teaching, and it was hard to take time away from the classroom when you cared about students’ education. Last year, I had missed six weeks in the spring because of the heart attack, too.

  Just then, the doctor nearest Mom noticed the photos on her laptop. Maybe what was happening was exactly what she had intended. Maybe she had even gotten his attention somehow to look at them. They began talking while she showed him the pictures, though I was in the middle of my own conversation.

  “October? It’s always possible,” one of the doctors said.

  “Okay, next question: When can I go home?”

  “Well, that’s a little trickier,” another doctor said. “You’re going to need physical and occupational therapy, which means a nursing facility as a bridge between here and home. You live on your own, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do your children stay with you?” he asked.

  Sore subject, I wanted to say.

  “Sometimes. But my mom”—I nodded in her direction—“is going to be staying with me until I’m better.”

  They turned to her. “Is that right, ma’am?”

  Mom and the doctor looked up from the laptop when we got quiet waiting for her response.

  “Yes,” Mom said. “I told her that I’d stay until the day she could literally stand and kick me out of the door.”

  The doctors laughed.

  “You are very lucky, Aimee,” the doctor who had been looking at the pictures said to me. “For the extent of damage that was done to your car, you could be in a lot worse shape.”

  I didn’t know what to say. He meant dead. I could be dead.

  Fucking Zach Ryder. This was all his fault. And he was dead.

  “Is there any type of therapy here that Aimee could get so she doesn’t have to move someplace else before going home?” Mom asked.

  “Yes, actually. We have a rehab floor here she can go to, but,” the doctor paused, looking at me, “you would have to agree to a few hours of physical and occupational therapy every day.”

  “That’s fine by me.”

  “Okay, then. We’ll start the process to get you transferred, but you need to continue getting better and stronger so that we can get you up and moving,” the doctor said.

  Phew. No nursing home. I gave them a tired smile, and they said their goodbyes.

  I wondered how soon before I could start the rehabilitation for home. I wondered how my new body would respond to movement and exercise that was different from Danielle’s work. I wondered what it would be like to have my mother living with me, taking care of me at age forty-one, while at the same time I wondered who would take care of my seniors at school, since I couldn’t.

  And then I wondered if I would ever be able to forgive a high school kid I didn’t know who might have changed my life forever.

  2000–2009

  Eight years after I started teaching English at Loudonville High School, also my alma mater, my Building One classroom moved from Room 114 down the hall, around the corner, and into Room 110.

  It was an administrative, geographical alignment of subject areas, evidently, and one that excited me to no end.

  Once upon a time, Room 110 had been the classroom of my favorite math teacher, Mr. Matthews, who had taught me all four years of high school—long enough for me to develop a huge teenage crush. And he knew it, too. I blushed when he called on me, I blushed when he walked into the cafeteria and my friends yelled, “Hey, Aimee,” and he blushed all the time, victim of a ruddy complexion that I found so—sigh—attractive.

  A few years after I’d inhabited the room as an English teacher, Mr. Matthews stopped in my doorway on a random visit to the high school one afternoon. He wanted to say hi, check out his old room, and I, instantly sixteen again, wanted to faint. I stood frozen beside my desk, a safe twenty feet away, grinning in surprise.

  “Mr. Matthews!” I shouted. “This is your room! And I teach in it now!”

  How obvious. How embarrassing.

  He smiled politely, said it was good to see me, and left.

  I wondered what he thought of his room’s newest décor.

  Just like way-back-when, two large windows still framed the acres of farmland behi
nd the building, but the oversized drafting desks and clumsy equation “cheat sheet” poster boards of Mr. Matthews’ were gone. The two, built-in graphing chalkboards were now covered with a map of Great Britain and a poster of me with Mickey Mouse, and between them, a map of the world was pinned to the room’s only bulletin board. The far corner of the room housed a map of Nazi-Occupied Europe and various photos from my visits to Holocaust sites in Poland.

  Technicolor movie stills from the Wizard of Oz covered the doors of my book cabinet, and a brilliant collection of Hallmark cards my sister authored sat among the framed photos on top of my filing cabinet. Books and vocabulary words that “every high school graduate should know” bordered the eclectic assortment, but the piece de resistance was my Ricky Martin photo collection.

  And it all added up to one thing: my classroom.

  A typical day in high school English usually meant a discussion analyzing some piece of brilliant classic literature—my escape. Like the time a few years ago when my AP Lit and Composition class had just finished Albert Camus’ The Stranger, a book no one liked to read but everybody liked to talk about.

  I had written the most simplistic explanation for existentialism I could come up with on the chalkboard just minutes before class started.

  To exist means to suffer. And to live through that suffering, we find meaning in our lives.

  “So, why did Meursault shoot and kill the Arab?” I asked.

  One student said Camus’ book was a joke. Another thought he was being a hypocrite, while yet another student agreed, “Yeah, the book makes no sense.”

  “Because Meursault is just Holden Caulfield all grown up,” someone else said, trying to be funny.

  Everyone laughed. I loved when students made literary jokes.

  “Meursault doesn’t even cry at his own mother’s funeral,” another student added.

  “Well, that’s a good point,” I said. “Who doesn’t cry at his own mother’s funeral?”

  “The Stranger is about some dude shooting some other random dude on a beach after a lot of wine,” another student said. “That’s it.”

  Everything is so black and white to teenagers.

  But maybe, I told them, just maybe, there was more going on. Maybe Camus was trying to tell us something. Or express his beliefs. I explained that Camus believed that life had no rational meaning, and because humans struggled with this, they constantly sought meaning. He also believed that people longed for immortality, even knowing that existence comes to an end. Life then, Camus thought, was an unending struggle toward nothing but death.

  Blank stares. A “huh?” or two or three escaped a few mouths.

  And then my teacher thing took over, my brain scanning its files to find an example—something to share—to help them understand.

  “What about school shootings?”

  Since I started teaching in 1992, fifteen school shootings in almost as many states had left more than seventy people dead and numerous injured. The killers ranged in age from twelve to thirty-two, and the educational settings varied from a one-room Amish schoolhouse to university campuses. All violent, and most of them random.

  “Aren’t we all trying to make sense out of something senseless? And isn’t that human nature?”

  No matter how many of the killers in school shootings had histories of mental illness, and no matter how many times the patterns of school shootings were analyzed, none of it would ever make sense. We would never be able to say, “Oh, that’s why he did it.”

  “Yeah, but those shootings are real life,” someone responded. “What we’re talking about is a book.”

  “But literature echoes our lives,” I said, “and what we are touched by daily. And sometimes, literature even underlines truths that we don’t want to confront.”

  Truths about living and loving and suffering and dying.

  “Sometimes, it’s no use to figure out a character like Meursault, because it can’t be done,” I said. “Because sometimes that’s what the writer intends. Because sometimes that is the meaning we’re looking for.”

  Sometimes qualities exist that we can’t quite name or define, showing us new ways to look at the world while revealing fresh perspectives, even about ourselves.

  And isn’t that the beauty of the writing and the literature itself?

  Faces around the room looked thoughtful.

  “I like the book a little better now that we’ve discussed it some,” someone said.

  A few others echoed with “Yeah” and “Me, too.”

  Common understanding and appreciation: all I was going for. Analyzing and thinking critically about literature and its lessons wasn’t as complicated when you could see life around you—maybe even your own—reflected through it.

  To exist means to suffer. And to live through that suffering, we find meaning in our lives.

  How ironic those words then, how true those words now.

  Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Clinic | Three Weeks after the Accident

  Moving to the rehab clinic brought a whole new existence for me: one of increasing autonomy.

  But it came with a price.

  I had to agree to over an hour of physical, occupational, and recreational therapy five days a week, and thirty minutes more for one day a week.

  Six days of therapy every week, learning how to use my muscles again, seemed unimaginable to me, especially when I was still confined to a bed.

  But I was willing to try. After all, it meant I was one step closer to going home.

  Therapy also meant it was time for real clothes. A hospital gown just wouldn’t do for the types of movement and exertion I was expected to tackle now.

  When a nurse’s aide came in to help me get dressed for my first visit to the therapy center, I surprised her by putting on my tank top with one arm and mostly by myself. I needed help with the bottoms, though. My abdomen was still attached to the wound vac and so swollen that she had to get a pair of loose scrubs. She removed the ace bandage and plastic cast from my leg and foot, and I inched the pants over them, being careful not to bump anything. When it was time, I leaned back on the bed and lifted my rear, while she pulled the scrubs up around my waist. Then she put my cast back in place and slipped a sock over my good foot.

  It was time to transfer to the wheelchair.

  My new wheelchair, measured to fit only me: shiny and black with chrome handles and footrests. My new best friend. A means of freedom and getting out of bed. It meant using an actual toilet by myself instead of calling a nurse to help with a bedpan. It meant leaving the confinement of a hospital room. A wheelchair meant going home.

  I couldn’t wait to try it out.

  The aide pushed it beside my bed, locked the wheels’ brakes, and asked if I was ready.

  Of course I was, thanks to Danielle. Danielle had been the taskmaster I needed.

  I was already sitting on the edge of the bed, so using my good arm and the bed’s railing, I lifted myself up, putting weight on my right foot, while she held me around my waist. I grabbed the arm of the chair, she pivoted me, and gravity plunked me down on the seat. It took just a few more minutes to place my legs on the footrests and hang the portable wound vac from the back.

  “Am I going to wheel myself there?”

  “No, today I’m going to take you,” she said. “You’ll learn how to move around in it once you get to the gym with the physical therapists.”

  She wheeled me out of the room, down the hall, and through a doorway into an adjoining facility, the physical therapy gym.

  People were everywhere. Different kinds of people: people in scrubs, people in wheelchairs, people on crutches, people with walkers, people in white coats, people in street clothes. Men and women, elderly and middle-aged. They were sitting around tables, standing by other people, or ly
ing on square makeshift beds. Some played cards or worked on games, some lifted limbs in exercises, some guided others through those exercises, and some sat looking back at me.

  This was a busy place.

  It was also strangely quiet. Only the sounds of low voices, piped-in music, and the occasional movement of someone nearby could be heard.

  I was fascinated by the scene, my eyes darting here and there as she pushed me slowly through the large rooms. So many people needed rehabilitation. So many broken people.

  Like me.

  And then I saw him, the guy Mom had been telling me about.

  A big man, broad-shouldered and burly. He was a Hell’s Angel who had lost his leg in a motorcycle accident. My parents had shared a crowded waiting room with his friends while we were both patients in the ICU. He had long gray hair thinning on top and an even longer beard. He was struggling to a sitting position on a square sort of bed, his right leg missing from just above the knee.

  He was angry, too. The scowl on his face and the coarse tone of his voice as he yelled at the therapist standing beside him made that apparent. His new body was frustrating him.

  When the aide pushed me past, I averted my eyes. Even though we had something in common, I decided not to strike up a conversation. He was scary, and I felt guilty. My body was new, too, but all of my limbs were intact. I would eventually gain my freedom back, but he, well, he would always be limited in his.

  And then it hit me once again: I was lucky. Lucky to have gotten out of that crushed car alive. Lucky to have survived my injuries.

  Those times, the luck was about survival.

  But the lucky I was feeling now was different. I was alive, yes, but there are all sorts of ways to be alive and unlucky.

  I could be the one missing a leg or an arm. Even paralyzed. I could have been left with brain damage, or unable to breathe on my own, or without the function of my kidneys. I could have had my face cut up beyond recognition.

  Huh. How about that. I was lucky. Again, maybe even a miracle.