“You’re not!”
This was the trouble with sisters. This was the trouble with family. I had barely cracked open the door to my life, and she’d just barged in and made herself at home—taking photos of me and judging my coping skills. We hadn’t even officially made up yet, and she was ordering me around.
Just as I had that thought, she went on. “You,” she said, pointing right at me, “need to sing.”
With that, the anger lit inside me like a flame—so physical, I felt myself light up. “I don’t want to sing!” I shouted.
It was like all the anger I’d been unwilling to feel—at Chip, at my mother, at the folks in this hospital who kept making me do impossible things—had been quietly gathering like some flammable gas. And Kit had just lit a match.
I slammed both my fists down against the bed. “I’m not going to sing!” My voice both too loud in that moment and not loud enough. “You can’t make me sing! Do you really think it’s that easy? You can’t just come in here with Boggle and show tunes and make everything all right! Stop trying to fix things! Give me a fucking break.”
Kit blinked. Then blinked some more. I wondered if she might cry, or run out of the room—but she just nodded.
In the long silence that followed, I deflated.
“Okay,” Kit said after a while, in a quiet voice. “Okay, that’s fair.”
I sighed, long and slow.
“You don’t have to sing,” Kit went on, shrugging, and looking at me with new eyes.
I matched my voice to hers. “Damn right I don’t.”
“I hear you,” she said. “I’ll back off.” But then she peeked up from under her eyelashes. “Can I at least do the haircut, though?”
*
AN HOUR LATER, hair was all over the floor. I’d transferred into the chair so that I wouldn’t have to sleep in a bed of “hair fuzz,” and we’d made a carpet of hair sprinkles all around the wheels.
Kitty fussed and fussed, and it took far longer than it should have, as all her genetic perfectionist tendencies kicked in. At last, she declared victory and handed me a hand mirror. I started to lift it, but then I hesitated.
“Take a look,” she urged.
I wrinkled my nose.
“You don’t want to see?”
I did want to see the haircut—but I didn’t know how to do that without also seeing my face.
“You know what?” I said then, shaking my head. “I’m good. I’m sure it’s fine.”
“Are you afraid you look terrible? Because you don’t.”
Yes. I was afraid I looked terrible. Of course. When your own mother can’t even look at you, you have to be a monster. But it was more than that. Once I knew what I looked like now, I would always know. There are things you can’t unsee.
It would be like the time my aunt walked me up to my grandmother’s open casket to “say good-bye” and I looked down to see an embalmed, flattened, just-plain-wrong version of the face I’d known and loved so long. For a long time after that, the only face I saw when I thought of my grandmother was that wrong one. It had erased the face I wanted to hold on to.
I didn’t want to look in that mirror to find that I was gone.
Kit seemed to read my thoughts. “You look just like you. A little sunburned, and with a few scabby blister things on the jaw…” She touched her jaw. “And with the cutest haircut you’ve ever had—you’re welcome. But still the same you.”
I tilted the mirror a little.
“Don’t be afraid,” she urged.
But I was. My hands felt cold. Don’t think, I told myself. It was time to face the future, whatever it looked like. I held my breath, and lifted the mirror, and tilted it, one centimeter at a time, until my whole face gazed back at me.
My same face. A little roughed up, but familiar as an old friend.
“See?” Kit said. “You’re still the beauty.”
A ragged sigh escaped my chest. “I don’t need to be the beauty. I just want to be recognizable.”
“You are,” Kit said. “Just way more stylish.”
I’d never had bangs, but this cut flopped down over my forehead in the front and was short and spiky in back. Pixie-ish. I’d never had anything but long hair—out of fear, really, that I’d cut it all off and then hate it and have to wait forever to get back to my old self. Also, my mother thought short hair on girls was ugly.
But this haircut wasn’t ugly.
Kit was grinning wide now. “How cute are you?” she demanded. “This is the haircut you’ve been waiting for all your life!”
“I don’t hate it,” I said.
“You love it. Come on.”
Next, I angled the mirror ever so slowly toward my neck. Seeing my face better than expected made me hopeful that the rest might be, too.
But the skin grafts were worse.
The side of my neck, from my jaw to my collarbone, was utterly unrecognizable. It was purple and gooseflesh-y and mottled like pepperoni. It was Frankenstein-esque. My face, if I didn’t scratch, would heal. But the grafts, even healed, as Chip had so tactfully pointed out, would look like Silly Putty forever. I would forever be a person that other people tried not to stare at in the grocery store. I would forever be someone who made other people uncomfortable.
Now a new feeling cut through my haze: resentment.
I knew what it was like to hate parts of my own body—what woman doesn’t? You “hate” that little bump of fat behind your knee, or that pointy little pinkie toe that doesn’t match the others, or that one crooked tooth. Anything about you that insists on being flawed despite all your attempts to get yourself perfectly uncriticizable is fair game for hostility.
But this was different. Those grafts didn’t even look human.
It was like some alien creature had laid itself down over my neck. Old dissatisfactions with my old self dissolved in the face of what it felt like to look at my shoulder. I’d “hated” my flabby parts before, and I’d thought things were “gross,” but I didn’t even know the meaning of those words until now. The sight of the grafts—puckered and gooey and shiny with Silvadene ointment—was so viscerally shocking, I felt a squeeze at the base of my throat like I might throw up.
I had to look away.
This was the feeling I’d been afraid of—but it was so much worse than I’d feared. It was like a part of the old me, sweet and vulnerable and shockingly innocent, had died. It’s one thing to think about in a theoretical way—we know we won’t last forever—but it’s quite another thing to see it happen. Part of me had been destroyed. I squeezed my eyes closed and felt a wash of regret. Why hadn’t I ever even appreciated that curve of my neck before, or the smoothness of its skin, or the pattern of its pale freckles? What had I been thinking that night, wearing a strapless dress? Why hadn’t I been more careful? How could I have been the keeper of such a precious thing—my body!—and taken it so stupidly for granted?
“That could have been your face,” Kit said then, peeking at my shoulder through squinted eyes. “You’re lucky.”
Lucky again.
“That’s what people keep telling me,” I said.
*
WE DID NOT wind up watching Grease that night. The haircut and all that came after was more than enough for me. I did let Kitty set up my computer so I could check email—but then I shut it right back down again when I saw that Chip had posted a photo of me while I was still in the ICU, looking absolutely ghastly, to Facebook, of all places, asking for prayers.
“After a tragic accident,” he wrote, “the love of my life is fighting for survival in the ICU.”
“A tragic accident?” Kit demanded, when I showed it to her. “He’s a tragic accident.”
He’d posted the photo on his wall and tagged me. He’d also linked to a news clip and an article in the paper.