first light

October 5, 1989. It is one day more than three months since the fall. My eyes are already tired and I have only had them open for a few seconds. This room is a different one from the room I first opened my eyes in -- yesterday? My brain has fogged over, and the defroster isn’t working yet. There is a large window beside my bed. It is open, and screened over, and I can feel the wind. It is a Disney kind of day, with birds singing in the distance. There is a sprawling azalea beneath the window, and hummingbirds flit patiently back and forth, waiting for the traffic jam of honeybees to dissipate. It is an awful lot to take in, and my head throbs.

Mama sits in a chair beneath the window, her head tilted back against the glass. She stares up at the acoustical ceiling tiles, probably trying to connect the puncture patterns into some sort of coherent scene; she taught me how to do this to distract myself whenever I needed a shot from Dr. Bonavault. Mama was always better at this than I was, or maybe just better at pretending. “Look, there is a giant creeping snail,” she would say, “and the villagers are running away from it.”

Mama is not yet aware that I am here now.

I remember waking up just like this after the car crash, but in a much less interesting room, and with Mama and Daddy both sitting on my bed, stroking my hair. They scared me at first, Mama in the neck brace that she wore for the rest of the summer, Daddy’s face red and scratched. He broke two ribs, too, and later he showed me the heavy bandages wrapped around his torso. They cried and smiled and they explained what Mama’s brace was for, and why Daddy was bandaged up. Then they cried some more as they explained to me what ‘minor skull fracture’ meant. I ran around for weeks after, telling anybody who would listen that I broke my head all open.

The disorientation settles a bit, and I gather my thoughts. The hospital bed, I must get used to the hospital bed. Why am I in a hospital bed? There are needles in my arms, taped over and tubed-up. My arms are yellowish, skin stretched tightly around my thin bones, which are far too visible for my liking. There is a line of demarcation, much like a tan line, wrapping around my fingertips, which are rosy and pink. I puzzle this together with a memory of a broken wrist when I was seven; my arms look now exactly how my arm did then when the cast was buzzed off.

Things begin to return to me: the pebbly cliff, Jack, peanut butter-and-honey sandwiches, diving... Falling. Everything comes back in a rush: falling, falling, falling. The colors. The voice. Is this heaven? I am crying now because a hospital bed is the stupidest place in the world and that voice was like being perfect, and from what I can tell I am very far from perfect now. Mama sees that I am stirring and she is over me in a flash and I do not want her here, not yet, there is too much inside my head. I throw up on myself and drop my head back onto the pillow and I am gone again, and in my dream I run around telling anybody who will listen that I have broken my heart wide open, and nobody is listening, so I sit down on nothing and cry and cry and cry. I tell myself I will cry until the voice returns and asks what is wrong, and I will say Where have you been, everything is wrong, but now it is fine. I never get to say this.