B0160A5OPY (A) (8 page)

“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.

And the world simply marched on as if this was a regular old thing.

“In the midst of life we are in death,” the minister had said at the funeral.

But it seemed to me, rather, that in the midst of death we are in life. Somehow, I was undeniably – obscenely even – alive. After a while, I even got hungry again and I ate, staying clear of the tastes that had been Mom’s favorites: sushi and fresh lemonade and homemade mac ‘n cheese. I ate, alone for the most part, looking at the empty chair across the table and thinking of Mom, and thinking, too, of that other family somewhere that was missing a member. His name was Andrew. They didn’t tell me much, but they told me that.

I had not been well enough to attend the inquest. My witness statement was submitted by affidavit. The lawyers said that the family of the dead man had been there, determined to see justice done. It was, and it wasn’t. My mother was held responsible for causing the accident through driving while using the phone, but she was not around to take her punishment. Or, looking at it another way, she had paid the ultimate price: a death sentence for accidentally taking the life of another. Messrs. Bradley and Martinez tried to protect me from all that, though they reluctantly agreed to pass on a letter of condolence that I wrote to the family. I was allowed to express regret but not to apologize because, according to the lawmen, that would open me to lawsuits. That time is all a bit hazy now, a series of unconnected images remembered through the mists of pain meds and grief. I always knew that one day I would need to meet that family in person, but the thought of it scared me stupid. Turns out, I was right to be afraid.

So that’s how I’ve spent the nine months since I got the scar – recovering and sleeping and crying and hiding. And even eating – though only after I’ve washed or wiped my hands. And, in spite of myself, living. More or less.

And, of course, A.S. – I’ve finally met the cute guy.

17

Luke

I don’t know what makes me maddest.

That I’ve had to suffer her presence these last weeks, knowing who she is while she’s been living in ignorant bliss?

That she’s been living, when Andrew is dead?

That she thought I was the sort of guy who would hate a girl because she’s
scarred
?

Or that she didn’t even remember his name! Oh yeah, that’s the one. That’s what enrages me most. She didn’t even remember Andrew’s name.

All this time, she’s been happily getting on with her life, forgetting his name – hell, forgetting his death, for all I know – while mom and dad and I have been stuck at ground-zero.

I actually began to feel sorry for her when I saw how she lived – all alone with the reminders of the past on her shelves, and all those clippings of other peoples’ tragedies. It was weird. And a bit sad. I guess I understood for the first time that she’d lost her mother. And I kind of know what that feels like.