Wrecked (18 page)

“Just notice,” I hear Frances tell me, and I realize I’ve closed my eyes. I keep them closed and keep noticing. It’s like a movie on fast forward. Drinking and a pyramid of beer cans and someone wearing a bright pink jean jacket and Ellen walking me around the second floor, keeping everything under control.
Buzz, buzz. Thrum, thrum
.

“Take a breath,” Frances says, and the buzzing stops, and I open my eyes and breathe in. “Let it go,” Frances tells me, so I let the air out. She waits a second, and then she asks, “What’s happening now?”

“I’m remembering the party,” I say. “I got really drunk, and Ellen took care of me.”

“Go with that,” Frances says, and she turns on the box again.

• • •

There’s Seth at the pool table, and then the green skin of the pool table turns into grass, and on the grass are small brown leaves, and my dad is screaming at me on the lawn, and then the lawn becomes the kitchen, and he’s screaming at me in the kitchen, and behind him the laptop on the kitchen table shows the poker game, and the green of the poker table on the screen turns into our lawn, and our green lawn becomes the pool table in Wayne’s basement, and I’m trying hard to sink the eight ball to impress Seth.

“Take a deep breath,” Frances says, and the buzzing stops, and I breathe in and open my eyes, and she tells me to let it go and asks what’s happening now.

“Different stuff,” I tell her. Because I can’t remember all of it. “I was angry at my father. We had a fight that night, and then I was playing pool. That was right before we left.”

“Go with that.”

I’m thinking how annoyed I’m going to get with “Go with that,” but then I forget about it, and there’s me and Ellen across from each other at the pool table, and Ellen saying something about how I’d rather be bitching about my father than be here, and then we’re in the Honda, and I’m worrying she’s going to throw up in the front seat and if she does, my dad will find out and be pissed off, and I’m going to pull over, even though she says I don’t need to, and she leans down to do something to the radio.

• • •

“Deep breath,” Frances reminds me, which is good, because it’s weird how you can forget to breathe. “And let it go.” She waits. “What’s happening now?”

“I don’t know,” I say. My voice is all shaky, and I’m breathing heavy. “We’ve been hit.” I huddle into the pillow in my lap and grip the buzzers.

My body’s freaking out, and it’s hard to catch my breath, and I’m having a heart attack, and there’s sirens and Ellen’s ponytail like glass in my eye and the smell of new plastic, and the earth dangling above, and “Hooow looong, hoow loong, how long … to sing this sooong?” and I feel Frances hand me a tissue box, but she keeps the buzzing going, and I open my eyes with it all happening so that I can wipe the tears with a tissue, and I just feel scared and ashamed and out of control, and I uncross my legs, knocking away the pillow, and I pull my knees up to my chin and keep hold of the tissues and wipe my eyes, and Frances goes, “Just notice, it’s old stuff going by, just notice,” so I try to keep noticing, and I get so tired, really, really tired, and then I’m waking up in the hospital bed, and my mother is there in her pajamas and raincoat, and she’s telling me I’m okay, and then I’m in the car with my parents, and my father’s saying, “She was in your lane, it wasn’t your fault, she was in your lane,” and then I’m in the hall at school, and Lisa is saying, “It was a cinder block,” only I know it was a tree branch, and it was Cameron who swerved, not me, and then I see Cameron’s silky hair and smoky skin, and I’m so sad I can hardly stand it.

Frances turns off the buzzing, and I take a huge breath and let it go, and I’m still half crying, and I try to explain, but it’s hard.
“It wasn’t me,” I say. “I mean, I was driving, but it was Cameron out of control, not me. She lost control of her car. And it was out of control. I mean, the accident was an out-of-control thing, and I was out of control, but that’s just because sometimes things can’t be in your control, you know? And it’s just really, really sad.”

It’s like colors and shapes of sadness and out-of-controlness, and I’m seeing them outside of me and feeling them inside of me, thinking how sad it is sometimes, things can be scary and sad, and I’m just watching it, and I open my eyes and let go of the buzzers.

“So many bad things can happen,” I tell Frances. “There’s nothing you can do about it sometimes. It’s just the way things are.”

She nods. “Go with that.”

I’m thinking again how irritating it is that Frances keeps repeating practically the exact same thing to me, and then I have this memory of my father, enraged, saying, “Why are you repeating the same incorrect information?” And I get so mad, and I think about the words of the song in the car repeating over and over and over, “Hooow looong, hoow loong …” and I’m remembering when my father said, “Stop saying you’re sorry,” and I think,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
and then that cop is going, “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay,” and then my body feels really heavy.

When Frances stops me and goes through her routine, I shrug. “I don’t know,” I say. “My bones feel like they weigh
a lot, and I keep thinking about things with my father, and I’m sort of mad at him.”

“When you think about the original incident,” Frances says, “what comes up now?” I think of the image we started with. It’s changed.

“The key chain is in the palm of my hand, and it’s glowing really bright,” I say.

She turns on the buzzers.

The key chain glows brighter and brighter, and it’s warm and comforting, and the light of it shimmers, filling my hand with brilliant whiteness, and then the whiteness begins to expand and to hollow until it’s a steering wheel made of milky white light, and Fm gripping it and driving, and Ellen’s sitting next to me, her brown hair dancing in and out of the window.

“Wow,” I go, before Frances can even say anything.

“Take a—” she goes, but I interrupt her.

“I know, I know.” I take a deep breath and let it out, and I don’t wait for “What’s happening now?”

“I’m driving with Ellen and the steering wheel is this white light, and it feels okay.”

Guess what Frances says?

We’re driving in the sun, and it’s this long, windy road, with the ocean along one side, sparkling and calm and clear, and even though I have this little knot in my stomach, mostly my body feels warm and relaxed, with the bright steering wheel solid and smooth in my hands.

• • •

I open my eyes. “You can turn it off,” I tell Frances. She does. “I feel good,” I say. “I really do. It’s this pretty, curvy road, and I’m just driving with Ellen next to me, and it’s totally fine.”

“So on a scale of zero to ten, how disturbing is the image now?”

“A zero,” I say.

Frances smiles. Her fang is sort of cute. “Do the words ‘I am in control’ still fit? Or is there another positive belief that fits better?”

“Do they fit with me in general?” I ask. “Or with the accident?”

“With the accident,” Frances says.

“I guess. I think so.”

“Think of the original incident and the words ‘I am in control.’ On a scale of one to seven, one being false and seven being true, how true do those words feel to you now?”

I think of the original picture. It’s the earth key chain, only now it’s dangling from the ignition while I’m driving on that windy road with Ellen and the sun and the ocean and everything feeling okay.

“Maybe it’s not ‘I’m in control.’” I change my mind. “Because something could happen out of my control.”

Frances waits.

“Maybe it’s more like ‘I can be okay driving.’”

“All right,” Frances says. “So I want you to pair your image with the words ‘I can be okay driving.’”

She turns on the buzzers, and I go with it, and we’re just driving and driving, and the earth key chain is swinging from the ignition, and it’s all okay. Frances turns off the equipment.

• • •

“It still feels good,” I tell her. “Still on that road. It’s still sunny and pretty, and everything’s okay.”

“Close your eyes,” Frances tells me. “Bring up the accident and the words ‘I can be okay driving,’ and mentally scan your body. From tip to toe. And just let me know if you feel anything.”

So I do that, and mostly I feel calm, relaxed. “I feel fine,” I tell her. “Except my stomach hurts a little bit.”

“Go with that.” She turns the buzzers on. Which surprises me because I thought we were done.

“My stomach hurts a little more,” I tell her after a while. “But I still feel pretty good about the whole thing.”

Frances glances at her digital clock on the windowsill and then has me imagine my safe place. I’m tired and time is almost up, so we don’t do a lot more buzzing. Just enough to let me relax for a few minutes at that magical Caribbean sea with the dazzling turquoise water.

MY MOM DROPS ME OFF AT ELLEN’S.

“Where is she?” I ask Mrs. Gerson at their front door.

“In her room,” Mrs. Gerson goes. She’s smoking a cigarette.

“I thought you stopped,” I say, stepping inside. Like, two years ago.

She cups her free hand around the back of my head. “I thought so too.” Then she pulls me in a little, holding the cigarette out with her other hand so that smoke won’t drift into my face. “See what you can do,” she whispers. “She won’t let me near.”

I find Ellen in her downstairs bathroom, sitting on the lowered toilet seat. All she’s wearing is her thick brown cable-knit sweater and her panties. Blue cotton bikini. She’s holding a plastic razor in one hand and shaving cream in the other, and the tub is running, and she’s crying.

It’s bad. I didn’t know it would be so bad. Her left leg from the knee down is skinnier than anything you’ve ever seen. It’s about half the size of her right leg, and it’s covered in dandruffy skin and dark, wiry hair. On the bony part of her shin a red spot, a sore about the size of a quarter, glares up from underneath the hair.

“I bet you didn’t know pubic hair grew on legs,” Ellen goes. It doesn’t exactly look like pubic hair. But it’s completely disgusting anyway.

“I thought you were supposed to get a shorter cast today,” I say.

“They decided on that thing instead,” Ellen says. “That thing” is a plastic and Velcro ski-boot-looking contraption lying on the back of the toilet. “Because it won’t rub my leg as much as plaster, and I can take it off to bathe or whatever.”

“Okay, look,” I say. I lean down and take the razor and the shaving cream from her. I dip a washcloth under the running water and wipe it over her leg from the knee down. I get it as wet as I can without making a mess. Then I squirt shaving cream into her hand. “Start at your knee,” I tell her, “and work your way down. Keep away from the sore.” She obeys, still crying, while I fold a towel on the floor and then kneel on it. “Do you want to shave, or do you want me to?”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m afraid I’ll cut you if I do it,” I warn her.

“I don’t care,” she says again.

“Slide down to the edge,” I tell her. She leans hard on my shoulder to maneuver her butt to the edge of the toilet seat. She winces, from her chest tube spot and from her ribs, and I wait until the
wince is done. Then we stretch her leg over and across the tub until we can get her heel anchored on the built-in soap dish. I’m being as careful as possible because I have the definite feeling she’s not even supposed to have “that thing” off for vanity reasons. Not that I blame her. “Here.” I hand her the razor. She stops crying and starts shaving. One neat row, edged in dirty lines of hair-tinged shaving cream. Then another. After each one I pluck the razor from her fingers and hold it under the tub tap to clean it off.

“Your mom’s smoking,” I tell her.

“I know,” she goes. “I smelled it.”

I hand back the razor. “So. What did the doctor say?”

She starts another row. You can hear the hairs getting sliced off. That’s how thick they are.
Snick, snick
. “The dicked-her?”

“Ellen!”

“I hate him,” she says. “He didn’t warn me about this. All he said—once—once, he said, Your leg will have lost a little muscle tone.’”

“How long do you wear the ski boot?”
Snick, snick
.

“He said six weeks,” she tells me. Except for the round sore, ringed with a thatch of hair, her lower leg is fully shaved. The naked skin is pale and veined and scaly. “But now I don’t believe anything he says. Maybe it’ll be months. Years even.” She slowly scoots herself back onto the toilet seat. I reach for the Velcro and plastic thing.

“Not yet,” she goes. “I took the dressing off” She means off the sore, I guess. “I wanted to see everything. I’ve got to redo it.”

I bring her gauze and medical tape and Neosporin and let her deal with the shiny spot on her shin and then with the boot, while I mop up stray globs of shaving cream and rinse out the
tub. When I’m done, I wipe everything down with the towel I was kneeling on. I throw the towel in the laundry hamper and let Ellen lean hard on me while she half walks, half hops to her room. She collapses on the bed, winces, holds really still for a second, and then breathes out slow.

“So guess what,” I finally say.

“What?”

“I think I can drive now.”

She gives me a glimmer of a smile. “Did you drive here?”

“No. I wanted you in the car with me the first time. If …” I stare at the plastic and Velcro. At how shriveled her leg is underneath. And I get scared a little. I can feel it in my stomach, flipping over. “If you’d be okay with that.”

“Let’s go to Top Hats,” she says.

“Now?” I ask.

“You said you could drive,” she tells me. “So, can you?”

“I swear,” I tell her. “But my mom dropped me off here. I don’t have the car.”

“You can drive mine!” Ellen’s mother yells from somewhere in the house.

“Were you listening to us this whole time?” Ellen shouts.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” her mother shouts back.

There’s this long, long silence.

“I can smell your disgusting cigarette!” Ellen finally calls.

“Do you want my keys or not?”

It’s not a windy road with the ocean on one side and warm sun making everything shimmer, and there’s no white light steering wheel. Instead it’s freezing, and Ellen’s not next to me.
She’s in the backseat, and it took us ten minutes, with her mother helping, just to get her into the car. Ellen’s not exactly happy, but I’m driving. I’m driving again, and I’m not feeling any sort of a heart attack coming on. Maybe I’m not in control of tree branches or cinder blocks, and maybe it’s not totally okay, because Cameron’s still dead and Ellen’s lower leg looks like a broom handle, but it’s okay enough. For now.