The Life of Glass (20 page)
Authors: Jillian Cantor
It was a
little surreal going back to school after my accident, being Ryan’s girlfriend and all, and having people know who I was. Somehow this rumor got started that Max and I had gotten in a fight on our date, he’d left me by the side of the road, and then I’d gotten hit by the car. I’m not sure where the rumor began, but I suspected Ashley.
I didn’t correct people, and there was this part of me that enjoyed it. Girls I didn’t even know, who were juniors and seniors even, smiled at me in the hallways and asked me about my arm. I told them, always, that it could’ve been much worse, which, of course, was also the truth.
But don’t worry about Max—two weeks after our date he started dating a cheerleader named Amy, who is beautiful and red-haired and bouncy, and who, Ashley told me for a fact, really does have fake boobs.
Ashley had been wrong about being laughed at by her friends, because it seemed like all the popular girls had taken Ashley’s side against the Nose. I noticed that the Nose no longer sat at the cool table at lunch. She’d moved to a table by the back window and pretended to study, and the strange thing was, even when Austin finally came back to school, I never saw the two of them together. Whenever I saw Austin, he was hanging around with the other guys on the team, high-fiving in the hallway and hollering by the bank of lockers. And Ashley was always with “Bobblehead” Beth the cheerleader, who’d moved into the spot of her new best friend.
At home it was Ashley, not me, who told my mother that Ryan and I were now a couple. “Oh?” My mother turned to me. “What about Max?”
“She and Ryan totally make a cute couple,” Ashley said, ignoring my mother’s question about Max. “Everyone thinks so.”
I felt my face turning red and hot, because I still wasn’t used to it, the way being someone’s girlfriend
made your feelings about him so loud and out in the open.
“Well, I always thought he was a nice boy,” my mother said, but she wouldn’t look at me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was angry.
It wasn’t her fault that she knew nothing about my terrible date with Max. She’d asked me over and over again what had happened that night, but all I’d told her was that I’d needed some air, that that’s why I’d gotten on the bike.
“It was stupid, Melissa.” She’d said it probably a dozen times already. “Riding your bike at night. You’re smarter than that. You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”
“I know,” I told her. And I promised never ever to do it again. A promise I intended to keep.
Still, she refused to buy me another bike. “You’ll walk,” she said, “and drive at some point.” Why she thought this would be any less dangerous didn’t make complete sense, but I could kind of see her point about the bike.
I got my cast off the Friday before finals week. My mother took the afternoon off, and she picked me up from school at noon.
“I can’t wait to get this thing off,” I said as I got into the car. The cast felt like a weight and the skin underneath it had been itching terribly for the past few weeks. At the same time I was nervous because the doctor had already told us that there would be a scar from the surgery. And I wasn’t sure what to expect, how hideous and deformed it might make me look.
My mother nodded, but she kept her eyes on the road, straight ahead of her. At the end of the street she took a right instead of the left she should’ve taken to head toward the doctor’s office. “Where are you going?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Then she made another right. And I knew exactly where she was headed. She drove slowly down the same street I’d pedaled with ferocious speed the night I’d been searching for Ryan, for Sally.
And then suddenly, she pulled off to the side of the road and parked up on the sidewalk, right there, right at the spot I’d been hit.
“I just want to know,” she said, “what you were doing here.” Her eyes were still on the road, not on me.
“I told you,” I said quietly. “I needed some air.”
She cleared her throat. “I have the rest of the day
off from work, so I’ve got time.” She looked down at her watch. “And your doctor’s appointment is in thirty minutes. It would be a shame to miss it and have to reschedule.” She turned off the car and took the key out of the ignition.
“You’re blackmailing me?” I was more surprised than anything, not only that she was threatening to make me stay in the dreadful fiberglass for another few days, but also that she cared so much.
She turned and looked right at me. “Sweetie,” she said, “I…” She paused. “Your sister always talks to me, but you…” She shrugged. “I don’t know how to get through to you.”
It was a combination of feeling bad for her and really just wanting to get my cast off, but I took a deep breath and let the story pour right out of me. All of it: what Grandma Harry had said about Sally Bedford, searching for her with Ryan at Charles and Large, pedaling toward her house the night of the accident, and then finally, my new resolve to stop looking for her, my thought that the accident had been a sign.
When I was done talking, she was silent for a minute, and then she said, “Thank you for telling me the truth.”
She put the key back in the ignition and drove to the doctor’s office without saying another word.
Later that night I was lying on my bed attempting to learn the biology flash cards Ryan had made me so I could study for the final. My arm still felt limp, and the skin looked flaky and surreal. The scar was smaller than I thought it would be, but it was still pretty red and ugly-looking. I kept getting distracted and staring at it and thinking about the fact that it would be there forever. The doctor had said that it would fade over time, but still, I knew that every time I’d look down at my wrist, I’d have a reminder of the night I could’ve died.
My mother knocked at the door, then opened it before I had a chance to respond. “How’s your arm?” she asked. I noticed she was holding a medium-sized clear plastic box.
“Okay.” I wondered if she was still mad, if she was coming in to tell me I was grounded.
“Here.” She thrust the box at me.
“What’s this?”
“Some of your dad’s things, from high school. I still had them put away from when I helped Grandma Harry move out of her house.” I was surprised because I hadn’t
known she’d kept anything of his other than that one picture from Sears. But I took the box.
“Why are you giving me this?” I asked.
She sat down on the edge of my bed. “Sweetie,” she said, “anytime you want to know something about your dad, all you have to do is ask.” She paused. “Everything you’d want to know about Sally Bedford is in here.” She leaned in and gave me a hug. Then she whispered in my ear, “I still miss him too, you know.”
After she left, I stared at the box, trying to decide whether or not to open it. Maybe the accident hadn’t been a sign of anything, I reasoned. Maybe it had just been the dark and two people who weren’t paying attention. Nothing more.
Everything I wanted to know was sitting right in front of me, and I couldn’t let it go. I wanted to know the truth, so I took a deep breath and lifted the lid.
The contents of the box: a high-school yearbook, five letters, four pictures, a playbill for
Guys and Dolls
, and a box of clarinet reeds. An odd assortment of objects that seemed to sum up my dad’s high-school years and maybe the kind of person he was in general, an interesting combination of thinker and dreamer.
I flipped through the yearbook first, slowly. In his senior picture my dad appeared nothing like I remembered him, so young and handsome, and he had this look on his face that reminded me of the way Ashley looked at school, very important and in charge. I learned my father had been a part of the pep band, the debate club, the National Honor Society, and the drama club. And there, right along with him in both debate and drama, was Sally Bedford.
She was thinner and younger-looking in these pictures than in the one I’d found on the internet, and she had a much cuter bob cut and smile here.
And then when I flipped toward the back of the book, there was a picture of her and my dad. They were sitting on a wall together. She was leaning into him with her head on his shoulder. He had his arm around her, and he looked as if he was laughing, as if there was this sense of joy bursting right out of him that he just couldn’t contain.
I traced my finger over his face and then over hers. And for some reason I thought about me and Ryan, about holding his hand as we walked up the steps to our school the first time as a couple, about the intense way my body had felt alive and the way everything else had faded, become background noise. Maybe that’s what
Sally Bedford had done for my father.
There were also a few loose pictures of them at what looked like two different formal dances. Sally wore a red puffy-sleeved dress and hung on tightly to my father, who had on a tux with a matching red cummerbund. In another picture they matched in an emerald green.
I flipped through the yearbook a little more and read what Sally wrote to my father, and then I read the letters. When I was done, I put everything back into the box and put the lid back on, and then I went and sat at my desk with my journal, picked up a pen, and started writing, until the real and the imagined blurred together into something that was part truth, part fantasy, but all the same felt like an answer.
Sally Bedford and Tom McAllister
The first time Tom McAllister saw Sally Bedford, it was the first day of his junior year. She was sitting under a paloverde tree eating her lunch. Everyone else gathered on the school grounds in clumps, but not Sally. She was new to school, and she was sitting all alone. She looked up and caught him watching her, and she gave a little wave. He waved back, though he felt his face turning red, knowing he’d been caught staring.
He saw her again later that week at the first meeting
of the debate club, and then later that month at the tryouts for
Guys and Dolls.
Each time she gave a little wave, and he nodded. Tom had no time for girls. He was worrying about his SATs and his grades and having enough diverse activities to get into a good college, with a scholarship.
Sally was a senior and a very talented singer and a dancer. She won the part of Miss Adelaide, the female lead. Tom had only joined drama because his mother thought it would look good on his college applications, and he landed a part in the chorus. He suspected that it was only because everyone who tried out was guaranteed a part, because the director asked him not to sing louder than a whisper.
Sally was small and a little mousy, shy and a little wilted like a flower in the Arizona summer sun. But onstage she was brilliant. Amazing. Tom watched her sing from the back of the stage, and her voice, clear and bright like wind chimes, gave him chills.
One day when her understudy was practicing, she came and sat next to him. “You’re always watching me,” she said. “Why?”
“I’m not,” Tom lied. He cleared his throat. “You’re very special.” He knew how weird it sounded as soon as it came it. “I mean talented,” he said. Yes, that had been what he’d meant, hadn’t it?
“Thank you,” she said. She stood up. “Are you busy this weekend?”
He wasn’t.
They went to see a movie. She drove because she had her own car and he didn’t. “I don’t know what kind of girl picks you up,” his mother said, shaking her head.
“The kind of girl who has a car.”
At the end of the night she pulled up in front of his house. She turned off the car. They stared at each other. Silence. They stared some more. Finally, he said, “Where did you learn to sing like that?”
She laughed, and she leaned in and kissed him.
For a year they were inseparable. Every weekend she drove them out on dates. They became debate partners. He helped her rehearse her lines. They went to the fall formal and the prom. They spent the summer at the community pool under the lofty shade of the cabana.
In August she left to go to college. “We’ll still stay together,” she said tearfully. “I’ll come home every weekend. I’ll write you every day.”
When she left, he felt like a part of him had been chipped away, like there was this empty, burning pit in his stomach—or at least that’s what he wrote in a letter he never sent her.
She called a few times, but after two weeks her calls stopped. She’d promised to come home for Labor Day weekend, but she didn’t show.
Tom spent the weekend in his bedroom with his blinds closed. “You can’t just lie in here and mope,” his mother said, trying to rustle him out of bed.
“I can,” he said, “and I will.”
And then she sent him a letter, A Dear Tom, This-is-never-going-to-work letter.
He went back to his bedroom every day after school, every weekend. He couldn’t imagine his life without her. He suddenly understood what it meant to have a broken heart, because his hurt, and it was hard for him to breathe without feeling like he was suffocating (at least that’s what he wrote in another letter he never sent). His mother told him there would be other girls, but he just shook his head.
He dropped out of drama and debate club. He let his mother fill out his college applications for him, but he was no longer interested in Stanford. He thought if he went to the same school as she did, he would find her and win her back. His mother, secretly, did not send this application in.
Life went on. He got into other colleges. He met his real soul mate, Cynthia. He got a job, got married, had children.
And then he got sick.
And in the in between, he and Sally ended up working at the same place. Maybe they talked again. Maybe she apologized. Maybe she asked for help with her taxes. Maybe they had lunch and laughed about old times.
Or maybe they didn’t.
I put my pencil down. This next part I didn’t know, but suddenly it didn’t seem to matter what else had happened. I was sure that when Grandma Harry had mentioned Sally, mentioned the terrible thing she’d done, that she was talking about the girl who had broken my father’s heart in high school, not the woman he may have talked to again all these years later.