by Emma Young
Dr. Monzales told me it would take time for my brain to connect with my new body, and my experiences during that process would be very difficult to predict.
Explanation A: That is what’s happening right now, and gradually it’ll get better.
Explanation B: I’ve survived the operation but my brain was injured. I have a degree of consciousness, but a permanent inability to move or communicate.
Either way, they’ll know that something’s going on in my head, because they had the world’s most sophisticated brain scanners all lined up to use on me. They’ll see activity in parts of the brain used for thinking, not just breathing and sleeping.
Which means Dad will be crying. Mum probably will be crying. Elliot? I have no idea what Elliot will be doing. I wish I could see him. Right now. I really wish I could see his face.
May 25.
A whining. It sounds like an insect, only it’s higher-pitched, and it’s . . . yes, it’s changing. The pitch is changing. And I feel something. Pins and needles all along my left arm. My arm. I just thought: my arm. But can I read anything into that? Does my brain know what it’s sensing? Did I really just feel something in my arm? High up. Near my shoulder. The exact spot where they were going to attach one of the electrodes for the brain-stimulating therapy. Am I dreaming?
June 7.
A voice. Low. Slow. I can’t make out words. Dad’s? No. I feel a trembling where my body should be. I can’t pinpoint it. Could be legs, or torso. Could be purely imaginary. The voice, though—I know that voice. Elliot? No. Dr. Monzales? No. It’s British. No—ha! But I can’t make out the words. What’s he saying?
June 9.
There’s a flare going on and then off in front of my eyes. Bright white, then black. Bright white, then black. If it’s real. It could be my mind hallucinating to escape the darkness, my equivalent of a desert traveler’s mirage. But if I’m sensing the position of eyes, does that mean something?
June 14.
A scent: sweet, fresh. Familiar. My candle?
A voice: “I don’t know if you can . . . me, so I’m not going to . . . yet. When . . . wake up, Rosa, I’ll tell . . . Come on.” That was Elliot. That was Elliot.
June 22.
“You remember that time I took you swimming at the King Edward baths? You must have been three. You’d only been in pools on holiday before. It was the first time I ever took you swimming in England. We got in there and you said, ‘Swimming pools live outside!’ And afterward all the mums had bananas and healthy stuff for their kids, and I had nothing and you were starving so we went to the closest place, which was a fish and chip shop, and it was getting dark, and you said, ‘The streetlights are on; we’re going down the road to a café and I want sausages and chips and ice cream.’ And I knew you were thinking of that book—the one about the tiger who came to tea. He drank all Daddy’s beer and I changed the words so Daddy wasn’t watching a fight on TV; he was watching a documentary on giant redwoods—oh, but that was the other book—the one about the cat—”
“Da—?”
“Rosa? Rosa! Rosa!”
4.
The first face I see with anything like clarity is Drema’s—though only her suddenly crazily wide eyes, then Dad’s after she runs off and calls him in. Then Mum’s. She cries. Even Elliot cries. I watch the tears run down behind the fabric of their masks, worn, I know, to help protect my immunocompromised body from infection.
“Rosa,” Elliot says, “you can see me?”
“Yeah . . .” Though it comes out more like “yuh.”
He says something, but I don’t hear him. The voice wasn’t mine. My voice wasn’t mine.
The first time I truly fear for my life is on June 29.
I’m in a different room, still hotel-like, beige with a window-wall, but bigger, so that everything I need can be brought to me.
I’m looking at that photo of Mum, Dad, and Elliot by Whitby Abbey and wondering what they’ll do with old family photos that include me, when my vision clouds. The room starts bleeping and nurses burst in. Later—I have no idea how much later—Dr. Monzales is beside my bed. “We have changed your medication, Rosa. Please, try to rest now. I am convinced you will be fine.”
The first time I move one of my new limbs is on July 16.
I’m dressed in new black leggings and a new loose blue top, chosen from a wardrobe full of presents from Elliot and Mum, as well as things that I’ve ordered online, ignoring Mum’s advice, but listening to Elliot’s. Well, some of it.
“No, no skinny jeans, Rosa!”
“. . . Okay.”
“That jersey jumpsuit!”
“You’re joking, right?”
“I wouldn’t joke with you about something this serious, Rosa.”
“In whose life exactly is the question of a jersey jumpsuit serious?”
He shook his head mock sadly. “Rosa Marchant, you have some really tough priority-reassessment work ahead.”
So—I’m in new black leggings and a loose blue top, and my physical therapist comes in. She’s grinning an excited smile that I can properly see, now that the immediate high-risk infection period has passed, and the masks have been ditched.
She straps me into something they call the Exoskeleton. It’s a robotic, battery-powered frame that walks for you. It moves my new limbs while I watch, helping my brain gradually remember what to do. Eventually she reduces the input from the motors—and my right leg twitches.
The first meal I eat by myself—moving my hand, with a little help from Dad putting the spoon to my mouth—is tomato soup. Memories rush back. Being seven or eight, coming back chapped-lipped and starving from the park, asking Dad to open a can of Heinz. The taste is incredible.
Dad grins the way a dad might grin if his one-year-old just fed herself for the first time. I smile back. He says, “You still smile just like you. I’d know you anywhere, Rosa, just from that smile.”
By now the muscles required to move my mouth have improved dramatically. I’m even getting used to hearing another voice speak my words. It’s higher-pitched than mine. Sweeter. More melodic.
The first time I see myself in a mirror is on August 7.
I’ve seen that photograph of Sylvia, of course, and parts of my new self.
My legs. A little longer than my old legs. Slim feet. Longer toes than mine. My arms. Pale. Three moles on the right forearm, a wishbone of veins around the thumb and forefinger, strangely similar to mine. My hands. Long, slim fingers, with whorls on the tips that are proof of an identity that was hers and is now also mine.
But my face? They’ve been careful. Will I look just like her? I know I should. But will I?
Mum comes into my room as I’m struggling to get dressed. “Here, let me help you,” she says.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. Awkwardly, I pull the end of a legging over my right heel. Then I shuffle forward to the edge of the bed and drag the waistband up.
“It’s a big day, I know.” She’s trying to sound bright.
I nod and reach for a T-shirt that Elliot gave me with a block print of a girl curled in an armchair, a cat on her knee.
“You want to talk any more about what this could be like for you before we go through?” she asks.
“No.”
Her turn to nod. I guess she’s got the message that I’m nervous and I just want to get this done. But now that she’s got it, I feel bad for forcing it on her. “Maybe you could help me up?”
So it’s Mum I’m leaning against, her clean-skin scent that I’m inhaling, her arm that I’m gripping a little more tightly than maybe I need to, as I make my way unsteadily down the corridor to a door marked STAFF ONLY.
Dad and Dr. Monzales are waiting outside.
“It’s a nurses’ changing room,” Dr. Monzales explains. “A full-length mirror is on the wall at the far end. No one is inside. We have it to ourselves.”
He pushes the door open, and with Mum’s help, I half walk and am half dragged past a wall of white locker
s, chairs, and hooks—to the mirror.
I look at “myself”—my—her—body—properly for the first time.
I stare for a few wild, disorienting seconds. Then dizziness sweeps up through my brain. I might even pass out for a moment, because suddenly I’m in a chair, Mum crouched in front of me, Dr. Monzales’s hand gripping my shoulder, his deep voice intense in my ear.
But I don’t hear him, and Mum’s face is overlaid with this image, burned into my reeling mind: a girl, average height, slender, with those wide-set eyes, a mass of dark chocolate hair, and a narrow-lipped mouth open in what I know is a kind of anguished amazement. A girl. Sylvia—me, half ghost and half alive.
Taking on this new appearance, leaving behind my old skin and emerging butterfly-like from my cocoon of sensory deprivation, is a thing of wonder, no doubt. But seeing myself in the mirror, another question hits me. I can only think I’ve been so concerned with the future that I’ve somehow neglected to process the fact that part of me will stay forever in the past.
That night, when the nurses are gone, the lights have been dimmed, and only Mum is left, looking tired, leaning over my narrow bed, stroking my forehead, murmuring “good night” like you might to a small child, I ask her: “What happened to my body?”
She stops mid-stroke. Pulls back. “This is your body.”
“What happened to my dead body?”
“Your dead body?”
“What else would you call it?”
Mum doesn’t answer.
“Did they bury it? Do I have a grave?”
“Rosa—”
“Has anyone brought me flowers?”
“Rosa—” Her forehead knots.
“Is there an inscription?”
Why didn’t they raise the issue? Why didn’t Dr. Monzales talk about what would happen to my body?
“Mum?”
She whispers, “It was cremated.”
“. . . Cremated. What happened to the ashes?”
Mum shakes her head slightly. “They weren’t kept.”
They weren’t kept?
“They belong to the past, Rosa. It’s so important to focus on the future.” She looks a little bewildered. Gently, she says, “What would you want them for?”
“I don’t know—put them in an urn. Put them on the mantelpiece!”
They weren’t kept.
In fact, someone threw them away. Somewhere in a biohazard landfill are the burned remains of my body.
Tears run from my eyes onto my cheeks. I taste the salt on my lips.
“Your body wasn’t you, Rosa,” Mum says, her voice breaking. She’s losing her iron control . . . She’s losing control.
It’s like witnessing a skyscraper collapse or a bridge crumble. The crack inside me fractures right down to my core. I’m shaking from the shock of it.
“You’re still here,” she whispers. “And we’re so lucky you are.” A tear falls from each of her eyes.
I manage to reach up and use my hand to wipe Sylvia’s—my—face. Then with her—my—thumb, I wipe away Mum’s tears. This only makes them come faster, which obviously wasn’t my intention.
For the first time in a very long time, I tell her a heartfelt truth: “I don’t know if I’m crying or she is.”
“You are, Rosa. You’re crying. You’re alive. You can walk, and with more therapy, you’ll be running. You’ll have your whole life to live, however you want to live it, with all the choices and all the future you should have at eighteen. This is your life. Your second chance.”
And Sylvia’s? I think. But I don’t say it.
I want to believe Mum. I really do.
But when she finally goes, reassured that I’m calm and safe to leave, everything disintegrates. I start crying again. My chest is heaving. I’m not sure I can breathe.
5.
It’s two days later, and it’s 2:44 A.M.
Since Mum left my room, I haven’t gotten out of bed.
I know she and Dad are worried about me. Dr. Monzales, too: “It’s totally to be expected that you’ll have down days, Rosa, but let us help. You can talk to me. Let me call for Dr. Bailey.”
But I don’t want to talk to anyone. And I am okay. Or I will be. There’s something I have to do, and I’ve been gearing up for it.
Now I’m pushing myself into a sitting position. I’m easing my legs onto the floor. I’m instructing the room, “Lights on.”
2:44 A.M. Surely there’s no one in the park.
Stumbling a little, the vinyl cold beneath my bare feet, I make my way around the bed, to the keypad by the window, and press the up arrow. The gentle whirring as the blind retracts is almost drowned out by the rush of my pulse in my ears.
Awkwardly, because it takes effort to coordinate my arms, and I still have trouble closing the fingers of my right hand, I pull my T-shirt up over my head. Then I take off my underwear. And I look at myself in the window. Naked.
My reflection is trembling.
I look at myself and I think of Frankenstein: The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart...
I squeeze my eyes shut.
But I have to look.
Like the parent of a difficult child, I force them—my eyes—to do what they’re told. To stare at that reflection. To get used to it. Because this is reality now.
And this is what my reality looks like, in full, in 3-D.
Her hips are slightly wider than mine. She has a round face with a neat nose, upturned at the tip. A low forehead, what with all that hair, which now reaches my shoulders. High cheekbones. Dimples in her cheeks when I pull a smile. A long neck, with a mole at the clavicle. Small, curved breasts. A flat stomach. I twist slightly. A skinny bottom. My heart races. Shh, I tell myself. It’s only you.
And I don’t feel horror. Or disgust.
She was American. Eighteen. Loved. Left by a near-drowning accident in a permanent vegetative state . . . The sum of my knowledge does not amount to much.
Now, as I look at myself in the window, I think about her parents. I guess I understand why they wanted their identities to be kept from me. And why, under the terms of the donation agreement:
The parents of the donor will receive full updates on medical progress until the recipient is discharged from hospital.
But as Mum and Dad wanted, too:
There will be no contact between the parents of the donor and the recipient.
I think:
Imagine knowing that your daughter’s body is out there, and seeing her.
But imagine knowing your daughter body’s is out there, and not being able to see her.
Which would be harder?
And:
Having another girl’s body and knowing essentially nothing about her.
Having her body and knowing everything.
Which would be harder?
And what, exactly, in theory, would I want to know . . . ?
Right now, I need to focus on what I can know.
And so I scour what I can see of her—of myself.
Then I sit down, and I explore every inch. I touch my toes, my chest. I even part my pubic hair. Because if this is going to be my body, I have to know it.
When I decide I have been as thorough as possible, I get back into bed. I pull the duvet right up to my chin. I was scared. But I did it. And now I do feel more hopeful.
6.
October 23.
My heart is pounding and I’m sweating badly, but it’s from exercise, not panic.
“Elliot?”
I’m on a bike in the gym of the hospital’s inpatient rehabilitation facility and Elliot is beside me, lounging on a stool. I just asked him a question. And he’s frowning at the other kids, some on treadmills, others on bikes, a few spread-eagled on massage benches, framed by the glowing green of the floor-to-ceiling blinds.
“Elliot?”
This time, he catches my eye and nods. “If I were a geek, I would say, I concur.”
“You conc
ur?” I breathe.
“Yeah: People are looking.”
Elliot’s on a two-week-long visit—to me, but also to Aula. Before he returns to London, and to his interrupted degree in English, I want his opinion. (And he owes me, what with his confession over dry croissants in Les Baguettes, the ground-floor cafe, this morning: “I was telling Aula’s friends I had to fly back out because my sister’s gone into rehab, and I haven’t even seen where she’s staying. They asked if it was drugs or alcohol . . . So I had to tell them you’d been communing with jaguar spirits in Guatemala and who knew what you’d been taking. Just remember the jaguars if you meet her.”)
“He’s looking at me again,” I whisper to Elliot between snatched breaths.
“. . . Yeah.”
“You’re doing great! Keep it up!” Vinnie, one of the nurse-trainers, pumps a fist at me on his way down the line of bikes. “Great work! Push it, now. Push it!”
“What if I get a seizure?” I ask him.
“The ER is thirty-eight seconds away, Rosa. Move it.”
“You utter cock,” Elliot says.
A couple of the other patients’ relatives look around sharply. Vinnie, who was ecstatic when he discovered that we have a shared fondness for Top Gear and has fruitlessly tried to engage me in car-related chat on several occasions, only grins. The insult’s become an in-joke that extends to him, as well.
Les Baguettes . . .
The rehab gym . . .
For three weeks now, I’ve been out among other people.
My progress, Dr. Monzales told me at a meeting in his office the day before I was transferred here—a wing at the other end of the hospital from my pre-op and isolation care rooms—has been “really, truly wonderful.”
I do have weakness in my right arm and leg, which is “probably permanent,” he says. Despite my daily meds, there remains a chance that my body will reject my brain—but that will always be a concern.
“So why can’t I move to the apartment?” I asked, looking at Mum.