TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, THE types of migraines i get are due to a condition called persistent post-traumatic headache. It sounds simple enough and, in a lot of ways, it is. All the name really means is that my brain still hasn’t gotten over what happened when I was ten, when my mother drove her gold Kia off the highway, hitting a light pole as she went before rolling twice and ending up at the bottom of a hill in front of a defunct gum factory. I was thrown from the vehicle—I wasn’t wearing a seat belt—and it’s always seemed ironic that despite not being anything close to athletic, I’d somehow succeeded in hurling my body through the front windshield.
I don’t remember anything after that. I’ve been told I landed facedown in a drainage ditch that was filled with maybe four inches of rainwater and algae. Shallow, but still deep enough to drown. I don’t know how long I was underwater but apparently I had to be resuscitated. That sounds overly dramatic, if you ask me, and I’d like to think that if I’d really died and come back to life, I’d know. Even if my mind couldn’t hold on to the memory, I want to believe there’s some part of me that would.
When I woke up in the hospital two days later, no one told me anything other than I’d had an accident and hit my head. Well, maybe they told me other things, too, and I just forgot. I did a lot of that in those first few days. Forgetting. Sleeping, too. I was instructed not to move without help, a directive I didn’t understand until I tried making it to the bathroom on my own, too bashful for a nurse’s help. I was upright for mere seconds, the world seemingly unmoving, while inside my own body, I spun and spun, circling the drain of consciousness before sinking to the waxed linoleum floor.
My head hurt all the time in those early months. I don’t think that’s surprising given what happened. A lot of people wanted to know the details of what I’d done to Marcus, forcing me to repeat over and over that it was a moment my damaged mind had stolen from me. That I didn’t remember a thing.
What was known was that he and I were alone in the house together with a loaded gun that he’d foolishly left on the coffee table. Apparently, I’d picked it up, it went off, and he’d died from a bullet to the brain while sleeping on the couch. Accidental, it was deemed. How could it be anything but? I was a timid kid, not an angry one, and in the end, Marcus was lamented as both a good man and a bad gun owner. But I refused to give him that, even in death, and so I’ll tell you this: Timid or not, I hated him for hurting my mother. For hiding behind Scripture and righteousness and making her feel as if she deserved to suffer at his hand, by making her hate herself.
By making her hate me.
No one worried too much about my headaches at first. They were the least of my problems, compared with cops and social services and my mother’s black, black moods. They were also ordinary, given my injury, and I was told I would heal. However, healing, like God’s mercy, failed to appear. The headaches grew worse. More frequent, too. And when the numbness and vision loss kicked in, that was when I had to go see a specialist.
The doctor I went to was a neurologist, who ran a bunch of tests and made me wear a stupid medical alert bracelet. He also let me know that while my most severe symptoms closely resembled a rare condition known as hemiplegic migraine, which carried the risk of coma and possible death, it was usually due to genetics, not injury. In the end, I was diagnosed with plain old regular migraine of the persistent, post-traumatic variety. But the more I learned about the hemiplegic thing, the greater my doubt. Perhaps the truth was that my injury had only set off what was already there, lying in wait.
Perhaps pain had always been a part of who I was.
And look, there’s no point not to anymore, so I’ll tell you this, too: I remember everything that happened that day with Marcus, and here’s what the coroner got wrong—my stepfather definitely wasn’t asleep when I shot him. It also wasn’t an accident. He woke up that afternoon to find me standing beside him, holding the gun he’d taught me to fire to his temple, and he knew what I was going to do. He also knew why, which was how I wanted it. I was the one who squeezed my eyes shut before pulling the trigger, and I don’t think I opened them again until hours later, when my mother came home and found us. And no, she never once asked what I’d done or how it had happened.
She never had to.
—
After Archie abandoned me on that ledge, there wasn’t much I could do about the situation. With great effort, I managed to reach into my unzipped side pack for my medication. My fingers fumbled with the blister packs, but I finally popped a Zomig out only to have it roll out of reach, somewhere near the edge. I whimpered at the loss—I wasn’t about to go searching for it—then fumbled for another pill. I held on to that one, shoving it under my tongue and letting it melt, before chasing it with two codeine-laced Tylenol. Then I prayed for sleep, the way I always did. I didn’t care if it was the easy way out.
A rumbling came from above. Followed by the sound of crumbling earth. Twisting my head, I glanced up just in time for a rush of falling rocks and dirt clods to hit me square in the face. I spat mud from my lips in disgust. Archie had done that on purpose. I was sure of it.
Laying my head on granite, I closed my eyes. Soon I was conscious of nothing but the wind prickling my skin, the rising pain in my head, and the yawning free-fall distance from the ledge to the ground below. My mind grasped for reason, an analytical solution to my current problem. Geometric even, because like points to a triangle, it seemed my strange trio of perceptions must have something to tell me—if only I could figure out what it was. But my awareness was far from equilateral, the pain most acute, and if I knew anything right about relationships, then that meant the Pythagorean theorem should hold.
I labored with the calculations. Rose was better at math than I was, but I determined that the distance to the ground was farthest, meaning it had to be the hypotenuse. Would its square be measured in yards or meters? Yards were easier, and I estimated the ledge I was stuck on hovered maybe two hundred yards in the air. Only I had no clue how to convert pain into any equivalent value, much less wind velocity.