voice is shallowest of all, a ghost that tells me I can speak until I open my mouth and gape at air that is empty and dry as a desert. Words became real only because it hurts to talk and I push them out of an aching throat as if from a cheese grater. The little birds told me, humankind cannot bear very much reality.5
Old people who can barely hobble are here in the rehab center; young people are in the rehab center in baseball caps. Some people don’t talk and some people can’t think. A good amount of them won’t ever rehabilitate enough to go home; some of them are rehabilitated enough to begin work pushing carts at Albertson’s Groceries.
My mind is a vault with a few corners of things I have heard in the rehab hospital, the darkness haunted with the harpies of weird dreams. I learned how to count straight yesterday; today before we left they explained how to find names in a phone book. I am one, two, three, four, five, six days out of a coma — maybe seven, depending on how you count it. They say it will come back. It will all come back.
Oh give thanks to the Lord for He is good! For His mercy endures forever.6
Take Cathy, Mike, the bearded male nurse, is saying. Now Cathy’s a heart-warming case. Smart girl, smart as a whip, top of her class in law school, engaged to a handsome young guy. Everyone thought she would die — got in a car wreck just before Christmas — but nope! No, no, that was a happy story. We thought she’d be a vegetable. But I tell you, that girl walked out of the rehab center herself after three months, and is as happy and as sweet as can be. She’s good friends with her old fiancé and his wife, and is supporting herself. “I still see her from time to time,” finishes bearded Mike in his chlorine green scrubs fondly, “When she bags my groceries at Albertson’s she loves to say hi.”
“Poor girl,” I mouthe, trying not to cry. Mike is the first person I have met who I do not like, no, not at all, and I don’t know why. The vibe attaches to me like a burr in my sock.
“Why?” he asked; “She is happy, her family is happy; she was a miracle. Customers love her. Take it from me, Cathy is one of the lucky ones.” He said that I wouldn’t remember him.
Lewis Thomas wrote that notions become as sea-creatures, decorated all over with other creatures living as symbionts.7 Here in the white walls bleached free, there are no weeds.
I am fifteen. They say. I am a miracle. My one clue that all of this must be real is that here I am — and what seems normal to me is an aberration to everyone else. Here I am: alive, newly-birthed, my mind swept free of the past like a whiteboard.
I think that you have never seen a morning washed so clean.
1. Eliot, Middlemarch, 382.
2. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 72.
3. Ps. 118:17.
4. Anon., Journal, Aug. 04, 2002.
5. Eliot, “The Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton.”
6. Ps. 118:1.
7. Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, 143.
PART II
For ask now concerning the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man on earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether any great thing like this has happened, or anything like has been heard.8
My own face keeps flashing into my mind, a picture of my own tanned face with bobbed blonde above my lavender tankini. Wheat-tanned hills lope behind it and the spray spatters onto it, almost, but the lakedrops slither down the memory squarely, as though it’s a picture with a glass window-pane in front of the face.
Let me take you through the hall. The room is monumental: the ceilings are twice the height they are in normal house, and the crown molding holds it in like the ribbon on a dress of Marie Antoinette. The heavy furniture, an armoire, daybeds, a couch, is heavy black wood twisted like a grapevine and polished like a candlestick. The room is upholstered a long time ago. Little curios — ivory boxes, statuettes, South Pacific shells — line the tables and nook in drawers. What you notice when you are racing through the room in the shadows at night, past the side of the table that goes on forever that used to be the door of an abbey, are the people on the wall.
A mallet comes down squarely on the frame and the glass is shattered, fragmented on the wooden slats of the dock. Pieces of the broken face flutter to the ground, shreds of magazine print dripping in a pool of blood.
Souvenirs of present personality are terrifying when the subjects are so long dust and wreaths of hair framed in gilt. Their dust is shelved in the marble family mausoleum in the St. Louis Cemetery of New Orleans. Their stories shape the air around them like the frame of a house.
The great green porch creaks like the house is moving. These wooden floors are never without footsteps. Heritage drapes on our family like the spring blue mist in the morning in south Louisiana, barely there and almost too bright to see through, laying on your shoulders like mosquito netting and glistening at your feet.
My grandmother, Barbara, was 15 when her mother died, succumbed to consumption. She was with her in the apartment in Houston, all alone when her mother took her last breath. The neighbors took her in for the few days before her father came back from traveling.
I was 15 when I thought I died, surrounded by family. They never knew I’d live.
They prayed that I would.
You can always tell a good artist by the eyes. They should follow you wherever you appear from — the side of the room, the door, the corner. These portraits are masterpieces. They are so real that I have almost caught them out of the frames so many times, nearly, almost there. They are life-size: larger than life, seeping life from the oil as I race past them, sent to bed.
The moss on the rock face of the Holter Canyon clutches to the niches in between eagles nests and ancient bristled bonsai-like pine trees, the only bryophyta of its kind found in the world. The water in the river snaking in the narrow channel beneath is glacier fresh and so blue, so dark mallard blue, icy and 3,000 feet deep, someone said.
Lewis and Clark, the explorers, came through this place on the Missouri on their journey to the Pacific Coast. Legend has it that, ensconced in the channel, they watched the cliffs swing shut in a silent rocky clasp and said, “Let us call this the Gates of the Mountains.”
The men in our family have many things in common—a nose, a laugh, but one is distinct and I remember family friends remarking on it: their wives are dearly beloved. Christian had two. When Amelie died, he repainted her white dress black and the portrait remained in the living room, to her chagrin. She has a portrait too, with her twin sons. The one on the right riding the tricycle died while the portrait was being painted. He is larger in the picture than he would have been in real life. The one on the left is the one that lived. Henry is the son of Edwin, the son of James,
