The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(70)



Her mom’s breath caught on the phrase remove it. “I still don’t understand, what does the spleen do?” she said. “Doesn’t she need that?”

The doctor said, “It’s amazing what the human body can learn to live without.” The doctor said that, as he’d told her parents earlier, in addition to the fractured spleen Emma had a cracked pelvis and a concussion. There would be rounds of antibiotics, exercises, rehabilitation.

Emma’s mother asked, “When can she dance again?”

The doctor told them Emma was lucky. She had not been wearing a seatbelt, and she might have been thrown from the car. She might have died. She might have gone straight through the windshield. She might have died. Had she been sober, her body rigid, she might not have absorbed the blow so well. She might have died. Through the fog of medication Emma tried to understand this.



Emma was sixteen and special, her teachers said: gifted. All week, her life coiled tightly around this gift—dance rehearsals, training, turning out, stretching, sitting in Chinese splits, legs spread, chest pressed to the floor and cheek turned to the waxed wood, or cycling through positions at the barre as her ballet teacher, Miss Celeste, paced the studio, pausing to press hips and rib cages into alignment, to correct the inelegant angles of arms, the placement of fingers.

Emma’s feet were her true gift. God-given. Strong and arched and perfect. Cracked and bloodied and bruised from years of toe shoes. Every day, she wrapped them in tape and lamb’s wool. She grew thick calluses on her toe pads and heels. Still, her feet swelled. Corns formed between her toes. In time, the corns became ulcers, seeping yellow pus. Her toenails thickened. Skin hardened in the nail beds. Sometimes a nail broke off and the exposed skin cracked, dark blood pooling in the pink silk of her toe shoe. Bunions formed and bruised, sometimes blackened. The skin blistered. The joints of the toes inflamed. Once, she had broken a metatarsal in the middle of a recital—a crack, a flare of pain—but this had not stopped her from dancing.

On weekends, though—endowed with that most dangerous of teenage possessions, free time—she released. And this, among her classmates, was how she was known. Party girl, fun girl. Down for a good time. Miss Celeste told Emma that her body was a temple, but Emma did not believe this. She believed it was an instrument: it did what she asked it to do. Performed as required. She wouldn’t coddle it. Indulge it, yes. Pleasure was the purest of pursuits: she was not ashamed to want it.

She was slightly chubby for a dancer, she knew, but cute. Compact. When she was a child, other, bigger kids would pick her up and adore her, place her on their laps, treat her as their baby. Her eyes were large and warm and her cheeks permanently plumped by baby fat. They petted her, prized her, fought to determine who might claim her for the hour of recess, for the day, for the term. Not understanding that it worked the other way: she had, in fact, claimed them.

All her life, Emma had lived with her parents in an A-frame in Mount Tamalpais State Park. Slanted roof, tall windows, wood-paneled walls. In the evenings, in the center of her mother’s kitchen, Emma would practice her pirouettes. Spinning past the sunset view of gold, tree-stippled hills—finding her spot on the blue bowl of the Pacific Ocean beyond. This was a point on which to focus as she spun. A point to return to again and again. And this was what dance had always been for her. The point on which to focus, to stop the world from spinning. What did people do with their lives, she’d often wondered, when they didn’t have that spot?



On the second day, Emma opened her eyes to the white light and remembered: Accident. Surgery. Spleen. Pelvis. Damaged. Lucky.

Trapped. Cut off.

In the hospital room she lay alone, her door cracked to the hallway, rubber soles of strangers squeaking past. She wanted to know where her parents were, what had happened to the others in the car, what had happened to her phone. She sat up, opening her mouth to shout. But her body shrieked in pain that shut her lungs, and she fell back against the pillows, closing her eyes and evening her breath until the pain’s pitch lowered to a deep and steady moan.

The room’s ubiquitous plastic radiated a faint artificial smell. Like the Vacaville Walmart where she and Abigail Cress had stopped last summer on their way to Abigail’s Lake Tahoe cabin—the store a monolith that Emma’s mother forbade her to visit (its owners were “those big-corporate, human-rights-violating, air-polluting jerks”) and which Abigail’s mother simply dismissed as “that nightmare.” Emma and Abigail had wound through the aisles of flimsy melamine furniture and tacky polyester clothes, clinging to each other as they giggled in fascination and horror at this newly discovered yet essentially unknowable corner of the universe.

Where was Abigail now? A memory returned, a bright balloon she grasped for as it floated past:

At Elisabeth Avarine’s party, Emma had gone into the kitchen in search of more to drink. Bottles and cups littered the counters, and a sour stench drifted from the overstuffed trash bag that slouched below the sink.

Abigail had followed her. “Do you think you should?” she asked.

Emma shrugged. She found a partially full handle of vodka on the counter and unscrewed the cap. Sniffing it, she scrunched up her nose: it was cheap stuff, like medicine. Still she poured most of what was left into a red plastic cup, then added Sprite until the liquid foamed and shimmered at the rim.

“Why do you let him do this to you?” Abigail said.

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