The Life of Glass

by Jillian Cantor

  In its place there was this new world, one where he’d looked at me in my bedroom earlier in the evening in a way that no one else ever had looked at me before. And I absolutely knew it. Everyone had been right all along. I did want to be with him. Not just friends. I wanted him to look at me that way again. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted to stand close enough to him to feel his breath on my face.

  I pedaled so fast that my feet kept slipping off in clumsy motions that scraped the exposed skin. But I hardly even felt the scrapes, just the wind in my hair as I flew down the street. My heart was thudding against my chest and I was breathing heavily.

  I am not exactly sure what happened next.

  There was a horn that was so loud that it shocked me, and there was a crunch and a thud. I flew through the air with this unbelievable grace, like a hummingbird flittering on a bird of paradise.

  And then there was darkness.

  Chapter 24

  There was a lot of darkness.

  I heard noises in the background, but they were hard to really place. It was like being in that dream where there’s something you know you really want, but you can’t make yourself move to get it.

  I saw people in my head, but they were foggy and blurred: Ryan, Ashley’s broken face, my mother, my aunt Julie, even Courtney, some guy I didn’t recognize, and a bright light like a halo. I kept thinking I should open my eyes. But I couldn’t because I was tired. So very, very tired. Everything felt heavy and hard and long. And it just felt so good to sleep.

  And then finally, I was able to open my eyes. The room was dark, and the furniture was sparse and shapeless against the black world. I had no idea where I was except there was a smell, the lemon Lysol scent and the vinegar that reminded me of Sunset Vistas and the hospital in Philadelphia. I was dead.

  “Oh you’re awake.” This unfamiliar woman, whom I thought might be some sort of angel, was talking to me. Then I noticed her medical-center badge and her name tag. NURSE JUANITA DIAZ. I felt my ribs moving against my chest. I was breathing. I was alive. “I’ll get your mother. Okay, hon?”

  She walked back into the hallway, and I tried to remember how I got here, what happened. I remembered Ashley being thrown from a horse, and I wondered if I had been thrown from one too. Had I been riding Daffodil? But then, slowly, in pieces, it started to come back to me: my date with Max, riding my bike on the dark street, the horn, and the sickening thud.

  My mother ran into the room and crushed me in a hug. “Oh, Melissa. Oh, sweetie, you gave me such a scare. What were you thinking?”

  Ryan. But I didn’t say it out loud.

  Ashley stood behind her, and her face was still bruised and hideous, so I knew I couldn’t have been asleep for that long. “What happened?” I said.

  “You got hit by a car, dumbass,” Ashley said.

  “Ashley, shush.”

  I couldn’t help but smile because I knew that Ashley was jealous. I’d stolen her injury spotlight. “At least I didn’t fall off a horse,” I said.

  “Girls.” My mother reached down and pulled my hair out of my eyes—still curly. “Well, at least I know your brain’s still working.” She paused. “You have a concussion and a broken arm. They had to do surgery to set it. And you’re going to be in a cast for six weeks.”

  I looked under the covers and was surprised to see she was right; there was a cast there. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “It will,” she said. “I think they gave you something for the pain.”

  I noticed that I had an IV in my arm, and it reminded me instantly of my father in the hospice bed, in those last days, the morphine dripping down slowly into his arm.

  “You were lucky,” my mom said. “It could’ve been a lot worse.” She kissed me on the head, then said, “I could just kill you for being so stupid.” She paused. “You girls. Both of you. Sixteen years without a broken bone, and then all of this. All at once. It’s too much.” Tears sprang into her eyes, and she reached up quickly to wipe them away.

  I knew she was right. I’d spent most of my life being worried about everything, every pain, every germ, that it might make me sick or kill me. For some reason I hadn’t been thinking about it at all when I rode my bike on the pitch-dark streets. I’d been thinking about Ryan. Maybe that was love.

  I leaned back against the pillow and closed my eyes. “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Three A.M.,” my mother said. Way too late to call Ryan. “Will you be okay if Ashley and I go home and get some rest?”

  I nodded.

  “We’ll be back first thing in the morning.” Ashley groaned, and my mother elbowed her. My mother leaned down and kissed me, and then they left me. In what might’ve been my deathbed.

  I lay there awake for a while, just thinking about how lucky I was to be alive. I thought about the fact that it doesn’t matter how much you wonder about things or worry about them. If they’re going to happen to you, they will. According to Ashley, my dad really believed that his cancer wasn’t going to kill him, but in the end there was nothing he could do to stop it. And somehow, I was hit by three thousand pounds of steel and I had only a broken arm and a concussion to show for it. Amazing.

  I was discharged from the hospital around two o’clock the next afternoon, and though they were still giving me medication, my wrist started to ache and my head throbbed. I felt way worse than I did the night before, like I’d been hit by the proverbial bus, not a car.

  Apparently the lady who’d hit me had run a red light, and the whole thing was her fault. This made my mother a little more angry at her and a little less angry at me, especially when she learned that the woman sent me flowers at the hospital. “The nerve,” my mother said. “If she thinks she can just buy us off with some flowers.”

  “They’re not even nice,” Ashley sneered. “They’re carnations, for godsakes.”

  “Well, I hope they throw the book at her,” my mother said.

  I felt a little bad because I knew that I hadn’t really been watching, that I should’ve been paying more attention. “It was an accident,” I said, so quietly that I wasn’t sure if they heard me, because they both ignored my comment.

  As soon as I got home, my mother set me up in bed with a tray of food, and I asked her to bring me the phone. “Don’t talk too long,” she said. “You need to rest.”

  I nodded and didn’t tell her that I planned on telling Ryan to come over.

  I called him, and I felt my heart beating faster. A broken arm and a concussion had done little to dull the excitement I’d felt last night as I’d raced toward him on my bike.

  He picked up. “Come over,” I said. “Come in through my window.” I hung up without giving him a chance to answer.

  Ten minutes later there was tapping. I pulled off the tray with one arm, struggled to stand, and limped toward the window.

  “Jesus, Mel. What happened?” He reached up and touched the lump the size of a golf ball on my forehead.

  “Ow.” I hadn’t known how tender it was before he touched it.

  “You go on one date, and you look like this?”

  I laughed. “I left in the middle of the movie, and then I came to look for you.”

  “I know,” he said. “My dad told me.” He paused. “I was in the wash.”

  “You were?” I shook my head, so I’d been riding in the wrong direction, all for nothing. I wondered what would’ve happened if I’d ended up at Sally’s house, and I wondered if the car that hit me was some kind of divine intervention, keeping me from ever getting there. Like God reaching his hand down or something and telling me not to find her. “Your dad said you went to find something for me.”

  He nodded. “I did. I wanted it to be a surprise.” He paused. “I was looking in the wash for more glass, you know, from the same piece.”

  I nodded. “I thought you’d gone to look for Sally,” I whispered.

  “I wanted to make you something. I don’t know, a memorial or something for your dad.”

  I s
tarted to cry, and I couldn’t stop the tears, even though they hurt my head.

  “We can still go look for her together if you want.”

  I shook my head. I wanted to tell him that wasn’t why I was crying, that I wasn’t sure I wanted to find Sally anymore, because maybe it didn’t even matter who she was. Maybe it was better remembering things the way I remembered them. Maybe I didn’t want to know anything else, anything that might tarnish the memories and make my dad into some other person that I never really even knew at all.

  Ryan put his thumbs on my cheeks and wiped away my tears. We stood there like that for a moment, my tears falling over his thumbs, the two of us staring into each other’s eyes. There was so much to say, and no way for me to possibly say it all and get it right.

  So, without saying anything, without thinking it through, I stretched up and kissed him.

  I kissed him softly, on the mouth, and I knew he was surprised because he didn’t move for a second. But then he kissed me back.

  I wasn’t thinking about my concussion or my broken arm, or the fact that I hadn’t taken a shower since before I’d been hit by a car, flung in the dirty street, carried in an ambulance and operated on. I wasn’t thinking at all. Just feeling. His lips were warm, and when I kissed him, I felt this warmth in my chest, this energy that wanted to burst right out of me. And this feeling, this overwhelming electric sensation that he was the person I wanted to be with.

  He pulled back. “What about Max?” he whispered.

  I shrugged. “What about him?”

  “I thought you liked him.”

  I shook my head. “No.” I paused. “I think I just thought I should, you know?”

  He touched my cast softly. “Aren’t you even going to tell me what happened?”

  I didn’t want to, because I felt embarrassed and enormously stupid. But I blurted it all out anyway, leaving out the details about exactly why I’d left Max in the movie theater.

  Ryan pulled me into a hug, and I put my head against his chest. His heart beat loud and strong in my ear, and for once his breath sounded even, not wheezy at all. “How are you feeling now?” he whispered into my hair.

  “Beautiful,” I whispered back.

  It was like it was something I’d always known but hadn’t known how to say until right that very moment.

  Chapter 25

  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 f
ade 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.