Three Months after the Accident
JUNE 1983
Jude is not yet home and I’m relieved. I leave Sab’s blood on my hands, evidence preserved. It hurts to have my fingers on the ends of my hands and my hands on the end of wrists and for the rest of me to be connected in such a wretched way. I sit at the table, unsure of what to do with myself, terrified of what I might unwittingly do. The money is hot against my palms. I spread the bills out and wait for Jude to come home and explain me to myself.
Twenty minutes pass before I hear the jiggle of the keys, the flick of the light, her bucket hitting the floor. Beneath her thick makeup she looks tired and weary, older than we are. I watch her face as she notices the money. Even in my bloodied state I am pleased by her pleasure—the stark widening of her eyes, the shocked O of her mouth. I know she has never been easily surprised, although the source of this knowledge is lost for good.
“Kat!” she says. “What the hell did you do?”
“Well, for starters, I beat the crap out of a really nice guy for no apparent reason.” I put down the money and show her the state of my hands, making gestures like a game show host. “But I’m guessing you’re asking about the money.”
My sister doesn’t know what to say next; I can nearly see the mechanics of her mind, cranking and mining for responses. I’m enjoying this brief exchange of roles—having the information she desires, dispensing it on my own time, in my own way.
“Let’s do both,” she says. She picks up the money and fans herself. “Starting with this totally rad wad of cash. Considering the state of your hands, I’m afraid to ask.”
“That one’s easy. I had some luck at a poker game. A contribution to your loan shark. I clench my left fist and wince. “Our loan shark.”
She sets the money on the table. I can see her rearing up for a lecture about the loan shark, how I’m only impeding my healing with such worries, but I rush to speak first: “So, how about the state of my hands? How do they know how to beat up a body taller and bigger and stronger than mine?”
She takes two beers from the fridge and presses one into my palm; the condensation feels like a salve against my skin.
“I didn’t mention this before, because it’s not a great memory,” she says.
“When did I ever say I only want great memories?” I ask.
She ignores the question and takes a long drink, keeping her eyes on me.
“When we were in Spain we got jumped one night,” she says. “Nothing too serious, but the guy stole our wallets and banged us up a bit. When we met up with Wen in England a week or so later, we told her about it. We were angry that we’d felt so helpless, like we were just there for the taking, completely at his mercy. So she asked if we wanted to learn self-defense. She had gone through a bad divorce and learned it to protect herself from her ex-husband. We got really serious about it.”
I have to remind myself who Wen is: the woman we met in Europe, who told me stories to fatten my brain, who promised to send pictures of me and Jude that haven’t yet arrived.
“How serious?” I ask, and press the can against my other palm. “Because my body was following some script on its own. I had no power or say in what it was doing.” I think of Sab, cornered in his own room, shocked by my subconscious fury and defenseless against it. Each strike against his flesh was part of a choreographed dance, a routine so ingrained that my body could perform it without a single command from my brain.
“Serious enough for it to become second nature, just like you describe.” She drains the rest of her can and crushes it, the metal crunching beneath her fingers. “So who’s the lucky guy?”
“That’s the weird thing,” I say. “I wasn’t jumped—I was the one who attacked. And I wasn’t being touched in a bad way. I was, in fact, being touched in a very good way and I wanted it to continue.”
She considers this for a moment and shrugs. “I guess all touch is new to you now. Everything is new to you now. We can’t know all of the connections your brain and body are making, and you have to be patient with yourself as you relearn.”
“I guess so,” I say. The idea of my brain and body being so removed from one another, as though they live in two distinct and distant worlds, is disquieting in ways I can’t begin to understand. I tell her everything: about meeting Sab, about poker in the snug room, about the broken cabinet and crushed heart, about my big win and failed celebration. I tell her about anger management class, his patience and generosity, his eagerness to crack the maddening puzzle of my brain. I tell her that I really like him, and maybe even kind of love him (based on my diminished understanding of that concept), and that I fear he’ll never speak to me again. In the midst of my monologue Jude begins crying—more than crying—yielding to a sob so deep it seems to hollow her out. I don’t know what to do; there is nothing in my slim arsenal of experience that instructs me how to respond. I reach forward and pat her awkwardly with my damp hand, telling her it’s okay, I’m okay, everything will be fine.
At that, my sister seems to remember who she is. She straightens up, removes my hand from her face. I’ve misunderstood, she tells me. She’s not upset—she’s crying because she’s happy for me, the happiest she’s been since the day I woke up and came back to her. She has wanted this for me, for both of us, for so long.
“Have you ever had someone?” I ask. “I mean, someone you felt about in that way?” It seems such a strange thing not to know about the person you know best, the only person you really know at all.
She digs the heels of her hands into her eyes, wringing out the last of her tears, and tells me yes, there was someone long ago, someone whose heart she broke and who broke her heart in turn, but we discussed it so much before my accident that she can’t ever discuss it again.
For three days, I leave a message on Sab’s machine as soon as I awaken and sometimes another at night, telling him I’m sorry over and over again, trying to find new ways to say the same thing. I don’t know what I was thinking, I tell him. I wasn’t thinking at all. I can explain this. My mind was turned off while my body was turned on. Wait, I didn’t mean it that way. Wait, I mean, I was turned on, of course, but I meant that my body had stopped speaking to my mind. Or maybe vice versa. Anyway, my mind and my body were at odds in some weird way I don’t fully understand, and I don’t expect you to understand it either, but I do expect—hope?—that you will call me back so I can say this all again to you, live and in person. And, if you like, at a safe distance …
Nothing.
I walk around the neighborhood and quietly observe, feeling like a sociologist struggling to grasp her own habitat. Everywhere I look there are normal—at least outwardly—people doing normal things. Here we have a mother in a playground pushing her kid on a swing, his squishy legs pumping; and over here, a miserable couple having coffee, not looking at each other, not speaking, content in their hostile silence; and there, a group of boys playing basketball, dunking and shit-talking and lumbering around to pat each other’s asses. People picking up dry cleaning, people parallel parking, people walking dogs, people jogging, people talking to themselves—all conducted, it seems, with deliberate and controlled precision. No one’s brain has any surprises in store. No one’s body seems to have a mind of its own.
I snap back to myself and realize where my own body has taken me: to the church where Sab has his anger management meetings. He had taken me here on a Friday, and it is again a Friday. I feel a small and quiet triumph; for once my mind and body harmonized and worked together, one listening to the other, acting on subconscious intuition. The sound of the door closing behind me is a mortifying echo. Every face in the room swivels toward me.
“Are you joining us?” a voice calls out. “We’re just about to start.”
I lift my head to see the circle of folding chairs about twenty feet away. Chuck stands in the center holding the Peace Rock, waiting for me to answer. My gaze finds Sab, and even from this distance I can see the purple-green splotch of his eyes, the bandage crisscrossing his nose. For one searing second he looks at me, and then down at his own clenched fists.
I trot in his direction, my heel sliding out from under me, prompting me to palm a strange woman’s head to regain balance. I’m sorry, I mouth, and snatch the rock from Chuck’s hands. “Go for it,” he says, and sits down.
I cup the rock in my palms and take a step toward Sab. His eyes stay downcast, and I can tell one of them is heavier than the other, the lid just beginning to reopen.
“My name is Kat, and I have an anger problem,” I say, speaking only to Sab.
“Welcome, Kat,” Chuck says.
When I am three feet away from Sab, I stop moving. I want to give him enough room to look up and see me, all of me, standing in this circle of strangers and serving up my darkest self.
“I wasn’t entirely honest the last time I was here,” I say. “The story I told is true, but I’m the sad protagonist, not my twin.”
My hands tighten around the rock and lift an inch, making it into an offering.
“So I’m the one who has a very weird kind of amnesia. Every day I hear narration about who I was and what I’ve done, without having any memory of being or doing those things. It’s like inheriting a secondhand version of your own life.”
The whir of two industrial-sized fans are the only sound in the room. Please look at me, I implore Sab. Please. He doesn’t move.
“In the midst of all this, I was lucky to meet someone. This person has been kind during a time when I’m relearning what kindness is. And funny, as I’m relearning what humor means to me. And interesting, as I’m figuring out what makes my brain spark, all of the world’s weird pathways that I’d like to explore. He’s already given me a second chance, and here I am, having the nerve to ask for a third.”
His head shifts a fraction, just high enough for him to view my knees.
“But because of my brain injury, because of the lifetime of things I’ve lost about myself, I hurt this person. I hurt this person very badly—”
I’m interrupted by a trio of sounds in quick succession: the scrape of a chair leg, a whisper, a muffled laugh. Sab’s eyes are now aimed at my throat. I force myself to go on: “I hurt this person very badly without knowing how or why. My body acted without direction from my brain, and my body is much stronger than I knew, and I can’t express the regret I felt when I began to kick and punch—”
Someone coughs. I swivel my head left and right. People are leaning in, engaged, listening. There’s another whisper, pairs of eyes widening, a hand covering an open mouth, a finger pointing directly at Sab’s bruised face. “As I was saying,” I continue, “the regret I felt—”
Chuck stands and clasps his hands together. “All right, then,” he says. “I think we all see where this is going—or, rather, where it has already gone.” He pries the Peace Rock from my hands. “Kat, Sab, maybe this would best be discussed among yourselves.”
One last shift and Sab’s eyes find mine. I force myself to hold the gaze, to take inventory of the damage I’ve done. Without a word, he rises from his chair and strolls to the far exit. The squeak of his sneakers against the linoleum both saddens me and compels me to follow.
“Go get ’em, Kat,” someone calls.
“Be gentle this time!” shouts another.
“That’s enough,” I hear Chuck say, and I spring to the exit and fling open the door and find Sab just outside. Our eyes meet again, and the way he says my name—that short, simple syllable—seems to crack open the ground beneath my feet.
“I think I love you, Sab,” I say. Nothing moves on his face. No twitch of his lips, no hint of a blink or a swallow, no flicker of his pupils away from mine. I begin to sweat. My mind presses some button that forces me to continue. “I’m not sure what that ever meant to me, but I am trying to go by what I think it means now.”
I take the last step, closing the distance. “And I’m sorry,” I add. “I think I was supposed to say that first.”
Sab still hasn’t moved. He has forbidden his face from forming an expression and his mouth from offering a response. A part of me admires his control, his skill at calibrating how the world sees him.
“Sab?”
His eyes still on me, he holds up a hand, a wordless command for me to shut the hell up. Then he rummages in both of his back pockets, and comes up with a deck of cards and a pen. He hands the pen to me and, with the cards facing down, spreads the deck into a fan.
“Pick one,” he tells me.
I do as he says.
He takes my card and turns it upside down, showing me both sides. “Now sign it.”
Again, I do as he says, balancing the card in my palm, writing my name in shaky letters. I hand the card back to him.
He restores the deck, stacking the cards into a neat pile. He works his hands like the bellows of an accordion, expanding and retracting, the cards floating back and forth. A card seems to sprout from the deck, volunteering itself. He folds it into fourths.
“Open your mouth,” he says.
I part my lips and hold my breath. Drops of sweat coast around the curves of my ears, quiver down my back. He slips the card between my lips and my teeth clamp down, securing its position. For a few seconds I close my eyes, a brief reprieve from the heat of his gaze.
Again he performs the accordion shuffle, the sleeve of cards drifting from one hand to the other, and when he stops he picks a random one from the deck. He folds it into fourths, just like mine, and pins it between his lips. Through gritted teeth he says, “Take my card and I’ll take yours.”
We swap, pulling the cards from each other’s mouths.
He opens his card and, miraculously, it’s the one I had in the beginning, my name scrawled across the Two of Hearts. I open my card and gasp: it’s the Jack of Hearts, and beneath the arrow he’d somehow written a message of his own: Here’s your third chance.
“You’ve forgiven me?” I ask.
“I guess I have,” he says. “Mostly because you shock me, and nothing is shocking anymore. I’m shocked by how much I like you, even though I don’t know how to separate your crazy from your normal. But that’s okay.” His voice drops on that last syllable, smooths itself into a whisper. “You don’t have to know everything to love someone. You just have to believe that what you know is enough.” These sentiments sound practiced somehow, as though he’s thought them many times but never before said them aloud.
“You said love,” I say, and instantly want to erase the words, swipe them from the air and tuck them back down my throat, hidden and unconjured. I wonder if the old me would feel such embarrassment, or if she’d boldly state the words again. In the moment, with Sab standing inches away, I want to inhabit the second version, slip her on and see how she fits. “You said love,” I repeat. “Which, considering all that’s happened, means you’re as crazy as I am.”
“I’ll admit I said it,” he says, “as long as you never let your sidekick come between us again.”
He dips me back, making a cradle with his arms, and drops his lips onto mine.
I vow to remember all of it: The slam of his apartment door, keys left in the lock, the complicit rustle of curtains being drawn. The backward walk toward his bedroom: the side-stepping, the legs entangling, the awkward lurching, the stumble over a pair of shoes in the hallway, the slam of another door, the thrilling panic of being alone with him, trapped with my back against a wall—all of this even before our lips connect properly, before he seizes the point of my chin and steadies my face, before he raises one thick, calloused finger and slides it inside my mouth, and I have to stop my upper jaw from dropping like a guillotine just so I can taste his blood.
No, I tell myself. This time no blood will be drawn.
Just in time, he removes his finger and replaces it with his tongue—such a strange organ, the tongue, and I close my eyes and think about what it must look like inside of my mouth: the tiny taste buds, the pink tip, the way it pokes at my own tongue, stirring it. They circle each other—slowly, at first, and then lash and flail, and I imagine our tongues as two expert swordsmen shouting en garde and going at it, advancing and retreating, fighting to the death. I laugh, breaking the spell, and he asks what’s so funny, speaking the question softly into my mouth, and I tell him nothing is funny and mean it: I am a normal twenty-two-year-old doing a normal twenty-two-year-old thing, kissing a boy I think I love, letting him kiss me back, wondering if I am doing any of it right, and if there’s a right way of doing this at all.
I let him lead, not out of the desire to relinquish control but the fear of what might happen if I don’t; I distrust the eagerness of my own body, the strength of my own hands, the instincts long forgotten by my brain. I don’t know how to become a thing to be exploded rather than the explosion itself.
Without my saying a word he seems to understand, and works with quiet concentration to defuse me, lifting my dress up and my underwear down and unknotting my fingers from their tight clasp. He pulls my hands up and away from my body, pinning them against the air, giving me nowhere to hide. For a long moment neither of us says a word, and I can’t bear looking into his eyes so instead I look everywhere else: the popcorn bumps of his ceiling; the lacquered black dresser; the framed photograph of his mother; the scattered hairs on his long, thin feet; and, finally, that part of him, and just as quickly I look away, both intrigued and anxious, afraid I might hurt it, or that it might hurt me.
“I think our bodies have called a truce,” he says. “Agreed?”
“Agreed,” I said. “I think you’re safe. I also think I should reiterate that I have no idea what I’m doing.”
We lie down on his bed, facing each other, on even and neutral ground. He picks up my left hand, that same hand that had transformed into a bullet that broke his nose, and asks me what I’d like to do with it. Carefully, patiently, he makes inquiries about all of me and then all of him, fitting us together one piece at a time: What do I want to do with my right hand? My left leg and right leg? What do I want him to do with his hand, his right and left leg, the broad and taut weight of his chest? I wonder if, back in Harmony, Pennsylvania, back in my teenage years, I’d ever kissed a boy, and if it were even a fraction as surreal as it is now, with Sab’s lips following my orders: there and there and there, like this, not that, too little, too much.
I could never have felt anything like the sweet weight of him, all the folds and points of our bodies matching perfectly, fingers twining, shoulders to shoulders, wholly melding, hiding inside ourselves, the machine clanking into action, following protocol, doing what it does. His eyes never once leave mine and I wish I could see myself as he sees me: someone whose sharp edges are a virtue, whose dark corners are worth exploring, a person who is not broken but instead reborn.