Now that I think back, I realize my mother was really the one who was stunned. She must have woken one morning and realized just how badly off we were and how helpless she was. Instead of the realization driving her to be more vigorous in search of solutions, it caused her to retreat to the gin and whiskey. It almost didn’t matter what it was as long as it was alcoholic and could jumble up her thoughts and fears to the point where nothing seemed to bother her.
However, to this day, I don’t think of her as having been an alcoholic. I believe she really could have stopped if she had wanted to stop. She didn’t have the courage to stop. It was ironically easier to look into the mirror and see someone she didn’t recognize. Otherwise, she would have committed suicide.
I suppose if we could have afforded psychoanalysis back then, she would have been diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic. Something that had begun too subtly for me to realize right away had been happening in her head. At times, I thought she was talking to someone else. At first, I thought that occurred only when she was drunk, but I quickly realized it was happening even when she was stone sober. I think the person she was talking to was herself before I was born, and even before she had met Daddy. From what I heard and could understand, she was warning her younger self not to leave home, that if she did, this could be how she would be.
Of course, it made no sense to me, and if I asked her what she was doing or whom she was talking to, she would look at me angrily, as if I were intruding on a very private conversation.
“None of your business,” she might say, or “It’s not for your ears.”
Whose ears is it for? I wanted to ask. There’s no one there. But I kept quiet. I was actually too frightened to push much further, anyway. Who knew what that might cause to happen, and enough had already happened.
She wasn’t home when the police came to the apartment the day we were evicted. The landlord had followed all of the necessary legal steps, but Mama had ignored it all. I was home sick. I opened the door and looked up at two burly sheriff’s deputies. One took off his hat and combed through his hair with his fingers as if he were searching for a lost thought. He looked sorrier than the other for what he was about to do.
“Your mother here?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Where is she?” the other deputy asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, and coughed so hard and long that they both stepped back, fearing infection.
“Jesus,” the first deputy muttered.
“Do you know when she’ll be back, at least?” the second deputy asked me.
I shook my head.
“We’ll wait in the car.”
They turned and went to their vehicle parked right outside our first-floor apartment. At the time, I didn’t know why they were there. I thought maybe they had found my father and needed to tell my mother.
After I closed the door, I went to the front window and waited, watching the street. Finally, I could see her coming. She didn’t look drunk. She was walking fast, swinging her arms, with her purse wrapped around the front of her body like some shield. She had told me she did that to avoid having it grabbed. “Not that I ever have much in it,” she’d added.
The deputies saw her heading our way and got out of their vehicle to approach her. She stood listening to them and then just nodded without comment and continued to the front door. When she entered, she saw me standing there and shook her head.
“You can thank your father someday for this,” she said. “Pack only what you really need. We can’t carry too much. I’m not spending money on a taxi.”
“Why are we leaving?”
“We can’t live here anymore. The landlord got the police on us.”
“Where are we going?”
“To a hotel nearby,” she said.
It sounded good, but when we arrived, I saw how small it was. The lobby was barely bigger than our living room had been, and we had one room with two double beds and a bathroom.
“What about a kitchen?” I asked.
“We’ll eat out when we want hot food. This will have to do for now,” she told me.
Her best hope was that “for now” was forever, only I didn’t know that. I didn’t know how serious the dying going on in her head was. Because we slept in the same room, I woke up often to hear her nighttime chats with her invisible second self. Most of the time, it was done in whispers, but I often caught a word or two. None of it ever made much sense to me. Maybe she’s just dreaming aloud, I thought, and went back to sleep.
She was doing it now as we trekked up the beach. The raindrops had become more like pellets. I kept my head down and lifted my eyes just enough to see her soaked old sneakers pasted with sand and mud plodding forward awkwardly.
“Where are we going?” I cried. I was tired and would have gladly just slept in the rain.
She didn’t answer, but from the way she was moving her arms and hands, I knew she was talking to her imaginary self. I could see the top of a bottle of gin in her shabby coat pocket. There was no one else on the beach but us, so there was no one to appeal to for any help. I was feeling worse than ever. The only way I realized I was crying was by the shudder in my shoulders. My tears were mixed in with the rain.
Mama suddenly turned and started toward the sidewalk. I hurried to catch up. She carried her suitcase limply. It looked as if it was dragging. Even though I was exhausted myself, I wanted to help her, to take it from her, but she wouldn’t let go of the handle.
“I’ll carry it!” I cried.
“No, no. This is all I have. Let go,” she said.
The way she looked at me sent a sharp pain through my heart. She doesn’t recognize me, I thought. My own mother doesn’t know who I am. She thinks I’m some stranger trying to steal her things.
“Mama, it’s me, Sasha. Let go, and I’ll help you.”
“No!” she screamed, and tore it out of my grip.
We stared at each other for a moment in the rain. Maybe she realized her momentary amnesia and it frightened her as much as it had frightened me. Whatever, she turned and surged forward.
I sped to keep up with her. We were at a traffic light on Pacific Coast Highway, and it turned green for us. She stepped into the road, and I caught up with her to walk side-by-side. We were nearly to the other side when I heard car tires squealing and looked to my right.
The vehicle struck Mama first and literally lifted her over my head before it struck me hard in the right thigh. I saw Mama slap down on the pavement just before I fell and slid in her direction.
That was how my life began.
1
The Accident
The pain was hot.
Although I was lying faceup in the road and the rain was sweeping over me in a downpour, I no longer felt the slightest chill. It was as if electric heaters had been placed all around me. I heard myself groan, but it seemed to come from someone else. My first thought was that I was dead and this was the way a soul left its body. Any moment, I expected to be looking down at myself lying there on the road, shocked, my eyes two balls of blue glass, my mouth opened in a silent scream. Souls don’t cry, souls don’t laugh, but they can be surprised when they realize they are no longer part of their bodies.
Cars began stopping, some nearly rear-ending the ones that had stopped already. Looking through what was to me a curtain of gauze, I could see some men directing traffic, shouting at drivers, waving off the curious. I started to move, but the pain shot so fast and sharply up the back of my leg, up my back, and into my neck that I immediately stopped and closed my eyes. I was vaguely aware of someone beside me, holding my hand. There was a man’s voice and then a woman’s. I realized the woman was trying to get me to talk. I heard more shouting. I tried to open my eyes, but they wouldn’t open. The noise began to drift off, and then it came surfing back on the wave of sirens.
“Mama,” I thought I finally managed to say. I wasn’t sure I had spoken. I drifted away again and then opened my eyes when I fel
t my body being lifted. When they began to slide me into the ambulance, I had a funny thought. I envisioned a freshly made pizza being slid into the oven. Slices of pizza were our lunch more often than not and sometimes all we had for dinner.
I looked back and saw another ambulance. They’re getting Mama, I thought, and that gave me some comfort. The paramedic beside me was saying soothing things and putting a blood-pressure cuff on me. There was so much conflicting noise, mumbling voices, cars, people still shouting, that I could make little sense of anything else the paramedic was saying. Finally, the doors were closed, and I heard the siren again as we began moving.
“Hot,” I said, and lost consciousness.
I awoke in the hallway of the hospital emergency room. My clothing had been removed, and I was in a hospital gown. I saw what I knew to be an IV bottle and stand beside me. The tube was attached to my right arm. There was a blanket on me, but there was no doctor, nor was there a nurse tending to me. People were rushing around. No one spoke to me. Another pair of paramedics wheeled in another gurney, and I thought, Maybe that’s Mama, but it turned out to be an elderly man with oxygen leads in his nostrils. His eyes were wide, as wide as those of someone who saw his own impending death. They pushed him past me without even looking at me, but it frightened me.
“Mama!” I cried. I waited, but either no one heard me or no one had time to answer. There was little I could do but lie there and wait. My arms, shoulders, legs, and neck were throbbing so much I felt I had turned into a drum. My ears were filled with the beat of my heart and the chugging of my blood through my veins.
When I saw a nurse hurrying up the corridor, I called to her as loudly as I could. She paused, but before I could tell her anything or ask her anything, she said, “Someone will be with you soon. Be patient.”
Don’t you mean “be a patient”? I was the one who felt drunk now, not Mama.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly what had happened. It had all happened so quickly. Mama was rushing through the rain as if she had an appointment. I ran behind her and kept calling to her. I was only a few inches away when I heard the sound of tires squealing. Right now, I could visualize the front of an automobile but little more.
Where was Mama now? Why had I been left in a hallway? Who had put me here? Who was looking after me? When I tried to lift my head, the whole corridor spun, and I was nauseated immediately. I kept my eyes closed and waited until the dizziness subsided, and then I opened my eyes slowly and took a deep breath. There was nothing I could do but wait.
Finally, I felt myself moving and looked down toward my feet to see a different nurse pushing the gurney. She looked younger than the first nurse and had a shock of brown hair drifting out from under her cap and down over her right eye. As she pushed my gurney, she blew the loose strands away from her eye.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked.
“You’re going to X-ray,” she said.
“Just relax.”
“Where’s my mother?”
“You’re going to X-ray.”
Didn’t she understand my question?
“My mother,” I said.
“Relax,” she told me.
“We’re having a bad night here. We’re doing our best to get to everyone as quickly as we possibly can. I’ve got to get you processed before I see about anyone or anything else.”
Processed? What did that mean? With all that ached on me, it was hard to keep talking, keep asking questions, and she didn’t seem to want to talk much, either.
I felt myself being navigated through the corridor to an elevator. When I was in it, I hoped she would tell me more now that we were away from all the bedlam, but there was another nurse in the elevator, and they started to have a conversation over me as if I weren’t even there. I heard them complaining about some doctor who hadn’t shown up and another nurse who was always late.
“Like any of us want to be here on time?” my nurse said.
When the elevator door opened, the other nurse helped wheel me out and then went off in another direction. Outside radiology, there were two other gurneys lined up, one with a young man with a bloodstained face and a heavily bandaged arm and the other with an elderly African American woman. A younger African American woman stood beside her, holding her hand.
“Just try to relax,” my nurse said again, and put a clipboard at my feet. “Someone will be out to get you soon.”
“What about my mother?” I asked.
She walked off without replying. I began to wonder if anyone could hear me. Maybe I thought I was talking but I wasn’t. The younger African American woman looked at me and smiled. The X-ray room door opened, and another patient was wheeled out in a wheelchair. He was an elderly man in a shirt and tie, wearing a blue cap with white letters that spelled “U.S.S. Enterprise.” He looked perfectly healthy, even bored. A male nurse pulled the gurney with the young man into the radiology suite.
“Not much longer now,” the younger woman told the older one.
“You hope,” the older woman said. “You’ll be on social security, too, by the time we get outta here.”
The younger woman laughed. Then she looked at me again. “What happened to you, honey?”
“We were hit by a car,” I said. “My mother and me, but I don’t know where my mother is.”
“Downstairs waiting, for sure,” she said. “Took us five hours to get this far.”
I was relieved to see she heard me. “I don’t know how long I’ve been here.”
“Long,” the older lady said. “You drip through this place like maple syrup.”
The younger woman turned to me and smiled as she shook her head to tell me I shouldn’t pay attention. “You’ll be all right,” she added, and turned to look firmly at the closed door as if she could will it to open.
I closed my eyes again. When I opened them, I realized I must have fallen asleep, because the two women were gone and there were two other gurneys lined up behind me. Finally, the doors opened again, the African American lady was wheeled out, and I was wheeled in. The young man bringing me to the X-ray machine was the nicest and warmest of anyone I had met so far. He assured me that he would do everything to make this easy and comfortable.
“Do you know where my mother is?” I asked him. Since he was being so nice, I thought he would give me an answer.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just the X-ray technician. I’m sure someone will be getting your mother to visit you afterward.”
“She was hit by the car, too,” I said. “Was she here already?”
He paused, thought for a moment, and shook his head. “She’s probably with the doctor somewhere else right now,” he replied. “Let’s get you going.”
After my X-rays were taken, another nurse arrived to wheel me out and back into the elevator.
“Where am I going?” I asked.
“To wait for the doctor,” she replied. “He’ll look at your X-rays first. We have an examination room open for you, and I want to get you into it before someone else gets in there.”
“What about my mother? She was in the accident, too.”
“I don’t know anything about her,” she said. “I just came on duty.”
She got me into the elevator and then out and into an examination room. I don’t know how long I was in there before the doctor arrived, but I know I was in and out of sleep, and I was very thirsty. I called for someone to please get me some water, but everyone seemed too busy to hear me.
When my doctor finally arrived, I was surprised at how young he looked. He had curly light brown hair and a round face with thin lips and a small nose, so small it looked as if half of it had still not emerged. In fact, it looked as if his facial features were sinking into his skull. His hazel eyes were that deeply set. His skin was as soft and clear as a little boy’s skin. Maybe he hadn’t begun to shave yet, I thought, which I knew was silly.
“Okay, now,” he said, as if we had been having a conversation that had been interrup
ted. “I’m Dr. Decker, one of the ER doctors here. I’ve called for Dr. Milan to look at you. He’s an orthopedic specialist. The reason,” he said, “is that you have a serious fracture of the femur.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
“It means your thigh bone.”
He held up the X-ray for me to see and pointed to my right leg bone.
“This is your thigh bone. There are four distinct parts to it, and your injury is at the head. See?” he asked as if he were teaching a class. “Look where the edge of my finger is.”
I nodded, even though I had no idea what he was pointing to.
“The reason it’s serious for someone your age is that it can and most likely will affect the growth plate, the soft area of the bone located at the epiphysis near the head of the femur. As a result of all this, your right leg might end up a bit shorter than your left. So we want a specialist to handle the cast, okay? It might be a while.”
“My head hurts, too, and so does my arm and my neck and shoulders.”
“You’ve been banged up quite a bit. Luckily, nothing else is broken, but you do have a slight concussion. That’s why you’re nauseous and dizzy. In fact, I’m amazed you don’t have a broken arm.”
He lifted my right arm, and I saw the black-and-blue marks. They were ugly and frightening. I couldn’t help but start to cry.
“Easy,” he said. “I’ll have the nurse give you something for the nausea. I don’t want to give you anything else until Dr. Milan can get here. Okay?”
“What about my mother?”
“Your mother? What about her?”
“She was hit by the car first.”
He nodded. “I’ll check on it,” he said. He patted my hand and left.
I expected the nurse to come in soon, but a long time went by before anyone came, and she wasn’t a nurse. She wasn’t wearing a uniform. She was an older lady with short gray hair that looked plastered around her head. She wore a pair of glasses with lenses so thick they looked more like the protective glasses mechanics wear. She approached me and lifted her clipboard.