by Tawni Waters
“No,” she says, her eyes twinkling playfully. “Why, is that odd?”
“Not at all,” I lie.
“You are so full of shit.” She smiles. “Lawrence, am I a strange woman?”
“Excessively. And I find it irresistibly sexy,” Lawrence says. He puts his arm around her and takes a whiff of her neck. “Mmm. Mountain breeze. My favorite scent.”
Jean laughs. “Oh, you pervert.”
Davey Crocket must be used to being called “pervert,” because he comes running from his place under the table and humps my leg.
“Hey, little dude,” I say, trying to extricate my ankle gracefully.
“And so she leaves us just as she found us,” Lawrence intones, picking up the writhing canine.
“It’s rather poetic, isn’t it?” Jean asks wistfully.
As I walk toward my bike, they laugh and call out well wishes.
“Keep in touch,” they say.
I pull the business card they gave me out of my pocket. It says Lawrence and Jean Whittler, Old Farts Extraordinaire on it. “I’ve got your info right here.”
“We’ll miss you,” they say in unison.
“I’ll miss you too,” I yell as I start my Harley.
It’s not until I’m racing down the freeway that I realize it’s true.
• • •
Had my mom not died, what happened next might have been the defining moment in my life so far. I would measure events as happening “before the wreck” and “after the wreck.” But breaking a few bones is nothing compared to losing your only parent, so it wasn’t as big of a deal as it could have been.
But I’m rushing ahead. You’re confused. I was just saying goodbye to Jean and Lawrence, and now I’ve wrecked. You need a transition, a rewind. Maybe I should say something like, “It all started when” only I don’t know when it all started. How do you decide when a particular episode in your life began? It’s not like you have slow fades to indicate scene changes and dramatic music to ease you from one mood to another. Did it start when I was listening to Lawrence slurp his breakfast? When I stopped for gas an hour later? When that asshole flipped me off as I pulled back onto the freeway? Okay, let’s go with that last one. That’s when it started.
So I had just pulled over at Circle K, filled up the bike, and grabbed a bottle of Gatorade. It was purple, an unfortunate choice as it spilled all over my white shirt when the bike went down, ruining my vintage Bon Jovi tee forever. I guess it didn’t really matter though. Even if my drink hadn’t spilled, the blood would have ruined my clothes anyway.
Like I said, I’m driving along, my Gatorade lodged in the triangle of seat between my thighs, pissed off for all kinds of reasons, the obvious, constant one being my mother’s death. Secondarily, I’m pissed because Dean had the gall to demand I call him. I mean, had he asked, it would have been one thing, but demanding is quite another. I’m also furious at the baby in my belly, having finally grasped—I mean really realized—that it has put me in a decidedly shitty situation. I can either abort it and feel guilty forever, or I can keep it and end up with boobs like Jean, not to mention a totally screwed-up life. There is a third option, adoption, but that won’t fix my tits, now will it? Holy hell. I never wanted to be a stripper, but shouldn’t I at least have had the opportunity to consider a life of professional public nudity before the choice was ripped away from me completely? What if I need money for college someday? A Playboy centerfold won’t even be an option.
So here I am, pissed as all get out, when this dude in a beat-up, gray truck passes me and screams out his window. I can’t hear him over the wind, but by the way he’s snarling, I deduce that he’s not trying to let me know my rear tire is low. And then, lest I miss his point, he flips me off. That does it. I snap.
“You douchebag!” I scream, and I squeeze the throttle hard.
People have not evolved much beyond their reptilian brain stems. Don’t let anyone tell you different. They have survival instincts that kick in when they are truly threatened, gut feelings that override all logic and make them get the hell out of Dodge when a maniac is chasing them down the freeway on a Harley, screaming epithets, even if the maniac in question is a girl who might weigh 125 pounds if her pockets were full of rocks. This guy is huge—his neck is bigger than my thigh—but he must get that I’m not quite sane because instead of engaging in a battle of words, he guns it.
“Where are you going, chickenshit?” I shriek, staring at the back of his shaved head glinting through his rear windshield. My blood pounds in my temples, making a drum of my helmet. My hands clench. I’m crying again. Why I am crying now, of all times? All this asshat needs is to see my weakness.
Instantly, he becomes everything I hate in the world. He’s my mom, who died on me without warning. He’s Dean, who had the audacity to get me pregnant and now wants answers. He’s the baby inside me, who insists I make a life-defining decision I’m not even moderately equipped to make. The douchebag is fleeing, but I’m gaining on him. Yellow lines fly along beneath me, a thousand bright warbirds accompanying me as I attack. I’m getting closer. I can make out the nipples on the silver naked ladies on his mud flaps, which makes me hate him even more. “Chauvinist pig!”
And then, he slows down. I don’t know why. Maybe a dog runs across the highway. That’s what he claims later when the police ask, but whatever the reason, I see brake lights. I brake slowly, like I should, fast enough not to plaster myself all over his bumper, but slowly enough that the wheels don’t lock up. I feel this weird satisfaction, knowing I’m pulling this off, maneuvering myself through a dangerous situation. I’m veering onto the shoulder, still slowing steadily, when this stump materializes from out of nowhere. It’s suddenly there. I do what I shouldn’t. I brake fast, locking the wheels, and I’m skidding, going down, trying to remember what Mom taught me. “Let go of the bike,” I hear her say. Maybe it’s inside my head, maybe out loud. I listen and let go, but not fast enough, because something snaps, and pain shoots through my arm.
People say this shit happens in slow motion, but it doesn’t. One second, my tires lock up and I think, “Shit!” The next, my head smacks something hard, like taking a sledgehammer to my skull, and the next, I wake up in a hospital.
Fifteen
I lied. Waking up in the hospital wasn’t the next thing that happened. I was going to leave this part out, but it doesn’t seem honest, and if I’m going to bother to write this at all, I want you to know who I really am, even if that is crazy.
So the next thing that happened was I saw my mom. To this day, it still makes me cry to think of it. As I was going down, there was this weird shrieking in my ears. It was the loudest sound I’d ever heard. Some of it was the tires skidding, but mostly, I think it was death closing in. And then, everything was quiet. Dead quiet. A quiet I’ve never known before or since.
I would like to say that I found myself standing in front of some pearly gates or hovering above my body, but that’s not how it was. I wasn’t anywhere. I was simply floating in indescribable…what? Light. That’s the only word I know to describe it, but it wasn’t the insubstantial stuff that comes out of chandeliers. This light was thick. This light had substance. Forgive my cheesy-as-fuck-ness, but this light was liquid love. I wasn’t scared anymore, not even a little bit.
“Mom?” I called. Yeah, I could talk. Even though I didn’t have a body. Even though I didn’t have a mouth. I could think and make noise even though I didn’t have a head. “Mom,” I said again. Somehow I knew she was there.
She kinda faded into the scene, grew out of the light like one of those flowers blossoming from seed in fast motion on nature shows. She was perfect, wearing her leather jacket, as I remembered her, only with that amazing light seeping from her pores.
“Hi, my baby,” she said, the same words she said to me the first time she held me. She kissed me on the face, even though I didn’
t have a face. That’s just what it was. I had no body. She had one. And she could kiss me.
“‘But soft,’” she said. “What light from yonder window breaks?’” She looked at me in a way no one before or since has ever looked at me, the way only a mom can look at her little girl, like I was the Taj Mahal and pyramids and Niagara Falls all rolled into one “‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.’”
“Mom, am I dead?” I asked.
She smiled a secret smile, the way she used to the night before Christmas when I begged to know what my presents were. “Oh, monkey,” she said gently. “We never die.”
And that’s when I woke up.
• • •
Have you ever imagined what it might feel like to be peeled with a vegetable peeler? I have because I’m twisted like that. If you are too, then you can sort of picture what I felt when I woke. Mom’s now-tattered jacket had protected my arms, but the asphalt ate through the skin on my right hand, leaving it raw and bloody. My arm got tangled with the bike and was broken in two places. A rookie mistake. Mom would have kicked my ass if she saw.
The worst part was what happened to my head. Later, when I saw my helmet, Mom’s name was shattered, a web of blunt trauma, as if it had taken most of the impact. I didn’t know that when I woke up though. If this was what happened with a helmet, I’d hate to see what it would have been like without a helmet. My skull felt like Godzilla was tap-dancing on it. And joy to the world, my collarbone was also broken. It wasn’t pretty; I was feeling the hurt.
So rewind with me to the moment I wake up. All I know is I wished I hadn’t. I’ve never felt pain like this. Not even close.
“Where am I?” I shriek, which is cliché of me, a line Mom and I would have dropped into the mouth of an invalid from our soap operas. Cut me some slack though. Five seconds ago, I was floating in liquid light with my dead mother.
“You’re in the hospital,” a woman’s gentle voice says.
“Mom?”
“No, sweetie.”
I open my eyes, or at least I try. They feel sort of stuck shut. “I can’t see,” I say, panicking.
“Your face is swollen,” the voice says. I finally open my eyes far enough to see that the voice belongs to a woman with a blond pixie cut. She’s wearing pink scrubs. “Don’t worry. Your eyes are fine. Your face is too. Or it will be.”
She adds that last part like she thinks I’m worried about what I look like. I’m not. I’m not coherent enough for that. Still, I’m aware enough to know I might appreciate the information later on when I look in a mirror.
Gently, the nurse sweeps my hair from my face. For a second, she reminds me of Mom. “I hope you don’t mind, but we went through your phone to call your next of kin. Your mom didn’t answer.”
“She can’t. She’s dead.”
The nurse looks sad.
Don’t. Say. It.
She says it. “I’m sorry.”
I try to wave away her condolences, but it hurts my shoulder. “Shit!” I say through clenched teeth.
“You shouldn’t move. You’re due for more pain meds. I’ll get you some.” The nurse goes through a laundry list of my injuries. I try to take it in, but my mind is reeling.
“How long have I been here?” I ask when she stops to take a breath.
“Two days,” she answers. “You were in a coma.”
“A coma?”
“Yes,” she says. “Brains are fragile. Yours took quite a blow.”
“Stupid stump,” I say.
“Stump?”
“Never mind.” I try to shake my head. It feels like Mike Tyson punches my face. “Fuck,” I say, gasping.
“Try to stay still,” the nurse says. “I’ll get those meds.” She stands. “Dean will be here soon.”
I jump at his name, in spite of her admonitions. “Fuck!” I say again. “Dean?”
“Since we couldn’t get ahold of your mom, we called the next person in your ‘favorites’ list. Dean was very worried about you. He’s on his way.”
Sixteen
When I was little, Mom used to talk about warp speed every time we’d drive through a snowstorm. The flakes would be coming at the windshield, looking like planets and stars flying by a spaceship, and she’d say, “Get ready, honey. We’re going into warp speed.” She’d push the magic button, which I now know was the hazard lights, and the warp triangle would flash red on the control panel. Squealing with glee, we’d fly along like that, two space travelers traversing a dark universe.
Now I’m wondering if Mom pushed the warp speed button on my life. Was there a control panel in that white light? I didn’t think to look. But everything is happening way too fast. Everywhere I turn, asteroids and planets and meteors rush at me. It’s anything but gleeful.
The most recent bit of space debris to show up in my orbit is wearing an Edgar Allan Typoe T-shirt when he walks into my hospital room. It features a very forlorn-looking Edgar Allan receiving a rejection letter for his story “The Ramen.” It’s funny, so I laugh, which makes my head hurt, which makes me cry.
Deans lopes to me and kisses my forehead. “You scared me,” he says. He’s trying not to cry, which makes me cry harder. He sits on the bed. I wince. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Does that hurt you? Should I stand?” He starts to get up.
“No, don’t get up. Please. Stay with me.” I clutch at him like I clutched at the Asshole right after I lost my virginity, which makes me feel vulnerable and shitty, but what are you gonna do? No way am I going to pull off my “I am a rock” routine, what with the bandages and the IV and my face looking like Gordon Ramsay went at it with a cheese grater. I keep clutching.
Dean takes my hand and presses it to his lips. They’re warm and soft. They feel like home. “You’re a pain in my ass, but I love you,” he says.
I laugh through my tears, tasting snot. “I love you too, Typoe Boy.”
For a second, he seems like he’s going to address the fact that I just said “I love you” for the first time, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “Typoe Boy?”
I glance at his shirt.
He looks down and flattens the shirt so I can see the picture better. “Oh, yeah. I forgot I was wearing this. You get why it’s funny, right?”
“Yeah, dork. I get it. I took freshman English.”
“Just making sure. I didn’t know if you were still concussing or whatever.”
“I’m definitely still whatevering.”
He kisses my hand once more. “If you ever almost die on me again, I’ll kick your ass.”
“I think I’m done with near-death experiences,” I say.
Dean glances around the room, taking in the institutional decor and the various implements of torture. He touches the giant bouquet of sunflowers that sits on my nightstand. “Mercy?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “She’s coming tonight. They called you instead of her, so she didn’t know.”
“Oh, shit! I totally should have called her,” he says. “I’m sorry. I thought for sure she knew, and I just wanted to get to you. I drove ninety all the way.”
“Apparently, the nurses decided you were the second-most important person in my life.”
Dean laughs.
I touch one of his curls, loving the way it falls along his jawline. “I’m not sure they were right.”
He nods. “I know. This must be weird for you.”
I shake my head. “You aren’t the second-most important person. You’re the first.”
He squints at me, seemingly trying to decide whether I’m telling the truth or high on pain meds. “You mean that, Harley? Because I can’t go three seconds without thinking about you. I swear to Jesus, the idea of living my life without you scares the shit out of me.”
“You don’t even believe in Jesus.”
“Yes, I do.” He pulls a cruci
fix from under his shirt. “You didn’t notice this while you were licking my chest?”
I feel myself blush. “I saw that, but I thought you meant it ironically.”
“No irony whatsoever. I gave up on church a long time ago, but I never gave up on the Dude.”
I almost start quoting The Big Lebowski, but I’m not sure he’ll get the movie reference, and anyway, it might offend him. So I say, “Oh, well, you never told me that.”
“You never asked.”
“I guess I never asked a lot of things about you.”
He smiles. “You were too busy busting my balls to ask questions.”
I smile back. “In addition to being done with near-death experiences, I’m also thinking of cutting back on ball busting.”
“So ask me a question.”
I think of questions I could ask. What’s your favorite color? What’s your best memory from second grade? But I ask the one I really want an answer to. “Why do you love me? I’m such a bitch.”
“No, you’re not,” says Dean. “You’re hurt, and you’re scared, and you’re always posturing, but you’re not a bitch. You have a beautiful heart and a great mind. I never believed your bitch routine for a second.”
“Posturing?” I repeat, feeling mildly insulted. “I’m so not posturing.”
“You definitely are,” he says. “You’re like one of those apes in the zoo pounding your chest to scare away potential attackers.”
I laugh.
“But, Harley, let’s get one thing straight, okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
“I’m not an attacker. We’re on the same team.”
Nodding, I touch his arm.
“My turn to ask a question,” he says.
I know what it’s going to be before he says it, but he asks anyway. “The baby is mine, right?”
I nod. “There was never anyone but you.” Then I realize I’m sick and tired of lying. “Okay, there was, but he was in New York before I even met you. I was just being a bitch that day in the hotel.” Dean looks uber-relieved, like he’d believed he had cancer only to learn the tests were all wrong. I feel sick at the thought of how much I must have hurt him. I say the words I’ve never said to anyone I’ve wronged before. “I’m sorry.”