The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  But that night, the night of the back-to-school party . . . I wore the red flats and the black skinny jeans I’d saved for and bought by myself . . . that night when I’d tried to curl my corn-silk, mermaid-long locks so they’d bounce against my back when I walked. It hadn’t exactly worked, but I still felt pretty. I wanted to be pretty that night, for Ralph.

  I closed my eyes. Why was I doing this? What if I couldn’t?

  Then what are you doing here, Kirsten?

  Going back. I was going back to that night because there was nothing else left to do.

  Lara and I arrived together and as usual she darted off someplace the minute we walked into the Hugh Crugh room. Which was fine because again, as usual, she outshone me like Venus does your average run-of-the-mill star. And besides, I’d told myself I wasn’t going to spend the whole time trying to keep track of her. Ralph had just gotten his driver’s license and I had my heart set on a ride home. And maybe a sweet kiss on the cheek.

  I ran a hand across my chest where I could still almost feel the tender throb of that teenage innocence. I had wanted so little . . . while Lara wanted it all. And grabbed it, no matter who it belonged to.

  My hand balled into a fist. I had to force myself to release it.

  Oddly Lara didn’t take center stage that night and I wouldn’t have noticed if she had. I was looking for Ralph but going all out to make sure it didn’t look like I was looking for Ralph. I could see my fifteen-year-old self so clearly. I pretended to be engrossed in the details of my friends’ mall escapades, though my peripheral vision was on high alert for a glimpse of him. I threw my head back in bell-like laughter, hoping my drooping-but-still-alluring curls would cascade down my back and enchant him.

  A similar laugh bubbled up my throat now as I saw myself dipping my first pink-polished toenail into the pool of flirtation. I had been so naïve and so shyly eager. And so trusting.

  The laugh died.

  Forty-five minutes into the party I still hadn’t seen Ralph, and both my hair and my hope were wilting. I made a few not-so-subtle inquiries as to his whereabouts. “It feels like somebody’s missing,” I said to everyone there, one by one. “Is it Maggie? No, she’s here. What’s-his-name . . . Ralph, maybe?”

  I tried some variation of that on one person too many: the freshman with the George Clooney wannabe haircut who, with his own brand of cluelessness, said, “Ralph’s out in the parking lot with your sister.”

  The scene, until now so clean and sweet and skinny-jeaned in my memory, rose up before me like a specter. I backed away from it until I skidded on a spray of pebbles and fell, bum first, among them. Their tiny points pressed into my hands, and the images pressed into me.

  Of the party dizzying around me as I shoved and pushed and elbowed my way out.

  Of my brand-new red flats sliding on the hallway floor, careening me into the wall against the banner that said, “Bear one another’s burdens.”

  Of jamming my hands against the bar to open the door to the parking lot—and stopping and squeezing my eyes closed and telling myself that Ralph had followed Lara out to bring her back in—because he was “too Christian.”

  And the image of stepping out to help him. So we could save my sister together.

  I punched my fists against my eyes now to push it all back, but it was too late. It was all there: the silhouettes of their two heads in the Subaru Ralph’s father had let him use for the first time . . . a new voice in my head saying, Get your little wilted self back inside. You do not want to see this . . . another voice, Lara’s voice, teasing, “Go ahead, Ralph. You know you want to.” And the long kiss. The one I’d hoped would be for me.

  Hands behind me now, I crabbed back until I hit the shepherds’ stones again. Pain clutched at my throat like strangling hands. This—this pain—was why I couldn’t look. I couldn’t stand this pain.

  “I can’t!” I screamed to no one there. “I can’t!”

  And then I did. I looked at myself, standing beside the Subaru with my dying mermaid hair sticking to my face, pounding on the window until Lara lowered it. Even now I could smell the alcohol oozing from her breath and from the seat where it had spilled out of the can Ralph held in his hand.

  I never looked at Ralph’s face. Not then, not now. I could only stare at my sister with her kiss-tousled blondeness and her road-mapped blue eyes and her unsurprised mouth that said, “Hey, Sis. I was just breakin’ him in for ya. You can have him next.”

  “I don’t want him,” I heard myself say in a voice that belonged to someone whose innocence had just been slapped away.

  “Oh,” Lara said.

  She giggled over something that only seemed to be funny to her and Ralph, who joined in as if on cue. It wasn’t funny to me. Hand to my throat—just as it was now—I stepped back from the car. Lara hung the top half of her body out the window.

  “If you don’t want him, I’ll take him,” she said.

  She tried to twist her head around toward Ralph and banged it on the mirror. More giggles, high-pitched and ugly.

  “Take him,” I said. “Take him far away so I don’t have to look at either one of you.”

  One more giggle, one that had already been halfway out, faded between us, into the mist of an almost-rain. She tried to focus her eyes on me.

  “That’s a good idea,” she said. “Ralphie, we should go far away. You drive and we’ll go far away.”

  The engine started with no hesitation. Lara was still watching me, brows pinched together as if that would help her understand.

  “We’re gonna go, Kirsten,” she said. “Me and Ralph, we’re gonna go.”

  “So go!” I said. Because in that moment I hated her little-sister blue eyes and the stud in her nose and the load I’d been carrying for her for two lost years.

  “You won’t tell?” she said.

  It had never been a question before, and I answered it. I answered it in a venom-filled voice I could still hear in my head.

  “I won’t tell,” I said. “Because I don’t care what happens to you. Go!”

  She did.

  “She never, ever listened to me before! Why did she listen to me then?”

  I let my scream fall dead on the stones around me and I folded my arms across my knees and I let my head fall onto them. And I cried.

  I cried and I cried and I cried until there was nothing left but rasping breaths and my own voice calling out, “How can I live with this, God?”

  The still, small question didn’t wait this time. Why are you here, Kirsten?

  My answer didn’t wait either. “I’m here because I need You!”

  It was the only answer I had. Perhaps the only one I had ever had.

  Silence settled again, this time fleece-like over the place I’d just emptied. I wrapped myself in its wooly silence and went back to the ranch to wait.

  If Emma was at the Cloister, she was shut up in her room. But I didn’t knock. I was sure my face was a blotchy, swollen mess for one thing. And I was tired in a way I’d never been, tired on the inside somehow, and I wanted to sleep. Take a shower and then sleep. I didn’t even bother to vacuum the moths out of the bathtub; we were practically on a first-name basis at that point anyway.

  “Just clear me a space,” I said to them. “I’m comin’ in.”

  I turned on the faucet for the wait-five-minutes-for-hot-water ritual and slipped out of the jeans that were so stiff with ranch detritus I could have stood them in the corner.

  Is it just me or are you in a weirdly good mood all of a sudden?

  Good mood? I wasn’t sure I even knew what a good mood was anymore. But I did feel . . . lighter maybe? Had I gotten free? Was that it?

  You’d feel a whole lot lighter if you’d shave those legs.

  That was probably true. My blonde leg hair was pretty much invisible most of the time, but when I propped my foot up on the side of the tub, I saw that my shins currently resembled a bathroom rug.

  That isn’t the half of it. Check out th
ose thighs.

  I stepped back on my right foot and examined my left thigh.

  “Come on, it’s not that hairy,” I said to the moths.

  I could still see the fading remnants of my early cuts, although as I ran my fingers across them I could no longer feel them. Their ridges had become flush with my skin. Even that one—

  I stopped, hand on my inner thigh. I was looking at the place I promised I would never look at again after the night I cut into it. The first time ever, in flesh I promised myself I wouldn’t see again.

  Until now, when I couldn’t look away from the word I had carved there the night I learned about Lara.

  I was screaming before I hit the bathroom floor, screaming what I had held in my throat since I watched those letters bleed.

  “It’s my fault she can’t walk! It’s my fault she can’t think! It’s my fault she’ll never be Lara again! It’s my fault!”

  I didn’t know how long I screamed that way before someone had her arms around me.

  “Why is it your fault, Kirsten?” she said. “Tell me, my friend.”

  I told Frankie everything, there on the cold bathroom floor clutching my jeans and her sleeve and her over-and-over assurance that it was time to set myself free. It poured from me, until I reached the place where the Subaru jerked across the church parking lot in fits and starts and slid out onto the wet road.

  “I still had a chance to run after them and stop them,” I said to Frankie. “But I didn’t.”

  “Could you have stopped them, really?” Frankie said. “Lara had never listened to you. She still wasn’t listening to you when you told her to go. She was listening to a self who was screaming for attention from your parents, not you.” Frankie bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Kirsten—this is your story. Go on.”

  “There’s nothing more to tell,” I said.

  Frankie waited.

  “Okay,” I said. “Yes. I went back inside and tried to pretend that nothing had happened. I didn’t know the word surreal then but I see now that’s how it was. I felt like I’d turned into somebody else and I had all these weird feelings . . . like I wanted to go in the bathroom and cut my hair off. And I kept having thoughts like At least she’s not here to cramp your style. Too bad she took your guy with her, though. Bummer. It was all just strange.”

  Frankie still waited. She didn’t come to my rescue, and neither did the Nudnik.

  “Then Hugh found me sitting in a corner tearing up a napkin and he took me to his office and told me there’d been an accident. Lara was in critical condition.”

  “And Ralph?”

  “He only had minor injuries. He had a seat belt on. Lara didn’t.” I shuffled my feet back and forth on the floor. “Of course she didn’t. She never wore it unless I told her to. And I didn’t tell her to. So . . . when he lost control and hit a light pole, she was thrown from the car.” My voice choked to a whisper. “And landed on her head. That’s it. That’s all.”

  “Is it?” Frankie said. “Because I’m still seeing this.”

  She touched the hand I had wrapped around my throat. “Something is still choking the life out of you, my friend, and if you don’t let it go, it will.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I know,” she said. “You can’t, but God can. So let’s pray it out, you and me, okay?”

  I sagged against her and nodded and she prayed . . . asking God to open my throat and ease the pain out into His hands so I didn’t have to fight it anymore. Frankie prayed and I breathed and she prayed and I felt the breaking loose of what was lodged in the lining of myself. It came out in broken pieces.

  “We thought she was going to die . . . there was so much brain damage . . . my father kept saying, ‘Let her go’ . . . but they saved her . . . they saved her and I was so relieved . . . they said I could see her and I was ready to tell her I was so sorry I didn’t stop her . . .”

  Frankie prayed some more and another piece tore free.

  “But she wasn’t Lara anymore. She looked at me but she wasn’t in her eyes. She moved her mouth but all that came out was a moan . . . and drool she couldn’t wipe because her hands wouldn’t do what she wanted them to do. I told her anyway, but she didn’t know. She still doesn’t know, because she can’t know anything.”

  Frankie stopped praying out loud and held me, and I could feel the prayers through her skin. That was the only reason I could let the last piece go.

  “I never told my parents I even saw her in the parking lot with Ralph, and he never told them either. I never saw him again.”

  “He left the church?” Frankie said.

  “No, we did. My father threatened to sue Ralph’s parents and Hugh and the entire United Methodist Church. We wouldn’t have been welcome back there anyway.” I tilted my head back and let my jaw drop open, just so I couldn’t hold it back anymore. “My parents fought every minute Lara was still in the hospital. My father said my mother should have known Lara was running wild and my mother said how was she supposed to know when Lara seemed the same as always to her? And how was she supposed to focus on her daughter when her husband was running wild himself? She blamed him—he blamed her—and I couldn’t tell them I was the one to blame.”

  “Do you blame yourself for their divorce?”

  I sighed from someplace. “Not entirely. The worst fights were over what to do about Lara when she left the hospital. My father wanted her put in a facility where she could get professional care. He never said it but it was there: he thought they should have let her die so she didn’t have to live the rest of her life like a mentally handicapped three-month-old.” I shook my head. “My mother wouldn’t have it. She insisted she was going to bring Lara home and take care of her, herself, with no help from anyone. My father even went to court over it, but the judge said since Lara was a minor, her parents were still responsible for her and unless she was being abused he couldn’t intervene. But they never were responsible for her.”

  “So you tried to be.”

  “And I failed.”

  Frankie nibbled at her lip and nodded for me to keep talking. By then I didn’t have the energy to put on the brakes anymore.

  “My mother watched the nurses and figured out how to take care of Lara. Everything but actual rehab. In the meantime, my father went out and designed another high-rise. The day they brought her home in a wheelchair with her head fastened into this metal thing because she couldn’t hold it up, my father just walked out the door and got another lawyer.”

  “A divorce lawyer.”

  “Yeah. When Mother was served with the papers, she didn’t even shed a tear. She never cried over Lara either. She just made arrangements with my grandparents in Missouri for them to move into a senior retirement place so she and I and Lara could live in their house, the one my mother grew up in. The state paid her to take care of Lara and my father paid child support but none of us saw him for eighteen months—until he came to tell me he was going to take care of college for me. He didn’t see Lara then. I knew he couldn’t even look at her.” The energy I thought was gone surged again. “But I had to look at her every day. I had certain things I was supposed to do for her—feed her dinner and read to her at night and sometimes I just wanted to scream, ‘Why am I doing this? She doesn’t even know what I’m saying!’”

  I stopped because I was screaming again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Frankie.

  “No need to be. Go on, Kirsten. There’s more.”

  I was almost to the end. But the only way I could get there was to cry it out.

  “I left her, Frankie,” I said between heaving breaths. “I left her so I wouldn’t have to look at her every day and see the way she was when I told her I didn’t care what she did. I just went off to college so I could . . .” I searched Frankie’s face.

  “So you could have the life your sister could never have.”

  “Only, you know something?”

  She shook her head.

  “I haven’t had a life since.�
�

  “Because you didn’t really leave Lara,” Frankie said. “You’ve carried her with you in all those scars.”

  She was looking at my left thigh, where my hand rubbed the word I’d kept hidden from everyone. Even myself.

  “What does it all come down to, my friend?” she said.

  “It comes down to this,” I said.

  My hand shook as I pulled it back and showed her the thin crooked letters of the word SHAME.

  Frankie closed her eyes, but not before I saw my pain in them.

  “I carved it there after I saw Lara that first time,” I said.

  I felt my head being coaxed onto Frankie’s shoulder. “I told you bat kol can come in strange and unexpected ways. It was there all along, the root of your suffering in your own writing. Now it can heal.”

  “How can it heal when it was my fault and it will always be my fault?”

  Frankie’s arm tightened around me. “You may have had some small part in setting the events of that night in motion, Kirsten. There are things you could have done differently so perhaps the accident wouldn’t have happened. More than likely it still would have. But whatever your share of the blame . . . why do you think we celebrate our communion and pray in the garden and go on with the work we’ve been given to do? Because we’re all forgiven. There is no shame, Kirsten. There is only God’s love.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. My body was sinking into a cushion where breathing was the only business required of a throat. I did finally murmur, “My scar is bat kol?”

  “Any way God can, God will,” Frankie said.

  “Then please do,” I whispered.

  The arms of sleep joined Frankie’s and wrapped themselves around me too. I made my final nestle into its cushion.

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  Chapter

  TWENTY

  I was still swathed in my quilts the next morning, trying to figure out how I’d gotten from the bathroom floor to the bed, when I heard Emma squeal like a little girl and pound across the front room to the door. By the time I got up, pulled on a pair of sweats, and made it to the porch, Emma was running barefoot down the hill toward the bunkhouse. Joseph stood at the bottom, his arms out waiting for her.