After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away (4 page)

“I can’t be forced onto a plane, I bet, shackled and handcuffed like a prisoner. I can’t be forced to move out there, to live with Dad and his ‘new family’ in the ‘prestigious’ gated community, where I will be enrolled in the ‘prestigious private school.’ Mom wouldn’t want me to live with them—it isn’t fair. I want to stay with…”

My voice trailed off. No one spoke. My eyes leaked tears that stung like acid.

Dad was a double-dad now. The new family consisted of not just the new young redhead wife but the new son too.

I resented this! It was so ridiculous.

Dad didn’t much like children, that was no secret. He’d had about all he could do to like
me
. When I was a little girl, I’d wondered why I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and Daddy told me,
You came first, honey. One of you is enough.

I hadn’t known how to interpret this. For a long time I’d wanted to think it meant I was special.

Before the wreck
Dad had sent me a packet of snapshots of his “new” house and his “new” family. The split-level Spanish hacienda-type house in La Jolla Heights, three times the size of Mom’s house, with a gleaming orange tile roof, palm trees perfect as papier-mâché trees, an inner courtyard with white stucco walls and gorgeous crimson flowers. The sky was very blue but hard-looking like enamel. Not
in the blue
, where you could float and drift and disappear into your thoughts.

Quickly I’d glanced through the snapshots, setting aside those I did not want to see. These I tore into small pieces.

But there was my “new” brother, Porter.

Porter! A ridiculous name for a seven-year-old with a pinched, squirrely face.

It seemed to be the deal, Porter came with the hot redhead wife, Deirdre. The two were a package.

I was about to rip Porter into tiny pieces when his eyes caught at me. I saw in his face the soft, vague wonderment of loss I felt in myself. It was weird—I found myself thinking of that Steven Spielberg movie
AI
, the moony little robot boy searching for his human mother who doesn’t love him. Through the inky-blue depths of the ocean and the vaster depths of the universe and eternity the robot boy searches for his beautiful vain earth mother who doesn’t love him. And this mother, you can see, is just an ordinary woman caught up in her own petty life, not meriting the boy’s eternal devotion.

Not like my mother. Mom was the real thing.

I was trying to explain this to my aunts and to Uncle Daniel, but they didn’t seem to understand. If Mom’s house was sold, strangers would live in it, not me. No one in the house would remember Mom, or me. “If Mom knew, what would she think?…”

Soon after this, visitors’ hours were over for the night.

16

Rehab! It’s a word that sounds so good, “positive.” But when you’re “in rehab” it’s hell.

In rehab, sometimes I was a pretty mature fifteen-year-old and sometimes I was a bawling fifteen-month-old who cringed and slapped in terror of being touched.

“Jenna. You will never fully recover if…”

I will never fully recover anyway. Who’s kidding who!

“…well, Jenna!
That
was excellent.”

It was? Why’m I so wrecked then?

The physical therapist assigned to me was named Devon. A six-foot dusky-skinned girl with bristly cornrow braids whom you’d have to look at twice to realize she wasn’t a girl but a woman and knew her business.

Devon had allowed me to know that when she’d been my age, or maybe a little older, she’d been an almost-Olympic-level swimmer.

Devon had allowed me to know that she liked me but just possibly didn’t trust me.
After the wreck
I seemed to be having that uneasy effect on lots of people.

Devon was all muscles, sleek and feline. One of those husky sinewy felines like lions, not the skinny type like cheetahs.

Mostly Devon praised me. Spoke of my “courage,” “athletic ability,” “motor coordination.” When I didn’t collapse into a heap on the floor mat where Devon was leading me through exercises. When I didn’t shriek with pain like a cat being killed. When I didn’t shove and kick at her like a crazed toddler. When in the shallow end of the toy-size rehab pool I managed to paddle a few yards without gagging and vomiting.

“See, Jenna? You can do it. Better every day, and I don’t BS my patients, see?”

Sure you do. It’s your job.

Devon said she’d heard from both my aunts (“Real nice, thoughtful ladies, you are so lucky”) that I’d been a runner. She could see, from my leg muscles.

After five minutes in the pool I was panting. Couldn’t catch my breath. Every muscle, joint, bone in my body ached. I wanted to scream,
This is
after the wreck,
now everything is changed.

Suddenly I was asking Devon what she knew about the wreck.

If she’d seen anything on TV? Read anything in the paper?

Aunt Caroline and Aunt Katie hadn’t shown me any news clippings if they had them. None of my visitors had said a word except to express sympathy for “what happened,” “the accident,” “this terrible thing.” Because I’d lost consciousness when my head struck the windshield, and I’d wakened in the emergency room, I didn’t know what had happened after the car struck the right-lane railing and I hadn’t wanted to know, but now suddenly I was asking Devon what she knew, and Devon stared at me for a moment, startled, licking her lips like she was nervous, and told me then in a lowered voice that she hadn’t seen much about it in the paper because she didn’t read the paper every day, but she’d seen some TV footage. My mother’s white Honda had been forced through the bridge railing by the impact of the big truck, and there it was, front wheels dangling over the edge of the bridge above the river, and the back part of the car stuck in the wreckage so it couldn’t fall over, and within minutes there were emergency vehicles, flashing lights, the Tappan Zee shut to traffic so cars and trucks were backed up on both sides for maybe eight miles…. Seeing the look on my face, Devon paused. She was a husky, sinewy cat-girl but not so sure of herself now.

“I maybe shouldn’t be telling you this, Jenna. If, like, nobody else has. Maybe it’s better for you not to know.”

I laughed. I guess it was a laugh. The croaking breathy noise that would come out of a frog’s mouth as a heavy foot stomps down on him.

“How long did the car ‘dangle over the river,’ Devon? Do you know?”

Devon shuddered. “This guy I live with, he wanted to watch. ‘Wow,’ he said, ‘this is like some nightmare,’ ’cause when we were seeing it, the car hadn’t been pulled up yet. You and your mom were still inside, I guess. Me, I ran out of the room. I wasn’t going to watch. I pressed my hands over my ears, too. Didn’t want to hear. If that car fell, and the TV picked it up falling into the Hudson River, I did not want to be a witness,
no thanks.
”

Rehab! Sounds so good, “positive.” But when you’re “in rehab” it’s hell.

17

In August Dad returned to Tarrytown to visit me in the rehab clinic.

Smiling, saying I was looking terrific. I was looking like his daughter again.

Saying he hoped I would let him “make it up” to me—the time he’d been gone from my life.

Saying he hoped I would not “hold it against him.”

And that I would love my “new family” in La Jolla.

In his fist of a right hand, a bouquet of a half dozen red roses in crinkly cellophane. Those sleek plastic-looking roses with no scent, the cut ends of the stems in ugly little plastic bootees filled with water.

I took the roses from my father. I sniffed the petals that had no scent. I murmured thanks.

I saw the relief in Dad’s eyes that I was able to walk again. I’d gained back some of the weight I’d lost. The color had come back into my face. Maybe there would be a few facial scars after all, but you might not notice if you didn’t stand too close.

The new wife, Deirdre, hadn’t accompanied Dad. She sent me her love.

I said nothing. I had no love to send back to Deirdre.

Dad apologized that Deirdre hadn’t come with him, but she was very busy at this time of year. Still, she was thinking of me. She was wondering why my application to transfer to La Jolla Academy hadn’t come in yet.

“If you intend to start in the fall. There is a single position being kept open for you, but…”

In the clinic the nursing staff liked Steve Abbott. You could see.

Dad was all smiles and cheerful greetings. Dad was so very grateful: His daughter wasn’t an embarrassment to him now.

An attendant came to take the plastic-looking roses from me to put in a vase. An attractive woman with a quick bright smile for Mr. Abbott.

I was feeling tired after my afternoon session with Devon, like a rubber doll that had been banged about and kicked. The application to La Jolla Academy hadn’t been received by the dean of admissions because it hadn’t been sent. My transcript from Tarrytown High hadn’t been received because it hadn’t been sent. To explain this to Dad felt like too much trouble.

“You don’t seem to be giving the future much thought, Jenna, but I
am
.”

I murmured yes, I too thought about the future. But it made me tired sometimes, it was so vast.

“So what, Jenna? What did you say?”

I repeated what I’d said. Dad’s mouth twitched in a kind of smile. “‘Vast.’ I don’t see what that’s got to do with it. We only need to think about the immediate future, the next step in your life. I’d thought you were in agreement with me, about arranging to transfer to—”

Dad glanced at his watch. This visit had to be a quick one, he’d told me. From New York he wasn’t flying back to California but to Sydney, Australia. He would be gone for twelve days, and in the meantime Deirdre would be in contact with me. “I’ve been talking with your aunts, but I really haven’t a clear idea what state your mother’s finances were in at the time of the”—Dad paused with a look of discomfort—“accident. I’m hoping they were in some sort of order. I tried to help Lisbeth out as best I could, but with my new family and new responsibilities it wasn’t easy. At least there is a life insurance policy naming you as beneficiary. And a fully executed will…”

Will!
I hated that word.

Mom is not dead but in some other place. Where you can’t hurt her anymore.

I smiled thinking of this. Maybe in some way it was true.

In La Jolla, Dad was saying, I would continue with outpatient therapy as well as “the other kind.” (Mental?) It wouldn’t be cheap, but at least the sale of the Tarrytown house would help pay for my treatment.

It was time to depart for JFK. Dad was a man who enjoyed ending visits. The way he glanced at his watch with a prim little frown as if he feared the time yet with a look of satisfaction that time was passing. A final squeeze of the hand, a final kiss. Promising to call, and I must keep my cell phone on, and get busy with the paperwork to La Jolla Academy.

“Dad, please. I’m not transferring.”

“What?”

“I’m not transferring to that school. I’m not moving to La Jolla.” I swallowed hard. My voice was surprisingly calm. Dad was staring at me as if I’d spoken a garble of foreign words. “…can’t forgive you. You were cruel to Mom and hurt her more than you needed to, and you hurt me, too. And now you want to make it up. But you can’t. This is after the wreck.”

Dad was on his feet, hovering over me. There was a shocked look in his eyes that shifted to that steely-sharp look I remembered. The look signaling
Don’t provoke me! Either of you.

My voice had started shaking. Dad touched my arm and I felt a sudden rush of emotion, a sinking-down sensation, as if I wanted to be hugged by him. Except Dad was saying bitterly, “Your mother turned you against me—of course.
Cruel
is her word. I was trying to be truthful, not a hypocrite. You blame me, but what about your mother? It was her careless driving that caused the accident, killed her and nearly killed you.”

I couldn’t believe what my father was saying! Blaming Mom for her own death.

“It wasn’t Mom’s fault, what happened—it was mine. I was to blame.”

“Jenna, what? What are you saying?”

“I—I don’t know. I think I was to blame. But it wasn’t Mom’s fault.” My throat began to close. I was trembling. I needed to summon strength from some place deep inside me.
In the blue
was lost to me now but I tried to recall what it had been, the sky opening into emptiness, in the distance white geese pumping their wings, lifting out of sight.

Wait for me, take me with you….

Dad was gripping my shoulders, shaking me. My eyes flew open.

Dad was telling me that I was sick, “mentally unbalanced,” “in need of psychotherapy.”

Somehow I was able to break free of him, of his angry fingers gripping my shoulders. I shoved a chair between us so he couldn’t grab me again and hurt me. It was strange how he’d never touched Mom, only me. Shaking me, scolding me, terrifying me so I was too stunned even to cry, with Mom looking on, begging him to let me go, tears glistening on her face. Only if Mom begged, if Mom said the right, placating words, would Dad relent. And I would be free to run away.

I wasn’t afraid now—maybe a little afraid—but it was happening so fast. I wasn’t even feeling much pain in my legs, pain that made me cry out like a wounded animal when I was led through my exercises.

In a shaky but loud voice I told my father I didn’t want to live with him and his new family.

“If you try to force me, I’ll run away. I don’t love you! Not after what you did to Mom.”

Dad’s face was flushed and not so handsome now. I could hear his angry breathing. A strand of damp, metallic-looking hair had fallen across his forehead.

“Jenna, all this is hysteria. You’re fifteen, you’ve had a terrible, traumatic experience. Your mother nearly killed you, and you can’t accept
that
. You—”

“I said I don’t love you! I don’t want you as a father! It’s after the wreck now, Dad. You can’t hurt me.”