Permanent Marker

by Aimee Ross

  I wondered what the limitations of my new body might mean to the future. I detested having my mother take care of me at my age. I worried about missing the start of the school year, especially Jerrica’s senior year. I wanted a normal life again.

  I questioned surviving the accident when the other driver did not, and I tried hard to wrap my mind around the fact that I had been resuscitated. What was so special about me, but not him? Why was I still alive?

  Sometimes I thought of all the wounded people I had encountered in the hospital. My roommates: the girl whose boyfriend had tried to kill her with the car she was driving, the woman with the undiagnosed disease who had helped me to stop pitying myself, and the other roommate who had fallen from a ladder while painting a ceiling and landed on her back. The Hell’s Angel who had lost half his leg.

  I wondered what had happened to them. Were they now “comebacks,” too? Were they questioning still being alive? Were they even still alive?

  Chances were, I would never know.

  Just like the things I would never know about Zach or the accident. It seemed like so much more than a random act in the Universe. It had to mean something to my life. Accidents are accidents because they are unfortunate incidents that happen unexpectedly and unintentionally. But this was no accident. Sure, it was unfortunate and unexpected, but there was intention. A young man of only nineteen years got into a car with the purpose of driving it. Straight through a stop sign. At a high rate of speed. He made choices. He caused a tragic wreck, not an “accident.”

  Within a split second following his stupid decisions, he had wrecked my car, my body, and my life. And it didn’t matter that he paid the ultimate sacrifice for his mistake. No, his death did not diminish my anger. Instead, my contempt just seemed to grow exponentially.

  I hated him.

  • • •

  Gossip spreads quickly in a small town—everyone knows that—but it is especially true after a tragedy.

  Visitors—old friends, colleagues, and former students—started to come by regularly, filling the time between rest and doctors’ appointments. I needed the distraction, and I loved the company. Some were shocked by my injuries and appearance, unable to hide their tears. Some were overwhelmed with gratitude that I had survived. And some shared stories they’d heard about the young man who had plowed into us that night.

  I heard he’d lost his license before, been in trouble with the law.

  I heard he was a real party boy.

  I heard he was quite a stoner. Yeah, known for smoking weed.

  I heard he played driving games with his buddies, running stop signs and stuff for points. For fun.

  I can’t say I was surprised by the rumors, especially in our rural area where everyone knew someone who knew someone else who was involved in some way, but once I heard them, they stuck in my brain. It didn’t matter whether they were true or not, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

  When I told the girls what I had been hearing, they weren’t surprised—they knew kids who partied with him.

  “Just don’t look at his Facebook page, Mom,” Jerrica said.

  “Yeah, Mom. Not a good idea,” Natalie agreed.

  But I did anyway. I had to know.

  What a mistake. Rumors were one thing, visual proof quite another.

  Not only did we have a lot of mutual “friends,” but a couple of them had started a page in memoriam, asking others to share their favorite Zach memories. I couldn’t tear my eyes away—I read every post and looked at every photograph. I was nauseated. Three obvious realities about him started to surface.

  1.Zach had a lot of friends and family who loved him and missed him sorely. The sadness was palpable.

  2.Zach smoked marijuana. Numerous photos showed him blowing smoke at the camera or at his friends. Many of the memories shared were of the intense parties he threw, the times he and his friends got “chill” by getting high.

  3.Some of Zach’s friends were my former students, kids I enjoyed in class, kids who partied with him. They were angry he was dead and outraged by the newspaper article about the accident, because it focused on me and the drill team girls who had been in my car. I was not only disgusted and disappointed that my students hung out with him, but I felt betrayed. He was the enemy, and they were on his side. Perhaps they even thought I had killed their friend.

  But I didn’t.

  This was all his fault.

  I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and say, “Look what you’ve done! How could you have been so irresponsible? Were you high that night, too?”

  But I couldn’t.

  He was dead.

  • • •

  One weekend, I asked Mom to help me get a few things from my classroom so I could work from home. I had been teaching at LHS for almost twenty years, but this would be Mom’s first visit to Room 110.

  Even though I hadn’t yet returned, the room was still mine, according to the old paper placard reading, “Mrs. Aimee Young.” I turned the key in the lock, grasped the metal knob with both hands, and yanked as hard as I could. The door swelled in any kind of humidity, no matter the season, but I was used to it, especially after all these years, ten of them in this particular room.

  I entered and breathed its familiar scent: a musty mix of heated floor wax, slate, and Pine-Sol. It was the smell of an old, comforting friend I’d known since high school. It reminded me of marching band, cheerleading, first loves, and high school dances. I graduated fourth in my class in this small, rural district: the same district that hired my father for his first year of teaching and then saw him retire thirty years of service later.

  This was not just a school—or classroom—to me, it was home. And I missed being here.

  I also missed being around teenagers.

  Mom circled the room, taking everything in as I shuffled papers at my desk. She was quiet—almost too quiet—as if walking through a museum exhibit.

  “You know what, Aim? I think this classroom was actually your father’s when the high school first opened.”

  I froze, shocked.

  “By the way, I love the Ricky collection—nice,” she said, still walking around the room.

  Wait, how would Mom know this had once been Dad’s room? And what if it had been? Holy smokes! This could mean I’ve been teaching in the same room my father had christened so many years ago!

  This room might have been his? And Mr. Matthews’? And now mine?

  “Did you go to the new high school, Mom?”

  “Oh yeah, I was a junior when it opened,” she said. “And I’m sure of it now. This was definitely your dad’s room. I had math with him in here. But you should ask him just to make sure.”

  Wait—what? I always thought Mom had Dad as a teacher when she was in junior high, not a junior in high school!

  I giggled.

  “Mom! I didn’t know you had him when you were a junior! You were, what? Seventeen? I thought you always said that you were in junior high!”

  “No, Aimee, you had him in junior high,” she said and laughed.

  “So then, if you started dating right after you graduated, wasn’t it a scandal?”

  LHS opened in 1963, a much different time. Plus, I knew teasing her would get her fired up.

  “No, not at all! Geez, Aimee!” she exclaimed. “He was my math teacher, that’s it!”

  But still—my parents had met each other here! This room might have been the genesis of me!

  “Okay, okay, okay,” I said, but kept giggling. It didn’t matter to me that she had Dad for a teacher, or how old either of them was when they started dating. They were twelve years apart in age, but they’d been married for more than forty years. Their relationship worked, whatever its beginnings.

  What mattered to me w
as the fact that my father, someone I had looked up to since I was small, someone I wanted to be just like because he was a teacher, may have been the first teacher in this room, six years before I was born. This room held my origins. No wonder it had felt like home to me for more than a decade.

  How cool would it be if this really were Dad’s room? What a legacy! I thought.

  But it would be a while before I would finally remember to ask him. (I have a terrible memory. I blame it on the accident.)

  Years later: “Hey, Dad, did you teach at LHS when the building first opened?”

  Mom, who was standing nearby at the time, smiled when she heard my question.

  “Well, let’s see,” he said, putting an index finger to his chin and looking skyward, as if for the answer.

  “That would have been about 1963, ’64. Yes, yes, I did teach there.”

  “So, do you remember which classroom was yours?”

  He laughed in that way he does, partially sighing while shaking his head, then said, “Oh, man, Aimee. That was so long ago.”

  Dad was in his late seventies.

  “Please—can you try to remember?”

  “Okay, let me draw a picture to help,” he said, grabbing a nearby pencil and a used envelope from the kitchen counter. The drafting teacher in him always liked to see what he needed to figure out in writing. (Huh. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.)

  “Well,” he continued, looking at the paper, “there are three buildings on the campus, right?”

  “No, actually there are four—”

  “But one is the gym, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so I was back in this building right here, Building One,” he said. “And when you walked in, there was something to the left—the library, I think?”

  “Yes, the library is just on the left inside the door. Go on—where was your room?”

  He looked up at the ceiling again, as if trying to place himself in the building, and then said, “If you walked all the way down that hall and turned left, the first door on the right was mine.”

  What? I almost screamed. That’s my room!

  “Dad! You mean 110? Was that your room number?”

  “I don’t remember,” he said. “I just know it was the first door on your right.”

  “Ohmygosh, Dad! That’s my room!”

  Mom, who’d been listening quietly this whole time, grinned slyly at me.

  “Told ya,” she muttered.

  I looked at Dad, waiting for his reaction. Would he cry, overwhelmed with emotion and memory and pride? Or would he laugh, hug me, and excitedly ask to come visit? Maybe he’d even want to talk to my classes!

  “Wow. That’s pretty cool, Aim,” he said.

  And that’s all he said. Clearly, I was far more impressed with this information than he.

  “It was only my room for one year,” he said shrugging, as if it didn’t matter.

  “Who cares, Dad? This is a big deal to me!”

  He laughed again, in that same self-deprecating way, but I knew he was happy about my excitement. How many teachers could say they taught in the very same classroom their father did more than fifty years ago? The very same classroom where their parents might have met each other? The very same classroom that had meant so much for so long?

  This room had cared for me, helped transform me, and provided strength. It had seen me at my best and my worst, in both my professional and personal lives, and it had always supported me. Almost like a parent.

  This room had become my escape, and over time, a safe place away from the chaos of the world. One of permanence. No matter how much I or my life had changed over the years, my room did not. Just like a home.

  Blessed by my very own father.

  • • •

  Mom went home on a Sunday in the middle of October 2010.

  Her goodbye was a tight, hard hug that said what words could not: I had survived and she was thankful, but she was worried to leave me. She knew I had healed enough to be on my own, but she was afraid the kids would try to convince me to move back to their father’s, or worse, that Kenny would. She was afraid I was too weak emotionally and mentally to protect myself, that I might give in. Or that the stress would cause another heart attack.

  As a mother, I understood her fears, but as a woman, I knew I was stronger than that. Look what I had made it through, after all.

  I fought back tears as we hugged and joked about the day she told doctors she would stay until I could literally stand and kick her out the door. I finally could, so it was time. I just didn’t want her to see me upset. If she did, she might not leave.

  And I needed her to go.

  I wanted to take care of myself again; in fact, I yearned for some sort of normalcy to return to my life, though I really hadn’t had the chance to find that place yet. I had been living in the Victorian for only two months, our divorce final only a month, when the accident happened. It was taking so long to be me, new and fresh and on my own, and now I could, because Mom was leaving.

  She laughed, and we said our goodbyes. I waved as her Honda SUV pulled away from the curb, and then I closed the heavy wooden front door until it snapped shut. I turned and leaned against it, and the tears I had been holding back flowed freely.

  I was alone. On my own.

  And I was scared. Scared to be independent, scared of my own fragility.

  Without someone to protect me around the clock, I was sure something bad, something worse, would happen to me. If a car could shoot out of the darkness and smash me to pieces, then meteors could fall from the sky and crush me into the ground, or a roof could collapse and smother me under its weight.

  Life could change, or even end, in a moment. That’s just the way it was.

  I could either hide in fear and avoidance or I could attempt to live with courage, one challenge at a time. And I was starting to get pretty good at that.

  In fact, I probably could have won an award for it by then.

  March 2004

  I circled the tables, collecting and sorting leftover handouts from the day’s Holocaust education workshop I had just led, when I heard a woman behind me.

  “Excuse me, Aimee?” she said.

  The room had cleared except for a few people on the periphery, talking and looking at resources.

  “Yes?”

  I turned, smiling, still on the post-workshop adrenaline high that accompanied a job well done, and found a middle-aged face, surrounded by loose and frizzy dark curls, pinched in a frown.

  “You know, you or the museum should really research the area you’re going into a little more,” she said. “I teach at a Jewish day school here in the Bay Area, and we have no trouble getting Holocaust survivors in the classroom.”

  I was in San Francisco, brought there by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a team member for the Northern California Forum on Holocaust Education. We had split into five separate classroom sessions to accommodate more than 200 attendees, including survivors, and this woman had been in mine. We’d just wrapped up a few days of sharing resources and strategies for teaching about the Holocaust, which included finding survivor testimony.

  I wondered how I should respond. I didn’t want to speak on behalf of the museum, because it wasn’t my place. And I had been trying to help teachers who might not have access to bringing survivors into their classroom.

  “Also—” she continued.

  I tensed. Uh oh. The soft fluorescent lights overhead reflected in her wire-framed, circular glasses.

  “You made it very clear that you are from a small, rural town and that you are not Jewish.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “So, what right do you think you have to teach about this?” she
accused.

  During the course of the workshop, I had shared that I taught high school English at my alma mater and that I lived in the same small town where I grew up—with little to no diversity—and yes, I had also shared I was not Jewish. But why did any of that matter? I was just giving my audience the context necessary to understand my pedagogy.

  I felt the heat of blood rush into my cheeks as a tight pain crossed my forehead.

  It’s a good thing I hadn’t told them how I’d gotten my start in Holocaust education!

  At first, it was about money and convenience. After just two years of teaching, I found out that I needed only a few more semester hours to move up a level on the district’s salary scale. When I saw that a weeklong course on teaching the Holocaust was being offered at a nearby university during my summer vacation, I was intrigued, and I was sure it would be easy to schedule a sitter for my then one- and three-year-old daughters.

  It turned out that the course was more than intriguing. It changed me.

  For that week, every day and all day long, I was immersed in Holocaust history, documentaries, literature, writing, and speakers. The more I learned, the more horrified I became. How could people treat other human beings like that? And how was it possible that children could be separated from their mothers or fathers or families? As a new and young mother, I was appalled. I knew then that I had to teach about this tragic time period to connect students to the most important lesson that anyone can ultimately learn: We are all human beings sharing the same world, no better than anyone else.

  That’s what right I had.

  But my brain was too slow catching up to her criticism to respond, and she had made her point. She was gone. Hot tears formed behind my eyes, threatening to spill, but someone was still in the room. I couldn’t cry—not yet.

  Pull it together, Aimee, I told myself, continuing to collect the remains of the workshop.

  She had no idea what I had done the past nine years, searching out any and all chances to learn about the Holocaust. She didn’t know I’d raised over $2,000 for a study trip to Poland and Israel that kept me away from my two small daughters for almost a month. She didn’t know that I’d developed my own elective course on the Holocaust, or that I had been receiving hate mail from Holocaust deniers for the past seven years. She didn’t know I’d won a contest through the museum for a lesson I’d created to teach about pre-War Jewish life in Europe. She didn’t know that lesson was filmed for an online video and published in a museum teacher resource. She didn’t know that I was preparing to take a second field trip with students to Washington, D.C., that spring, specifically to visit the Holocaust museum and hear a survivor speak. And she didn’t know I’d written and won a grant to bring a Holocaust survivor to Loudonville in the next month.