slow rehabilitation

She remembered the flutter of the wind against her face, startlingly soft, like the wingtips of a seagull. Gentle, even. The landing, so hard she couldn't even feel it, only a single warning note flickering in the back of her brain. This is bad, she thought, standing on a cold hard floor, staring up at a blinking red light, a bulb in a wire frame. And wondered at the imagery.

She felt it all retroactively on the morning she woke for the first time after the fall: the wind, and the air, dense but cool, and then, at the end, the water, every drop of it, and the rocks, gritty and pocked where they cut through the waves, and below, so smooth. She had flailed at them briefly as she plunged beneath, where the water, despite going inky with her own blood, was shot through with pale morning light, and where the salt against her eyes was a more pleasant and manageable sting to cope with. Below the choppy surface, the world was still, and when the air that hadn't exploded from her lungs began to draw her back up, Eleanor, strengthless and on the cusp of passing out, grabbed at the rocks. Had a single conscious thought -- please let me stay here -- and: nothing.

On the morning she woke, she was dismayed to see a flexible plastic cord emerging from the crease of her inner elbow. She recognized the room before registering it; she had been here for ten days, after all, and while she had been away, as the nurses would so carefully describe it to her, there was a part of her that seemed to understand everything that had happened. One of the nurses smiled a crooked smile at her, and Eleanor said, "You can't even tell," referring to the nurse's smooth white crown in place of her left front tooth, which had been knocked out by her boyfriend three days after Eleanor had been admitted, unconscious, into intensive care.

But until Eleanor regained consciousness -- although she would for months protest this term, arguing that she never lost consciousness, that she was always conscious, that she was just preoccupied with other things -- the memories of the impact itself were inaccessible. By contrast, once she woke, the memories of the conversation began to dissipate, slowly peeling away in filmy strips until only the hard bone of the memory remained, all the details indistinct, dwindling. The tradeoff displeased her: why should she substitute something so wonderful with something so terrible? Was her brain stuffed full? Was it impossible for the two experiences to coexist?

This is when she began to paint, and to fill the first of three journals that she would keep during the remainder of her teenage years, of which there were five, technically, but which ended, really, at the moment Eleanor struck the rocks at the base of Huffnagle. Here, also, ended her ability to display patience and compassion and tolerance -- all things that she had learned well, and would spend years stubbornly unable to learn again. She liked to think, privately, that all participants in great, life-changing experiences looked at everybody else with naked disdain.

In her sophomore geometry class, the teacher lectured on Euclid, and drew sloppy circles bisected by crooked lines, and when he fell silent, concentrating on the click of the chalk against the scuffed board, Eleanor -- parked in her wheelchair in the back of the classroom -- broke the quiet of the room. "Really," she snapped, as if issuing a rebuttal, though nobody had spoken to her, "who gives a shit?" And she wheeled out of the room, leaving her books and bag behind, and in the hallway was unable to turn sharply enough, and thumped into the bank of lockers opposite the classroom door. As she fumbled to spin the wheels, she heard the teacher's voice suggesting to the class that they cut Eleanor a little slack, that she had been through great trauma, and a full recovery can take "months; why, even years."

This was a consequence she would spend an incredible amount of time learning to account for -- that in the wake of her experience, nothing seemed to really matter but just that: the experience. It would be years before the lesson would, finally, take. And when it did, her first post-revelation thought was: No wonder nobody talks to me anymore. By then, the lesson didn't matter; she had already pushed through her first life, and was well on her way into the second.

But this didn't stop her from lying still in bed that night, remembering in bursts:

The impact. The resurfacing.

(flash)

The sudden drag of sand. Jack, beside her, looking away, at Stacy. Shouting something about the boat. Get the boat? Jack, then, trying his damnedest to get her to snap free of the fugue, slapping his palms together over her face. She heard not a sound, and then

(flash)

the bump of wood against wood. On her back, staring up. A hard bone of wood beneath her shoulders. If this was the boat, she thought, then that would be, what was that called, one of the bendy pieces of wood that curved the hull, what was that what was it

(flash)

Still in the boat. The bump of wood against wood, that was the boat, tied to the pier, the waves knocking the two together. Where was everybody? Thin voices above and behind her, then feet pounding on the dock, louder with each footfall. A stiff adult voice commanding someone -- Jack? -- to "move away, son". Oh, she thought -- I can hear.

(flash)

The dim white corner of a big white box. A wall. Another wall. A ceiling. The sensation of a hand on hers, a thumb tracing her palm. Abruptly, panic, and just as suddenly: total calm, because the hand was Jack's. She was certain of it.

Jack, she thought to herself now, lying in bed in a rented room in a brownstone in New York. All the uncertainty, all that confusion, and: Jack. Jack, whom she had lived with for six months in his little place in Grants Pass, after she'd left Harold. Jack, who had been there when she lost the baby, and who understood better than anybody could have why she didn't cry. Jack, with whom she had never slept despite the ferocity of her attraction, and the rather boundless -- she liked that word -- nature of her love. And why?

Because she was terrified of one ridiculous thing: that finally allowing Jack into her would be a long overdue here-on-earth kind of awakening, another sort of life-changing experience. She was absolutely convinced of that, and this wasn't what frightened her. What she was afraid of was that she would discover that, like the interchangeable memories of her plunge and her flight, the human mind could maintain only one true moment of greatness. How could she choose? And maybe she was wrong, but there was only one way to find out. She left a note, and she went to New York.