Beyond Belief (30 page)
Authors: Cami Ostman
The word
stump
reminds me of a tree outside our kitchen window at home. Native Americans once cleared the land and left a stump, which serves as a prized reminder of their existence before our arrival. I feel a kinship with that lost tree. I wonder if it was as painful for the tree to be whacked by an axe as it was for me to be hit by a car. The tree stump is buried, camouflaged by salal, and it’s actually pretty now. My stump will never be that pretty. I will never be that pretty.
W
HEN MY FRIENDS VISIT
me three days later, I notice how they force themselves to look at my face. I sense their morbid curiosity, their desire to gaze at the remainder of my leg, the small bump hidden under the bed covers.
“Did you hear about David and Sandy?” Karen asks. Karen and I have been friends since sophomore year, when we met in our
first play together. “They broke up!” Leslie, another friend from the drama department, chimes in, “I heard David is really bummed about it, but Sandy acts like she doesn’t care.” David and Sandy are the golden couple of the senior class. I listen as my friends report on the couple’s latest crisis, but it seems trivial and meaningless. Their words sound like the schoolteacher in the Charlie Brown comics: “
Wah-WAH, wah-WAH, wah-WAH
.” I smile, nod my head, and laugh when they laugh, but I feel as disconnected from them as my leg is from my body.
I am grateful that Glen hasn’t visited me and I hope he doesn’t. I’ve had a crush on him since my first play sophomore year. We’ve had fun together hanging out backstage with the cast, but we’ve never spent time alone. I’ll be mortified if he sees me in the hospital looking like this. Nobody mentions him, and I don’t ask. But secretly I’m curious to know if he’s heard about my accident. Does he care? I’ve spent hours fantasizing about him, but . . . If he didn’t think I was cute before, he certainly won’t now.
As I lie in my hospital bed later that night, frustrated and forlorn, I weep, feeling separate and alone. Gail, a kind nurse, hears me whimpering and comes into my room. “I’ll listen,” she says softly.
“They all feel so far away and in another world. They don’t understand what I’m going through.” She explains that my friends are too immature for me now and that they can’t understand. This doesn’t help me. I don’t want to be the mature one. I don’t want my friends to have to “understand” me. That is for grown-ups. I just want to be a senior in high school. I want to turn back the clock a week and replay the whole scene. Take two. In this scene I don’t get hit by the car. I go back to school the next day and I gossip about my classmates, take my tests on time, and show up for rehearsal.
M
Y EYES POP OPEN
and it is dark. The hospital is cold and quiet save for the distant hum of this huge edifice working around the clock. Flowers pack my room, masking the antiseptic odor. I don’t need to look at the clock; I know what time it is. I’ve been here for a week, waking up every morning at 3:00
AM
to stabbing pain and an incessant deep ache that begs for another dose of medication. I still insist it be given to me by injection instead of orally. The act of taking a pill, putting it in my mouth, holding a cup of water, and swallowing requires too much effort.
I lie with my arms bent at the elbow, hands resting palm-up beside my ears, as if in surrender. I can’t sleep any other way. The cast digs painfully into my crotch, and any attempt to readjust my position serves as a nauseating reminder of my missing leg. It is unnatural and disturbing how nearly weightless the absence of my leg feels now. The doctors tell me I lost about twelve pounds of leg. I am reminded of how it feels after a long hike carrying a fifty-pound backpack. When you reach camp and take off the pack the sudden lightness of your body is a relief, but now that weightlessness does not feel like relief, it just reminds me that part of me is missing.
I look out the window at the Space Needle decorated with Christmas lights. For the first time in my life, a twinge of uncertainty and doubt about my faith surfaces. All of my life, the story of Christ’s salvation has sustained and comforted me—especially since my dad’s death. Now I feel Jesus has betrayed me.
It isn’t fair. I’ve been the “good girl”—reliable, responsible. And, for the past six months, I’ve dutifully gone to Mass every day before school with my mom. I praise God every morning; I love Jesus and try to emulate him. I adore Mary’s quiet strength and want to be as pure and chaste as she was. I’m proud of my Catholic upbringing and my Good Girl status. To my high school friends, I’ve gallantly
referred to myself as Colleen Wait-Until-Wedding-Night Haggerty. Everyone laughed when I said this, but we all knew that I meant it.
The reward of a good life will come, I’ve been promised—it will come. But this is no reward.
These new feelings of uncertainty and doubt leave me with a tight panic in my chest.
Maybe there’s no reward for me because I’m actually being punished!
There’s a boy in my choir class with a deformed hand. The first time I noticed it, my stomach lurched, and I had to keep the bile from exploding from my mouth. I can’t bring myself to sit next to him, let alone talk with him. Whenever I find myself near him, I am certain that his deformed hand smells like a garbage dump on a summer’s day.
Then there was the time when I was in fifth grade and I volunteered at a home for the physically disabled. The first time I went there I was assaulted with the stale, disgusting odor that permeated the house. With a mixture of awe and disgust I watched a man with shortened arms play the piano. Another resident, a young woman with a huge, warm smile, had arms and legs that were so deformed she scooted around on a gurney. Like most of my recent visitors have done, I focused on her face so I didn’t have to see how distorted her body was. It was the only way I could keep myself from throwing up. Just before I was scheduled to return there, I got appendicitis, and that ended my volunteer job. I was racked with guilt at the relief I felt that I didn’t have to go back. Yes, God is probably punishing me for my sin of being disgusted by other people’s deformities.
My faith assured me that my relationship with my dad was not over when he died, it had merely changed. Although I missed him terribly, my faith in his altered existence allowed my life to carry on without him. But this tragedy is different. How can my life possibly go on now with a part of
myself
missing?
If I learned anything from Dad’s death, it is that God is calling the shots. What happens to us here on Earth is determined, not by fate or by chance, but by God’s will. God makes the decisions and I’m supposed to accept them.
Right now, this isn’t good enough for me. I feel buried by anger, crushed by doubt, and overwhelmed by panic. God’s decisions don’t make any sense. I stifle the desperate need to yell, at the top of my lungs, “FUCK YOU, GOD!” This is what going to Mass every day gets me? This is what saying
no
to the wrong crowd means? As long as I obey you, stay a virgin, go to confession, don’t swear, obey my mom . . . Well, it’s a long list, but as long as I do it all, I’ll be rewarded. Right? If this is my reward, no thanks! And why me? God doesn’t ruin the lives of other people who keep fewer rules than I do.
I bet David and Sandy have had sex and it doesn’t look like God has punished them
, I almost say out loud.
This isn’t fair and it isn’t right!
I don’t even care that I might be committing a sin just by thinking these blasphemous thoughts.
I
LIE AWAKE A
long time fretting. I worry about acting in the play, I worry about walking around a college campus and I worry about how my relationships will change. One fear about my future in particular nags at me: What man will ever want me now? I don’t know a lot about sex; I have only kissed a few boys and still consider that icky. But I know that during sex I will be naked. I know that legs wrap around bodies in moments of passion, and I’ll have only one leg to do the wrapping.
Who will ever want to make love to me now
? I imagine a disgusted husband on our wedding night, seeing my ugly body for the first time. I imagine myself in his shoes. If I were him, I would want to know what I was saying yes to for a lifetime.
In the dark on my seventh night in the hospital I come to an agonizing but practical decision, and I decide to tell my mom about it. My stomach tightens as I remember a conversation a few years ago when Mom assured my sister and me that she and Dad were virgins on their wedding night. I know she’ll be disappointed by my decision. All I’ve ever wanted is for her to be proud of me.
In the morning, Mom comes in for breakfast. With me in my wheelchair, we sit near the window of my hospital room, which overlooks the steeples of the nearby Catholic church. The gray January light streams through the window, filling the room with the same heaviness that rests in my heart. Her eyes look at me with a mixture of sorrow, strength, and pain. They let me know I can share my thoughts and, at least right now, I won’t be admonished. She sits next to me, holding my hand.
“Mom, I need to tell you something,” I start, taking a deep breath, “I think you should know that I’ve decided to have sex before I get married.”
She looks over at me and raises her eyebrows.
“My future husband needs to know what he’s getting into,” I quickly add. “It’s only fair to let him see all of me and know what it’s like to have sex with me so he’ll know if he’ll be grossed out.” I wait and watch her face.
She looks away from me out into the gray Seattle day. Then she quietly nods her head, pats my hand with hers, and says, “Okay.”
Her quick agreement surprises me. Does it mean I am right? She knows about sex. She knows how ugly my disfigured body is. She agrees that I
will
gross out my future husband. I am filled with deep disappointment. I wanted my mom to argue with me and reassure me that I’m still beautiful just the way I am. I wanted her to get
indignant and guarantee me that no man would ever be grossed out by my body. The last thing I expected was her approval.
My heart feels hard from betrayal and anger. The kind of hardness that protects from cruelty what is vulnerable.
T
HAT NIGHT, ALONE AGAIN
at 3:00
AM
, I pray what will be my last prayer for a long time. “God, you shouldn’t have done this to me. I have worked so hard to be good. Don’t expect adoration and blind faith any longer. I’ll deal with what you’ve done the best I can with or without your help. But I won’t hold my breath.” This isn’t a threat or an ultimatum. It is my last stand against this unfair, sinister prank.
The reliable rules of reaping what you sow, of being rewarded for good behavior, have changed. God changed them midgame, and so I will too. Though I still need God’s help, I’m not going to ask for it. He doesn’t deserve that respect.
I turn my head away from the colored Christmas lights glimmering outside my window and gaze toward the warm yellow glow of my call button. I push it and lie back to wait for the nurse to arrive with the next injection.
M
y mom kept an arsenal of romance novels that lined the higher shelves of our home library. Judging by the pristine quality of the dust jackets and the tightness of the bindings, I suspect she never got around to reading any of them. She was a lab technician who spent her second shift cleaning up after four kids and occupying a double-wide rocker with her high school sweetheart. After all that, who has time for rippling muscles splashed across a page?
As a little girl, I often stood en pointe atop a wobbly skyscraper of never-consulted encyclopedias and dropped my mother’s pink-and-purple romance novels—one by one—into a neat stack at my
feet. I was playing author. In my mind I was a dashing copper-haired beauty, clad in a flowing dress and laced into a corset that barely contained my heaving breasts. I was a serious grown-up just like the women gazing up from the jackets of these grown-up books.