After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away (8 page)

Uncertain how to answer this, I tell him whichever.

“Saint-Croix is my name, but
je m’appelle
Crow.”

To Saint-Croix he gives a nasal French pronunciation, San-Krwah. I’ve had enough French to pick up
Je m’appelle
Crow—“I am called Crow.”

“‘Crow.’ That’s an ugly, big bird.”

“To other crows, a crow is not ugly or especially big.”

“A crow is a…predator bird?”

“Is it?”

I’m not sure. Really, I don’t know anything about crows except they are large, ungainly, raucous, said to be highly intelligent. Possibly crows aren’t predators like hawks and eagles. For sure their feathers are pure sleek black, like this guy’s spiky hair.

“Crow. People call you that?”

“Some people. Some others, like in my family, call me ‘Gabe’—‘Gabriel.’” He crinkles his nose as if this is too pretty a name for him. “At school here, even teachers call me Crow because nobody can pronounce Saint-Croix. Nobody in Yarrow Lake mostly.”

“Are you French?”

“Me? Hell, no. Do I look French?”

Crow has a way of speaking somewhere between teasing and sincere. His voice is low and gravelly, not like the voice of a typical high school boy. He does look French, sort of. Years ago, before my dad left us, we went to Paris, rented a car, and drove south to Nice. Crow reminds me of people there. He says, “There’s relatives of mine in Quebec, but my father crossed the border into Maine, became a U.S. citizen just in time to be drafted to Vietnam. My mother was born here, and so was I.”

Crow pronounces “Quebec” with a hard emphasis on the “Q,” like “Kay.” He’s running a big-knuckled hand through his hair, pondering me. His eyes are like warm molasses with a look of bemusement, as if there’s something comical about the way I’m sitting here by myself, math text open on my knees, homework papers fluttering in the wind.

The new girl, alone. Hoping to be seen.

“What’s that, algebra? Feldman’s class?”

“Yes. I hate it.”

“You’re a sophomore?”

No avoiding it—I tell him yes. I ask if he’s a…

“Senior. Should’ve graduated last year, but I lost a year. Like I said, Jenna, I’m accident-prone.”

Jenna!
The sound of my name in Crow’s mouth, the special inflection he gives to the name like it’s some kind of music, makes me feel weak.

“So, where’d you say you’re from, Jenna?”

“I…didn’t say.”

“So, where?”

“I…”

My throat shuts up. I can’t speak. I’m feeling panic that in another moment I will blurt out to this guy I don’t even know what happened on the bridge. The wreck, and
after the wreck
.

“Go away! Leave me alone.”

It’s a joke, I realize. Crow’s friends are watching. The sexy-cool older guy pretending to be interested in the misfit new girl, hilarious.

I fumble for my backpack, shove my math text inside, and stammer I have to leave. Something flutters from my hand, I don’t have time to retrieve it. Crow seems surprised. Maybe he says something, but I don’t hear him, blood is pounding in my ears.

“I hate you. Hate you all. Hate this place I’m trapped in.”

Stupid buzzer bell ringing for one-o’clock classes. I am so embarrassed and so angry. Thinking that I will walk out of this school and never come back. No one can force me to be a student here where I don’t belong just like no one can force me onto an airplane with my father, to go live with him and his “new family” in La Jolla, California.

I can’t face my classes. My teachers. Everyone will know. Everyone will be laughing at me.

I’m at my locker, trying to work the lock. So upset I can’t remember my combination.

One thing I’ve learned since the wreck: Nobody can force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Even for your own good.

Except: If I walk out of school, my aunt and my uncle will be upset. They won’t understand. They will try to reason with me. And Mom, if she knew. I hate this:
I can’t let down anyone who loves me.

So I don’t walk out. I don’t even hide in one of the girls’ restrooms. Instead I trudge upstairs to fifth-period math. Mr. Feldman’s class, which I hate. (Are people watching me? Laughing at me? How quickly can word spread through school that Crow made a fool of me out in the parking lot?) I’m just about to step inside Mr. Feldman’s classroom when I feel a jab on my shoulder. It’s a smirky red-haired guy with a silver wire glittering in his eyebrow. He hands me two crumpled sheets of paper: “Crow says you left this in the parking lot.”

My algebra homework.

11

Oh oh oh, help us

No codeine now, but I’ve been advised to take Tylenol for “pain relief” except I don’t dare take as many tablets as my “pain relief” would require, and I’ve been waking from sweaty dreams at dawn. By the luminous green digital clock at my bedside I see that it is 4:28
A.M
. when the dream jolts me awake like a kick in the belly. I’m tangled in bedsheets, my heart is pounding worse than when Crow was laughing at me. It’s two nights later, maybe three. This dream is like a hawk’s talons sinking into me. My fingers clutching raw at a railing, a bridge railing that has been broken and twisted, I’m desperate to keep from being sucked through the broken place and into empty space.
Oh oh oh, help us,
I’m sobbing, I’m a little girl sobbing, below us the river is rushing black and brackish-smelling, it has sucked away the person I was with, the person behind the wheel of the car, the person I was trying to save whose face I could not see, my throat is raw with screaming,
Mom! Mom!

Soon afterward, someone knocks on the door of my room. My aunt asking if I have called her, and I say no.

12

In Yarrow Lake much of my life becomes secret.

Like an iceberg, which they say is nine tenths hidden below the surface of the water. What you see is such a small part of it, you don’t have a clue what it actually is.

How was school today, Jenna?
is code for
Are you adjusting? Are you going to be “normal”?
and it pisses me off how my aunt and my uncle are always asking. Even my little cousins Becky and Mikey. Their parents have instructed them,
Be nice to Jenna!
so they try, and I love them for trying so transparently only just I’m not in a mood to play big sister to them. Sorry.

A secret life is the sweetest life. Also the safest.

Weekends are family time. (Even if sometimes on a rainy Sunday afternoon Uncle Dwight, the workaholic, slips back to his office at McCarty, Weissman & Associates, Architects, for a few hours before supper.) The McCartys are children-oriented, like almost everyone in Yarrow Lake, as in Tarrytown, so this means the family being together, in good weather on Yarrow Lake, where friends have a sailboat, or bicycling on the Sable Creek trail, or watching Becky play soccer at her school, or going to see
Shrek 2
at the Lakeland Mall and having an early meal afterward at Leaning Tower of Pizza. Family time is a kind of sacred time, so it baffles and hurts the McCartys when Jenna explains politely that she would rather stay home, she has schoolwork, or wants to walk/hike/run by herself, or…whatever it is Jenna does in her room with the door shut for hours.

Doesn’t Jenna like us, Mommy?

Of course Jenna likes us! What a thing to say!

If she likes us, she’d be happy, wouldn’t she? She always seems kind of sad.

But that doesn’t mean Jenna doesn’t like us, Becky. It just means that Jenna is sad.

Here is a secret.

How when the McCartys leave to go sailing on Yarrow Lake, I immediately go into my aunt and uncle’s bathroom to see what drugs they have in their medicine cabinet. So disappointing! Mostly just boring over-the-counter drugs like Bufferin, Advil, Tylenol anybody can buy, plus medication for “hypertension” (Uncle Dwight) and “dyspeptic stomach” (Aunt Caroline). I was hoping, with my aunt sometimes kind of nervous and edgy, that she was into tranquilizers like Valium (which Mom took for a while after Dad left us), but I guess not.

Except I don’t give up the search. Their bathroom is kind of old-fashioned, with a long cabinet counter and drawers filled with stuff, including old prescription drugs, vials with just a few pills remaining, and one of these turns out to be OxyContin, prescribed for Dwight McCarty,
one tablet every three to four hours for pain relief
, and there are four big pills remaining! I’m so excited, I almost drop them.

Figure my uncle will never miss these pills, the prescription was for zero refills in March 1999.

13

“Hey, babe, you bald?”

Trudging upstairs to math class, which is my worst class of the day, I’m jostled by some obnoxious guys grabbing at my grimy sailor cap, yanking it from my head in a burst of hyena laughter and tossing it into the air, and I’m red-faced, furious, and embarrassed, fumbling to retrieve it, except now that it has fallen onto the stairs, people are kicking it and stepping on it, I’m desperate, pleading, “Give it back, give it back, please,” and finally the cap is returned to me, a girl has picked it up, slaps dust off it, hands it to me with a pained little smile: ”Here, Jennifer.”

To my embarrassment, the girl is Christa Shaw. Who seems to feel sorry for me, not hate me.

I can only murmur thanks, pull the hat down on my head, and escape.

Wrapped in a wad of aluminum foil, kept in a secret compartment in my backpack, are the last three OxyContin tablets I’ve been saving for such an emergency. Risking Mr. Feldman’s seeing, I take one of the tablets, trying to hide my mouth with my hand, swallowing the big tablet dry, and praying I won’t choke or start to cough and be discovered.

14.

Never! Never tell my secrets.

Never tell my aunt how miserable I am at school. How my face shuts up tight as a fist even when a part of me wants to be friendly. How it’s so much easier to stare straight ahead than make eye contact in the corridors, at my locker, in classes. How I dread seeing Crow, or his friends who laughed at me. How I dread being called on by Mr. Feldman and Mr. Farrell, who hate me for sitting silent, sullen, down-looking in their classes. How it’s getting harder and harder for me to concentrate on schoolwork, even subjects I used to like, history, English, science. How in gym class I can’t keep up with the other girls—I’m afraid of feeling pain. And anyway, everything is so trivial. And anyway, I know that I will fail, what’s the point of trying? I’ve gotten dependent upon wearing the grimy sailor cap even indoors, against the “dress code.” Anxious that if I don’t wear something on my head, people will see the ugly scars in my scalp from the wreck, my hair isn’t thick enough to disguise them, this baby-fine hair that I hate, that I’m ashamed anyone might see and think it’s mine. And tiny nicks in my skin, in my forehead and on the underside of my jaw that I can’t stop running my fingertips over and over. And how hard it is to walk without wincing if my ankle hurts, or my knee….
You know what you look like? Like somebody who’s been in a car crash.

My homeroom teacher, Mrs. Terricotte, takes me out into the hall to ask about my hat. “Jennifer, why? Is there some reason why you are always wearing that hat?” Mrs. Terricotte’s pebble-gray eyes are wary. There’s something in my face and in the set of my jaw. Maybe she’s been warned by Mr. Goddard or by my other teachers. Explaining the reasons for the school dress code. How most of the boys would be wearing baseball caps, reversed on their heads, so there has had to be a regulation against any kind of cap, hat, or scarf, a regulation that was established by the school district years ago…

I’m wearing my grimy sailor cap. I will wear my grimy sailor cap. I tell Mrs. Terricotte that I have to wear it, my head was shaved a few months ago, my skull was sawed open to reduce the pressure of cerebral bleeding, my scalp is covered in ugly, ripply scars that my hair isn’t thick enough to hide, my voice is low and rapid and almost Mrs. Terricotte can’t make out my words, she has to stoop to hear me, it’s an awkward moment, she’s feeling sorry for me, very likely she has heard about me, why I’ve come to live with my aunt and uncle, why I have transferred to Yarrow Lake High from a private school in Tarrytown, how lonely I am here, how unhappy, until finally Mrs. Terricotte relents: “Jennifer, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize. Of course wear the hat if you’re more comfortable wearing it.”

Touching my arm in a gesture of comfort. Warily.

15

Another secret. No one will ever know.

In the local telephone directory I discover two listings:

Saint-Croix, Roland

655 Deer Isle Rd, Yarrow Lake

Saint-Croix, Roland

Carpenter & Cabinetmaker

39 S Main, Yarrow Lake

On a map of Yarrow Lake and vicnity I locate Deer Isle Road north of town. This isn’t an area of Yarrow Lake that I know. My aunt and my uncle don’t seem to have any friends there. On a Saturday afternoon in early October, kind of windy-blustery and threatening rain, I bicycle approximately a mile and a half to Deer Isle Road and another half mile to locate Crow’s house, which surprises me. It’s in a mostly rural area of small wood-frame houses and shanties, mobile homes propped up on cement blocks, ramshackle old farmhouses like Crow’s, which is set back from the road on a long rutted lane, partly hidden behind a stand of scrubby pines. This time of autumn in New Hampshire, sumac is blazing crimson, goldenrod is blazing in the fields, when the sun is shining it’s a kind of dazzling-beautiful setting, but today is sunshine, then clouds, more sunshine and more clouds, windy and unpredictable. At the front of Crow’s property is a pasture in which a single swaybacked gray-speckled horse is grazing, her only companion a black goat with a wispy beard. Straddling my bicycle at the end of the rutted driveway, I see the horse and the goat eyeing me with interest. I’m hoping that Crow doesn’t suddenly appear in the lane or come up behind me on Deer Isle Road.