by Hope Nation- YA Authors Share Personal Moments of Inspiration (retail) (epub)
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• • •
The trip to the airport is a piece of cake. I drop my father at the terminal, wave goodbye, then navigate the morning rush-hour traffic back home. Even with the windows open, the air’s tight. I shouldn’t have worn my long-sleeved Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers T-shirt, but I love that shirt. I bought it at the concert a few weeks ago, and it makes me feel cool. Being a “cool girl” is on my “being perfect” checklist. Stalled in traffic, I glimpse my reflection in the rearview mirror. In those fleeting seconds before I can pick myself apart, I think I’m pretty. There are the almond-shaped, blue-gray eyes that read green in the bright sun. The emergence of cheekbones. A strong, straight nose—on the prominent side like my Irish-lineage grandmother’s and dusted with freckles. The pouty bottom lip that I like to imagine is inherited from my French great-great-grandmother. She was pretty, they tell me.
The rain’s starting as I take the exit ramp from I-35 back into Denton. I’ve got both hands on the wheel as I sing along to the radio. “L.A. Woman” by The Doors. Jim Morrison’s psychedelic, menacing croon blasts from my kick-ass Bose speakers. I’m approaching the intersection of Dallas Drive and Teasley Lane. If I turn left down Teasley, I can drive to our former neighborhood, past our old house with the bay-windowed breakfast nook where I used to sit to sketch. After the divorce, my parents had to sell that house, and now my mom and I live in a small town house with a faulty foundation on the other side of town on a street of oil-stained driveways and chain-link fences and a Baptist church whose summer marquee reads, “If you think it’s hot now, don’t die without Jesus.”
The rain comes harder, slickening the road. At the intersection, the traffic light slides to warning-yellow, but I’m going too fast to brake. I decide to sail under the light before it hits red. So I press the gas. In the left-turn lane opposite, a white pickup truck has other ideas. At the last second, it shoots in front of me. My foot hits the brake hard. The tires slide sideways as my car hydroplanes on the glass-like pavement and swerves into a violent spin. I am trapped inside the tornado, the landscape a blur. I have to stop, but I don’t know how, and I’m terrified. There’s a grassy median. If I can make it to the grass, I might find traction there. But it’s hard to see while spinning out of control. I angle toward it and hope for the best. So fast, so fast. Which gear will stop me?
In the chaos, my foot slips to the gas.
The last thing I see is a giant steel light pole coming straight for me.
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• • •
When your car hits a giant stationary object at forty miles an hour, the impact is tremendous. The front of your car—hood, bumper, engine, carburetor—crumples in on itself like an empty Coke can squished between two strong palms. Your body, fragile, all-too-human, travels forward like a projectile, especially if there’s no protective seat belt to hold it back. Witness it in slow motion, and you see the car’s collapsing front end shoving the steering wheel upward as you fly forward. If the steering wheel hits an inch above your eyebrows, you’ll be dead instantly. If it hits an inch lower, at your throat? Dead. The best hope is that your face takes the brunt of the impact, bones crushing, flesh tearing, muscles, tendons, and nerves severed into a spaghetti squash of uselessness. That’s the best scenario. The one that lets you live. Lucky you.
Back at the crash now. Watch as your face hits the steering wheel with the impact of a jet-propelled battering ram, so hard it breaks the wheel off at its column. (Goodbye, Irish nose. So long, baby cheekbones. Good to know you, lips.) You merge with the shattered steel and hard plastic like a dying Transformer that can’t quite transform. It is not clear just yet whether you really are one of the lucky ones. You are not awake. You are not there. You have always longed to be elsewhere.
Now you are.
* * *
• • •
That thing they tell you about your life playing out before your eyes? True. While I’m unconscious in the smoking, sputtering ruin of that Toyota, mine spools backward like the home movies my parents threaded onto our old projector. The memories are hazy-bright, slightly glitchy, and without context, a randomly tossed handful of moments presented sans meaning. But the feeling is good. I am not unhappy. And then, as if extracted roughly from a warm memory cocoon through a scratchy tunnel of sound, I’m coming to inside my mangled car. The radio still plays. It’s too loud. I want it off. Around me are muffled voices, approaching sirens. The voices sound worried. Panicked. One shouts, “She’s moving! She’s awake!”
“Sweetheart, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” I say, and gag on blood. Is that my blood?
A sense of disassociation floods through me, complete with a kindly robo-calm narrator for all my misfiring thoughts: The car has stopped spinning. Oh. Good. That’s good. I had an accident. Mom will be mad. She worries too much. They’ll have to clean me up before I can go onstage tonight. So much blood. My head hurts. Makeup will cover it for the show tonight. Yes, makeup. No. Wait. That play is over. Oh, good. Okay. Turn off the radio. Turn it off.
Shock is an amazing survival mechanism. This is how it works, like a photographer trying to distract a crying toddler with a succession of toys: “Don’t feel the pain in your broken bones. Don’t panic because you’re having trouble breathing. Don’t know how close you are to real danger, to death. Just act like it’s all normal.” Shock serves its purpose, and I am riding on some high-grade shock here. The panicked people with their sirens are debating how to get me out of the mangled car that has its steel arms wrapped tightly around me.
“I can get out,” I say. “I just need to turn off the radio. It’ll run down the battery.”
Normal. All normal. Thank you, Shock. You are a most excellent companion.
“We’ll do that for you, honey,” say the Panicked People.
“Oh. Thank you.”
They want to put me on a stretcher, but I remember something. While soaking in my grandmother’s claw-foot tub at her house in the hills of West Virginia and pawing through her Reader’s Digest, I came across a story about a boy who died from a bike accident. No one had thought to turn him on his side, and he choked to death from a bloody nose.
“I’ll walk,” I say.
Opening my eyes is impossible for some strange reason. “I can’t see,” I say, and hands hold gently to my arms, guiding me to an ambulance. With the first steps, a sudden, sharp betrayal of pain sneaks past my good buddy Shock and shoots up both legs. “I think I broke something,” I say in my new robo-voice. I am placed on a gurney and rushed to our local hospital a mile away, where emergency room doctors and nurses bustle around me, fast and decisive, firing off questions:
“Can you open your right eye?”
I do. Pain pinballs against the bones of my skull. “Yes. It hurts.”
“Can you see?”
“Yes.”
The doctor exhales. “Good.”
I don’t know why this matters so much, but he said good, so that must mean everything is okay. Of course everything will be okay. I’m eighteen. My future is unwritten. Nothing is permanent. Rain moves through. Rain moves away. Sun comes out again in time for the pool.
“We’re going to have to cut off your clothes to examine you,” a nurse’s voice says.
“But it’s my concert T-shirt,” I say, as if this is explanation enough.
“I don’t think we can get your shirt off over your head.”
“I can do it,” I insist. I’m a distance runner. Very strong. No sweat. I try to sit up. Try to move my arms. Any part of my body. Impossible. For the first time, Fear nudges Shock out of the way.
The nurse: “We need to cut off your clothes, honey.”
“Okay,” I say in a small voice. The scissors make a terrible rasping sound as they tear through my blood-soaked clothes and the concert T-shirt I bought with my own money.
My mother
has arrived. It’s a small town, and a message has reached her at Texas Woman’s University, where she is working on her master’s degree. She moves into the room now, asking questions in her English teacher way, a dry-eyed crisis warrior, an Appalachian mountain girl turned Texas matriarch. I feel bad that she’s alone. My mother and I fight a lot. I tell her she’s too controlling, too overprotective. I want her protection just now, but I’m also afraid she’ll never let me drive again. My family doctor is here. He’s been my family doctor since I was a tomboyish ten-year-old. He has watched me grow up. Seeing me now, he cries softly. I can hear his strangled voice: “We need to get her to Dallas immediately.”
Quickly, they load me into an ambulance, my mother following in her car. As we scream down the road, sirens blaring, I’m hideously embarrassed. So much fuss. So silly. I’ll be fine. When I was fifteen, the doctors thought I had cancer in my leg. I spent a week in the hospital as they ran all sorts of tests, and in the end, the tumor was benign. See? Fine. Everything’s fine. I’ll be fine. I’m just very sleepy is all. So, so sleepy. An exhaustion I never felt in my years of cross-country runs overtakes me. And all that blood rushing down into my stomach has me nauseated as hell. Up front, the EMT speaks softly to the driver: “Are we going to lose her?”
I will not go to sleep.
At Dallas Presbyterian, my injuries are explained to me in clinical terms by trained voices. I have been in an accident. Do I remember what happened? Yes: Rain. Brake. Spinning. Pole. Radio too loud. Ouch. Do I know what day it is? June twenty-first. Do I know who’s president? Reagan. Am I having trouble breathing? Yes. Very much yes. Blood and mucus coagulate in my throat till at times I fear I will suffocate. This is because I don’t have much of a nose left. The impact of the steering wheel against my face has obliterated the breathing apparatus pretty good. I’ve also fractured my jaw, which eventually will need to be set and wired shut, but they don’t dare do that yet because I need to be able to try to breathe through my broken mouth and to throw up, if necessary. The ER doc has opted not to perform a tracheotomy. Instead, someone I cannot see will periodically suction the choking, bloody mucus from my throat when it gets really bad, which, it turns out, is pretty often. “You’re lucky to be alive,” they tell me in a refrain I’ll come to hear a lot. Lucky is an empty word. It does not stand on its own, but is dependent upon its relative position for meaning: You’re lucky . . . that tiger ate only your brother. You’re lucky . . . you didn’t take that boat ride that killed a hundred other people. You’re lucky . . . to only lose your whole face and not be dead. Luck is not the same thing as hope.
There are other injuries—the right leg and left foot, crushed cheekbones, broken teeth, bruised sternum and ribs. But the big one is the left eye. It’s injured somehow. I don’t know how; no one really tells me. Just “injured” is all the information I’m given. Shock is starting to come off duty, and Pain is just punching the clock for its long shift. They want to give me pain meds but can’t just yet. First, there’s got to be exploratory surgery to stabilize me and make sure I don’t have any internal injuries that are bleeding out. There’s no time to waste. A mask comes down over my face and I’m unconscious.
I am in surgery for nine and a half hours.
I wake in a drugged panic, still intubated. I can’t see, can’t talk, can’t beg them to take out the gag-inducing tube. And I know one thing: I’m going to puke. My hands grasp and clutch desperately in an effort to signal my distress. I tug at the tube. Oh God, I’m choking to death. Hands push mine down.
“Hold on. Hold on, sweetheart,” an anonymous voice says.
I can’t hold on. I will choke on the puke and the plastic in my throat. I’ve never been more terrified or powerless. In the nick of time, someone removes the tube.
I sit up and vomit Sara Lee butter pound cake everywhere.
* * *
• • •
Somewhere in the sky, my father’s plane travels unbothered across the country. It won’t land for another four or five hours. When it does, a group of sober-faced ministers from the Presbyterian General Assembly will gather around him in the anodyne airport among shoeshine stands and luggage retailers. Softly, they’ll deliver the bad news and escort him to a different gate to wait for another plane that will bring him straight back to Texas. He will take that trip numb and mute, pleading silently with God. Bargaining with God. Furious with God. My father is a forgiving man, but it will take him decades to forgive God and himself for asking me to make the trip in the first place. His path to hope is years away and will come in a surprising way. Seven years into the future, he will be diagnosed with HIV. Six years after that, it will progress to AIDS. In those years of his death sentence, he will get sober, adopt a cat, foster animals, write editorials against corruption and abuse of power, enjoy his grandchildren, sing in a chorus, play the church organ, raise money for an orphanage, and retire to the mountains of northern Colorado. As he lies dying in hospice listening to Judy Collins singing “Amazing Grace,” he will tell me that he sees grace and beauty in everything, that everything will be okay. He will liberate himself from shame. He will stop whittling himself down in a futile quest to make himself suitable for those who told him that being gay is a sin. He will know he is loved. He will finally love himself.
He will die in the arms of hope.
For now, while my father takes his agonizing journey back to me, my mother has called the person she needs: John. It’s a Modern Family moment a good thirty years before Modern Family exists. My mother links hands with her gay ex-husband’s new partner, the two of them holding each other up during the long bedside vigil. For a brief, conscious moment, I hear my mother’s voice in one ear, John’s in the other, both of them letting me know they are near. And finally, my father is there too, and my three parents arrange themselves into a new, hopeful form of love. Sometimes, hope is rearranging. It is making more room than you thought possible.
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• • •
A few days into my two-week hospital stay, the surgeon, Dr. Broderick, stops by. He chats amiably with my parents and me. He’s British, and I love hearing his Masterpiece Theater–worthy accent. “I’m going to shine a light in your left eye,” he says at last in his plummy tones. “Let me know when you can see it.” I wait. And wait. And wait. My sinking stomach knows the truth first. Surely by now he’s flashed that light at my eye.
“Did you see it yet?” he asks.
“No,” I answer, hoping it doesn’t mean what, deep down, I know it means. Denial is also not hope, though it’s often confused for it. Denial is holding fast to a rope not tethered to a supporting beam, then closing your eyes as you fall. If you keep your eyes closed, you might not see hope approaching. It can be small. Small as a moment. Small as a hand reaching for yours once you let go of what you can no longer afford to keep clutching.
Dr. Broderick clears his throat. The seconds stretch. “Right,” he says, businesslike. “Here’s the truth. Your eye has been damaged beyond repair. You may choose to keep it, of course, but it will be unsightly, and it may become infected and infect the other eye, risking blindness. Or we can remove it and fit you with a prosthesis, a glass eye, which will look like the other one.” My father is upset. I can hear his terse, lowered voice in the room, though I can’t quite make out his words. I only hear Dr. Broderick’s response: “She’s an adult now. It has to be her decision.”
I am finally an adult, just like I wanted. This is the first adult decision of my life: allowing doctors to remove my eye and fit me with a prosthesis. Permanent. Irrevocable. Forever and ever, no take-backs, amen. In the end, it isn’t much of a choice, but it’s still mine to make.
I tell them to take it out.
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• • •
“So there’s good news and there’s bad news,” my mother says the next day when they come to wheel me into surgery again. “The bad news is, you lost you
r contact lens. The good news is, they don’t think you’ll need it anymore.” I laugh. Oh God, do I laugh. My mother laughs too. Great whooping, cackling laughter. The hospital staff is horrified, but there’s so much hope in a laugh. My mother pats my hand. And then I’m wheeled back into the operating room.
Every four hours, I’m allowed a shot of morphine. For the first two hours, I waft in and out of a twilight sleep inhabited by beeping machine sounds and muffled announcements from the nurses’ station, and wild, fantastical fever dreams in which I’m never quite sure whether I am awake or asleep. The borders of reality have been erased. All is porous. The second two hours are another story. Morphine has its limits. During the grit-it-out time, the pain is a living animal clawing me up inside. The twilight sleep becomes a nightmare landscape in which I am utterly alone, an isolation so complete I wonder if this is madness. Opening my eyes brings stabbing pain, so I never open my eyes unless instructed to do so. The breathing is half suffocation, and the suctioning brings only temporary relief. Between that and the drugs, my two-week stay in the hospital is a bit like being in a sensory deprivation chamber.
The nurses at Dallas Presbyterian Hospital are incredible, though. There is my savior, a redheaded nurse with an Irish brogue who comes marching in with scissors when the clueless oral surgeon repositions my broken jaw slowly over a day using braces and rubber bands—a misguided attempt that causes excruciating, electric pain to shoot up through my head if I move so much as a millimeter. “That child hasn’t cried the entire time she’s been here. He must be killing her!” she says, cutting through the industrial-strength rubber bands and forcing the doctor to come in on a weekend to wire my jaw shut and stop the pain for good. The head nurse, Karen, is a saint—sweet voiced and reassuring, always checking on me. It is only later that I learn that her teenage stepdaughter was killed months earlier. A car accident. And there is my beloved Randy Trawnik, the incredible ocularist with the wicked sense of humor who will make all my prosthetic eyes for years, painstakingly crafting them first out of wax, then out of plastic, painting the color to match just so, creating the illusion of blood vessels using tiny bits of red embroidery thread, thin as candy floss. He has a prosthesis himself, from having accidentally shot his eye out when he was also eighteen, and I’m grateful to have a friend and advocate all wrapped up in a compassionate, skilled artist who truly gets it.