Rosebush Page 5

  Dr. Connolly looked like he might have played football in high school and still talked about it. He was tall with fading red hair and cheeks halfway to florid, like someone’s jovial but slightly inappropriate dad. “I’d say it’s a classic case of hit-and-run,” he said. “Like what happened between wife number three and me. She hit me for divorce, I started running!” He winked at Joe.

  Astonishingly, Joe didn’t wink back.

  According to Dr. Connolly, despite the broken rib, 103 thorn piercings, a concussion, a broken leg, and (hopefully temporary) paralysis, I was lucky. “You should have been dead,” he told me.

  He went on, enumerating all the things that could have been wrong with me but weren’t and hypothesizing that my paralysis was in part due to swelling on my spinal cord and partially psychological. The swelling of my limbs was a result of the drugs and would go down soon. “Long as you’re a strong brave girl and your luck keeps up,” he said, “you’ve got a good shot of coming out of this good as new. We should look for some improvement over the next few days. Feeling in the limbs is good. If you can feel your toes, well, then”—he laughed—“you’re doing better than me.”

  Hit-and-run? Should get better? Swollen limbs? It was too much to take in, too much to try to process, so I found myself staring down at the body that was mine but not mine. I had the sensation I sometimes got of seeing everything through someone else’s eyes, like watching the neighbors’ TV from across their yard. There was the white hospital gown with blue stars on it. My arms, covered in gashes, were at my side. My left wrist had clear tape holding down three IVs that went to a machine out of my range of vision. My right hand had a monitor of some kind taped to it, attached to a dozen rainbow-colored thin wires. Beneath the hospital gown I could see that I was wearing what looked like a diaper.

  A diaper. Oh my God. What if this was my future? It seemed silly, but that was the thing that got me crying again.

  My tear-blurred eyes moved to my mother. Through Dr. Connolly’s speech, especially as he got to the part about how I should ultimately be okay, the nerve at the edge of her left eye began to twitch. That meant she was struggling to keep the anger that was always fluttering just below her perfectly manicured surface away. As any one of the testimonial letters hanging on the wall of her office could tell you, she was an amazing and accomplished woman and had earned the reputation that she could get anyone “short of Hitler” elected. Her candidates described her as a “rock,” “unflappable,” and “the most reliable thing this side of the John Deere tractors my constituents are proud to manufacture right here in our town.”

  She showed Dr. Connolly and Loretta to the door and turned to face me. None of those letter writers would have recognized her then. Her picture-perfect smile was gone and her eyes blazed. “My God, Janie, what were you thinking? How dare you? How dare you do this to yourself? To me?”

  How dare I do it to her? To her? I felt even more like I was watching this from a great distance, like this was a play about someone else.

  She rifled through her purse and pulled out her silver monogrammed compact mirror. “Look,” she ordered, holding it right up in front of my face. “Look what you did.”

  I looked and another scream rose in my throat. The distance vanished. This was me. And I was horrifying.

  Half my face was swollen like a balloon. There was a bandage wrapped around my head, my hair was matted in knots, one of my eyes was half closed with a massive yellowish-purple bruise around it, and my lower lip was torn and twice its normal size. The left side of my face was covered in stripes of brown where thorns had ripped across my cheek. There was a bruise on my shoulder going up to my neck.

  Hot tears welled up again and I closed my eyes. I felt nauseous. The girl in the mirror was awful, disfigured. Disgusting. She couldn’t be me. She couldn’t.

  “Do you see?” my mother was in my face demanding. “Open your eyes and look, Jane!”

  I did, but I stared at her, not myself. Why was she doing this to me? Let her look if that’s what she wanted.

  “I think you look like a warrior after battle,” Annie said into the silent standoff between my mother and me. “I think it makes you look tough.”

  My mother whirled on her, taking the mirror. “It does no such thing. She looks horrible, like—”

  And like one of the summer storms we used to get in Illinois, she exploded suddenly from rumbling thunder into a torrential shower of tears.

  She buried her face in Joe’s shoulder and sobbed. “Quiet now, Rosie,” he said, patting her hair. “Jane is in enough pain.”

  At last, something that Joe and I could agree on. With his arm around her, he guided my mother into the bathroom next to my bed and shut the door.

  Hot tears ran down my cheeks. You might think that if you were paralyzed, at least you couldn’t feel pain. But it isn’t like that. You can’t move, but you can hurt. You can hurt more than you can imagine.

  Chapter 6

  Annie did what she always did when she was nervous—she started talking. “Kate and Langley were here earlier. The doctor said you’d be allowed to have visitors because it will help you recover.”

  Her words were like knife points pricking me. What could Kate and Langley have thought when they saw me? What would David think? I was horrible. A freak. I wanted my face back.

  “They were really nice. Kate made fairy wings for Marvin out of toilet paper.” Marvin was the Barbie doll that Annie had decided was actually a man trapped in a woman’s body. “And Langley showed me how to put on eye shadow, but Mom made me take it off. They woke you up before and took the breathing tube out, but you got scared, so they had to put you back under anesthesia. An induced coma, they called it. The doctor said your face was puffy from the sleeping medicine, but now that you are awake, it will go back to normal.”

  I was only half listening, still thinking about how I looked. I found myself getting angrier and angrier with my mother for not letting me get my eyelashes dyed the week before, when Langley and Kate did it, because then at least my eyes wouldn’t look like little pig eyes the way they did when I didn’t wear mascara. Angrier and angrier at her for not caring where I went, for not paying attention. She had time to pay attention to Joe, but for me she was too busy, I was too much work, too much—

  “I wore my best dress because I wanted to look nice when you opened your eyes.” She tugged at a thread on the corner of one of my blankets. “They said you might never, but I knew you would. I knew you wouldn’t leave us.”

  The sweet craziness of her wearing her special dress jolted me from my selfishness. Oh, little sister, I wanted to say. I’m sorry you have to go through this.

  She went on, pulling at the thread more deliberately. I couldn’t see her eyes, only her long dark eyelashes, made longer by the magnification of her glasses. “Mom was just scared, that’s why she acted all angry,” she said. From the time she could talk, which had happened when she was only fifteen months old, Annie had been our mother’s number-one fan. Even though she was only seven now, in some ways she was the most mature member of our family. “She didn’t mean to yell. She was so scared you were going to die and then when you lived, she just had too many feelings, and they kind of all came out at the same time. Because she loves you so much. You know how she does that.”

  There was no reason for me to argue with Annie. Let her keep an ideal image of our mother as long as she could. I blinked once.

  “And—” She paused, then rushed on. “I brought you something.”

  She went to the corner of the room and started digging around in the backpack she carried with her everywhere. Inside she had two books (in case she finished one), a fruit roll up, twenty dollars (five of them in quarters), a Swiss army knife, and an extra set of shoelaces. I’d never bothered to ask how she settled on those items.

  When she came back to the bed, she was holding a toy stuffed dog with a worn patch on his head and his right foot. It was technically mine, but I hadn’t seen it
or thought about it in years, not since we left Chicago at least.

  As though she could read my mind, Annie said, “I kept it. I sleep with it sometimes. I hope that’s okay.”

  I meant to blink once, but instead I blinked a lot of times because my eyes pricked with tears.

  Memories—memories I kept locked very far away—came flooding back now and I couldn’t stop them. Sitting with my father on the old rocking chair in his study, having him read me poetry. I must have been really young because I remember I could get my whole body into his lap. That’s how I picture us, both with our shaggy dark hair and pale skin. “Bastard children of the lusty Spanish sailors routed in the battle of the Spanish Armada and the kind Irish lasses who took them in” was how he described his ancestry, always with a twinkle in his blue, blue eyes. As much as Annie resembled our mother, I resembled our father, or at least I inherited his coloring and his wide-spaced eyes and strong chin and slightly too-big mouth. I don’t think I ever had the twinkle, though.

  I loved his study, the brightly colored rag rug on the scarred golden-planked floor, the way the white molding around the window was so thick with repainting that it had lost all detail, the bookshelves that covered every wall surface, the sheer yellow curtains that turned the light a buttery color where it slanted across the unruly piles of paper on his desk and landed in a pool right in front of us. It wasn’t grand—not like Joe’s house, where the moldings were pristine and the windows were tinted and the rugs were so deep they came up to your ankles and the books all had matching red-leather spines that have never been cracked—but it felt like home.

  I could sit there for hours listening to him read aloud to me, but what I loved most was when he read poetry, and in particular when he read the Robert Frost poem “Road Not Taken.”

  My father went from himself to a shadow in only three months. At first when the doctor said he was sick—“Some kind of muscle-wasting disease. We don’t know what it is”—it was hard to believe. He still looked like Dad, and sounded like him. But soon he began to change. It was like watching someone fade out of a photograph, each day becoming paler, smaller, washed out, more ephemeral, until only their outline and one trait—a nose, the way the shoulders slope—remained. And one day you looked at the photo and even that frail residue had vanished.

  The last time my father left the house, he was gone for hours. We were frantic—he barely had the strength to get himself into and out of the shower at that point, so the idea that he was somewhere, driving, made my mother crazy. But when we rushed into the garage after hearing the door open, he was getting out of the car, beaming. He was clearly weak, but he seemed better, more alive, than he’d been in weeks.

  “Where the hell have you been?” my mother demanded. Even then she had to yell at him.

  When he told her he’d been to the mall, she stared at him, aghast. “How could you have been so stupid? You’ll tire yourself out and—”

  “What? Get sick and die? Oh, Rosalind, my darling, that’s going to happen anyway.”

  He’d gone to a toy store to buy one of those stuffed animals with a voice chip in it that you give to people saying “Happy birthday” or “Merry Christmas.” This one was a dog with floppy ears, and he’d rigged it to record the whole of him reading “Road Not Taken.”

  “All you have to do, anytime you miss me,” he said, holding the dog out to me with a shaking hand, “is push his left foot and you’ll hear my voice.” He tried to push it, but by then his fingers were too weak, so I did it and we listened, together, to him reciting my favorite poem.

  It was our last shared moment. After that he went to the hospital. “I’ll come back good as new,” he said. “I won’t ever leave you, Janie girl, that I promise.”

  He never came back. He broke his promise. He disappeared forever. He left me alone and I didn’t want to be alone. I changed—everything changed after that. He’d been wrong, I saw. The road less traveled led to heartache and loneliness.

  I’d shoved the dog in the back of my closet after he died and forgotten about it, or tried to, but apparently Annie hadn’t. She was holding it toward me now. “I know maybe it’s not your favorite poem anymore but, well, I figured maybe it could still keep you company.”

  No, I wanted to say. Get it away from me. I can’t stand it. He lied. He knew he wasn’t coming back. He abandoned us and then Bonnie—

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  I couldn’t blink twice fast enough. NO!

  Annie nodded but slipped it in the bed next to me. If I could have, I would have pushed it away, but I couldn’t and now I was trapped. I tried to turn my face away from it but managed only to avert my eyes.

  “Please, Jane,” Annie said, standing at the side of the bed, her voice so soft and small sounding. “You have to get all better. You have to come home.”

  She smelled like Bonne Bell lip gloss and raspberry fruit leather. Behind her red-framed glasses her eyes were huge. She looked wise beyond her years and like a very scared little girl all at the same time. Fear and love and hope stared out at me. I had trouble swallowing. “Promise?” she squeaked.

  I blinked once. Yes.

  The bathroom door opened and my mother and Joe emerged. Her eyes were pink, but she’d washed her face and, of course, reapplied her lipstick.

  “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she said, coming to take my hand for the second time. How ironic that this was more than she’d touched me in months and I couldn’t even feel it. Her voice trembled. “I don’t know what came over me. I—we—have been so terrified. So afraid you wouldn’t wake up or when you did—” She broke off. “I couldn’t imagine losing you. And when the doctor said you would be okay, when you woke up, I guess I just—” She swallowed, dried her eyes on her sleeve. Her sleeve! “The pressure just exploded. I didn’t mean what I said. I know this was just an accident, that you didn’t—didn’t want this to happen. But the way things have been between us… And you sneaking off to a party…I—I didn’t behave well. I’m so very sorry. You understand, don’t you?”

  She began to sob again and Joe ducked into the bathroom, reappearing with a Kleenex. She took it with the hand she’d been using to hold mine and put the other one on his arm.

  I blinked once. A nice thing about not being able to talk, I was learning, was that it spared you having to say anything you didn’t mean.

  I was spared even more by Loretta knocking and coming back in. She smiled at everyone, oblivious to the tension that hung like humidity in the air, and said, “It’s nearly visiting hours and I think someone here could use a sponge bath. If the rest of you will excuse us?”

  Everyone filed out obediently, even Joe. Loretta, I decided, was a woman to learn from.

  She wasn’t big, but she was strong and managed to get me out of bed and into a wheelchair. I couldn’t feel the floor, the chair, her hands. But it wasn’t like floating. It was terrifying, like being completely out of control. I started to breathe fast again and she stopped what she was doing.

  “Look at me, sweetheart,” she ordered.

  I did.

  “You’re going to be fine. This is all temporary. You’ve got to calm yourself down.”

  Temporary, I told myself. Calm down. I nodded.

  “You’ll see. Before you know it, you’ll be singing and dancing.”

  My breathing started to return to normal.

  “Good girl,” she said, and moved around to the side of the chair. She unhooked monitors from my fingers. “Won’t need most of this much longer,” she said cheerily. The IVs stayed with me, now hanging from a hook on my right. More tubes were gathered on the left. I was like a traveling medical exhibit.

  This is all temporary, I repeated to myself.

  She pushed me into the bathroom and said, “Feast your eyes on this five-star accommodation.”

  It wasn’t bad, actually. The entire room was covered in white tile. On one side were a toilet and a sink with a mirror above it. On the other, separated only by a c
urtain but on the same level so that you could easily move between them in a wheelchair, was a big showerhead.

  Loretta talked as she carefully undressed me. “It’s nice to finally meet the famous Jane. You know your mother hasn’t left your bedside since you were brought in. Sat there talking to you the whole time. Talking about you, too. I hear you’re quite a girl. Good student, great sister. Popular.” She tugged the hospital gown off my arm. “Your mother kept telling everyone, wanted everyone to know how important it was that you could see, get all better. ‘She just has to be able to hold a camera,’ she said. ‘You should see her pictures. She’s a brilliant photographer.’”

  I wondered how many blinks it took to say “Stop lying.”

  Loretta moved me onto a bench on the shower side of the room. She turned on the hot water, then looked around.

  “Someone took my bucket!” she said in mock horror. “You sit tight where you are and I’ll be right back.”

  I sat there, listening to the sound of the shower and feeling the steam begin to rise against my cheek. It smelled like Coco Chanel in here, my mother’s perfume, and looking beyond the half-open curtain I saw that she’d left her makeup bag on the sink. Of course, Rosalind Freeman would never for even a moment look anything less than perfect even when her daughter was nearly dead.

  I took a deep breath, closed my eyes as the small room filled with steam. The warm, moist air felt wonderful, almost like normal. Maybe I was going to be okay. Maybe—

  I must have dozed off. A noise roused me and I peered past the curtain to see if it was Loretta coming back, but no one was there, just the toilet and the mirror.

  The mirror on which was written in all-capital letters, faint but unmistakable:

  YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED, BITCH.

  That’s when my voice came back in a long, gurgling scream.

  Chapter 7

  Loretta flung the door open. “What is it, sweetheart? What is this fuss about?”