by E. R. Frank
Even with half vision, from ten feet away, feeling like I’m still underwater, I can see she’s messed up. I ache all over, and I’m stiff as anything, and my whole head is pounding, with the center of the pound right in the middle of my right eye, even with the drops for pain, so it takes a while to get near Ellen’s bed.
Besides two IVs, one in each arm, there’s a tube that goes from under the covers to a bag with what I’m sure is pee in it. She has a bandage on her left cheek, a big blue tube in her mouth that looks like a sicko accordion straw designed to choke you to death, and another tube that’s attached to her somewhere, only I can’t tell where because it disappears under the hospital blanket and sheets. She’s asleep, I guess, only I’m worried she’s in a coma. How do you know the difference, anyway?
“You look like shit,” I tell her. She turns her head the littlest bit. “I threw up on you.” She opens her eyes, and for a second I think she sees me, but then she closes them again. I hear this slow whooshing sound, but I can’t tell which machine it’s coming from.
“Hey,” a male nurse says, walking in. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
Ellen is really still now. The whooshing keeps going, though.
“You need to leave,” this nurse says. He’s got hair the same color as mine. “What floor did you come from?”
“I killed Cameron Polk,” I whisper to Ellen.
Nothing.
I’m sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for my parents to come get me. The hospital doesn’t let you walk out. They make you wheel out. I’m thinking about how stupid that is and trying to block the screaming, stopped, out of my head, when my dad walks in.
“Hi,” I say.
My heel starts uncontrollably tapping the footrest of the wheelchair.
“Anna,” my dad says, and the next thing I know, he’s kneeling and hugging me hard, careful not to touch my right eye.
“Is the Honda totaled?” I ask.
“I don’t care about the car,” he answers, which is a complete lie and really nice of him to say. Especially because he hugs me tighter when he says it, even though it’s hard to hug when one person’s in a wheelchair and when you can see that her heel is clattering like a mini jackhammer.
Driving home, it’s mostly my father who talks. My mom lets me sit up front in the Audi and stays quiet.
“Jack is …” My dad stops and clears his throat. “Jack’s not doing well,” he tells me. I try to picture my brother. It’s hard, for some reason. “He’s pretty broken up.” My mother’s hand finds my shoulder and rests there. I look out the window and wonder how long she’s going to keep it there, warm and light, and notice how the shield over my eye itches me around the edges.
“Was it my fault?” I ask. My father doesn’t answer right away. He turns left on Pelham, taking the long way home. “Was it my fault?” I ask again. “The accident?”
“She was on your side of the street,” my father says. She was? “Were you speeding?”
I shake my head. He makes a left onto Ladyshire. And then I figure out what he’s doing. He’s avoiding Ocean Road. He’s avoiding where it happened.
“Were you drunk?”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“What do you mean, you don’t think so?”
I feel black fuzz start to mix with the ache behind my eye, and I try to stay clear.
“I had two shots of Jack Daniel’s a long time before I drove,” I say, waiting for the yelling. “Two or three hours before.”
“Your blood-alcohol level was under the legal limit.” My father’s not raising his voice. He doesn’t mention anything about the fact that I shouldn’t have been drinking at all. “Were you speeding?” he asks again.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I was about to pull over for Ellen. We thought she might be sick.”
“Her blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit,” my father informs me.
I’m not surprised. Everybody’s quiet for a while. And I still need to know for sure.
“So.” I’m kind of shaking again. My fingers are quivering. “Was it my fault?”
“No.” My mother’s hand tightens on my shoulder before my dad can answer. “She was in your lane.”
When we come around the curve in our street, so that I can see my house, there’s a figure kneeling on the grass. As we get closer and pull into the driveway I can see that it’s Jack.
“What’s he doing?” my mother asks. I look out the window with my one good eye, and Jack glances up with his two.
He’s picking leaves off the lawn.
5
WHEN WE WERE LITTLE, WE GOT ALONG REALLY WELL. ESPECIALLY at the beach. Every day of our two-week summer vacation at Commons End we would play in the surf, facing the choppy green expanse for hours. Our parents would be lying on the shoreline, under the shade of two umbrellas, covered with sunblock, broad-brimmed hats, and wraparound sunglasses. They’d be reading in low-slung chairs, legs outstretched, bottoms of their feet encrusted with wet sand.
My brother and I would locate ourselves exactly in the path of the breakers, giddy with the challenge of negotiating those endless waves. We’d dive into a curl and pop up and out the other side, braced for the next. We’d shoot our bodies vertically over a crest, letting the edge of it slap hard at our necks. Lie on our backs, feet forward, bobbing toward the sky with a slow-moving swell. Duck low and deep when our timing was off on a rough rogue, holding our breath beneath the frenzy, desperately waiting for it to pass over. Bodysurf until our bellies scraped sand, then fight the tide to get back in. Wipe out every now and then, the ocean flinging us underwater into a spinning knot of suffocating, airless panic. Bump and slip and hurl ourselves into each other’s bony arms and legs. And then, dozens and dozens of waves later, with blocked ears, salty, snotty upper lips, and burning eyes, Jack would look at me and say, “I’m going to stop the ocean.”
He’d face the surf, plant his feet wide, all lean limbs and spiky hair and shiny skin. “Watch.” He’d raise his arms, palms flat forward, a wave bearing down on us. “Stop!” he’d yell in his deepest voice. “I command you to stop!”
And for a second I’d think he could do it. I’d think the wave would freeze in its curl, cartoonlike in its obedience to my brother’s power. But then it would be on us, tumbling our bodies under its smack, daring us to find our legs again.
“Stop!” he’d order the second one, arms out, like a traffic cop. “Stop! You will stop now!” But that one wouldn’t stop either, and then, hurrying before the next hit, he’d pull at my shoulder, lining me up right next to him. “Anna,” he’d say. “You’ve got to help.” So I’d plant my feet wide, just like his, and throw out my palms, and I’d shout at the next wave, “Stop! Stop!”
And the two of us, blue-lipped and drenched, worn out and determined, would yell over and over and over, wave after wave after wave, “Stop! We command you to stop!”
6
THEY LET ME SLEEP LATE ON MONDAY. I SLEEP HARDER AND deeper than usual. When I wake up, I’m so groggy it takes a while for me to figure out that the heaviness in my blood and the dread in my chest are because two nights ago I killed somebody. Cameron Polk is dead. And Ellen. Jack.
My eye is killing me. I sit up in bed, peel off the spaghetti strainer, and reach for the eyedrops. It’s hard. I miss a few times with each bottle, and the liquid drips coldly down my cheek.
Things are clanging downstairs. Silverware drawer opening and closing, dishes dropped into the sink. I press the shield back into place, drag myself out of bed, and pull on jeans and a zip-up sweatshirt.
My parents are in the kitchen drinking coffee and wiping instant-oatmeal dust off the table.
“Don’t you have classes?” I ask my mother. I rub my left eye. It has tons of crust in the corners. Gross.
She reaches to hug me. “Never on Mondays.” She holds on for a long time, careful of my right eye. It’s strange but good, like when she held me in the hospital bed. It’s not that we don
’t get along, so much as we’re not that close, I guess. The truth is, before yesterday I don’t remember the last time we touched. “Just office hours,” she’s saying now, sipping at her mug. “Which I’ve cancelled.”
She teaches Web design and computer skills at the community college. She always gets the highest marks on her student evaluation forms at the end of each semester. She has Jack or me look at them and give her the results because she says it’s only a matter of time before her luck changes and they all start to hate her.
I wander over to the kitchen table, near my father. “I thought Russell was incompetent.”
My dad works in finance. He invests other people’s money, and he has this male secretary who he doesn’t much like and who he thinks is going to accidentally bankrupt the clients and ruin us all forever.
“Russell is incompetent,” my father says. “Which is why I’m going to work.” He checks his watch. “In about five minutes. I just wanted to see you first.”
“Here I am,” I say. And then I want to cry, but my father doesn’t like crying, so I look away. Still sitting, he pulls me in by the waist and doesn’t say anything, which makes not crying harder.
“Why don’t you just fire Russell?” I ask into the air over his head. It’s an old question. It feels good to ask it, like everything’s normal, like today’s just another day. My father releases me.
“Because everybody’s incompetent,” he says. “And I’d rather deal with familiar idiocy than with unfamiliar idiocy.” It’s what he always answers, and it helps me pretend that my hands aren’t trembling and that I’m not sore all over and that I didn’t kill anyone.
“How does your eye feel?” my mother asks. Which begins to ruin my pretending.
“Like it has a toothache,” I tell her.
“We leave for the ophthalmologist in half an hour.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Then we’ll see if you can visit Ellen.” Now my legs are trembling a little too. I sit down and cross my legs and arms, try to hold everything still.
“Can I go wake up Jack?” I ask.
“No,” they both say, right at the same time.
Dr. Pluto is all business.
“Hyphema,” he tells me and my mom. He looks more like a football player than an ophthalmologist. His whole head is shaved, and he’s huge. When he puts my face in this vise, his hand palms my head the way I’d palm a tennis ball.
“Are you still here?” I ask the room. Because I can’t turn my head now.
“Behind you,” my mom says from behind me and to the left. I didn’t care if she came in or not. She wanted to, though.
First Dr. Pluto uses this machine to shine a vertical yellow light right at my eye.
“This is called a slit lamp,” he tells me, even though I didn’t ask. When he’s done with that, he puts a drop in my eye, tells me the next procedure won’t hurt, and fiddles with the vise a little.
“Does that feel okay?” he asks.
“I guess,” I say. I mean, my head is in a vise.
Now it’s a different machine. It moves closer and closer and closer, until it touches my eyeball really fast and there’s this beautiful bright blue light everywhere, and then it’s done.
“I’ll need to see her every day to monitor the pressure and to make certain there’s no rebleeding,” Dr. Pluto tells my mother while she helps me get the strainer back on. “A hyphema is really just blood in the anterior chamber. It’s a tear in the eye, probably from the air bag.”
My mom asks him something, but I stop paying attention.
The air bag. The smell of new plastic. “Hooow looong, hoow hong, hoow loong …” Screaming, stopped.
Ellen’s mom owns a women’s clothing store called Cinnamon Toast. According to the tags of speckled brown paper on each item, Cinnamon Toast specializes in flowing styles and natural fibers. Usually Mrs. Gerson is wearing something in flowing style and natural fiber, and today is the same as always. Muted green slacks and a pale lavender blouse. She reaches for my face as soon as I walk into the fifth-floor waiting room. She cups my cheeks in her palms.
“That thing is awful,” she tells me, meaning the shield, and she pulls me into lavender. “I’m so glad you’re all right.” She smells like Ellen’s house: lemons and perfume. It’s nice but embarrassing to be in her arms, so I ease away after a second.
“Are you all right?” Ellen’s father asks, holding me, straight armed, by the shoulders and staring at my face. Aching in my eye. Aching in my throat.
“Yeah,” I tell him. His eyes are swollen and bloodshot. “How’s Ellen?”
“Well,” Mrs. Gerson answers in this bright, fake voice. “She’s got a tube in her mouth to help her breathe, a tube in her chest to reinflate her lung, an IV for antibiotics, an IV for pain, a catheter to help her pass water, a cast on her leg, and nothing for her ribs. They’ll heal on their own.”
“A collapsed lung is bad, right?” I say. Mrs. Gerson’s attitude is confusing me. It doesn’t match Mr. Gerson’s face.
“She’s going to be fine, Anna,” Mrs. Gerson tells me. I see a nurse behind that long counter glance up and try to make eye contact with her, and I see her refuse to make eye contact back. That starts me shaking so hard both of the Gersons notice. Ellen’s mom takes my hands and rubs them.
“She’s going to be fine,” she says again, loud.
“I’m really sorry” My teeth are chattering again. My eye radiates ache through my head. “I’m really, really sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Mr. Gerson says. “They say there was a tree branch. Cameron must have swerved to avoid it.”
A tree branch. I hadn’t heard that yet. But if Cameron swerved to avoid a tree branch, couldn’t I have swerved to avoid Cameron? I start to think about the alcohol and how drunk I was at first, and then how drunk Ellen was.
“Ellen doesn’t have a drinking problem or anything,” I tell them. “I mean, sometimes this year she would get pretty drunk at a party, but only twice.” Oh my God. She’s going to kill me for telling them this.
“Okay,” her father says to me. His red eyes start welling up.
“We were always careful, though,” I go on. I can’t seem to help myself. “We always were with each other, and we never drank with anybody we didn’t know.” Well. Almost never.
“Okay,” Mr. Gerson says again. His eyes are all wet, but he doesn’t cry.
He works for the same bank as my dad, only in some other area. Something higher up, I think. I don’t know. They don’t ever see each other at work. They have totally different responsibilities. And even though Mr. Gerson’s got some big job and isn’t a teller, I suddenly imagine how calm he’d be during a robbery. Some guy with a stocking over his head would be pointing the gun right at Mr. Gerson, and Mr. Gerson would just face him squarely, all steady.
“And she doesn’t do drugs or anything, and it’s not like she needs to drink when we go out. She doesn’t do it at every party.” Which, now that I hear myself saying it, might be sort of a lie.
“Okay,” Mr. Gerson says a third time.
“Don’t be mad at her,” I tell them. When I say that, Mrs. Gerson starts to nod, but then her face collapses like Ellen’s lung, and she’s crying, and seeing Mrs. Gerson afraid is almost as shocking as Cameron Polk being dead.
“It’s okay,” Mr. Gerson tells her. He turns from me to face her. “It’s okay”
He sounds like that policeman from the accident: “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.” But it’s not okay. Nothing is okay.
The Gersons let me see her for ten minutes. They leave the room for five.
“I called you,” I tell Ellen. That whooshing sound would put me to sleep if it weren’t paired with all those tubes and things, snaking right into her body or disappearing under the blanket. Today her left leg is over the covers. There’s a bright white cast from just above her knee all the way to her toes.
“I left a message. Actually, I left eight. Did you get them?” I know she did
n’t because cell phones aren’t allowed in hospitals. There’s no phone in here. She can’t talk anyway, with that tube in her mouth.
Her hair is dirty. It looks like somebody brushed it, but it really needs a shampoo.
“Pretty soon it’s not going to be cell phones anymore,” I say. She makes a sound, and I lean forward to listen better, but then she stops. I notice this other machine. A squarish clear plastic box with water in it. The water is making all these bubbles. I can’t figure out what it’s for.
“It’s going to be these little chips that get implanted behind our ears. I read about it just now, while I was waiting to have my eye checked out. They didn’t have any People magazines, so I had to read Scientific American instead. Actually, I didn’t really read it. Mostly just the headline. Things are blurry up close with my right eye. But I’m allowed to use my left one. And TV is okay.”
Ellen opens her eyes, and I move to where it seems like they’re focusing, but by the time I adjust my position, they’re closed again.
“No school for a week,” I say. “I’m supposed to stay really still, and I have to wear this shield thing when I’m asleep and in a car.” Now she moans. Definitely a moan. She moves her head a little. “El?” I go. She’s still again. “I’m supposed to try not to sneeze,” I say. “If I sneeze, it might tear inside my eye again, and then everything gets worse. Only, once you have to sneeze, it’s impossible to stop yourself, you know?” She opens her eyes and looks straight at me. “El?” She stays looking at me. “Hi, Ellen,” I tell her. I move closer. She keeps her eyes open for a second longer, and then she’s gone again.
