This Darkness Mine

  The pulsing light fades, the shadow branches taking over the dance being performed on the side of the house as black explodes across my vision. Dad is swearing, Mom is crying, but I . . .

  . . . I feel just fine.

  Because I didn’t do anything wrong.

  seventeen

  The music my body makes is not appealing.

  I’m in the back of the ambulance listening to a concert of beeps and buzzes, all of them discordant, my body the only blamable orchestra. I have so many extra things inside of me: a needle in my arm, tubes in my nose, a tree branch sticking from my side. I felt my sister curling up as the medics worked, retreating into the fetal position with each foreign object that is introduced.

  I’m only able to stare straight above me because of the brace they put around my neck, the sterile ceiling of the ambulance the only thing I can see except for the medics’ chests when they reach across me in response to some new wave of off-key noise. Their lanyards hang from their necks, one of them resting on my nose for a maddening instant, creating an itch I can’t scratch.

  “This is not how I sound,” I tell the female, whose ID says her last name is JONES in all caps, an assertion of herself.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t sound like this,” I try to say again, but the words are frightened things, not willing to come out into the chaos of lights and noises, strangers’ hands becoming intimate with me in a matter of moments.

  My eyes flick over to the male, FABER, whose jawline is tight in response to an erratic noise that won’t settle down. I try to make it keep time with the muscle ticking in his jaw, but there is no pattern where the two find common ground.

  There’s an indignity to this cacophony, the idea that my body has created it an insult that goes deeper than the IV in my elbow. The music I create is breath exhaled into cold air, skin moving against skin, and the small noises Isaac makes in the dark to answer my own. Not this barrage that only rises with no falls, counter beats the only punctuation in a song with no rhythm.

  I want to tell the medics this because I am embarrassed of my body’s song, ashamed of the jarring quality that we all are being forced to endure in such a small space. But I don’t get the chance. I’m whisked out of the squad and into a hospital, the sirens cut out to be replaced by my mother’s sobs as she exits the front of the squad. I get a single moment of darkness and quiet, a breath in between an inhale where Mom isn’t crying, and then the doors of the ER slide open and I’m plunged headfirst into sterile light and tightly controlled voices.

  Mom disappears behind doors that my gurney crashes through, a lady wearing scrubs with kittens all over them forcing her back through when she tries to follow. The kittens are seriously misleading because the woman has a voice of steel and her biceps nearly pop the stitching right next to a fuzzy calico. I’m thinking about that sweet little face with a tear right down the middle of it when I realize I probably don’t look much different right now.

  “How bad?” I ask.

  Jones glances down at me, a drop of sweat on her nose. She’s running, the fluorescents flashing by above as I try to get someone to answer me. The medics are joined by people from the hospital, more hands are on me, new voices creating crisscrossing paths over my body as words are exchanged, most of them unintelligible.

  “My face. How bad?”

  “Don’t worry about that right now, sweetheart,” one of the women says, which as terms of affection go is a terrible choice in my situation. We come to a sudden halt that makes me woozy and a quarter turn that sends my head spinning even after the gurney stops moving, and then we’re in an elevator being subjected to a truly abysmal rendition of Beethoven.

  “I can’t die—”

  “You’re not going to,” Jones interrupts me.

  “—listening to this music,” I finish. “It’s unbearable.”

  “That’s the spirit, keep fighting,” Faber says, but I see Jones glance over at him, eyebrows slightly pinched like maybe her internal bitch meter just pinged. It seems my so-called friends would agree with her, so maybe she’s reading me right.

  I can still hear Lilly’s and Brooke’s voices following me as I went down, tree branches snapping around me, the ground rising up—the only thing that’s truly welcomed me in years. I covered the space in between me and it more quickly than any that’s ever existed between myself and my friends, or my parents.

  “I’m not a very nice person sometimes,” I tell Jones, as the elevator moves upward. Whatever has broken inside seems to be leaking truth, words I’ve clamped my mouth shut over for years. I feel the dropping of my stomach, and hope that it’s the movement causing it and not the organ actually falling out of me.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” she says, but her eyes are on the bank of buttons, the light climbing as we ascend.

  “I was close,” I tell her. “Until now.” I point to the flap of skin hanging against the side of my face.

  “Sense of humor, that’ll help pull you through,” Faber says, but I ignore him. Everything he says ends with an upbeat, like he’s making a car commercial.

  “It’s not me though,” I go on, still trying to catch Jones’s eye. “Whenever I’m not a nice person, or if I make a bad choice. That’s my sister.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says, and stabs a button as if that will make the elevator go faster.

  “Are you in much pain?” Faber asks.

  I don’t answer him, because I am in pain. Rather tremendous pain, if I’m being honest. I’m breathing, but never enough, like a balloon that only fills halfway and then ejects everything in a halfhearted wheeze. My lungs feel like a cheap party favor, my head the piñata that took the brunt of the hit, my heart the soundtrack that keeps skipping.

  The only thing still working well is my mind, and whatever part of the body willpower is located in. I won’t lose consciousness again, won’t switch off and let others discover all the hideous things inside of me. I take a deep breath and try to focus, causing a bubbling noise from my side.

  The elevator doors open, and we’re greeted by a wall of people in white, and finally, some consistency. There’s a deep thwump-thwump coming from somewhere, methodical and perfect. I relax as it fills my ears, my chest cavity, the hole where my sister’s apology should be, still vacant. Voices are lost, like mutterings in another room that are easily dismissed. I’ve left the elevator music and senseless sounds of the ambulance behind me to come to this point, a helicopter on the roof creating the great, deep pulse of sound, a black mechanical heart to lift me into the sky.

  I go willingly, some of the people in white climbing in beside me. Jones and Faber are left behind as we lift off, this feeling of weightlessness so different from my fall to the ground. From the corner of my eye I can just see Jones turn to Faber, spinning her index finger next to her ear.

  I’ll have to try harder. Argue louder. Explain better. Maybe someone has to know me before they can see that I would never do these things; use a boy for sex, throw myself out a window to keep him from leaving, have friends who hate me. Sasha Stone is not that person; Shanna Stone is.

  But Shanna has been terribly quiet since we landed, as if the fall knocked her into silence. If she’s anything like me at all she’s putting together the right words for an apology—or as I like to call it, an explanation. She’ll find the right things to say, just enough to make it better without actually humbling herself. And when that happens, we’re going to have a long talk about personal safety.

  And hopefully punctuation.

  I can’t hear anything except the rush of wind outside and the constant thwump of the blades, but one of the women in white looks down at me and rests a hand on my cheek. I smile at her, even though I know there’s blood in my teeth.

  I smile because everything is going to be okay.

  Shanna will be back.

  eighteen

  When I wake up things are missing: the branch from my ribs, the hair on the right side of my head, my sister??
?s voice. There are things to take their places: a chest tube, catheter, stitches, and the serious face of a woman sitting by the side of my bed. She doesn’t know I’m awake yet, and she’s reading a yellow file that’s resting on her crossed legs, her nose crunched in concentration and her eyebrows stuck in a permanent worried position.

  I’m not wearing the neck brace anymore but I quickly find out that moving my head isn’t the best option. My scalp feels stretched tight, as if there wasn’t enough skin to make ends meet but they sewed it together anyway. The music of my body is silent, but I can see a heart monitor by my bed, the sonic waves it makes erratic in places.

  “Sasha?”

  I turn back toward the woman, amending my earlier assessment down to girl when I hear her voice. It’s hesitant and unsure, with none of the conviction of an adult.

  “Yes?” I ask, ignoring the feel of the pillowcase against my bare scalp, shockingly cool.

  “I’m Amanda Cargrove, with family services,” she explains.

  “Oh,” I say, closing my eyes. “That’s nice and everything but my parents have jobs. I’ve got insurance. The hospital doesn’t need to worry about how all this will be paid for.”

  I make a small circle with my hand to indicate “all this,” an IV trailing in its wake. But even if I could make a big gesture it wouldn’t be able to cover everything, the squad, the helicopter, all the worried faces hovering over me that need to be compensated for their time.

  I’m probably in a lot of trouble.

  Amanda clears her throat. “I’m actually with mental health services,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say again, but nothing else follows.

  “Would you like to tell me about what was going on right before your accident?”

  No, I would not like to tell her about the boy I was meeting who is not the boy I am dating, or the friends who called me a bad word. I would not like to tell her about the panic in my chest at the thought of Isaac leaving, angry with me, or the sound of glass breaking when it connected with my skull. I would not like to tell her about losing first chair and who knows what else in the small period of time it took for me to fall twenty feet.

  I would not like to tell her these things, so I say nothing and stare at the blank gray screen of the TV mounted directly across from my bed. I can see myself reflected there, badly. I’m amorphous, a vague lump with no clear outlines of where I begin and end. I don’t know how much of that is because of the surface, or because that’s what I really look like right now.

  Amanda flips over a piece of paper. “Your first responders said that you fell out a window. Can you tell me if that’s true?”

  “Are you even supposed to be talking to me?” I ask her, the first synapses waking up inside my head to fire in irritation. “I’m a minor.”

  “I have permission from your parents to be here,” Amanda says. “They’re very worried about you, Sasha.”

  “Where is here?” I ask, glancing around the room again. I appear to have it to myself, which is a blessing. I don’t think I could stand listening to someone else’s noises with only a length of curtain in between us.

  “You’re in the trauma ward at Stillwell Hospital,” she says. “Life flight brought you here from county. They didn’t have the necessary equipment to—”

  “Put me back together again?”

  Amanda only looks away from me, back down at the file balanced on her knee. She’s even blushing a little, like maybe she shouldn’t have said that.

  “How old are you?” I ask her.

  “Twenty-two,” she says, as if the gulf between seventeen and twenty-two is a vast thing I can’t possibly comprehend.

  “Did you always want to be a social worker?” I ask.

  “We really should be talking about you instead,” she says, eyes still on the papers as if they might provide a question for her to blurt before I come up with another one.

  “What kind of a degree do you have? Where did you go to school? How long does it take to get certified in what you do?”

  I know the answers because it’s something Lilly considered. They are: associate’s, community college, and not long. Someone with that kind of pedigree is not going to sit upright while I’m on my back and grill me about my personal choices.

  Amanda clears her throat, going for a do-over. “Your parents know I’m speaking with you, and they’re very concerned about your fall.”

  She says fall like I’m supposed to correct her.

  Someone who is being evasive would concoct a story of how it happened, impossibly, while brushing their hair, tripping on piled clothes, or while performing some complicated dance move that built up speed right before meeting resistance. But I’m not a liar, and I’m not ashamed of what I did.

  Because I didn’t do it.

  “I didn’t fall out the window; I jumped,” I say, watching as her pen scratches across the file still on her knee, the writing a sloppy mess she’ll have to type up later. I could offer her the little table on wheels by my bedside, meant to hold nothing more substantial than cups of Jell-O. But I don’t.

  There’s a knock on the door so tentative it has to be a nurse and not a doctor. Amanda looks to me for approval before giving permission for her to enter. This nurse is wearing scrubs with superheroes all over them, a mix of DC and Marvel that would have Heath declaring blasphemy if I didn’t shoot him a death glare first. He and his friends have been banned from geek philosophy in my presence.

  There’s a second stab in my middle, like the tree branch might have scraped across organs before they took it out, microscopic cells rebuilding what Mother Nature damaged in my fall from grace.

  “Are you sure that I’m okay?” I ask the nurse, her mouth opening in no doubt what was going to be an obvious statement like, “Look who’s awake,” as if she or Amanda have narcolepsy and were surprised to find themselves conscious.

  Instead of answering, the nurse glances to Amanda for guidance. To her credit there’s no good way to handle that question. I have more things inside of me right now than the last time Isaac came over, and by the feel of it, my right ear is about half an inch higher than my left. Also the only person who has entered my room so far is a mental health worker so the safe answer probably is that no, she’s not sure I’m okay. But you don’t just say that to someone.

  You also don’t just call people female dogs, but I’ll bring that up with the interested parties later.

  “How do you mean, Sasha?” Amanda asks, sparing the nurse.

  I wave the question away, suddenly tired. My head feels like a half-full water balloon, the kind you can squeeze really hard on one side but the other bulges out, ready to burst. I can open only one eye, the other swollen and heavy, my pulse a distinct beat coursing through puffy flesh. The nurse smiles at me and hooks a bag of something clear into my IV.

  “For the pain,” she says.

  Pain. It was an echo when I woke up, a voice already spent in an empty room. But it’s been growing while I talked to Amanda. I settle into my pillow as my vision grows fuzzy, noticing the tiny professional frown on her face when the nurse glances at my heart monitor.

  “What—” I begin.

  “I need you to rate your pain on a scale of zero to ten,” she says, pulling a rectangle of cardboard from the plastic holder at the foot of my bed.

  The diagram she’s holding shows a series of faces, the one on the far left the ubiquitous happy face seen on everything from denim jackets to bumper stickers. His smile flattens as the faces evolve on their journey to the right, heating from a mellow orange to a burning red, mouth a wide O of pain, eyes squeezed shut like bird tracks in the snow. I can’t help but notice that the red face with the number ten underneath it has a worn spot on its cheek from years of people touching it, maybe mistaking it for a cherry scratch and sniff.

  “Five,” I say blithely, settling on the one that seems as if it would smell like peaches. That face is mildly concerned, but it could be distracted from its pain by decent con
versation or maybe some chamber music. It has no bearing whatsoever on how I actually feel. Zero is Isaac under the trees and ten is a bad name from my friends, in stereo. But they don’t have that diagram here.

  The nurse makes a note in her chart, and Amanda in hers. “We’ll do this again in about ten minutes to see how you’re reacting to your pain meds and adjust accordingly,” the nurse says.

  But I’m already reacting, sliding down the irritation scale of red to the sunny haze of yellow, ten to zero in sixty seconds, a C minor scale even though it only has eight notes and this is definitely a double-digit process. I’m at a negative two on the pain scale and sliding into the black when I remember Amanda is still in the room, and maybe she’s okay.

  “I’m high as fuck,” I tell her.

  I smile and falter on the last step into unconsciousness, until I wonder why I haven’t seen my parents yet.

  Or Heath.

  Or Isaac.

  Or Brooke.

  Or Lilly.

  Or if there’s anybody left who gives a shit.

  A crack of light in the darkness, the creak of hinges.

  I’m awake, what should be the monotonous tones of my heart monitor nearly on tempo but not quite. It will never be fully black in this room, I realize. Too many machines, shiny with reflective surfaces. Too many lights blinking. Red. Green. Orange. Stop. Go. Slow. The light widens, a form slipping through.

  “Mom?”

  Funny that I know this from her shadow, a less dark patch in the room, vague yet familiar.

  “Shh . . . ,” she whispers, moving toward my bed. “I thought you’d still be asleep.”

  It feels like I might be. My tongue is as heavy as my eyelids, but they’re all pulling toward a central point—it stuck to the roof of my mouth, then sliding inexorably down.

  “Slept enough,” I say, managing to flick one finger toward the windows. It’ll never be dark out there either, I suppose. Headlights. Lamplights. Streetlights. Halogen. Fluorescent. Radiating.

  “How are you feeling?” Mom asks, flipping on the lights. She drags a chair to my bedside, its legs scraping on the floor. I close my eyes against the sound, and my head tilts to the side, tiny pinpricks of hair already growing back in.