CHAPTER 31

What If

For a long time, the accident and the what-ifs were always part of the conversation with the girls. Not overtly, but they were the elephant in the room. One night, as we approached the two-year anniversary of the accident, we were all hanging out at Samantha’s house in the living room and something shifted. It was a mini-reunion almost, not planned as such, but we just happened to be together. We were gossiping and catching up, which was our favorite thing to do.

This particular night, with all of us hanging out, the accident didn’t loom. The sadness wasn’t masked with laughter. It felt gone. I don’t know how else to explain that. It’s as though it didn’t matter to us, as a group. Individually, sure, I am certain we were all dealing with it, but as a group we’d been liberated from it somehow, and this casual, uneventful night was only about fun and laughs and friendship.

One of the girls was really nervous because she had to have her wisdom teeth removed.

“I’m freaking out about it,” she said as we all sat around chatting.

“You’ll be fine. It’s just the dentist,” someone else said.

“I’m scared,” she kept saying.

I said, “Geez, I broke my neck. You can get to the dentist.”

We all erupted in laughter. It was different laughter. It was like something significant had changed in a good way, especially for the friend who had so playfully and innocently pushed me. She laughed, too. Finally. We all did. It wasn’t somber anymore. The accident had become fair game. It didn’t own any of us. It was one of those markers, you know, those moments where it’s all different, and although the pain still existed, it didn’t fill up a room anymore. We could genuinely laugh. I don’t think I would have made that joke a year earlier. She was just too sensitive about it then. Everyone was. It was raw, and the guilt and pain consumed them all. But I remember the shift so vividly. We could all feel it and see it and hear it. We were girlfriends again. We’d all come out of this okay.

That night, it became clear as we talked that we all felt guilt to a certain degree. It had come up over time, little by little, but it took us nearly two years to really address and solidify our feelings. We all felt it in different ways. My friend who helped me get out of the pool that night told me late in my stay at the hospital that she felt badly about the fact that maybe she injured me more on the scene by listening to me and pulling me out of the pool, instead of stabilizing me. I assured her that I really felt like the damage had been done when I hit the bottom. Another friend felt that maybe she should have caught me or done something—that she could have prevented the fall if she could have reached out and grabbed me. To me, that was so illogical and her guilt so unnecessary.

One friend told me she watched it all happen in slow motion and, looking back, believed that she could have prevented it. Instead, she called 911. I felt guilt, too, about my split decision to dive instead of allowing myself to fall feet first. I even felt guilty that I was afraid to go into the water. What if I had just walked into the pool at the steps, instead of hesitating or talking about it being too cold to jump in? My friend who pushed me watched that scene in her head like a movie, frame by frame, and every time, she played the “what if” game and was then overwhelmed by anxiety. We felt guilt for all the times before as kids and adults that we had played around by a pool. I’d done it. They’d done it. Thinking of all the times before made us cringe, and nothing even happened then.

If only one little thing had been different or we’d been standing in different places. They all wondered if it could have been one of them who got pushed instead of me. I wondered what would have happened if I had pushed someone that night, which of course could have been the case. I am sure they all would have rather not been there given what happened, but no one ever actually said that to me.

For all of us, it was a loop in our heads, and we were finally at a point where we could share our feelings on the matter, which to me meant the healing perhaps had really begun.

What if I didn’t push her?

What if I didn’t complain about the cold and had just gone in on my own?

What if I hadn’t made it downstairs because I was still inside?

What if I had been able to catch her?

What if I had not made us go swimming in the first place?

What if we’d stayed out longer?

What if we’d gotten drunk and were too drunk to go swimming?

What if it had been the next night instead?

Airing our feelings like that opened a door for us all. A month or so later, a bunch of us got together for Samantha’s birthday and we had the most amazing time, in part because it was fun and we were all together, but in part because no one said a word about the accident again, something that had been slowly happening with increasing frequency. It was becoming a pattern. There wasn’t really any kind of deep conversation at all, just pure fun like we used to have back in the day.

The night began at Samantha’s house. Before we left Chris stood behind me and helped me look like I was standing up with my girls, and we took an old-fashioned group picture like the night of my bachelorette party. Chris was the designated driver, so it was his job to chauffeur us to the club. My van has a nice amount of space, and along the top it has an outline of blue light. We blasted the music, and for one night it was more like a pimped-out party van instead of a wheelchair van. We were all dressed up, too, and we went to a rooftop club.

I felt a real change that night: It didn’t feel unique or special or out of the ordinary. It just felt completely normal. Can you imagine striving for normal? Not spectacular or anything insane. I was just so relieved we were back to 100 percent regular, raw fun. We’d had so many nights together where the sadness filled the space. They made the rest of the talking feel forced. But not this night. This night, it was just plain real and normal. And I cherish that night when nothing else was with us but friendship and love. It took a long time to reach that moment, but I think once we did, a lot changed forever. We couldn’t roll backward in any way because the healing had begun.