Wrecked (3 page)

I WANT TO VOMIT, AND MY RIGHT EYE THROBS. I GO TO TOUCH IT
, when I hear someone say, “Don’t do that.” I open my eyes, except only the left one seems to be working. A nurse calls out to someone behind her, “She’s waking up.”

I feel panic spreading through my blood, like ink in water.

“Anna?” It’s my mother.

“What are you wearing?” I go. Even with one eye I can see her long raincoat over pajamas.

“Anna,” she says again. Blue-and-white-checked cotton. A raincoat over pajamas? Something is very wrong. I reach up again to my eye, but Mom grabs my hand.

“Don’t,” she says. “You have a shield on it. Leave it.”

“Is Dad mad?” I say, and she starts to cry. Seeing that is so strange it makes me remember everything. Scattering the
leaves in one fell swoop, and Ellen bloody in my lap. And screaming, stopped.

“Ellen.” The panic is seeping everywhere. “Is Ellen okay?”

“She has a collapsed lung,” my mom tells me. “And some broken bones.” She blows her nose. The nurse fiddles with something above me, and I notice I’ve got a needle sticking in my arm. An IV.

“A collapsed lung?” I go. “That’s bad, right?”

My mother nods.

“Is it days later?” I ask. I think it is. I think the accident must have happened at least a week ago.

“No, Anna,” my mom says. She picks up my hand and squeezes it. “It’s the same night. It’s five thirty in the morning.”

“What bones did Ellen break?” My eye is killing me. The throb fills up my entire head.

“Some ribs and her leg.”

“Did I break anything?” I ask. Because it’s hard to tell.

“No,” my mom says. “You just injured your eye.”

“My body hurts.”

“Where?” Mom asks.

“Everywhere.”

“We’ll get the doctor. He’ll want to talk to you.”

“Where is Ellen?” My mom’s chin starts to work a little again, and I feel the ink oozing into my chest.

“Intensive care,” my mom finally says.

Maybe it’s going to be Ellen who will wake up days later.

“Is she in a coma?” I don’t know why I ask that exactly. Maybe because that’s what usually happens on TV. My mother shakes her head and lets go of my hand to stroke my left
arm. The one without the IV. Sometimes people don’t wake up from comas. Sometimes people just stay vegetables. Ellen. A vegetable. I can hear her say it:
veg-Ellen-table
.

“Is she going to die?” I ask.

“No,” my mother says. “She’s not in a coma, and she’s not going to die.” Suddenly i’m really tired.

“She better not,” I say. It’s hard to get the words out. To speak.

“She won’t,” my mother says. It doesn’t sound like she’s lying, but a collapsed lung is bad. I’m pretty sure that’s bad. And there’s something else going on, something to do with the panic. I can’t relax.

She’s still stroking my left arm.

“Mom,” I say,
why are you petting me?
But I don’t have enough energy. “Mom” is all I say.

Later I still feel sore all over, and my eye throbs along with my whole skull. There’s a sideways sliding tray set up in front of me. Scrambled eggs, toast, a small cup of purple jelly, and orange juice are sitting on it. I have to pee. Badly. I shove the tray out of my way and realize there’s no needle in my arm anymore.

“Hello?” I go. The door to my little room is open, and with my left eye I can see nurses and people walking back and forth. “Hello?”

My mother rushes in. Now she’s wearing regular clothes. Her light leather jacket, jeans, and clogs.

“Anna?” she says.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

She helps me. It’s strange to stand up. It makes my entire
head pulse, for one thing, and my legs feel wobbly and splayed, like a newborn foal’s. I have to lean on my mother to walk the five steps to the toilet. Which is strange too.

There’s a mirror above the bathroom sink. My mom hustles me through washing my hands, but I see myself long enough to get nauseous again. My hair is a mass of orange snakes. The thing on my eye looks like a miniature spaghetti strainer. Silver-colored metal, pricked with little holes. Around the sticky, white-tab edges of it my skin is swollen and blue. I try not to imagine what’s underneath.

“Is it Sunday?” I ask after I’m safe back in bed. My mother sits in a chair next to me. For some reason I still feel like I must have blacked out, and for much longer than she’s saying.

“Yes.”

“Last night was the accident?” I ask, just to be sure. She nods. “Where’s Dad and Jack?”

My mother looks awful. Huge gray circles under her eyes, white lips, stringy hair. Like she hasn’t slept all night. Which, now that I think about it, she probably hasn’t. “Mom?” I say again. “Where are they?”

“Anna,” she says, taking my hand again.

“What?” I won’t let her hold it. Something’s not right. That ink seeps through me. I can’t relax. “Dad’s really, really mad, right?” I say, but some part of me knows that’s not it.

“Do you remember what happened last night?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “What does that have to do with Dad not being here?” The aching in my eye and head drops straight to my throat. My body starts to tremble. My whole body. It just starts to shake.

“Do you realize that there was another car involved?” my mother goes.

There was screaming. Screaming and screaming and screaming. It wasn’t Ellen, and it wasn’t me.
“Hoooow looong, hooow loooong …”
And then the screaming stopped. It stopped because the life stopped. Somehow I knew it then. I know it now. I don’t need anybody to tell me. I heard the life stop.

I feel the ache come out of both my eyes in tears, and I try not to cry, but it’s hard not to cry, and it makes me shake more. My mom sees it. The shaking. My teeth are chattering. She climbs onto the bed. She spoons behind and wraps her arms around me tightly to try to keep me still. But I can’t stop shaking.

“Anna, listen to me,” she says. Her breath is warm on my neck and in my ear. “The driver of the other car died.”

“I know,” I try to tell her, but my jaw and mouth are chattering so much, I can’t make the words.

“Anna,” my mother says. She pulls her arms even tighter, and I’m glad because I think I might shake myself right off the bed onto the floor if she weren’t here, holding me together. “It was Cameron Polk,” she says.
Cameron Polk
. “Do you understand?”
Cameron Polk. Cameron Polk
. I make myself understand.

“Yes,” I say, shaking.

“Do you understand?” she says again.

“Yes,” I say.

THE NURSE IS EXPLAINING ABOUT MY EYE. ONE DROP A DAY TO help the pain, and another drop of something else to keep my pupil dilated so that there won’t be rebleeding. Somehow I register the word
rebleeding,
and I wonder, vaguely, what that means. The nurse might be trying to tell me what it means, but I can’t really understand what she’s saying. I see her mouth moving, and I see my mother’s listening face, and I even hear words, but it’s like I’m underwater on Mars. Everything is blurry and foreign and floating.

Things get slightly more clear and still and in focus after my mother leaves me to call my dad and check on what’s happening with him and Jack. I wobble out into the hallway and ask another nurse where intensive care is, and she tells me, even though I think she won’t. While she’s saying I should go back to my room and wait for my mom to come get me, I get myself
into the elevator and hold on to the metal bar on the way up to the fifth floor. Right as the elevator door opens I see the Gersons rushing down the hall in the opposite direction from me, so I make my way to the end of the hall where they were coming from, and I check a few doors, and the third door is where I find Ellen.

Even with half vision, from ten feet away, feeling like I’m still underwater, I can see she’s messed up. I ache all over, and I’m stiff as anything, and my whole head is pounding, with the center of the pound right in the middle of my right eye, even with the drops for pain, so it takes a while to get near Ellen’s bed.

Besides two IVs, one in each arm, there’s a tube that goes from under the covers to a bag with what I’m sure is pee in it. She has a bandage on her left cheek, a big blue tube in her mouth that looks like a sicko accordion straw designed to choke you to death, and another tube that’s attached to her somewhere, only I can’t tell where because it disappears under the hospital blanket and sheets. She’s asleep, I guess, only I’m worried she’s in a coma. How do you know the difference, anyway?

“You look like shit,” I tell her. She turns her head the littlest bit. “I threw up on you.” She opens her eyes, and for a second I think she sees me, but then she closes them again. I hear this slow whooshing sound, but I can’t tell which machine it’s coming from.

“Hey,” a male nurse says, walking in. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Ellen is really still now. The whooshing keeps going, though.

“You need to leave,” this nurse says. He’s got hair the same color as mine. “What floor did you come from?”

“I killed Cameron Polk,” I whisper to Ellen.

Nothing.

I’m sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for my parents to come get me. The hospital doesn’t let you walk out. They make you wheel out. I’m thinking about how stupid that is and trying to block the screaming, stopped, out of my head, when my dad walks in.

“Hi,” I say.

My heel starts uncontrollably tapping the footrest of the wheelchair.

“Anna,” my dad says, and the next thing I know, he’s kneeling and hugging me hard, careful not to touch my right eye.

“Is the Honda totaled?” I ask.

“I don’t care about the car,” he answers, which is a complete lie and really nice of him to say. Especially because he hugs me tighter when he says it, even though it’s hard to hug when one person’s in a wheelchair and when you can see that her heel is clattering like a mini jackhammer.

Driving home, it’s mostly my father who talks. My mom lets me sit up front in the Audi and stays quiet.

“Jack is …” My dad stops and clears his throat. “Jack’s not doing well,” he tells me. I try to picture my brother. It’s hard, for some reason. “He’s pretty broken up.” My mother’s hand finds my shoulder and rests there. I look out the window and wonder how long she’s going to keep it there, warm and light, and notice how the shield over my eye itches me around the edges.

“Was it my fault?” I ask. My father doesn’t answer right away.
He turns left on Pelham, taking the long way home. “Was it my fault?” I ask again. “The accident?”

“She was on your side of the street,” my father says. She was? “Were you speeding?”

I shake my head. He makes a left onto Ladyshire. And then I figure out what he’s doing. He’s avoiding Ocean Road. He’s avoiding where it happened.

“Were you drunk?”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“What do you mean, you don’t think so?”

I feel black fuzz start to mix with the ache behind my eye, and I try to stay clear.

“I had two shots of Jack Daniel’s a long time before I drove,” I say, waiting for the yelling. “Two or three hours before.”

“Your blood-alcohol level was under the legal limit.” My father’s not raising his voice. He doesn’t mention anything about the fact that I shouldn’t have been drinking at all. “Were you speeding?” he asks again.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “I was about to pull over for Ellen. We thought she might be sick.”

“Her blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit,” my father informs me.

I’m not surprised. Everybody’s quiet for a while. And I still need to know for sure.

“So.” I’m kind of shaking again. My fingers are quivering. “Was it my fault?”

“No.” My mother’s hand tightens on my shoulder before my dad can answer. “She was in your lane.”

When we come around the curve in our street, so that I can see my house, there’s a figure kneeling on the grass. As we get closer and pull into the driveway I can see that it’s Jack.

“What’s he doing?” my mother asks. I look out the window with my one good eye, and Jack glances up with his two.

He’s picking leaves off the lawn.

WHEN WE WERE LITTLE, WE GOT ALONG REALLY WELL. ESPECIALLY
at the beach. Every day of our two-week summer vacation at Commons End we would play in the surf, facing the choppy green expanse for hours. Our parents would be lying on the shoreline, under the shade of two umbrellas, covered with sunblock, broad-brimmed hats, and wraparound sunglasses. They’d be reading in low-slung chairs, legs outstretched, bottoms of their feet encrusted with wet sand.

My brother and I would locate ourselves exactly in the path of the breakers, giddy with the challenge of negotiating those endless waves. We’d dive into a curl and pop up and out the other side, braced for the next. We’d shoot our bodies vertically over a crest, letting the edge of it slap hard at our necks. Lie on our backs, feet forward, bobbing toward the sky
with a slow-moving swell. Duck low and deep when our timing was off on a rough rogue, holding our breath beneath the frenzy, desperately waiting for it to pass over. Bodysurf until our bellies scraped sand, then fight the tide to get back in. Wipe out every now and then, the ocean flinging us underwater into a spinning knot of suffocating, airless panic. Bump and slip and hurl ourselves into each other’s bony arms and legs. And then, dozens and dozens of waves later, with blocked ears, salty, snotty upper lips, and burning eyes, Jack would look at me and say, “I’m going to stop the ocean.”

He’d face the surf, plant his feet wide, all lean limbs and spiky hair and shiny skin. “Watch.” He’d raise his arms, palms flat forward, a wave bearing down on us. “Stop!” he’d yell in his deepest voice. “I command you to stop!”

And for a second I’d think he could do it. I’d think the wave would freeze in its curl, cartoonlike in its obedience to my brother’s power. But then it would be on us, tumbling our bodies under its smack, daring us to find our legs again.

“Stop!” he’d order the second one, arms out, like a traffic cop. “Stop! You will stop now!” But that one wouldn’t stop either, and then, hurrying before the next hit, he’d pull at my shoulder, lining me up right next to him. “Anna,” he’d say. “You’ve got to help.” So I’d plant my feet wide, just like his, and throw out my palms, and I’d shout at the next wave, “Stop! Stop!”