by Debra Busman
“What are you talking about?” I say. “I’ve never been suicidal. I feel like I am fighting for my life.”
“You are,” she says, looking older than I remember her.
I don’t know how to cry any more than I already am. I don’t know where all this water is coming from. I cannot drive. I cannot work. Some days I find myself in front of the TV at five p.m. watching Baywatch, watching Rescue 911. Every time I choke at the sight of the ocean, sob through the Technicolor rescues, the bobbing heads, the weeping loved ones on shore, clutching one another. I don’t know who I am anymore, I tell whoever will listen. I feel like I am dying.
“You are having a spiritual breakthrough,” friends tell me. “You are so lucky to have this opportunity to leave the past behind, to split away from your ego.”
“I’m not having a spiritual breakthrough,” I say. “I’m watching fucking Baywatch.”
The healer works on my lungs, relaxing the tight grip in my chest. I lay back into her soft burgundy blanket. “You need to start trying to breathe deeper,” she says. “Try to pull the air all the way into your body. Feel it move through you.”
“I need to start working out again,” I tell her. “I hate being this fucking weak. I hate it that the ocean just pulled me backward like I was a little piece of nothing when I was swimming with all my strength.”
The healer laughs, gently touching my cheek. “You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever known,” she says. “Don’t you get it? Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime couldn’t have done squat out there in that ocean. This is not about physical strength.” She places one hand under my back and the other over my heart. “Just try and breathe now,” she says. “Relax. Let me know if this gets to be too much.”
I relax into the warmth of the soft blanket, easing into the familiar heat and touch of her hands. I feel very young. She seems extraordinarily kind. The pressure on my chest increases and I try to breathe into it without coughing. Then it becomes too much and I try to tell her my chest is being crushed but I cannot speak and I open my eyes to see her hand still hovering just above my breastbone, not even touching me and then
I am in the emergency room, strapped down on a gurney. I am twenty-two years old. I have just totaled my car in a head-on crash on Carmel Valley Road delivering newspapers. I am fine, but they are wheeling me down the corridor, heading toward the X-ray room. I need to get back to work, finish the route. The X-ray technicians lift me into position, taking a front, rear, and two side views of my chest. A purple bruise gathers where I hit the steering wheel and I wait for them to develop the film so I can be released. I hear the technicians in the other room. “Jesus Christ,” one of them says. “Look at this. She must have broken every single bone in her body. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Look at all these bone scars.” Another voice, a woman, says, “I’ll talk with her.”
The older nurse comes back into the room, avoiding my eyes, setting up the X-rays on the lighted view case on the far wall. She raises up the back of my gurney so I can see. “Well,” she begins, “it’s not too bad. You do have three fairly significant fractures.” She points. “Here, here, and here.” I see three dark crevices running through the bright, white ribs on the screen. “That’s why it is kind of hard for you to breathe right now,” she tells me. “There’s not really much to be done. I’ll wrap them, but mostly you just need to take it easy and they will heal on their own.”
“Okay,” I say. “Can I get dressed and go?” I hate hospitals.
She looks over at me, frowning. “That must have been a really awful accident you were in,” she says.
“Aw, it wasn’t that bad,” I say. “See, just a few busted ribs.” I start to get up.
“No, I mean when you were a child,” she says.
“I wasn’t in an accident as a child,” I tell her.
She points her stick back up to the screen, tracing tiny, pale lines running through nearly all my ribs. “See all these places where there are the faint, grey lines?” she asks. “Every one of these is a scar from where your ribs have been broken. I assumed it must have been an accident when you were very young.”
I shrug, looking toward the door. “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I never was in an accident. I fell out of a tree once, wrecked my bike, got in some fights, that kind of stuff. Shit happens when you’re a kid. You know. Can I get dressed now?” I ask again. I don’t remember anything about my childhood before the age of five. I want to leave, get out quickly before her pity suffocates me.
“That’s right, honey, just let it go. Just cry. That’s really good.”
I open my eyes to see the healer looking down at me, her eyes soft. I didn’t know that I was crying. My face is wet. I shiver and she pulls the blanket closer around my shoulders. “You’ve been gone quite a while,” she says. I tell her about the emergency room, the fractured ribs, the baby, ghostlike scars. She listens carefully, nodding. “Bones never lie,” she says. “Your body remembers everything.”
I turn away, pulling my knees up to my chest, rocking myself. It shocks me to think that my body remembers something I don’t. “I’ve always been able to count on my body,” I tell her. “It’s my body, my strength, my ability to run, to fight, that’s kept me alive.”
The healer puts her hand on my shoulder. Softly, she says: “Yes, and your body remembers all the times you could not run.”
Back home the ranch looks different. I can’t find my dog. I call, whistle for her, suddenly afraid she has been killed or injured. She is so old. I want to feel her fur, tousle her ears, wrestle with her like before, hide her blue rubber ball and watch her retriever body spring into action. Practically deaf, half blind, still she has the fierce nose of a bird dog and the eager heart of a puppy. I finally spot her way over on the far ridge of the Brehmer Ranch, trotting like a coyote. She shouldn’t be that far away. Everything feels strange, different. My cat follows close to me, watching with full feline attention, but skittish, running when I turn toward her. Only the horses have stayed the same. I pull the burrs from their tails, brush their manes, curry them for hours until I’m dripping wet and their coats shine, glossy in the sun. While I brush the dark bay mare, the chestnut gelding pushes gently into my shoulder, pulls the hoof pick out of my back pocket, mouths my hair, blowing warm, sweet breath into my neck. He lets me stretch out on his back as he eats his evening hay. Both their bodies feel strong, warm, solid. Familiar. Everything else has changed.
“You’re just afraid of falling in love,” says Leah. “I know. It scares me, too. But it’s so good what we have.”
“But we don’t have anything,” I say. “You have an idea about us. You have an idea of who you need me to be for you. Okay, maybe I saved your life. But now I’m not even here. Don’t you get it? Everything I was, everything I had, everything I understood got washed out to sea. Even my fucking Levi jacket with my last sixty bucks in it. Okay? There is no ‘me’ here anymore to be ‘in love’ with you.”
“Maybe my dad will give you some reward money for saving my life when he comes out to California,” Leah says. “Don’t worry. It will all be okay. I know I’m not in this alone and I know I’m not making it up. This love is way too good. My life is way too good.”
Every night the dreams come. The drowning dreams. The getting shot dreams. One night a vision comes to me. I can’t tell if it is an old man or woman, but it is a very wrinkled elder who smells like sage and sweat and forest. The elder puts one hand on my back and one on my heart, barely touching, and I feel the heat. There are no words, yet I clearly hear the thought: Remember, if you are ocean you cannot drown.
I wonder who is talking and how they know what I have never told anyone, that every day I find peace in a daydream, that the only time my throat unclenches is when I imagine myself driving down the coast in my red truck. I drive slow, watching for critters running out on the road, looking at the incredible beauty of the coastline. I pull off on the gravel turnout for Garrapata Beach, park the truck, a
nd carefully hike down the cliff. On the beach, I begin to take off all my clothes, slowly. There is a slight breeze and the air feels cool. Naked, I open my arms to the sun, arching my back, breathing deeply. Then I walk into the surf, my heart liquid, bursting with joy. Surrender.
Giving Thanks
Any work whose journey has spanned more than a decade is bound to have an extensive band of gratitude recipients, and the folks who have believed in and supported these unruly characters along the way are bountiful and impressive.
I give thanks to Ann Todd Jealous, Bettina Aptheker, and Kate Miller for first championing these girls and believing their stories needed to be heard. Big gratitude to UCSC folks Roz Spafford, for wise support, and Carla Frecerro, for framing stories as narratives of resistance; to Mills crew Elmaz Abinader, Ginu Kamani, Toi Derricotte, Julie Shigekuni, Micheline Marcom, and Kim Hall for having my back every step of the way; to June Jordan for refusing to surrender; and Lucille Clifton, whose early support of Jackson and belief that linear time-defying ancestor truths are as real as any others kept me grounded and the work affirmed.
Deep gratitude to my lovely comrades at CSU Monterey Bay and the Creative Writing and Social Action Program: Frances Payne Adler (“Deb, you gotta get that book out there!”), Diana Garcia, Pam Motoike, Annette March, Maria Villasenor, Rina Benmayor, Ernie Stromberg, Umi Vaughan, and two amazing students, Nicole Jones and Monica Murdock, who first taught some of these stories in the Women’s Writing Workshop with such brilliance, grace, and expertise I almost wept with joy.
Appreciation for all the books and journals that have published parts of this novel in various forms: Eleven Eleven: A Journal of Literature and Art, Issue 15, 2013; Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape, 2014; Combined Destinies: Whites Share Grief About Racism, 2013; Fire & Ink: An Anthology of Social Justice Writing, 2009; and The Los Angeles Review: Number 4 – 2007.
Special thanks to Laurie Stapleton and Susan McCloskey, who “got” and affirmed this book at especially critical junctures; to Faith Adiele for a most timely encounter in the literary woods of Hedgebrook. Grateful to be blessed with the most supportive family one could dream of, and for Akasha Gloria Hull and Dana McRae, who had to live and/or hang with me during important chunks of the book’s journey and who still loved and supported me anyway, cheering on these wild girls and their beleaguered writer every step of the way.
Huge appreciation to my incredible agent Dana Newman and the terrific crew at Dzanc Books, whose love for literature and joyful perseverance in publishing is a most beautiful thing to behold. Michelle Dotter’s keen editorial eye and structural expertise has been especially astute and delightful. I feel so honored and fortunate to have such great folks shepherding this book along the way, making all this possible.
And, always, deep gratitude to all the four-leggeds—Bucky, J. Edgar, Jai, Shen, Kai, Coco, Sar, Xena, Uma, Cayla, and Luca— great beings who have taught me love and kept me in this world, sustaining spirit and giving heart for the journey.
I dedicate this book to all the kids and teens, queer and allies, who have and are currently living on the streets, making a way out of no way to find love and forge survival and resistance.