I’ve been in the hospital eight days when I’m healthy enough for my spinal fusion. It’s almost Thanksgiving now, and though I’ve been too nauseous from the medicine to eat anything but hunks of bread, I’m suddenly starving. A gob of drool slides out the side of my mouth when I look at the gingerbread cake on the cover of my mom’s Southern Living and my chest flutters with thoughts of fresh eggs, vegetables from my daddy’s garden, the heat of a 400-degree oven, and home. My daddy smiles at me like he’s reading my mind. A nurse appears mysteriously at my bedside and wipes the saliva off my chin; the anesthesiologist and the doctor follow.
They talk to my parents while I think about slick, leathery Honey Baked Hams and cookie batter. They draw on my hip in ballpoint pen where they’re going to borrow some bone to stabilize the repair in my neck and describe the little wire they’re going to use to keep it all together. I’ll let them do anything as long as I get to go home. I can hardly hear them talking over the phantom smells of my kitchen.
“Ruthie Lindsey. November 10, 9:42 a.m.”
The nurse announces the date and time. My mother’s lips graze mine and I start to wilt into the pillow. She’s nervous but my daddy stays calm. He sits in his favorite waiting room chair while they operate.
* * *
A nurse sits down next to him a few hours later. The procedure is finally over.
“I don’t know who you are but your daughter must be somebody special, somebody must really want her here. Her neck popped back into position perfectly when they lifted her onto the table. I’ve never seen anything like it. We thought we’d need to screw her into a halo brace, but she’ll be fine with a traditional one that she can take off in the shower. The bone fusion went wonderfully. Mr. Lindsey, your daughter will be going home soon.”
He just smiles, like he knew this would happen all along.
I wake up woozy but entirely myself. My mom cries, crazy from sleep deprivation and relief. My daddy sits next to the bed and holds my hand.
“God loves you, Daddy loves you.”
Weeks later, I walk through the sliding doors of the hospital, up a giant neck brace and lots of wire in my neck, down a spleen, and back into my life again.
* * *
Sometimes when something bad happens, it’s easier to pretend that it didn’t.
My daddy cooks his famous barbecue chicken the night I come home.
“Is it the best chicken ever? The best you’ve ever had?” he asks us, just the way he always does.
My mom makes Sister Schubert’s yeast rolls and a bowl of chocolate-chip cookie dough that we eat raw, sticking our spoons right into the sweet muck of it and looking for spiny clusters of pecan. Nobody misses a beat. We curl little ribbon tails for our Christmas presents and listen to Bing Crosby and laugh; we stick to the script that we know. We have lots to say about the accident but no energy or desire to say it. We bury the brokenness and the trauma under an eight-foot spruce tree in the corner. We try to forget—I try hardest of all. We don’t get to choose the things that haunt us, the memories that linger, the uninvited feelings that follow us around. We may not want to see them, but eventually they make us look.
I am sitting on the wobbly cream-colored toilet upstairs underneath a Glade PlugIn that smells like cinnamon chewing gum. I’ve been home just two days. My mom is making baked beans in the kitchen and Oprah is preaching truth on the living room TV. My daddy is sunk into his chair reading a book as thick as birthday cake about the Cold War. I run the faucet to make sure nobody will hear me and look down at my bruised belly, throbbing away like the diaphragm of a speaker, bounce, bounce, bounce. I haven’t crapped in twenty-three days. The painkillers slowed everything down and my body kept a tight grip on every ounce of nutrition it could gather in the hospital. Every little stitch and suture on my body is being undone from the pain and the pressure. I hug my knees and a little drop of sweat smacks onto the poodle hair of the bath mat. Everything starts to tremble.
Keep it together. Calm down. You’re fine.
I think-pray, God, Jesus, please!
I stick my fingernails into my skinny white birch-log legs and leave little half-moon divots behind.
The muscles in my legs seize up, a burning pitches through my pelvis, and I feel myself screaming, just like I did when the bright lights came at me on the road. My panties rip between my knees and I black out. My mom busts through the door and catches me just before my head hits the edge of the tub.
When I come back into the room, she is holding me.
“We have to go back to the hospital, baby,” she whispers.
The word hospital awakens something in me and I’m part animal. I thrash on the floor and kick against the vanity until the scabs left over from the staples in my stomach begin to weep. I beg her not to take me back.
“Please, Mom! No!”
“Ru, we need to go.”
She loads me into the car while I scream and she drives too fast to the ER in Zachary. I catch myself in the rearview mirror, a crazy-eyed skeleton girl.
* * *
The nurses give me Xanax and an enema and I tell them all about the time I got diarrhea after going down the waterslide at Blue Bayou. I laugh when the doctor sticks his thumb into my butt and my mom smiles at me through her tears. Just a few hours ago, she was driving me along the same road that almost killed me, trying not to relive every moment of the past month while I made sad coyote sounds in the back seat.
I go home the next morning with stool softeners and nobody says a word about what happened the night before. I shuffle around the house in my neck brace with my butt on fire. We don’t talk about the way my mother felt brokenhearted seeing me that way the day before, or the bruises on my arms that are just starting to reveal themselves from where the nurses restrained me. We don’t talk about the skeleton girl I saw in the car mirror. It is hard to look back, and we don’t want to. Instead, we put Home Alone in the VCR and string lights on the tree and let the holidays pass by us, let springtime pass by us. By the end of April, I get my brace off and it’s like the accident never happened at all. I graduate on time and get into college.
When they found me slumped over the steering wheel the night of the wreck, there wasn’t even a scratch on my skin. I looked pretty and calm, I didn’t look like I needed saving but I felt it. I still do.
5 Itty-Bitty Fish
I do college exactly as I’m supposed to. I go to LSU, where everyone in my family goes, and I live with my old friend Susan from the little Christian school in Mississippi. Our room looks like the Ralph Lauren Home display at Dillard’s, like J.Crew exploded on a bedspread, and we have a mini refrigerator filled with Diet Dr Peppers and SlimFast. The scented candle we light when we study makes the whole floor smell like lily of the valley. We join the sororities that Southern girls are supposed to join and throw parties with fraternities attended by the Southern boys we are supposed to marry. We are a beautiful school of prom queens and cheerleading captains all swimming the same current our parents and older siblings did, toward marriage at twenty and graduate school at twenty-two and three children by thirty. Everyone loves it here but I’m not sure. I feel like an itty-bitty fish swimming in the wrong direction. Belonging here is drinking too much and having sex and getting bikini waxes. Belonging here is crash dieting, size twenty-six pants, and Cancún on spring break. Belonging here is impossible for me. The other kids party, they get drunk and joyfully lose control. I starve myself because food is the only thing I can control. I play along when I can, I smile big and put gloss on my lips, but I feel an emptiness. There is nothing here that can fill me up but the sugar-free frozen yogurt we all eat to stay skinny.