I wake up to an empty house the next morning and turn on the TV in order to let some morning talk show fill the house, chasing away all the memories of before, the good with the bad, while I contemplate if I have enough time to make an omelet before Amelia picks me up for work. I’m still considering when I notice a piece of mail left for me on the kitchen table.
I recognize it from across the room, a college brochure from Cal State Northridge. Mom must have signed me up for every possible mailer they have because I still get things like this nearly every other weekend.
Information for a college I’ve already been accepted to, one that’s all the way on the coast, a school I don’t want to go to because I don’t want to go anywhere. I know what I want to do after I graduate and college isn’t it.
After the accident I didn’t care what my future looked like because most days I didn’t care to live it. I was trapped in a broken body with a dead heart and a grave I couldn’t bring myself to visit because I was the reason it existed. My existence became a routine of filling hours until I could pretend to sleep, wake up, and do it all over again. Mom made appointments for me, plans for me, and I went along because nothing mattered anymore. When she brought the application for Cal State Northridge, what difference did it make if I felt this way here or there? At least there would be better for her. She wouldn’t have to come face-to-face every day with the person responsible for making her a widow. And I wouldn’t have to keep hoping for the forgiveness we both knew I didn’t deserve.
If she’d left it at that then maybe I’d have never realized that I wanted something different, that I could still want things in this life. But she didn’t.
Vocational rehabilitation started out as just one more program she researched, one more thing to fill the hours. I’d met other wheelchair users in the hospital and rehab, they’d even sent a girl my age to visit me when they first transferred me out of the ICU. She was supposed to be encouraging, all smiles and optimism because she’d adapted her goals to her new life instead of abandoning them. But that wasn’t what I remembered seeing. I saw a broken, paralyzed girl confined to a wheelchair. I saw a horror I had never imagined for myself and still hadn’t reconciled with.
I didn’t want to hear how I could be just like her if I wanted to, I wanted to go back. And if I couldn’t, why in the hell would anyone think I’d want to go forward?
But when I got paired up with Amelia through voc rehab, she didn’t care if I talked to her because she had no problem talking to me whether I answered or not. For weeks, Mom would drop me off at Amelia’s shop and I barely said a word to her. I watched her work, listened to her words, saw her flirting with the artist painting her workshop, and I kept my mouth shut.
I did whatever Amelia told me to do, but I didn’t ask questions or care if I did a good job. I didn’t care period. And I kept on not caring right up until the day a girl only a handful of years older than me came into the shop with her parents. They’d had earrings made for her for graduation and she’d leaped into their arms when she saw them, hugging them so tightly, a perfect little trio of a family. She’d skipped away from them to admire the earrings on in the mirror before twirling back with a smile so radiant that I dropped the metal files I’d been sorting by size.
They clattered and clanged off the concrete floor, rolling in all directions, and before I could even think to go after them, the girl was flitting toward me. She bent this way and that as she came, easily scooping up the tools in seconds and setting them back on the table beside me. She said something nice, I think, something innocent before returning to her parents and leaving with them shortly after.
I didn’t mean to cry and I didn’t even know what part of it all ultimately sent the tears slipping down my cheeks, but Amelia saw them. Instead of coming over and offering the comfort that would have only made me feel worse, she kept working and let me cry.
When I finally got a hold of myself again, she called me over to her worktable and set down the crucible and blow torch she’d been using. When I reached her, she lifted the medallion necklace I was wearing and flipped it over to reveal the tiny 925 imprinted on the back. “Where’d you get this?”
I glanced down at it and shrugged. “Some antique store.”
“So nobody special gave it to you? It’s not an heirloom or anything?”
I shook my head then yelped when she yanked on it, breaking the clasp so she could drop it into her crucible. “You’ll never learn to love the new life you’ve been given while you’re still trapped in the idea of the old.” She spooned something called flux on top of the necklace and then picked up her torch. “That’s not your life anymore,” she told me and turned the blue-white flame on my necklace, ignoring my protest. I watched the silver melt and liquefy in the bright orange fire and then she shifted and in one quick flick of her wrist, dumped the liquid metal over a bucket of frozen peas.
I had no idea I was watching my first rustic casting but I knew I was mesmerized by the organic-shaped silver item she drew from the peas. She filed down the sharp edges, soldered tiny rings onto each side, and after an acid bath and a dunk in water, added a chain. Then she had me lean forward and fastened it around my neck.
“It’s time for you to start discovering that this new life, the only one you have, might still be worth making into something.”
The necklace she made didn’t look anything like the medallion pendant it had been. It didn’t hang the same or catch the light as it once had. It had odd edges and holes, almost like a piece of coral, and the metal even felt different when I ran my fingers over it.
It wasn’t the same and never would be again, but there was a beauty to it all its own.
The next day I asked Amelia to teach me how to do what she did. And I didn’t just mean with jewelry.
I’ve made hundreds of pieces since that day, learning new techniques and methods for turning metal and stone into things that people pay me for. Forgiveness still doesn’t seem like something I can give myself, but I don’t want to view my life as a series of hours that have to be filled anymore. I want a chance to make something new, try or fail, good or remelt and try again, until maybe my life turns out to be worth something after all.
I still have so much to learn, and not just with jewelry, and here I have someone to teach me, someone who’s as much a sister as she is a mentor. More than that, my dad is here and all the memories I’ll ever make with him. I know what the grass here feels like under my bare feet and the way the Arizona sun warms my legs in the Kellys’ pool. I know what it’s like to run down these streets and grow up in this city with a boy who even now makes my heart pound.
I lost myself here and I’m only just starting to try and put myself back together.
But I don’t see how I’ll be able to do that hundreds of miles away in one of these glossy brochures my mom keeps leaving for me.