After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “If you try to force me, I’ll run away. I don’t love you! Not after what you did to Mom.”

  Dad’s face was flushed and not so handsome now. I could hear his angry breathing. A strand of damp, metallic-looking hair had fallen across his forehead.

  “Jenna, all this is hysteria. You’re fifteen, you’ve had a terrible, traumatic experience. Your mother nearly killed you, and you can’t accept that. You—”

  “I said I don’t love you! I don’t want you as a father! It’s after the wreck now, Dad. You can’t hurt me.”

  The shocked look in Dad’s eyes, for once he got it.

  18.

  Nobody wanted me to know. But I wanted to know.

  Sure I was scared. Maybe it was a mistake. But once Devon had told me, I had to know all I could.

  My fingers shook as I typed in crucial code words—LISBETH ABBOTT, TAPPAN ZEE, COLLISION—and on my laptop screen came

  HEAD-ON COLLISION ON TAPPAN ZEE

  LEAVES ONE DEAD, TWO CRITICALLY INJURED

  TRAFFIC BACKED UP 8 MILES

  TARRYTOWN WOMAN, DAUGHTER RESCUED FROM CAR

  DANGLING 50 FEET ABOVE HUDSON RIVER

  CAR, TRUCK IN HEAD-ON COLLISION

  RESCUE WORKERS PULL ACCIDENT VICTIMS TO SAFETY

  MOTHER, DAUGHTER TRAPPED IN CAR 40 MINUTES

  NO WITNESSES TO TAPPAN ZEE COLLISION

  I stared at the photographs. My eyes were watering badly. It took a while to make out the car grotesquely jutting through the broken railing, front wheels floating in space. It was a nightmare vision from which you couldn’t turn your eyes. TV viewers had stared, fascinated. The car was such a wreck, you could not have identified it as a car, let alone my mother’s car. You could not see anything beyond the smashed windows. You could not see human shapes inside. The photos had been taken from a police helicopter hovering only a few yards away from the wreck. There must have been a video camera as well. I wondered who the rescue workers were who’d managed to pull my mother and me out of the car in such circumstances, risking their own lives.

  Should have died with Mom in the wreck. You know that.

  I was staring at the screen when someone touched my shoulder and I looked up. It was Aunt Caroline.

  She’d brought me my laptop from home. It had not occurred to her what use I would make of it.

  “Oh, Jenna.”

  Gently Aunt Caroline shut the laptop. I waited for her to reprimand me, but she said nothing, leaning over me to hug me. I guess she was crying. I don’t think that I was crying. From outside in the corridor came the voices of strangers.

  It was my last day in rehab. From now on my injuries would be secret.

  II

  At Yarrow Lake

  1

  After the wreck my injuries would be secret, I was determined.

  And I’d never be hurt again. I was determined.

  2

  September 5, 2004. Yarrow Lake, New Hampshire.

  Driving into the town of Yarrow Lake (population 11,300), my aunt Caroline asks suddenly if I would like her to swing past the high school where I’ll be starting classes next week. My first panicky thought is No! Not yet, but Aunt Caroline doesn’t register this, like she hasn’t been registering most of what I haven’t been saying on the five-hour drive from Tarrytown, so we drive past Yarrow Consolidated High School. It’s a two-story dull redbrick building with weatherworn white trim and a bell tower set back from the street, playing fields behind it and tennis courts, a decent-looking dirt track, like small-town New England photographs you see on calendars except the foliage here hasn’t begun to change yet, early September is warm as summer. Miles away at the horizon are the White Mountains, which are beautiful to look at but not white, not yet anyway, covered in dense pine forests. Aunt Caroline is enthusiastic about the high school as she’s enthusiastic about most things, trying to be like Mom, like she remembers Mom, telling me that her husband, Dwight McCarty, graduated from Yarrow High in 1977, loved the school and was captain of the softball team. Why she’s telling me these things of long ago I don’t know. Why do adults feel they have to tell you every damn thing that floods into their heads on any damn subject, as if the quieter you are, no expression on your face, the more it means you WANT TO HEAR THIS! when in fact you’re NOT LISTENING! Except I guess I am listening because I hear my aunt say that girls’ sports at the school are supposed to be good. “But thank God, Yarrow isn’t obsessed about sports like some high schools in New Hampshire. Here the focus is…” Aunt Caroline turns into the school’s crescent driveway and cruises through, smiling like a real estate agent hoping to sell a property to a prospective buyer who’s just staring, blank and noncommittal. A bronze-gold banner with black letters is stretched across the portico above the front doors:

  WELCOME BACK! CLASSES BEGIN SEPT. 8

  My heart has begun to pound with dread and resentment. I am so angry, I can’t speak.

  I miss Tarrytown, I miss my old school. I miss my friends, and my house, and my room…. Can’t think how I will miss Mom so my mind shuts off in that direction.

  In fact I haven’t been returning my friends’ e-mails. Haven’t been returning their calls. Preparing for the move, finishing up my therapy, it’s too much effort. Now I’m staring at the facade of Yarrow High. Where I won’t know anyone and won’t want to know anyone. And no one will want to know me.

  “Aunt Caroline, I can’t…can’t do this.”

  Maybe my voice is muffled, Aunt Caroline doesn’t seem to hear.

  Like a willful child I’m gripping the car door handle. Wish I could escape by just opening the door, jumping out, and running away.

  Except I can’t run just yet. I am “mending.”

  Five hours in the car with my aunt east from Tarrytown and into Connecticut, north into Massachusetts on Route 7, then north and east into Vermont, then New Hampshire across the Connecticut River (where the bridge at Lebanon just about freaked me, I had to shut my eyes tight and bite my lower lip to keep from whimpering), how many times in secret my fingers groped for the door handle. I could open this door. Unbuckle my seat belt, open the door, and throw myself out before Aunt Caroline had a clue what was happening and could stop me.

  Just a fantasy. Silly, stupid. I’d never do it.

  Wild ideas that flash in and out of my mind like winking lights.

  Like my idea of living alone in our house in Tarrytown. My idea that a fifteen-year-old could live alone. Could attend classes at her old school like normal. Like nothing has changed. (Except Mom has gone. Except Dad lives three thousand miles away.) Stupid Demerol dream.

  Aunt Katie had informed me in her sharp surprised voice, Why, Jenna! The house has been sold. We thought you knew.

  Out of nowhere I hear my angry voice: “Maybe I’ll buy it back someday. Nobody can stop me.”

  This time Aunt Caroline hears me say something. Hasn’t a clue what I am talking about, so I have to explain about the house, and that’s embarrassing. Like I’m asleep with my eyes open. Under the spell of powerful dreams.

  “What a good idea!” Aunt Caroline says carefully. “Yes, someday, maybe…”

  And I’m thinking it isn’t just Mom I miss, it’s in the blue.

  “Well. Here we are.”

  Pulling into the driveway at 339 Plymouth Street. Where my aunt has lived for as long as I can remember with my uncle, Dwight McCarty, who Mom used to say was a good, kind, decent man. (Maybe Mom spoke of her sister’s husband with a wistful air.) Plymouth Street is one of the better residential streets in small-town Yarrow Lake, but the McCartys’ house is an old white colonial with rust-colored shutters and a weatherworn brick chimney, one of the smaller houses on the block. For years, in summer, Mom and I have visited my aunt and her family so I’m familiar with the house inside and out, and yet there is something strange about it now, I can’t think what. My young cousins Becky (ten) and Mikey (seven or eight) have come running out to greet us, their smiling nanny behind them. Uncle Dwight is still at work,
he’s an architect with a local firm. The way the children look at me, the way Becky says, sort of shyly, “Hi, Jenna,” and Mikey holds back a little, blinking, looking quizzically toward his mother, tells me that my cousins are registering someone missing.

  Aunt Caroline has instructed them not to express surprise when they see me, not to ask where is Aunt Lisbeth, for my little cousins have never seen me step away from any vehicle in their driveway except in the presence of their pretty smiling Aunt Lisbeth.

  Quickly I stoop to hug Becky, then Mikey. Shutting my eyes tight to prevent tears from leaking down my face.

  Afterward I’ll think: It isn’t just their aunt’s absence the children have registered, but something changed in their cousin Jenna. The way I walk as if I’m trying not to feel pain in my back and legs, and my skin that’s still sickish white, and something forced and frozen in my face. On the underside of my jaw are thin scars like commas you can only see close up and maybe there’s a smell about me still, that sad chemical hospital smell that makes the nostrils pinch.

  And maybe I’m hugging them too hard. My little cousins, I’m hugging them like somebody returned from the dead and naturally this is scary to children so young.

  Aunt Caroline says gaily, “Becky, Mikey! Be sweethearts and help us carry some of Jenna’s things upstairs. You know which room is hers.”

  3

  Don’t speak to me don’t touch me!

  I’m trying to remember that I love them: my “new” family.

  Aunt Caroline, Uncle Dwight McCarty. My little cousins Becky and Mikey.

  My “new” room, the second-floor guest room where I’ve usually stayed when Mom and I came to visit the McCartys in the summer. It hits me when I start to unpack and hang things in the closet, the last time I was in this room, a year ago August, while I was unpacking like this Mom was somewhere close by, maybe unpacking in her room or downstairs with Aunt Caroline…. The wish came to me hot and angry: I want that time back!

  I hate this time now. I’m feeling sick, trembling.

  My “new” room. Too girly for me. Aunt Caroline has fussed with curtains, some kind of puckered lavender material. I hate curtains anyway, I’d like to tear them down. The wallpaper design is some shade of lilac, the ceiling is plain white. The floorboards in this old house (Uncle Dwight is proud of the fact that the house dates back to the eighteenth century and the hardwood floors are “authentic”) are uneven and splintery—still, I hate shoes when I’m in my own room. I HATE SHOES! Somehow one of my sneakers goes flying across the room, hits a lamp with a frilly shade, and almost knocks it onto the floor. I’m laughing, breathless. I threw a sneaker like it was my arm that did it, muscles in my arm, not me.

  Aunt Caroline told me, Take a nap, sweetie. After our long, exhausting drive.

  Aunt Caroline likes to touch me, stroking my shoulder, my hair.

  It’s what moms do. Can’t help it. They see you’re hurting, they need to touch. So I have to check the impulse to shrink away.

  Even when Mom touched me lots of times, once I wasn’t a little girl any longer, I’d sort of shrink away from her. The way a cat does when she isn’t in the mood to be petted.

  I especially don’t want my hair touched. I hate my hair. No wonder Dad stared at me, revulsed.

  After the wreck my head was shaved for stitches, and what’s growing back has a weird baby curl. It used to be streaked dark blond, now it’s a weird silvery brown, like something faded in the sun. Hate to look at myself in the mirror so maybe I’ll turn the mirrors in this room backward.

  My suitcases, which used to be Mom’s suitcases, are open on the canopy bed. Aunt Caroline offered to help me put things away, hang clothes in the closet, no thanks. Out of the big suitcase I’ve taken framed photos to place around the room: windowsills, bureau top, desktop. Mostly Mom and me, smiling. Mom always looks about the same age but I’m different ages, heights. Weird to see how in the most recent photo Mom and I are about the same height, standing with our arms around each other’s waists.

  First thing I’ll see in the morning. Last thing at night when I switch off the bedside light.

  4

  “Jenna. How are you, honey…?”

  Quickly Uncle Dwight gets to his feet, comes to hug me, kind of awkwardly. I go stiff and still, signaling, Hey, no need to hug me, I’m a big girl. Maybe Uncle Dwight is surprised by my frozen-face smile or the smudged white cord cap pulled down tight on my head.

  Maybe Uncle Dwight is surprised by the fact that I’m here in his house. That because he’s a nice guy, but mostly because he’s the husband of my aunt Caroline, he’s taken on the role of stepdaddy.

  “…looking good! So happy to see you….”

  Must be weird to be somebody’s uncle. Just the word uncle.

  Dwight McCarty, one of those older men with glittery glasses, soft-spoken, “nice.” Half the girls I knew at Tarrytown Day, their fathers were like my uncle Dwight, meaning you never gave them more than a glance, you smiled and answered their kind of awkward questions, backed away and escaped and a minute later, if anybody asked, you couldn’t remember what they looked like, even whether they were bald or had some hair. My own dad wasn’t one of these, which is why Mom and I lost him.

  “…registration is tomorrow—Caroline says she’ll be taking you. I guess you know I went to Yarrow High, class of…”

  Behind my uncle the TV he’s been watching is all noise and rushing shapes. It’s CNN news, broadcast live from hell. I guess it’s the Mideast. Maybe Iraq. Maybe Israel. Another suicide bombing. A truck bombing. Sixteen killed, thirty-two injured. A woman clutching a (wounded? killed?) child against her, screaming except there’s no sound, only just the announcer’s American voice so excited and earnest: Insurgent attacks in Baghdad. Cut to another scene of sirens, leaping flames, capsized trucks, terrified people running in a street, trampling one another in their panic to escape—what? I must be staring at the TV, not hearing a word my uncle is saying, my jaws have begun to tremble in that weird way, my eyes are filled with tears because the sirens are so loud, the sirens hurt, now my aunt Caroline is clutching at my arm, my hand, calling me Jenna, Jenna-honey, but I’m not listening to her either, staring at the blank TV screen now that my uncle has quickly switched it off.

  Later I help Aunt Caroline put Mikey to bed. Next is Becky, who wants to stay up later though she’s tired and fretful. Next is Jenna, who doesn’t actually go to bed, only just quietly shuts the door to her room at ten P.M., insisting to her aunt she’s fine.

  Except she’s imagining she can hear through several walls her uncle whispering of her The look on her face, hearing those sirens! For a terrible moment I thought she was going to faint or have convulsions. And Aunt Caroline We’ll have to be careful, Dwight. Try to avoid news like that on TV if you think Jenna is close by. It will take adjustment living with my niece. I told you it wouldn’t be easy.

  In the middle of the night I’m awake sweating through my cotton nightgown. Must be the codeine painkiller I’m prescribed to take each night before bed has worn off.

  For pain, the label says.

  In the middle of the night I’m crouched in the bathroom that opens off my room, anxiously counting how many of the chunky white tablets I have left: only three.

  How many refills: zero.

  5

  …in the dream I’m running. Mom is watching me (I seem to know though I can’t actually see her) and at first it’s the park near our house in Tarrytown, then it’s a track, I am running on a dirt track, it’s a race I am running in, our track team competing with girls from another Westchester school and Mom is watching somewhere from the sidelines, and I’m so happy I’m able to run fast again without wincing at pain in my knees, or in the small of my back, my feet are flying and my strides are long and assured and I can’t see the faces of the other girls running around the track, I’m breathless pushing ahead—ahead!—I’m the front runner!—and in the last stretch my heart is beating hard hard hard and then I’m o
ver the finish line—I am the winner of the half-mile sprint, people are congratulating me, but I need to find Mom, I need Mom to see that I’ve won my race, these other people are in my way and confusing me, I don’t want to be hugged by strangers, but where is Mom, I’m pleading, “Mom? Mom?” and with a jolt I’m awake, it’s a morning of bright acid sun pouring through a window and I’m awake somewhere I don’t know, somewhere I don’t want to be, awake wishing I could sink back into delicious sleep, safely back into the blue where I realize now that Mom is lost, but my eyes are wide open now, the codeine has worn off leaving me awake, sickish, and jittery.

  Here is the shameful fact: I’ve never won any half-mile sprint in a school competition. For sure not at Tarrytown Day, where I was just barely on the track team. Mom saw me run a few times but never anything spectacular like in my dream. Always Mom was proud of me even if I came straggling in second to last, but sometimes I wouldn’t tell her there was a race, just after-school practice. I loved being on the Tarrytown track team with my friends, but I never cared enough to work really hard like the two or three fastest runners, these were older girls who were sort of fanatics competing for sports scholarships at Ivy League universities, that sure wasn’t going to be Jenna Abbott.

  Out of bed, on my feet headed for the bathroom I’m feeling kind of shaky. My right knee hurts, and my head. It’s as though in my dream I was actually running. Like in my dream I was exerting myself recklessly and will have to pay for it now I’m awake.

  A taste as of something brackish comes into my mouth: Tomorrow is the first day of school at Yarrow High.

  This morning Aunt Caroline is taking me to meet with the principal.