* * *
My mom comes into the room later that night with Laura. They’re carrying Walmart bags and when I attempt to smile at them despite the tube down my throat, their faces crumple into the most beautiful ugliness I’ve ever seen. Laura’s little hummingbird body bounces up and down and she grabs onto my mom’s arm. My mom has been sleeping at the hospital with me. They don’t have any cots, so she’s been living in the waiting room with other sad strangers. Webs of redness cover the whites of her eyes and the supple skin of her cheeks has gone chalk-dry from too much AC. She’s undone. She hasn’t been undone like this since the day she gave birth to me in a room just like this one.
“Baby, RuRu, Mommy’s here.”
I attempt another smile for her when she comes closer and she nearly collapses from the joy of it. She has been waiting for me, brushing my hair, singing me songs, and wishing she could travel with me into the jungly space between life and death. Over and over, she traces my face from the bottom of my chin to my forehead and then ski-jumps off the tip of my nose. I bat my gummy lids at her and she belly-laughs. It’s like she’s just become a mother all over again.
I want to speak to her but I can’t, I can’t make any sounds with the tube down my throat. I move my fingers a little, just below the restraint, and the motion startles both of us. I uncurl my pointer finger and write I love you on the bed with the tip in an invisible ink only she can read. My mom loves Jesus but she was angry at God for a long time, after cancer took her mama when she was just thirteen years old. As she kisses my hands and watches me drift back into sleep, she feels completely loved by him.
When something happens in St. Francisville, people show up. The accident doesn’t just happen to me and to my family—it happens to everyone. The entire parish, all colors and classes, all the different people, waits to see me two at a time, loosely corralled by side tables and rows of plastic chairs. They drain the vending machines of Mountain Dew, pass out tins of oatmeal cookies, and fall asleep upright, heads leaning into each other when the caffeine wears off. People who have never spoken before become friends, they share newspapers and snacks, they take care of each other while they take care of me. The West Feliciana High mathematics department comes to visit, Lile’s ex-girlfriends, the Ladies in Pearls, Jamise and the Pams, the people from the Episcopal church, the Catholic church, and Frannie’s all-day-long church in Hardwood, they all come, even Chuncky, the toughest girl in school, who loves to pick on me and is so imposing that she’s never, ever corrected for spelling her own nickname wrong. She makes sure to tell my mom that she’s my very best friend, but apparently everyone says that. Still-hot suppers are delivered to my mom nightly in Tupperware steamed all the way up the sides and she tells me there have never been more competing casseroles in one place.
“You are so loved,” she says to me, and I hope she knows that she’s loved too. She has never been very good at receiving that truth.
My daddy is a celebrity here, so I always know when he arrives; it is the best part of my day. Former students and neighbors mob him when he steps off the elevator, inundating him with hopeful stories, giving him a meal for the Deepfreeze, asking him if there’s anything, anything at all they can do to help. He’s the man who taught most of them how to show up, the man who at some point showed up for them, for their families. He winds his way out of conversation as politely as he can and turns up the long hallway to my room. He is finally alone with the anticipation of seeing me. His slippery-soled work shoes click and clack on the tile, quicker and louder the closer he gets. Once he crosses the threshold, it’s a homecoming for both of us. He holds my hand in his and says, “Pat, pat. Rub, rub. God loves you, Daddy loves you,” over and over again and I almost forget that I’m not five years old and beside him in his big bed. I feel peaceful here, held, enveloped by God’s love and minded by his angels. My daddy comes often but he can never stay long; sitting next to me as I sit next to death, quiet and still, is too much for him. He leaves so I don’t have to see him upset.
Hospital time moves at its own erratic-stopwatch pace, tick-tick-ticks between episodes and crises and appointments and surgeries and shifts and dosages. The protocols and routines stretch time in the strangest way and I begin to forget about things outside the hospital, the school assignments I was supposed to turn in, brushing my teeth. They take me off life support; I retch and gag as the thick tube crawls out of places I didn’t know I had. My lung collapses again and they put my chest tube back in. It goes straight into my side and I feel every single fiber as it moves through me. They poke my stomach with needles full of blood thinners that leave pinkish-brown bruises behind; they wait and they monitor. They empty the pee bag, I fill it again. I watch it all lazily, one foot outside my own body on a slow, sleepy opiate trip from a forest of gifted flowers: fluffy carnations and orange lilies shaped like stars, an orchid that I will let die. Even with my mom beside me, the hospital can be a lonely place and sometimes at night when the halls are quiet, I worry that life will never go back to normal.
The cheerleaders come to see me; a blue-and-white oasis of tracksuits and too much blush glows against the ashy walls of the hospital. I can’t see them, the doctors are busy fiddling with my chest tube, but they find my mom in the waiting room and surround her with their blueness. They’re on the way to a football game in another town but they have stopped by to see me. I should be on the bus with them, cheeks covered in glitter, big bow on the top of my head. They tell my mom with the mad conviction all cheerleaders are made of that they know I can get better. Their heads nod, their ponytails flick up and down, their little hands clap reflexively. She visits with them for a bit and they brighten up the sterile tan waiting room with their colorful uniforms.
“Miss Marsha, make sure you watch the nine o’clock news,” one of them says on the way out the door.
My mom smiles and squeezes her hand. I should be with them, but instead, I am in a bed with a half-shaved head and atrophied legs.
* * *
“And Ruthie Lindsey, a young local girl…”
An hour later, I wake up to the sound of my name. My mom is sitting by my shoulder, smiling at the little television in the corner. Our big-haired local news lady is broadcasting live on the scene from the end zone. The one-man technical team struggles against the noise and the lights and the fury of Friday night football and keeps losing the poor news broadcaster in the crowd. She is wearing a bright blue ribbon in the corner of her blazer, right above her heart. She points to it with a seventeen-tooth grin and explains that it is for me. Then she tells a story I feel like I’m hearing for the first time.
“She had a five percent chance of survival and a one percent chance of walking.…”
I take an inventory of my broken bones and missing pieces as she lists them.
The camera slowly pans around the stands and I notice everybody is wearing a blue ribbon; people from my school and this school and other schools, people I know well and people I will never meet. They’re saying my name, “Ru-thie, Ru-thie, Ru-thie.”
On the opposite edge of the field, I see the cheerleaders. They are clinging to the edges of a big bust-through that says ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE. THIS ONE’S FOR YOU, RUTHIE. The camera zooms in as a stampede of testosterone rips through it and heads straight for the little news lady, engulfing her. Jerome waves from the field and blows me a kiss. I catch it even though he can’t see me. I laugh out loud for the first time and it wakes me, the happy music bounces off the ceiling and for a moment, I’m just a teenager. A Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine commercial steals the moment away from me and as the TV lasagna releases big puffs of steam, I know that I need to get back there, to those people.