“Try to stay still, Jenna.” Gary’s voice reminds me I am not on the bench at a hockey game. I am here, stuck inside this tube. Stuck inside my body.
A tear rolls down my face, but secretly I’m glad. Even if it’s pain, it’s wonderful anguish. I am, simply, a girl who loves a boy. A boy who will never know, since Julian moved away in middle school. But, the point is, all of this longing is so strong and, in some way, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever felt.
Right now, in this electric cage, I let my mind ride the waves of sedatives. The song shifts, and I’m floating again. Flying over a lush field. The grass under me looks spongy and fresh and so real that it makes me want to walk on it. Want to feel it spring up under my bare feet.
“Hold still, hon. Just a few minutes more. You’re doing great.”
I hold still. A breeze blows my hair back, which I know is impossible, but it still feels so real. And I’ve got that voice hovering next to me again, a small breath in my ear, like how I saw Julian’s breath that day on the bench. “It’s so easy,” the voice says. Only the e part is stretched so it sounds like eeeeasy.
A strand of hair comes loose and tickles my cheek. I wish I could move it. I try not to think about it, try not to obsess, but it’s killing me. Then it’s blown back, off my face. “You’re okay now. It’s all done,” Jennifer tells me.
“All done,” Gary says. “Be right there.”
And, just like that, I have to prepare myself for reentry. Into the harsh light of the room. Into the harsh vibe of this life. I leave that other version of me, the one that could move freely and easily, in that MRI tube. And I wonder if I could have been that girl all along, if only Dr. Jacoby hadn’t screwed up.
Two
Looking back on it now, I feel pretty stupid for not figuring any of it out way earlier. It was my own version of believing in Santa—I was told the story so often that I never thought to question it. (We didn’t have to deal with the Santa fallout; I’m Jewish. Mom used to go on and on about how proud she was that they never lied to us, as if the worst crime ever perpetrated on a kid was the invention of a benevolent old dude in a red suit who distributes presents. It isn’t.)
Dr. Jacoby—or Dr. Jerkoby, as Ben refers to him when we discuss the subject—is probably a good guy. He had a really strong history leading up to my delivery. He’s a Harvard Medical School graduate who did his OB/GYN residency at Johns Hopkins. From what I could find online, there were no complaints filed against him. No lawsuits. Very small percentage of C-sections. I’m sure his kids and grandkids love him. He probably volunteers at his church, or cleans stretches of the woods so that animals don’t choke on litter strewn by inconsiderate campers. Maybe he builds houses for Habitat for Humanity or serves soup to the homeless.
He may do a hundred million nice things, but nothing he does now will make up for the day he delivered me.
Because the thing is, I wasn’t supposed to be like this. I wasn’t supposed to have cerebral palsy. That day, something he did caused it.
But I didn’t realize that until this past summer.
Ben and I were taking an SAT study course—his idea—and we were in the midst of a vocabulary practice test. I came to a fill-in-the-blank question: “The doctor was accused of…so they settled the claim in court.”
My eyes danced over the choices. The root of all of the words was mal, as in bad. Maleficent, malevolence, malfeasance, malignancy, maliciousness. Maleficent was the bad fairy in the movie, and that word in particular meant mischievous. I knew the answer wasn’t maleficent, because a doctor wouldn’t be evil or mischievous. The other options—malevolence, malignancy, maliciousness—weren’t the right ones, either.
But a doctor could be blameworthy. As in, “The doctor was accused of malfeasance…”
I started to sweat even though it was freezing in the classroom, my eyes locked on the word malfeasance. I bubbled the answer, so sure of my response, but that word stuck with me. That sentence. A doctor could be accused of malfeasance and settle. The combination of the words, the phrasing, made my mind race.
And everything around me became suspended in time. The air. The sounds of pencils scratching and my classmates breathing. My own breath caught in my chest. Suddenly, I remembered why the phrase sounded so familiar.
The other time I’d heard it, I was six, and we were visiting my Aunt Flora in Florida. Even back then I was obsessed with language and with words. Mom said it was like I inhaled them.
Aunt Flora took us to see these wild parrots that had been released by their owners and had all found each other, forming a parrot community. There were some other little kids there, and we were all being so careful not to spook the beautiful birds. But then I moved and my crutch made a sound, and the birds flew away.
A sour-faced little kid said, “You chased them away with your silver thing.”
“Crutch,” I told him. “It’s called a crutch.”
The kid didn’t seem impressed by the new word I just gave him. “How did you get like that? What’s wrong with you?”
In my mind, it was a ridiculous question. I was born this way, just like he was born short and with weird spiky hair, and I told him as much. I saw my Aunt Flora and my mom exchange a look, and they took us back to Aunt Flora’s.
That night, I had trouble sleeping. It’s not like no one had ever asked me that question before. But this time it sort of got inside me. After tossing and turning for a while, I gave up on sleep, and I snuck into the hallway to listen to the adults.
They were sitting at the kitchen table, and Mom was drinking red wine. She looked really sad.
Aunt Flora was holding her hands and said, “You’re doing fine. She’s doing fine. Look at her, I mean…she’s so smart and so pretty and so confident.”
“I know. She is. I just can’t help but think…”
“Look, Steve got enough money for her settlement. For the…what did the judge call it?”
“Medical malfeasance.” Mom took a sip of wine. Put the glass back on the table. I could see from my perch that Mom was crying and Aunt Flora was rubbing her back.
Eric found me, put his finger over his lip, and walked me back to bed.
“Mom’s crying,” I told him.
“Yeah. She always does when Dad doesn’t come with us for these vacations.” It seemed like a big brother lie to make me feel better; I had a sense the entire thing was about me, even if I couldn’t understand why. Medical malfeasance. I stored those toxic little words away for later, but forgot about them.
Back in the SAT classroom, I put those words together: malfeasance, settlement. As smart as I am, I’d never considered that when I was born, something maybe happened to make me like this.