“Why do I have to hold it? Why can’t it go on the back seat?” I whined.
“Because it might fall and break the glass. Just hold it tight, will you?” Mom started the engine and backed up at speed out of the parking space. Behind us a car horn honked in protest.
“And wipe the rain off it,” said Mom, reaching her arm over to brush the droplets of water off the glass and pale wood frame with her sleeve. I shoved her arm away.
“Both hands on the wheel, Mom, focus!” I said. “And buckle up already.”
“Let me just get into the stream of traffic here. You okay, there?”
“I’ve been more comfortable.”
The painting was big and bulky. It pressed heavily into my thighs and obscured my portion of the windshield. I tried to maneuver it flat, so that it would lie more comfortably on my lap. I could only manage to rest it on a slant between my stomach and the dashboard, but I could at least see where we were going. I was glad the rain was lightening up, because when my hair got damp, it got frizzy. The frame of the painting was poking into my stomach and I shifted it a little. Now my midriff was pushed up against it. I looked down at the picture critically, pulling a face at the boring, empty landscape, painted in dull olives and browns, devoid of any humans or animals.
“This will brighten up your boardroom no end,” I said. “I can see why it was so important to get it reframed and on the wall. A real cheerful conversation piece, this is.” Before she could interrupt and tell me it was very valuable and tasteful, I continued, “Listen, Mom, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. No time like the present – isn’t that what you’re always saying? Are you listening?”
“I always listen, Sloane.”
I rolled my eyes. She always listened to several things at once, heard maybe half of them.
“I wanted to ask you for –” I began, but my mother’s phone was summoning her again; this time it was the double-tone that indicated an incoming text message. Her hand dipped again into her bag and fished out the phone. She pressed a button automatically, looked down to read the message.
We were coming up to an intersection where the traffic lights shone in shimmering amber pools on the rain-wet road. Out of habit I scanned the road ahead. And saw several things at once. Traffic lights turning red, cars in the lanes adjacent to us stopping, two kids in school uniforms starting to run across the road in front of us.
I wanted to yell, “Mom, lookout! Stop! It’s red. There’s someone in front. Stop!” but all I got out was “Mah!”
In the same instant, I reached out my hand and grabbed the steering wheel, yanking down hard. The car slewed to the side – just avoided hitting the two little girls. In my peripheral vision, I saw the smaller one stumble forward. The car had just nudged the bag on her back, but they were safe. We had missed them. In the fraction of a second it took to register this fact, the car travelled into the intersection. I guess Mom must have slammed her foot on the brake, I don’t know, but we were still moving. I looked up into the wide, round eyes of the driver in the blue car now crossing directly in front of us in the intersection.
There was a deafening, shuddering bang.
And then nothing.
When I opened my eyes, it felt like that bang was still reverberating in my chest. There was a thudding and a pulsing deep inside. My heart? My head felt too heavy to move it from where it rested on my chest. As I lifted it, something slid off my head and fell. I looked down. Lying in the puddle of glass fragments which filled my lap was the remains of the painting – all splintered ends of snapped wooden frame and torn folds of warped canvas. Some long, sharp shards of glass still clung to the edges of the frame, reaching up into the air like crystal stalagmites, and red paint trickled down from one corner across the painting. Why had they framed it when the paint was still wet?
My hands and arms were covered with a layer of rough, round beads of glass; they rolled off when I lifted my arms. Rain was blowing into the car now. I could feel it on my face. It was raining in the car? That would ruin the painting. Mom would not be pleased.
Mom.
There was a moment of realization, a beat, then my heart gave a hard kick and I seemed to come awake.
“Mom!”
I turned to check on her. There was no-one in the seat next to me. An icy swoop turned my stomach cold, colder than the rain blowing in my face as I looked from the empty seat to where the windshield ought to be. A web of crumpled glass hung from the buckled frame, but the part above the steering wheel had been thrust out over the hood of the car.
I shoved the painting aside. It fell into the foot-well, onto the brake and gas pedal, and alongside a cellphone whose screen was still glowing. A part of my mind registered that the screen-saver had not yet had time to kick in. It could only have been seconds since the text came in.
I fumbled to release the catch of the seatbelt; it shook in my hands. I had to get out. My door wouldn’t open. I pushed and shoved, checked it was not locked, shoved again. Must get out! I pulled back, then, holding the handle open, bashed against the door with my shoulder. It hurt – a sharp pain to join the other pains which I was only now aware of feeling. I felt it as though from a distance, as though I could feel what was happening in someone else’s body, as though I weren’t in my own.
I couldn’t think clearly. My mind was in my throat, where a single word was stuck, unable to force its way past the noose of fear that strangled me. It shrieked inside me. “Mom! Mom! Mom-mom-mom-mom!”
Someone – a woman – was at the door, pulling it open for me, helping me climb out, asking me something. I tried to stand up and crumpled to the ground. There was something wrong with my knee – it would not straighten, would not hold me up. I looked around from where I half-sat, half-lay on the road. The rain was still coming down as it had before, as if nothing had happened, as if the world had not just careened to a stop. Smoke, or perhaps it was steam, was rising in a cloud from under the arched hood of our car. The other car, a twisted mangle of blue, had spun off to one side but my eyes were riveted at once to a flash of sunset colors, part of a crumpled heap lying impossibly far away from our car. Leaning on the woman, I hobbled across the rough, wet surface of the road, towards that blaze of crimson and orange.
There’s a gap, an absence in my memory here. And then I am back inside the moment but outside of myself, looking dispassionately from a little way away as that girl who is also me sits on the road, with my mother’s head in her lap, paying no attention to the people who are milling all around. My mother’s eyes are open, but dull. There is an absence in them, too. And the me outside of me knows that she is gone, knows that the flattening on the side of her head must constitute a fatal injury. There is no point in trying CPR, my logical mind deduces. Instead, I should get up, go and check the other car – surely that driver needs help. I must call 911, phone my mother’s office and let them know she will not be in today.
But even as these thoughts race through my mind, the other part of me – the part inside my bowed body – hangs onto my mother, tries to shake a light into her staring eyes, cradles her head between my hands as the scream finally breaks through my tight throat.
“Mommmm!”
The blood on my mother’s cheek is washed away by the falling rain and reappears fresh and red. A puddle of blood stains the lap of my jeans. My mother must be bleeding from her head wound, I reason, I should stop shaking her – it could make her worse. Foolish, the rational part outside chides me, a stopped heart cannot pump blood. The blood, it points out, cannot be coming from my mother. It must be coming from me. The drops are coming quickly now, the rain cannot wash the crimson splashes off her waxy white face quickly enough.
I lift my right hand to my face, feel a strange gaping sensation. As I touch it, I become aware of the pain there. A fierce cold burn.
The edges of my vision are suddenly ragged, as if they are being nibbled by the blackness
beyond.
My hand comes away from my face covered in red. But the pool of blood staining my jeans, spreading out from beneath my thighs to frame my mother’s face like a blossoming red halo, must be coming from somewhere other than this steady trickle falling from my face onto hers. It must also be coming from me, from my upper thigh. Heavy bleeding, the logical voice chips in, that’s bad.
It is drifting further away, that voice, but so am I. The black tugs at me, and I want to go, to leave here and be enveloped by its nothingness.
But now someone else is crouched down in front of me. I can’t quite make him out. He is blurry and he sways. He holds my shoulder, says something in a loud voice – words I can’t make out.
I try to tell him the important things: to tell him to check the other car, and also that I’m bleeding from somewhere, and that my mom …
But the gnawing darkness opens its maw and swallows me whole.
16
B.S. and A.S.
B.S. and A.S. That’s how I divide my life: Before Scar and After Scar.
I say “scar”, although of course, there were many. But it’s the one that matters.
There were many things I had planned to do in my life – before I got the scar, I mean. And some of them were going to take me out of my city and into the wide world out there.
I was going to swim better than I ever had before. I was a pretty good swimmer. Backstroke and breaststroke – those were my thing. I’m tall, and my long arms and legs gave me an advantage over the other girls in the water. I was going to swim for the regional zone team – had just, in fact, qualified at the trials. Next stop would be sectionals, then nationals, and maybe even the Olympics, one day. It was a long-shot, a dream, but not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility. And it’s not a big-enough dream if it’s easy, right?
Plus, I was dedicated. Monday to Friday, I arrived at the training center’s heated pool at 5a.m. so I could get in a good two-and-half hours of training before school. There were another two hours every afternoon or evening – strength training and speed work – and five hours each on Saturday and Sunday. I was a regular on the competition circuit, pitting myself against the best in my category, collecting medals like stepping stones on the path to becoming number one.
Before I got the scar, I had also planned to look up my dad and reconnect with him. My parents had divorced when I was just five years old and I could remember only bits of him: the scratch of his beard on my cheek when he hugged me, a distinctive sour-sweet smell, the whirl of color when he lifted me over his head and spun me around, the harsh shouts when he and mom fought and I hid among the dirty laundry and damp towels in the bottom of the large bathroom closet.
Mom was unusually cagey on the reasons behind their breakup and the reason he wasn’t a feature in my life, but she had agreed I could track him down and make contact once I was sixteen. In these days of Facebook and LinkedIn, how hard could it be to find him? It would be good to get to know him, to begin a relationship from scratch, to hear about his life. I wrote it high up on my to-do list.
I was also, B.S., going to ask my mother something important. I began asking her that rainy day on the drive to school, but her phone beeped before I could get the words out. And that’s when everything changed.
Oh, and I was going to meet the cute guy. Definitely.
He was a swimmer too. He swam in the open section, but he still looked young – maybe seventeen or eighteen. He was tall, at least 6’2”, with caramel-colored hair, a ripped, abtacular body, and gentle eyes – the kind that made your knees melt, your brain go soft and your stomach clench.
We had made contact in the chat rooms on the Sink-or-Swim! website. On a few occasions, at some trial or swim meet, we’d exchanged glances and smiles. Once he’d handed me my swim meet program when I dropped it, and at the last meet I ever competed in, I almost met him. We had both won our races and after his second event, he pulled himself out of the pool and, still dripping wet, headed over to where I sat on the bleachers. He wrapped a towel loosely around his waist and spoke. To me.
“Hi.”
“Hi, yourself.” (I’ve always been one for scintillating conversation.)
“I’m Luke. I think we’ve met online. I’m Not_A – you’re WaterBaby?”
He had an amazing smile – slow and lazy and just the slightest bit lopsided.
“No. Yes! I mean...” That smile was distracting me, making me stammer and blush, making my brain stutter. “My actual name’s –”
“Luke! C’mon, quickly – you’re supposed to be on the winner’s podium to get your medal.”
A coach swept him away while I looked on.
“See you later, Water Baby,” he called over his shoulder, but he didn’t – not that day at least. Mom had to rush back to the office for an evening meeting, and so we left before the end of the swim meet. All okay, I consoled myself, there were more competitions scheduled before the end of the season and I’d catch him at one of those. Yeah right, so much for that plan.
Many things actually happened after I got the scar, in the time of A.S.
Pretty much straight away, I was dropped from the regional zone team. I had missed the training camp – I was too busy getting blood transfusions, shivering on a stainless steel table in an operating theatre, trying to eat disgusting hospital food, taking meds for my messed up insides, and weeping. Endlessly weeping for my mother.
When my body had recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital, when the stitches had been pulled out of my face and inner thigh, and the brace removed from my knee (now held together with a titanium pin), I went back to the water. I could still swim. I was probably still better than most people in the water, but I couldn’t swim well enough to be competitive. I enjoyed being in the water, but I did not race. My knee would never again work as well as it should, and something had gone missing from me – my hunger for the dream, my drive to do much of anything.
I no longer have a grand ambition for my life. Somehow, I don’t think I’m going to live too long, anyway. And I’m okay with that.
I did look up my father. To be strictly accurate, the lawyers now administering the trust fund which my mother left me were instructed to trace him, and trace him they did. The search was not easy, apparently, but Bradley, Bradley and Martinez were persistent. They found him on several databases which black-listed bad creditors, and discovered that he had filed for bankruptcy – twice – and was wanted for a string of outstanding debts. Eventually their investigator found him living in the YMCA in Des Moines, Iowa, and a social worker appointed by the state to investigate my circumstances drove me out to meet him.
I introduced myself to the stranger, shook his hand and immediately felt sullied by the smarmy charm of him, the long, dirty fingernails at the ends of his tobacco-stained fingers, the oily excuses for a lifetime of absence, and the now-identified familiar whiff of alcohol emanating from pores and breath as he leaned over to try embrace his “long-lost daughter”. He was too oblivious of my life, too uncaring about the loss of my mom, way too interested in my trust fund. On the spot, he listed half a dozen opportunities for once-in-a-lifetime investment prospects. On the spot, I decided I would be better off as far away from him as I could get. Bradley, Bradley and Martinez filed for my legal emancipation from him and I was duly “divorced” from my father. It took a restraining order, though, to get him to stay away and stop contacting me.
The social worker who assessed me told the judge that I was extremely mature for my age and used to caring for myself. The pile of money that Mom left me, her sole heir, meant that I could buy a small unit in the same secure apartment complex in which my aunt Beryl, my mother’s younger sister, lived with her toddler triplets and husband. The court agreed that I could live alone as long as I stayed under the regular supervision of my aunt, and received monthly visits from social services. It worked out well; the triplets kept my aunt perpetually busy and out of my hair, so I was left pretty much alone to do my own
thing.
It suited me to be alone, to hide out from the world, to finish my second-to last year of school with the help of private tutors and tests written under the eagle-eyes of independent examiners at the lawyers’ offices.
A.S., I never needed to ask my mother that question after all, I got what I wanted in a roundabout way. Who needs an increase in their allowance when you inherit your mother’s entire estate? Beware what you ask the gods, as they may grant it you, and all that. In my crazier moments, I think I may somehow have caused the accident, willed it into existence by wanting more money. Eileen, the therapist I was sent to after the accident and mom’s death to help with the flashbacks and nightmares and anger and grief, had a theory about this.
“It’s a kind of magical thinking, a misguided attempt to convince yourself that you had some control (even in a negative direction) over a devastating event in which you were actually completely powerless,” she told me.
I was skeptical. Why would I have wanted to cause the crash?
“Life’s scary when you realize how much of it is out of your control.”
That part, I agreed with.
A.S., I spent a lot of time trying to learn how to live with, and around, and in spite of the empty holes that now took up the space where my mother had been. It amazed me, I mean really and truly staggered me, how life went on all around me even though it felt like my life had stopped. Dogs still barked, phones rang, hamburgers came off the grill in a stream at McDonalds, and people lined up – in the drive-through and at the counter – they lined up to buy the stuff. People actually still wanted to eat.
How could anyone have an appetite when my mom was gone? Not there in the mornings to nag me awake, or there in the middle of the night when I had the flu, or beside me in the car laughing at a comedy sketch on the radio. Where had she gone? How was it possible that all of her – not just her body, but her stories and memories, had been obliterated? Gone. Gone somewhere I could never get them. Things she had never told me about herself, I would never now know.
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