In Case of Emergency (24 page)

Maybe there’s an easier way.

After all, the very definition of any type of ritual calls for a separation from everyday routine. A solemn attention to the present moment. Which means that perhaps the most definitive healing power lies in the very suggestion of the intent to heal. Perhaps just knowing that someone is focusing his or her eyes, energy, hands, tools, medicines, ointments, and cures on you is the essential medicine.

Of course, that would also mean that the most effective and ancient form of therapy is what’s known today as the placebo effect.

34

“Why didn’t you call sooner?” Ayla asks. I lie on the carpet of my living room, my legs sprawled out in a Y, my hands clasped over my abdomen. She sits cross-legged, just above my head, looking down at me.

I don’t know how to tell her that some part of me didn’t want to call at all. That between feeling hideous all over again after running into Jared and completely shaken by the kid on the GSW call, I also hadn’t wanted to give up my role from our road trip as the person who listened, who comforted, who held things steady. I wasn’t ready for those roles to switch. I don’t know how to tell her that I thought she might hear the story of a boy killed by a bullet and be reminded of Iraq, of her own brain injury, of friends of hers who died, and this would set her off, or at least I would seem insensitive. Or worse—the worst thing I can think of, really—maybe she would hear all about the patient I couldn’t save, shrug her shoulders, and say, “What’s the big deal? Why’d you let it get to you?”

So I shut my eyes. Ayla tucks a stray piece of hair behind my ear before
cupping her hands at the base of my skull. She’s barely said a word.

When Malcolm arrived and offered to drive me home, I called Ayla, overwrought and slightly drunk, and asked if she would meet me at my apartment. As soon as she walked through the door, the story of my GSW patient spilled out of me. Ayla listened with a look of concern. She didn’t interrupt. Or offer advice, or ask questions.

“Say something.”

“Like what?”

“Anything.”

She’s silent for a while, her hands motionless, still cupped behind my ears. “The first time someone I know died, I was in high school. There was this junior, Robbie Blakeney, who jumped off a cliff. He left his jacket and a note under a rock at the top. I didn’t know him that well, but it was—everyone was so quiet the day after it happened, the teachers, the students, and I remember there was this thing some of us did where we met on the field after school and had this long moment of silence for him. After that I started avoiding my parents, especially my dad. He’d had a sister who committed suicide. I knew he knew about Robbie, everyone did, but I thought it would be better to pretend nothing had happened. One day he sat me down and said, ‘Two things. This isn’t going to go away, and you shouldn’t expect it to. Second, don’t ever be afraid to talk to me.’”

I turn onto my side and scoot toward her until my cheek rests on one of her thighs. She rubs my back in long sweeping motions, down to my tailbone and back up again.

I tell her about my dream. My eyes shut tight, I ask her, “Do you think I’m crazy?”

Soft lips make contact with my shoulder. “Not at all.”

* * *

Ayla and I approach the pool. She’s still dressed in her normal clothes, but I’ve changed into a swimsuit and towel. When she said, “I want to watch you swim,” she hadn’t meant right away, but although it’s nearly midnight on a Tuesday evening, going for a swim suddenly seemed like the best possible idea.

She sits on the edge of a wooden lounge chair, sinking into the faded yellow cushion, her elbows resting on her knees, her hands clasped in front of her. The wrong position for lounging. She appears tense, brooding. The rippled light, cast up on the underside of her chin, makes her look like a hologram. She gestures for my towel and I shyly hand it to her. Her face breaks into a radiant smile as she looks at me standing there.

The clear body of water is too lit up from within to reflect the bright moon sagging in the sky above us. At the shallow end, I place both feet on the first step, feeling my face twist from the cold, the goose bumps climbing up my legs, the jump-start shock in my lungs. I peer down at my ankles. Under the water my feet look swollen, a different color than the rest of me. I take a deep breath and plunge the rest of the way in.

When my mother had her accident, she’d been skiing with Sergio. Somehow they’d gotten separated. The rescue team found her a few hours later, half-buried in the snow.

When we got the news, Dad, Ryan, and I took our first family vacation in over a decade. I hated Colorado, but it had never really stood a chance. When we arrived, every temperature felt wrong—it was too cold outside and too warm inside—and I couldn’t get comfortable. I grumbled constantly, willing to talk about everything except my mother, everything except what little I knew or could remember about her. But the worst part of the whole thing was watching my father meet the person my mother had run off to be with. I wanted so badly for Dad to treat Sergio coldly or with bravado or with superiority, to do something besides shake his hand and start crying. I wanted to remind him of the line he’d left on my voice
mail a thousand times, the one that goes,
ignore everything you can’t drink or punch
.

I can feel Ayla watching me. I propel myself forward despite my sluggishness. My body struggles to shed its extra weight, to savor the feeling of water against skin, of surfacing at the right moment to drag air into my lungs.

How had the rescue team located her? How quickly had they known she was dead beyond resuscitation? What had her expression been like—surprised, terrified? Or did she not even see the tree until it was too late? Perhaps she’d been like the teenager who got shot from behind: her body giving off an assumption of pure invincibility.

When Ayla woke up in Germany, about twelve hours after getting hit with the IED, she found out she would be going home. She didn’t understand too well the other stuff the doctors said, about frontal lobes and executive functioning, but she understood the words “going home” just fine.

Her first stop back in the States was the Walter Reed VA hospital, where they put her in a low-stimulation ward for about a week. A place with low light, bare rooms, hushed voices—a place that lacked the overhead paging of hospitals, where balloons, cards, and television weren’t allowed. Even the smell of flowers could be overwhelming for some after that type of injury. They taught her to think of her brain as a computer that could be reprogrammed through purposeful repetition. They taught her to treat it as a muscle that required exercise, food, oxygen, and rest.

I try to show off for Ayla, changing from one stroke to another, even doing the butterfly, which I haven’t done in years. But then I settle on the backstroke, my arms barely making a sound in the water. You don’t have to think about your breathing when you do the backstroke, and this way it’s easy to look at the sky, the giant moon looking flimsy and in need of washing, a flattened and dirty white paper globe.

My mother was cremated. When it came time to spread the ashes Sergio was too squeamish to hold the urn, my father too heartbroken, and
no one asked Ryan. If I felt resistance in grieving for her, I felt none at all in holding what was left of her body the last few moments before it scattered. A body is bones and muscle, skin and organs, the lattice of cells upon cells upon cells. People use the word
organic
all the time; people use it to mean healthy, intuitive, natural, environmental, sustainably farmed. But the original definition meant none of these things: the word
organic
first meant carbon-based. As in, all life forms on this planet are built from a fundamental carbon chain or ring to which other atoms are attached. My mother’s remains were organic.

We sprinkled what was left of her off Westwater Canyon at the border of Colorado and Utah, the light gray granular ash drifting down toward the river, mirroring the clumps of ice embedded in the canyon walls, and the sun shone fierce against the red earth at our feet; it lit up the orange-streaked chasm in front of us, and the glowing brightness of the earth and sky and ice glinted off the river’s surface miles below.

Months later I grew perversely curious about the process of cremation. I already knew the basic principle—extreme heat and flame reduce the body to bone fragments—but it bothered me to find out that what was left after cremation was then sent through a processor, one with steel blades and a sifting system, one that turned all the residual skeletal matter into a uniform powder blend, to make what little was left even less recognizable.

It always felt like the actual moment in which my mother was cremated was when the yawning and fiery bright, orange-red canyon walls swallowed her up, the moment when I held my breath and turned the heavy urn over, hoping nothing would go up my nose, and the light gray ash shook out with a thump and dissipated in the wind.

Ayla talks about recovering from her injury as an ongoing daily decision. But since starting this job—maybe since my mother left us—I’ve been wishing there was a cure. A better answer on how to cope, how to
comprehend things that aren’t comprehensible. A proven and approved way of life, a pill, an answer, an algorithm…

Unlike six years ago, these days Ayla passes. She passes as an uninjured, non-disabled person 95 percent of the time. Only the subtle things remain—the difficulty she has remembering things, the frequent writing in her planner, the way she closes her eyes when she gets dizzy, the stirrings in her sleep.

Opening my eyes in the water, I picture Ayla in her hyperbaric chamber. Once a month she spends an hour in a cylinder full of pure pressurized oxygen, the idea being that the saturated cerebral blood will prompt regeneration in damaged neurons. Built to fit people one at a time as they lie flat on their backs, the chambers either have a submarine’s small round windows or are made of a thick, transparent acrylic. Ayla prefers the submarine style. She’ll even ask them to cover the windows so she can’t see anything but the curved steel around her. Rather than becoming claustrophobic, she breathes easy. Having spent most of my childhood in a swimming pool, I can understand.

Touching my feet down in the shallow end, I push myself to a standing position against the suction of the water. Ayla, sitting there, watching me, with her wide, flat hands and long fingers, her strong shoulders and loud heartbeat.

Gesturing to the rippling water, she says, “You’re very good at that, you know. Do you feel any better?”

“Much,” I say, tilting my head, wiggling a pinky finger in my ear, suddenly unable to look at her or make my way toward the steps. She reaches for the towel. “One more thing, and then I’ll get out.”

I fill my lungs with air and swim to the bottom of the deep end. I stay there, cross-legged, hands circling to keep myself submerged, as if I’m about to have an underwater tea party. My hair swirls against my neck, drifts back and forth in front of my face; my cheeks balloon out; pressure builds up behind my eyes, behind the inner recesses of my eardrums. Everything is quiet.

35

“Did you sleep okay?” Ayla asks as I poke at the last of my parsley-studded omelet wedge with a fork. Except for the lone businessman reading the newspaper by the window, we are the only ones at Luna Café.

“Slept fine.” That’s not true; I slept like shit. And I know if Ayla hadn’t sensed my restlessness last night, my constant dozing and waking up, she could at least look at my drooping face this morning and guess the truth.

“Any dreams?”

“No dreams.” That’s true, anyway.

“How much have you been thinking about him?”

“I’m fine, Ayla.”

“No, you’re not. And you don’t have to be. But we can talk about something else if you want.”

She’s obviously waiting for me to respond.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I say.

My headache and lack of sleep aren’t the problem. It’s Ayla. As if it’s not enough that she twitches in her sleep, she also grunts and sighs. Last night every time I was on the brink of losing consciousness, one of her limbs would jerk or she’d make a sound that woke me.

To change the subject, she tells me about calling home yesterday. “My dad told me about this funny thing that happened,” she says. “My mom and I used to take care of this vegetable garden. I mean, it was huge. We had an area for the stuff that you had to replant annually and an area for some stock stuff that could kind of keep itself going. Anyway, after I got back from Iraq I suddenly had this black thumb, so I couldn’t—”

“You told me about that already.”

It’s an almost imperceptible shift, what happens in her face then, but she resets quickly. Her voice comes out a little flatter. “I’m sure I did. Do you want to hear the story or not?”

“Okay.” I feel crappy to have reminded her of her memory snags, but I’m still annoyed with her for reasons I can’t quite understand. All she has to do to look fantastic is run her hand through her hair. She always wants to go to Luna Café, even though it’s where we always go. We’re already getting boring.

Ayla tells me one of the last things she tried to plant before giving up on gardening was an apple tree. She cleared a spot where the seeds could get full sunlight, only nothing ever grew. Earlier this week her mother was in the tool shed and noticed one of the walls was caving inward. When she looked at it from the outside, she discovered a three-year-old apple tree growing in the middle of some old shovels.