Wrecked (14 page)

“You have to say ‘off,’ Dad,” Jack tells him, pulling free of Aunt Jerry, his face that half-and-half mask.

Mamie is too old to be a jumper. She lies right in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, so you sort of have to leap over her. She’s almost the size of a small pony.

“God damn it,” my dad mutters when he spills some of his beer, stumbling over her. Mamie licks it up and then goes for his hand. He spills more beer trying to avoid her big head.

We sit down to eat almost right away. The table is covered with soups and salads and pumpkin breads and cranberry dishes and sweet-potato purees and two bowls of rice with flower petals garnishing the tops. We’ll never finish it all, and Aunt Jerry will take the leftover main courses and half the fresh desserts to a soup kitchen later tonight. She’ll make Jack and me come with her. She does that every year.

“There won’t be any lawsuits?” Uncle Buck asks while he carves the turkey.

“No,” my father says, shoving Nixon’s head out of his crotch. I hadn’t even thought about that.

“It wasn’t Anna’s fault,” my mother says. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was an accident.”

“Not even a civil suit?” Uncle Buck asks. He puts the dark meat on one platter and the white meat on another. I pick up two big serving forks, waiting to add them when my uncle is done carving.

“No, Buck,” my mother says. She sounds mad. “There won’t be any lawsuits.”

“Lucky,” Buck says. “That’s lucky.”

“Stop that, Anna,” my father tells me.

“Stop what?” I ask him. Everybody looks at me. I don’t get it at first. Then I notice: The two forks are clacking together in my hand, making a fast, metallic rhythm, like a pair of castanets. I drop them onto the table and shove both hands in my lap. “Sorry,” I say.

I’m refilling the water pitchers in the kitchen halfway through the meal. Aunt Jerry and my mother are pulling more bread out of the oven. It’s infused with some sort of garlic pumpkin flavor, and Uncle Buck won’t allow us to eat any that’s not warm.

“It’s called EMDR,” Aunt Jerry’s saying. “It’s a kind of therapy for trauma survivors. I really think you should try it for her.”

“For me?” I ask. “Are you talking about me?” Am I a trauma survivor?

“Get away!” I hear my father yelling.

“Off, Lucifer!” Uncle Buck and Jack yell right after that. If I hadn’t just been called a trauma survivor, I’d laugh.

“Dad doesn’t want me in therapy,” I tell them.

“Your father is clueless,” Aunt Jerry says, annoyed.

“Jerry,” my mom goes. “You don’t have to—”

“Just look at her,” Aunt Jerry tells my mother. “Look at her!”

My mother looks at me. Aunt Jerry looks at me. I wonder if this is how the dogs feel when Jerry goes to pick one out.

What do they see?

Lucifer comes with us in the car. Everybody else stays home. Uncle Buck will get the desserts ready—the ones we haven’t taken along with the leftovers—while my parents moan about how sick they feel from eating so much.

“So, how have you been really?” Aunt Jerry asks Jack.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. You should ask how Anna’s been.”

“It’s obvious how Anna is,” Jerry says. “You. You’re less obvious.”

“He’s sad,” I say.

“Shut up,” he tells me, but not mean.

Lucifer is a mutt. He’s small and energetic. He keeps trying to lick our faces. He wiggles from the front to the backseat, back and forth, first to me, then to Jack, then to me. If I’d been prepared for Lucifer, I’d have dug up my eye shield.

“And how have the two of you been together?” Jerry asks. She’s my mom’s older sister, but she’s different from my mother. She gets right to the point. She doesn’t let things go. She reminds me a little bit of Ellen’s mom, actually, only not so stylish. To be honest, with her short hair and boxy body and something about her skin, she sort of looks like a man.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I think you know what I mean,” she says. I glance at Jack. He’s staring out the window.

“You mean that I killed his girlfriend,” I tell Aunt Jerry.

“Shut up,” Jack tells the window.

“That’s not exactly what I mean,” she goes. “And that’s not exactly the truth of it either.” She glances at me in her rearview.

Lucifer leaps from Jack’s lap back to mine.

“Let me tell you what I wish for you,” Jerry says after Jack and I stay quiet. She pulls into the Salvation Army parking lot. “I wish that when you’re the ages of your mom and me, you see each other more than Thanksgiving and Christmas each year. I hope that you talk to each other a lot, about real things, the things that matter, and that you’re involved in the lives of each other’s children.” It’s embarrassing. How serious she’s being. How … I don’t know. Earnest.

Lucifer’s on her lap now, snuggling in, even though we’re all about to get out of the car. Jack glances back at me. His face is red.

“Siblings should be friends,” Aunt Jerry says. “The two of you, especially, should be friends.” Why us especially?

“Okay,” Jack says.

“Okay,” I say. I think we both just want her to stop.

“You didn’t kill Cameron,” Jack tells me suddenly, twisting all the way around from the front seat to see me.

“Yes, I did,” I tell him back.

“No, you didn’t,” he says.

“Yes, I did.”

“Stop it,” Aunt Jerry says. “We have to bring the food in.”

So we stop.

• • •

Back at the house, in front of the dessert spread, with steaming cups of coffee and cappuccino and exotic teas, Uncle Buck doesn’t let us dig in until we say what we’re thankful for. We do it that way every year. Nothing before the main meal. No prayers or toasts or anything. Thanks always come just before dessert. It’s mandatory. Uncle Buck tells my dad to begin. My father puts his palms on the table and looks around at all of us.

“Get away!” he yells when Lucifer tries to climb on his lap.

“Off!” Uncle Buck pulls Lucifer back by the collar. My dad takes a deep breath. The vein in his forehead starts pulsing.

“Well,” he says. “We have a lot to be thankful for this …,” and then he stops talking. He looks at me and Jack, and he tries to say something, only instead his face crunches inward and goes pink. He turns to my mother and makes a snorting sound, and then he looks at me and Jack again, and he shakes his head, and he stares at the middle of the table, and he goes, in this awful, high-pitched voice, “I can’t.” And he just sits there, shaking and then crying, while we watch, frozen, and Mamie lurches to her feet from the foot of his chair and whines and starts to lick his face, and Uncle Buck yanks her away, and it’s almost as bad as the screaming, stopped.

“YOU HAVE SOMETHING CALLED POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER,”
the therapist tells me. Her name is Frances. She’s about my mom’s age, and she’s got a lot of freckles, which are sort of cute and funny-looking at the same time.

“Nightmares, startle response, panic attacks, inability to concentrate, avoidance behaviors.”

“Avoidance, like avoiding driving?”

She nods. “Those can all be symptoms of PTSD.”

“Did you buy that at Cinnamon Toast?” I ask her. She looks down at her flowing clothes in muted colors.

“Uh …,” she goes.

“My best friend’s mom owns that store,” I say. “Ellen. The one who was in the car with me.”

“Oh,” Frances says.

It’s the third time I’ve seen Frances in two weeks. My parents have seen her once, together.

“How come Ellen doesn’t have post-traumatic stress whatever?”

“Disorder,” Frances reminds me. “PTSD. She might have it. But I don’t know Ellen, so I couldn’t say.”

It’s not that I don’t like Frances. She’s okay. It’s that I’m embarrassed about being in therapy.

“It means I’m crazy, right?” I say. “Jack and Ellen think so. They think I’m completely and totally insane.”

“Do you think you’re insane?” Frances asks.

“I don’t think most sixteen-year-olds go around feeling like they’re going to die from heart attacks every time they get near a steering wheel,” I say. Not to mention shaking practically all the time and nightmares every single night.

“Actually,” Frances tells me, “in your case that’s a normal reaction to an abnormal life experience.”

“If it’s so normal, why isn’t Ellen having the same reaction as I am?”

“First of all, she wasn’t driving. But also, Ellen was drunk and then passed out,” Frances says. “Her brain was having an entirely different experience from yours.”

“We were in the same car,” I say. “We were in the same accident.”

“Were you?” Frances asks.

Now I’m thinking she’s the insane one. If I were a little younger, I’d probably look at her and go, “Duh.” But I just stay quiet.

“Anna. There’s nothing crazy about you. Listen.” She leans
forward, and her freckles slightly change color somehow. They get darker. “When a trauma occurs, it seems to get locked in the nervous system with the original pictures, sounds, and feelings. A part of the brain that’s involved in handling thought and language shuts down. Another part of the brain that knows only body sensations and emotions gets lit up. Way up. If those two parts of the brain don’t find a way to reconnect, we can end up with symptoms like the ones you have.”

She stops talking and leans back in her black leather chair. I’m sitting at the corner of her couch. It’s red and has these small, cream-colored suede throw pillows, which are really, really smooth. I can’t stop stroking them, as if they’re little pets or something.

“Well, how do I get the two parts of my brain to reconnect, so I’m not such a head case?” I ask.

“There are different ways to treat PTSD,” Frances tells me, “including taking medication for the anxiety and panic-attack part. There’s also something called exposure therapy, which would involve getting you behind the wheel of a car before you really want to, and then making you drive. Then there’re ways of making use of body sensations. We’ll use elements of that today. And there’s something called EMDR, which is my vote on what’s most likely to get your brain reconnected.”

“I don’t want to drive.” It’s the only part of what she’s just said that I hear.
Getting you behind the wheel of a car again
. I feel my heart chipping away at the inside of my chest, just at the thought.

“All right,” Frances says. “We won’t do that, then.”

My heart’s still pounding, though.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Your face is red, and you’re sweating.”

I wipe the tops of my thumbs down my temples, which are hot and damp.

“That’s your body’s response to the memory of the accident,” Frances says. “You were thinking about having to drive, right?”

I nod.

“See how you’re physically reacting to that thought?”

“I guess,” I say.

“What kind of feelings are you having, thinking about it?” she asks.

“Shaking. Sweating. Hot,” I say. “Kind of like I could throw up.”

“Okay. Those are body sensations. What kind of emotional feelings are you having?” she asks.

“Scared. Embarrassed. Nervous,” I say. I am crazy. I must be.

“Put your feet flat on the floor.” Frances sits up straight, uncrosses her legs, and does it herself. “Like this. Really feel the bottoms of your feet supported by the rug and the wood beneath.”

I untangle myself and copy her. I slide my butt to the edge of the couch and flatten both my feet inside my black leather boots with the zippers up the sides.

“Press down a little bit and see if you can feel the ground pressing back, solid under the soles of your feet.”

“Okay,” I say after a second. I’m a little calmed down, I think.

“Now take a couple of deep breaths,” Frances tells me. “Like this.” She breathes in really, really slow through her nose. She
holds it a second and then blows the air out through her mouth, long and deep. It’s a little weird. It looks like Ellen’s mom, sort of, on her yoga mat.

But I do it anyway. I take a breath.

“Slower,” Frances tells me. “Go slower.” So I do. “How does your body feel now?” she asks after I blow the air out.

“I thought therapy was about talking,” I say. “Not breathing. Or … you know … feet.”

“This is uncomfortable for you,” she tells me.

“Kind of.” But as weird as it is, having my feet solidly on the floor and breathing deep like that does make me feel better. “I guess I’m not feeling as embarrassed,” I admit to Frances.

“Good,” she goes. “So you get a sense of how your body can cue emotions, and how emotions can cue your body. Right?”

I nod.

“So if you notice you’re feeling anxious or afraid, you can use this to help soothe yourself. Just put your feet flat on the ground and breathe.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. “But …” I stroke the cream-colored pillow, worrying that the nightmares are too big and the shaking is too strong to be fixed so fast by some new way of sitting and breathing.

“What is it?” Frances asks.

I stop stroking and look at all the certificates on her wall. There’re a bunch of them, and the one on the left middle row is crooked. “Am I going to be okay?” I think about how mad my dad is at how messed up I am now, and I feel that thick ink in my chest. “I mean, really okay?”

“Yes, Anna.” I can feel her staring at me, and I pull my eyes from her certificates on the wall to look back at her. Her freckled face is so confident. “You’re going to be fine.” The ink thins out a lot. Not all the way. But a lot. It’s a relief. To hear that from someone who maybe actually knows.

Rob’s SUV is the easiest car for Ellen, with her wheelchair, compared with Ellen’s mom’s Volvo or our new Honda. So instead of going to school separately, Jack and I and Ellen and Rob start showing up together.

“How new is your car?” Ellen asks Rob as Jack helps her into the wheelchair. I’m holding her book bag, and Rob’s kicking at the back left tire, worrying it’s got a leak. He doesn’t say anything. “Because it smells new,” Ellen goes. “And it’s spotless.”

“Rob’s a clean freak,” Jack says. The air has that December edge to it that turns our breath into mini steam clouds.