Permanent Marker

by Aimee Ross

  “You stop that cryin’,” she repeated, scolding me.

  The thin plaid curtain that might have separated us had been pulled back, exposing us to each other. I looked over my left shoulder to make eye contact with her.

  She was sitting the same way she had been for the past few days that we’d shared the room: in a chair that looked like a sling, made of cloth and metal, both arms and legs extended, parallel to the floor. She could not move or walk.

  “You goin’ be fine, but I—well, I—who knows,” she continued slowly.

  I didn’t know her name, but I knew she was married and a mom. Two small children and their father had visited the other evening, but she couldn’t even hold the youngest on her lap. Both kids, probably under the age of five, had been content to watch TV and color while their parents talked.

  She looked so tired now, slumped against the back of the chair, and much older than she probably was. Whatever was wrong with her had taken its toll on her sad face, but she tried to smile.

  “May I ask what happened to you?” I asked.

  So far, I had been careful to give her privacy. We had barely spoken to each other.

  “They don’ know. Test after test after test, and they just don’ know.”

  She paused, grunted. She was in pain.

  “But you, you goin’ be fine. You will heal. You will be well again,” she nodded.

  And then she leaned her head back against a pillow and shut her eyes, while her words bounced around the inside my head.

  I dabbed at my tears with a tissue, digesting her gentle reprimand.

  A woman who had no idea what was wrong with her own body, who seemed to have conceded to an unknown disease, had just given me a pep talk. A woman who might never be able to embrace her children.

  I felt guilty. And embarrassment for being so self-involved.

  But I also hoped she was right. That I would be okay and that I would heal. From what I understood, MRSA was pretty serious, and I still wasn’t sure how it might affect me.

  Later, as a nurse helped me into my wheelchair and pushed me to the door, I turned to look at my roommate one last time. She was quiet there in her sling.

  “Goodbye. And thank you.”

  “Bye,” she said, attempting a smile. “Good luck to you.”

  Luck, I thought as I was wheeled from the room. Not this time. What I needed to be well was medicine, doctors, time—so much time—and hard work.

  Within the week, the intravenous antibiotics necessary to fight the staph were switched to oral capsules—the infection was healing—and the physical therapists gave their blessing for my discharge. The woman had been right after all. I was ready. My broken body was mending.

  Follow-up appointments and home nurses were scheduled, the portable wound vac arrived, and Mom packed up my room. I was heading home, exactly one month—to the day—after the accident.

  This Cleveland hospital had advertised itself as the “proud sponsor of the comeback,” and now that was me.

  III

  “Things don’t go away. They become you.”

  ~Darin Strauss, Half a Life

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  August 2010 | One Month after the Accident

  In the fuzzy, floating seconds after impact that warm July night, between the recognition of splintered bones and the reality of crushed metal, I remembered wondering how long this accident would inconvenience me, how long until I could get home.

  I never imagined it would be thirty-two days.

  I still needed medical attention on a regular basis but not enough to take up a bed in a rehabilitation center. I could get around my apartment in the Victorian with my wheelchair or walker, and I had Mom for help. She had inhabited my spare bedroom shortly after the accident and now she was to be my live-in nurse, caring for me just as she had when I was a little girl. I was grateful to have her here, but at the same time, at age forty-one, I resented having a babysitter.

  Whatever medical needs of mine Mom couldn’t handle, home health-care nurses would. They were scheduled to visit several times a week to change my wound vac dressing, check my injuries, and make sure I was healing.

  My first appointment was set for the morning after I returned home.

  As soon as she arrived, Sharon, dark-haired and petite, held out her hand and introduced herself as an RN from an area home-nursing company.

  “I’m just going to review your hospital notes here, and then we’ll get started,” Sharon said as she pulled a file from her bag and smiled. She had a kind face and a gentle manner.

  Sharon had read from her files, turning many pages, when I heard her say, “Oh.” She had encountered a surprise about me—probably all of the fractured bones, or maybe my punctured lungs, the ventilator. Maybe she hadn’t been expecting so many injuries.

  “I see here that you were resuscitated?” she asked.

  Resuscitated. The word echoed in my head.

  Had I heard her correctly?

  “I’m sorry?”

  Sharon looked up from her paperwork and smiled again.

  “You were resuscitated,” she said quietly. “Did you know that?”

  I was stunned. No one told me.

  Resuscitated?

  I swallowed and shook my head.

  “Hey, Mom? Can you come in here?”

  Mom appeared almost immediately. She must have heard something in the tone of my voice that worried her.

  “Sharon said it’s in my records that I was resuscitated.”

  Sharon nodded, as Mom turned to her with wide eyes.

  “Oh, wow,” Mom said. “We didn’t know that.”

  Sharon looked back down at the paperwork again.

  “It says right here that you were in hemorrhagic shock due to blood loss and had to be resuscitated,” she explained.

  My body had lost so much blood because of internal bleeding that it had gone into shock. The blood-thinning medication I took because of my heart attack probably had made things worse. I remembered Jorden yelling from behind me in the car when the voice at my window wanted to know who I was: “That’s Aimee Young! She’s had a heart attack before!”

  And thank God she did. The EMTs and the doctors where I was first taken might have acted more quickly in assessing me and calling for Life Flight because of it. In fact, Jorden probably saved my life that night. With that much internal trauma, every second would have counted, and Jorden’s smart warning might have saved me from going into shock mid-air. Sharon said I had been resuscitated in Cleveland shortly after the helicopter’s arrival.

  Resuscitated.

  Revived.

  Dead or almost dead.

  The other driver had died that night, and now I knew more precisely how close I’d come to dying, too.

  The rest of Sharon’s visit was what I expected: she checked my vitals and injuries, asked about my medication use, and changed my wound vac dressing. But what she had told me about being resuscitated rattled me.

  I needed to think about it.

  I stopped living. Doctors brought me back.

  I thought of the voice I heard in the car that night—strange, quiet, and firm. Almost otherworldly. Stop moving or you will die.

  It couldn’t have been an EMT, because they were outside the car. This voice was inside the car, right beside me. In my ear.

  A warning. The voice knew how serious my injuries were before doctors, even EMTs, did.

  Stop moving or you will die.

  And I had. Almost.

  “Can you believe that?” Mom asked after Sharon left. “After everything you’ve g
one through, now we find out you were...”

  Resuscitated, I thought, as her voice trailed off. Sharon’s announcement hung in the heavy summer humidity of my living room.

  Tears filled my eyes, and my chin started to quiver.

  “Do you remember it?” Mom asked. Then as an afterthought, “Hey, did you see a white light or anything?”

  Her comment took me by surprise, and I giggled, even as I cried. I knew she was trying to make light of the situation because she didn’t want me upset. And we’ve all heard about those near-death, crossing-over-the-brink, white-light/bright-light experiences.

  I shook my head.

  “Mom, no.”

  “I’m just asking,” she said. “That’s what they say happens, you know.”

  I replayed the loop of memories I had from that night in my mind just to be sure. No lights, no visions, nothing. Just that voice in the car, cautionary and guiding.

  “I don’t remember anything after they put me in the helicopter.”

  “Wow,” she said again.

  I was horrified once more by the magnitude of that life-changing split second. One young life was gone before he’d even really lived.

  His injuries were fatal. He couldn’t be saved.

  But I could.

  • • •

  Before I knew it, I had settled into a comfortable daily routine that revolved around TV shows and meals, unless Mom was chauffeuring me to any number of scheduled medical follow-ups. The first, while still in my wheelchair, was with my family dentist to see if he could fix my broken smile. I was embarrassed and self-conscious without my front tooth.

  After looking at the damage done inside my mouth, Dr. Steve recommended dental implants for both teeth—the missing one in the front and the broken one in the back—and an oral surgeon to start the process. It would be time-consuming, taking anywhere from six months to a year or more, but he assured me the results would be worth it.

  “Quite frankly,” he told me, “you should get permanent implants. You did not do this to yourself, and you have the right to have your teeth back the way they were.”

  I fought back tears. Someone understood. He understood.

  Dr. Steve had summed up in one sentence how I felt about my entire life now, and his words applied to more than my teeth. I had not caused the changes in my body any more than I alone had caused my marriage to crumble. I deserved to have my body and my life—a home, my children—back the way they had been.

  But neither would ever be one hundred percent again.

  Dr. Peterson, who put me back together, told me that one day my body would be normal again, but only ninety percent. I would never be completely normal again.

  And even if I had my own home one day, I had come to realize that my children would never live with me again. Sure, they would come stay with me, and yes, they would always need their mother, but the bedrooms of my children—where they slept every night—were in what was now their father’s house. A place they had called home for thirteen years, and for Connor, all of his life.

  I held in my tears and smiled a toothless smile.

  Implants. Two new teeth.

  In the meantime, the gap in the front of my mouth would be filled with a removable partial denture the dentist called a “flipper,” which I would wear while my gums healed and until the brand-new teeth were in place. My flipper would come back from the lab two weeks later and fit the spot perfectly while I awaited my new teeth. Unless you looked closely or noticed the thickness of my speech, you would never know it was fake.

  That flipper would restore some of my confidence, and I wore it for more than a year. My broken smile was fixed! True, it was temporary and removable, and no, it wasn’t the award-winning best smile in the LHS Class of ’87, but it was still mine. (Those commercials for dental centers that promise a brand-new smile in just one day because of same-day dental implants have to be lying or not doing something correctly, because it certainly was nothing like that in my case.)

  Fourteen months later, after the implants and crowns were completely in place, I would peer into the dentist’s hand mirror and notice something very interesting: Not only did both teeth fill their spots well, but my new front tooth was whiter, smoother, and better than the old one. It was perfect. Maybe even more beautiful than before. Finally, my smile was back!

  When I returned home that day, I took the flipper out of the pocket of my purse and held it in the palm of my hand. What should I do with it? I wanted to throw it away and never lay eyes on it again, but I was afraid to. It had been my vanity’s safeguard, a friend who filled a void. A void I never wanted to feel again. I decided to keep it just in case.

  I pulled a Ziploc baggie from the kitchen drawer, placed the mouthpiece inside, and smoothed the closure with my fingers. I put it inside the bathroom’s mirrored medicine cabinet on a shelf and closed the door. I knew I would keep the flipper forever, and for so many, many reasons.

  I leaned in to the mirror as close as I could and bared my front teeth. Ah, yes. My front tooth was back. And it was pretty. I was pretty.

  I smiled at Aimee.

  I could tell from her reflection that it felt good to have a secure smile in place again, because she was beaming back at me.

  2000 and Beyond

  When students found out about my Ricky Martin love affair, they started bringing in anything Ricky they could find, and soon my modest Ricky photo collection outgrew the insides of a book cabinet’s metal doors where it started, spilling posters, calendars, cards, and stickers all over my classroom walls.

  Students added to it regularly, eventually growing it to behemoth proportions. They even nicknamed it “The Ricky Shrine.”

  And I loved that. I loved him.

  “If we ever walk in and candles are lit, we’re calling the men in white coats to take you away,” my students joked.

  “Go ahead,” I replied.

  “Choose: your husband or Ricky,” students teased.

  “Nah, I can’t,” I replied.

  “He’s probably gay,” students said.

  “So what,” I replied.

  For more than sixteen years, Ricky was a permanent fixture of Room 110—he was maybe even my co-teacher. We—Ricky and I—were a lot alike. He’s a proud humanitarian who built houses for Habitat for Humanity after earthquakes in Thailand, Haiti, and Chile, and I was a proud educator, confident of my efforts to teach students and other teachers nationwide about the Holocaust.

  As Ricky transformed from Latin heartthrob to one of the best-known child-welfare humanitarians in the Third World, even creating his own foundation, I traveled to Germany and Poland, became a regional educator for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and shared resources across the nation with other educators.

  In a 2010 CNN interview about his philanthropic work for the Ricky Martin Foundation, Ricky said, “Heroes represent the best of ourselves, respecting that we are human beings. A hero can be anyone from Gandhi to your classroom teacher, anyone who can show courage when faced with a problem. A hero is someone who is willing to help others in his or her best capacity. It can be someone teaching another to write, saving someone in danger, or giving up your life for another.”

  And I loved that. I loved him.

  Then, while writing his autobiography, Me, Ricky came out publicly as a proud homosexual man.

  “Did you know he’s gay?” students asked. As if that mattered.

  “Did you know his grandmother was a professor who wrote a couple of books, and his great-grandmother was a teacher?” I asked them. Kind of like me and my aspirations.

  As time passed, though, students no longer knew who Ricky Martin was.

  “Who’s that guy?” they asked, pointing at his posters or the life-size cut-out of him decorating my room.


  And then I told them our story and how much we had in common, or I sang the lyrics to “Shake Your Bon-Bon,” “She Bangs,” or “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” Sometimes, I even showed them his music videos. I felt it was my cultural duty to educate them, after all.

  And they loved it.

  They loved that their middle-aged, goofy English instructor was “in love” with a gay Latino singer, or as they put it, “Totally crushing like a fangirl.”

  I supposed my crush made me unique in their eyes. It made me human.

  In fact, I came to accept the fact that one day, after I have retired, after thirty-seven years or more of teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare, essay writing and literary analysis, vocabulary, annotation, and grammar, the indelible mark I will have left on education at Loudonville High School will be one of two ironically related things: my love of Ricky Martin or my passion for teaching about the Holocaust.

  Unless a strange turn of events happens between now and then.

  “What would you do if Ricky walked through your classroom door right now?” students would ask me.

  “Oh my God, I would die,” I always told them, totally crushing like a fangirl.

  And I probably would.

  August 2010-October 2010

  Being home from the hospital continued to agree with me.

  Jerrica, Natalie, and Connor stopped by every day after school, and any combination of the three came to hang out on the weekends. It was good to be near them again on a regular basis.

  My physical progress and many firsts read like a laundry list of things normally taken for granted: appetite back, first outing, less pain medication needed, first time being left alone, slept through the night, first glass of chardonnay, able to groom herself, first shower (seven weeks to the day after the accident), and so on. After three weeks, I was out of the wheelchair and on crutches, and a few days later, I was taken off the wound vac.

  My broken body was healing, improving every day, but my mind—my psychological state—was a mess. I was trying to come to terms with so many things.