“Fractured some vertebrae,” he says. “Any worse, and I’d have been in this thing for life.” His arms flop around the wheelchair.
“So, technically, we’re lucky.”
“Technically,” he says. “Though rehab for the foreseeable future may be construed as less than that. I was supposed to be on a set, but now, it’s Des Moines until fall.”
“A set?” The wires connect from the news report. The moments of short-term cognitive clarity are unpredictable, coming and going at random. “Ah, yes. That’s right—you’re an actor?”
“I am,” he says.
“Like, big-time actor or a guy who says he’s an actor and actually waits tables?”
He laughs. “I was the worst waiter you’d ever seen, but yeah, I bussed my fair share for a few years. But now”—he clears his throat, suddenly ever-so-slightly self-conscious—“I guess I’ve earned my
keep. Successfully retired my tip jar.” He shrugs. “A big TV show, some film stuff.” He smiles with his perfect teeth, and I can see it then: the movie star.
“Did I recognize you on the plane?”
“Maybe.” He shrugs. “We didn’t talk about it, and then, you know, I passed out.” I try to imagine it: the sour-faced me from that
People
cover chatting him up in first class. I can’t conjure it up, so I replace it with the fabulous me chatting him up in first class.
Yes, that seems better
.
I sigh. “I suppose I’ll be here for a while, too,” I say, “though I don’t think I have anywhere as glamorous as a movie set to be.”
“Don’t sell yourself short—you were on your way to meet with some new hot artist.” He shakes his head. “Again, can’t remember her name: Harmony, Faith something, maybe? Something hippie like that.”
My mother had hinted at something similar—the art gallery. I rattle it around in my brain: it seems reasonable enough. Not repellent, not a terrible fit, not something that the fabulous me couldn’t be doing to take the world on by storm.
“I promised you I’d come in and buy something the next time I was in New York,” Anderson says.
“A genuine promise or a promise by way of flirting?” I ask, and he bows his head faux bashfully and smiles. He’s an easy read already. I smile in return. “I’m married.”
He shrugs. “It sounded complicated.”
Complicated? I’m sorry, I don’t remember!
“Besides,” I say, “aren’t you, like, twenty-two?”
“Twenty-eight. I play young.” He exhales. “Listen, you look tired. Let me get out of your hair. I just wanted to come by and thank you as soon as I could.”
My eyes do feel heavy, so I let him go with the promise that he’ll come back tomorrow. The nurse returns to wheel him back to his own recovery, but not before he places the
People
magazine next to me, next to the photo album filled with disparate faces of strangers, and I’m left to wonder, just before I slip into slumber, how my life can be so well documented when I can’t recall one single second, one tiny sliver of an iota of the life that came before.
By my fourth day
of consciousness and a week and a half since my plane split in two, I have submitted myself to every test possible—the MRI, the CAT scan, the interviews with the hospital shrink, an oxygen test, an I’m-not-sure-what-the-hell-that-was-for test, the how-many-presidents-can-you-name test (zero, but Peter kindly reminded the psychologist that I’d never been one for history), and we are no closer to assessing the cause behind my memory loss.
Physically, I am also an anomaly, an equation with no solution. The neck brace came off today, and my left wrist is fractured and splinted, and a few of my upper ribs are bruised, such that a sharp jolt of pain greets me when I try to shift too quickly, but for the most part—the welts on my face and the scabs from the surface wounds aside—I am remarkably in one piece. Other than my brain, of course. Other than that, I’m nearly perfect.
My mother has placed crystals by my bed—
healing crystals,
she says, as if she is wiser than the men armed with their degrees in modern medicine—and she has paraded an endless slide show of pictures in front of me. Still, nothing from my thirty-two years of experience has returned to my cerebral landscape. I ask about my father—
where is he?
—and am told only that we lost him when I was a teenager. That he was once a famous painter but now he is gone.
My mom hushes me and says that she’ll explain it all when I’m stronger, when I’m ready.
Samantha, my slightly anorexic—but not in a diagnosable way—college roommate whose brown roots have been left untouched too long and whose cheeks are in much need of a blush brush, arrived yesterday: I recognize her only from the photos, of her standing beside me at my wedding, and of us in sorority T-shirts after two too many shots of god knows what, grinning ridiculous grins as if our whole lives were in front of us. Invincible. That’s how we looked. Untouchable. She sits beside me and tries not to cry but, like everyone else—Peter, my mom—mostly fails at the task, and so sniffles and gasps while trying to offer me a shoulder on which to lean.
My younger sister, Rory, who comes from a seemingly entirely different gene pool—with luminescent red hair, six extra inches, and eyes the color of ripe moss, shuffles in after Samantha. She is pretty in a way that makes my pupils pop, an immaculate blend of DNA that unites every once in a while to create something exquisite. She forces a smile and says that we run the art gallery together, and I forge a real smile back, at the idea of our fabulous selves tackling the world together, ascending the heights of New York City: the two of us, sisters. Strangers now, but sisters once. I bask in the idea of this, even without knowing her. Once I knew her. Once, way back when, when I had a life, and I’m comforted in the idea that we had a life together.
“It was my fault you went,” she says, pulling me from the moment. Her face muscles quiver like they’re too exhausted to function properly, and I can see her consciously trying to tame them, to abate the torrent of tears that will be inevitable. Her guilt clouds her perfect green eyes, darkening the glow of her obviously flawless skin. “I normally do the artist meetings, but Hugh had tickets to Springsteen
before the holiday weekend, so I made you go.” Hugh, she explains in a sidebar, is her boyfriend of two years, and is back at their hotel. He flew out here with her for support—at least until he has to be back at work on Monday. She confides that this is a precursor to their engagement. But then she catches herself, as if there’s a rule against thinking happy thoughts in my company.
“It’s no one’s fault,” I answer, though maybe it actually is. Maybe it
is
her fault, and I have a million reasons to be furious with her. Who knows? Not me.
Samantha stops in two nights in a row before pushing back to Hoboken, back to her eighty-hour-a-week job as a big-firm lawyer, and back to her husband and his hundred-hour-a-week job at an investment bank. “Sometimes, I wish we could just be twenty-one again,” she says as she lays an old sorority shirt over my torso and snaps a picture with her iPhone, thrusting it close to me. The shirt reads
GOLF NIGHT
, and Sam explains that this was a mixer in which we went to our favorite fraternity and imbibed a different drink in each room.
“Like, a hole, a golf hole,” she says. “You were always the most levelheaded, stayed the most sober, but still it was our favorite party of the year. We always tried to get you to do a drink in every room, but you held your ground: too mature for us even at twenty-one.” She laughs, and even though I know she means this as a compliment, mostly it breaks my heart. I stare around at the hospital room and the gravity that life can bring and wonder why anyone would ever want to grow up too soon, take it all too seriously.
“How did we meet?” I say, suspecting I can get it right: that we stumbled into each other at an underground off-campus party, or that I was so dazzling in an art history seminar that she couldn’t help but introduce herself, or that I was strolling around the campus and simply
had
it,
the magnetic it that everyone was drawn to. But even before she tells me, even before I’m done telling myself these things, I know this can’t be true. That the face on the cover of
People,
with the frown, with its matching commas that cratered into my chin, well, she wasn’t
it. She may not have even know what
it
was in the first place.
“Oh, funny story,” Sam says. “We met the first week at school. In the breakfast line. Neither of us knew anyone else to sit with, and since we both reached for the Frosted Flakes vat, we chose each other.”
“Not exactly something to write home about.”
“No,” she laughs. “But we milked ‘
they’re great
’ for the longest time after that.” I look at her blankly, and she tries to smile. “Inside joke. Tony the Tiger. Better told another time.”
Dutifully, every morning during this first week, Peter has come by to refill the vase on the windowsill with daisies.
“They’re your favorite,” he said the first time he arrived with a bouquet.
“Really?” I answered, because it seemed hard to believe that daisies could be anyone’s favorite.
“Well,” he conceded. “They weren’t, but I gave them to you on our first date, and then they sort of became our thing. Like,
shouldn’t I have known better?
” He laughed but it sounded more like a hiccup. “I probably should have known that you’d want something elegant, perfect, long-lasting. But you know, you being you, you just told me you loved them—didn’t want to be rude to this imbecile who showed up with cheap flowers, and didn’t tell me otherwise until a year later when you actually decided that you did love them.” He shrugged. “They were the only flower I could afford when we first met.”
“So what were my favorites? My real favorites?” I asked. I pictured it, or tried to anyway. Him: half a decade younger, without the pallor of grief on his face, wooing me with daisies. Me: also half a decade younger, no awareness of what life would bring, liking him enough to allow him to woo me with said daisies. I smiled. It was cute, almost, if you didn’t know what happens next. But even then, I reconsidered—it was still cute. His ineptitude with the flowers, and that I didn’t want to embarrass him over this ineptitude. I must have really liked him, really been smitten. And now, even though he felt too tall for me, like I’d have to stand on my tippy tiptoes to kiss him, and too broad, too, like he might crush me if he rolled over on me one night while I was sleeping too heavily to notice, I softened in the re-created, subjective memory of it all.
My husband.
I wasn’t quite used to him, to the idea of him, but still, if my younger self loved him, I’d find a way to do the same.
He squinted his face to remember my favorite flowers. “What are they called? Oh. Hyacinths. Something about their fragrance. Reminded you of being a kid. I’ll track some down and bring them tomorrow—maybe that will help.”
“Maybe that will,” I said, and we both looked at the other with a hopefulness that hyacinths might actually be the answer to this.
When everyone finally leaves me alone, I sleep and try to remember, but there’s nothing there, nothing
to remember,
and after a while, it feels like I’m trying to use a limb that’s not connected to me. What’s that phenomenon?
A phantom. Yes, that’s exactly what it is.
How can I flex my foot if it’s not attached? How can I curl my fingers into my palm if my brain has no way to send the message?
Mostly, I zone out at Jamie Reardon—that reporter from the local news who now covers the story for the one national cable station the
hospital receives. He reminds me of someone whom I can’t recall, but the reminder is comfort enough. Like he could be my confidant, an old high school love, a brother. He looks sturdy, reliable, and though he’s just a projection on the screen, I already feel like we are friends.
Sometimes, Anderson comes by, and we sit—strangers but not really strangers—and watch Jamie in silence as he transmits the details of the crash, of our recovery, to the world that gobbles them up. We confer over our mutual gratefulness to have survived, leaving the murkier details—the guilt, the families of those who didn’t, the enormity of the questions like
Why us?
—untouched. To be alive is enough for now, and when it’s not, Jamie Reardon fills in the quiet spaces that are too difficult to consider if we allowed for them anyway.
On day five
back into the waking world, Dr. Macht, my mother, and Peter weave their way into my room. My mom instinctively reaches for the remote, zapping the white noise.
“Nell, we need to tell you something,” the doctor says, with Peter shadowing his shoulder, looking like he might fall apart at any second. Without his baseball cap, he looks fifteen years older—the circles under his eyes the color of dark bruises, the pallor of his cheeks near-dead.
“I know that you can’t remember this.” Dr. Macht hesitates, but then puts on his best doctor voice and continues. “But it’s important that you know that you were pregnant.”
I feel my eyelashes flutter.
“Unfortunately, with all the damage your body sustained, that
pregnancy is no longer viable.” He hesitates. “Actually, you miscarried when you first came in. We needed to wait until you were stable to tell you.”
Peter starts weeping behind him, and I wish, in a way, that I could, too. Wish that I could feel the loss of this as tangibly as he does. Something akin to a wad of emotion forms in my throat but it’s easily swallowed.
“How far along was I?”
“Relatively early into the pregnancy—it appears well within the first trimester, maybe eight weeks or so. We have a call in to your insurance company to track down your New York obstetrician, maybe get some answers from her.” He glances toward Peter. “I’ll give you two some privacy to digest this.”
He shuts the door and leaves Peter and me in a vacuum of silence, barring Peter’s unsuccessful attempts to clamp down his emotion.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I know that this whole thing is hard on you. Were we trying for long?”