Where It Began(5)

I say, “It’s not ever coming back, is it?”

“What?”

You have to wonder if she’s even paying attention.

“About the accident,” I say. “About what happened that I don’t remember.”

The doctor shakes her head. I watch her ponytail whip back and forth. Scrunching up her face in what’s supposed to pass as sympathy, she skewers the clasp of her clipboard with her pen. “Classic retrograde amnesia,” she says. “But never say never.”

But you can tell that is exactly what she’s saying.





V


VIVIAN, MEANWHILE, IS IMPERVIOUS TO THE SLIGHTEST hint of any fact she doesn’t like. This is just how she gets through the day. She is waiting for my missing night to reappear, whole and perfect, in what used to be my memory. She is waiting for me to tell her all about it. She keeps leaning over the railing of the bed so the end of her nose is six inches from the end of my nose.

“Don’t give up! Try to remember!”

I try to remember, but the DVD that was my former life goes spinning along up to the big front door of the party house on Songbird Lane, splutters, and picks up, raggedy and dim, with me on my back in the wet grass three and a half hours later, a new movie with a whole new plot.

“Try to remember!” Vivian says, as if I’m holding out on her.



This is what I remember:

How everything leading up to the party is nothing special.

Me and Billy in the front seat of Billy’s car with the Andies making out in the backseat because Andy tried to teach Andie how to drive his stick shift and she stripped the gears, and now Andy’s car is at the Porsche mechanic’s semi-indefinitely and Billy has to drive Andie and Andy everywhere.

Me wearing a black silk stretchy tank top and a bra with lime-green ribbons for straps. Which Billy keeps fiddling with and touching and getting all twisted up, his index finger tracing the green ribbon strap closest to him, as we drive out on the 101. That much I remember perfectly. That bra strap and my jeans. How I was wearing low, low tattered jeans that came washed thin and papery from ritzy Italian-designer washing machines, hand-shredded in designer shredders, tight as shrink-wrap.

Me pressing my hands up against the roof of the convertible that Billy puts up because it’s drizzling when we drive out of Bel Air. Billy kissing the underside of my arm. Me wondering if the underside of my arm is too flabby, but too blissed out to care all that much for once. The sound of one of the Andies unzipping something in the backseat.

Billy pulling his car onto the front lawn of the house on Songbird Lane under a security light. Girls in jeans and camisoles and high heels loping past toward the big front door that opens and then shuts out three and a half hours of my life.

My life, which, by the time I wake up wasted, lying dead drunk on the ground clutching the car keys with my head bashed in and heading for the hospital, is pretty much over.

Only I don’t know that right away.

Billy is gone and no one will let me look in a mirror, but I still can’t figure it out.





VI


WHAT IF?

This is quite the scary game under the circumstances.

Given that Billy is not exactly famous for being with girls who Don’t Look Good: What if?

Vivian isn’t saying anything, but it doesn’t exactly strain the intellect to figure out what she’s thinking. It’s not as if she has that many Rules to Live By, and as far as I can tell, whenever I drift off, which is most of the time, she is out foraging for remedial beauty supplies that she stashes discreetly behind all the dying flowers in giant striped Sephora shopping bags.

I say to Ponytail Doc, “So, what’s the deal with my face?”

You can tell that she is clenching her teeth so as not to say, Oh shit.

I say, “It’s not like I’m going to get upset and yank out the IV and die. Let me see.”

I watch her running back through the entire contents of Relating to Teenagers 101 in her mind, trying to come up with a really good way to say no.

I am clenching my teeth, but oh shit is the least of it.

She takes a breath. She taps her toe. She stares down at her pager as if she is trying to get it to beep through sheer force of will.

I say, “I want a mirror.”

“I know this is hard for you,” she says, “but you’re in a state of flux. A mirror would capture one moment in time but your situation is . . . um . . . dynamic.”

Lovely.

Dynamic.

The * orthopedist with the stuffed marsupials hanging off his stethoscope carries on at length about his reconstructive genius and how he’ll have me throwing pots, playing some imaginary accordion, and keyboarding fast enough to be some other *’s secretary any minute. But when I get to the part about my face, he clutches his koala bears, grimaces at Ponytail, and flees.

“You have to tell me what’s going on,” I say to Ponytail. “Am I coming out of this as Scarface or what? You have to tell me.”

“Healing takes time,” Ponytail says, infinitesimally edging back toward her usual state of bizarre cheerfulness while carefully sidestepping the question. Not that she isn’t manaically thorough: Orbital fracture. Reconstruction. Hairline fracture, broken, chipped.

My face is like the table of contents in a how-to book for surgeons.