All Things New Read online

  Sparks of hope, and of doubt. there is no way i am okay

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jessa.” I barely hear myself.

  “Can you open your eyes for me, Jessa?”

  “I don’t know,” I say weakly. “They feel . . . heavy.”

  Heavy is an understatement. My eyelids feel like they are caked in wet mud.

  “What’s that sound?” I mumble. “The water.”

  “You hit a fire hydrant. I need you to try to open your eyes.”

  Eyelids lifting in slow motion. A face comes into view. A man standing beside the car. The door is hanging open. I blink, try to get the man’s face to come into focus. It almost does. He’s my dad’s age, dark crinkly eyes, curly black hair, a doctor’s white coat.

  a doctor. My insides flood with relief.

  “Good,” the man says. He smiles, and I realize we are eye-to-eye. I am not staring past him, or at the bridge of his nose. My eyes aren’t darting away like they always do. They are glued to his pupils, shiny black like wet paint. “Now let’s see about that hand.”

  I follow his gaze and see that the heavy thing on my wrist is the steering wheel, bent to the side, trapping my hand like a cage. The doctor grips the wheel and bends it back. Pain ricochets up my arm as my wrist un-flexes. The doctor sees me wince.

  “Pain is okay,” he says. “Pain isn’t permanent. Pain we can fix.”

  pain. so much pain

  My vision blurs. Woozy, I lean back against the headrest. A hand on my forearm. Two fingers on the inside of my left wrist. Another lightning bolt of pain as the man tugs on my hand. A loud pop as the bones snap back into place.

  “So what happened back there?” he asks, conversationally, a small talk voice.

  I am confused. why does he sound chatty? why am i still in this car? There is something dripping on my shoulder.

  gasoline, it’s gasoline, the car is going to blow up

  My eyes dart to the wet spot and see that it is blood. I wish it were gasoline. I hear myself scream.

  “Jessa.” The man’s voice is firm now. “The glass from the window cut your face. That’s why you’re bleeding. I know it’s scary, but you are okay. Do you hear me? You’re okay.” He says it like it’s three syllables, oh-oh-kay.

  he is lying. i am not oh-oh-kay

  “The thing is,” he goes on. “The circulatory system has a way of overreacting to stuff like this. So we have to convince your body that it doesn’t need to freak out. Does that make sense?”

  nothing makes sense

  “I—I couldn’t . . . see it,” I say. I am talking about the other car. I am talking about Wren and Alexis. I am talking about this moment, which came out of nowhere and swallowed up everything else.

  The man’s mouth moves, but this time his words float by me, unheard. My skull feels like the windshield, splintered, a tiny tap and the pieces would scatter.

  Blood trickles into my mouth. Salt and rust on my tongue. Bile in my throat.

  “Stay with me, Jessa. Just a few more minutes, okay?”

  okay okay okay i am oh-oh-kay

  In the distance, sirens wail.

  “Is that your purse on the passenger seat?”

  my purse, why is he asking about my purse?

  He leans into the car. “I’m going to reach over you and grab it, okay?”

  The man has my wallet now, is pulling my driver’s license from its plastic sleeve. He sets it on my lap and checks my pulse again. “You’re doing great,” he says. He says something else but the sirens drown him out. Red lights flash in my peripheral vision. Someone cuts the siren off. “The ambulance is here,” the man says, and rises to his feet. “I’ll be back.” His shoes crunch glass as he walks away.

  Panic flutters limply in my chest. I am too tired for it to take flight.

  Voices outside. Doors opening, the slide of metal, rolling wheels. I turn my head toward the sounds and there’s a prickling sensation in my cheek. Not pain exactly. But wrong. Something is wrong.

  My fatigue evaporates, burned away by fear.

  My hand floats to my face. But it’s not my face, it can’t be my face. please god don’t let it be my face. It’s not skin under my fingers but chunks of ragged broken glass. Pins in a pin cushion, darts on a board.

  The bottom drops out inside me and for a moment I feel everything and then I sink beneath the surface and feel nothing at all.

  Chapter Three

  Through fog, a woman’s voice.

  intracranial

  contusion

  edema

  lucky

  I cling to this last one, lucky, and the fog begins to recede. My mom’s voice now, simultaneously hushed and high-pitched.

  “But she’s . . . okay?” That word again. Not three syllables this time, a hurried two.

  “It’s still too early to know,” the other voice replies. She has an accent, I hear it now, Australian maybe. “But her scans look really look good. I’m optimistic. Like I said, she’s a lucky girl. Let’s just see what happens as we try to bring her out.”

  “Thank god. And . . . her face?”

  Cotton edges sharpen. I am awake.

  Eyelids spring open. Light floods in. The light recedes a little and two dark blobs emerge. blob blob blob, the word pounds in my brain.

  “Jessa, honey?” The sound is coming from the blob on the left. Mom. I turn my head in her direction and my skull explodes in pain. I can’t see her. I can’t see anything except darkness and light. No faces, no color, no anything, just two shapeless masses against a bright void. I blink and blink and blink but nothing comes into focus. My head pounds with the effort. “Jessa,” she repeats. “Can you hear me?”

  I swallow. My mouth is acid and sand.

  “Jessa, I’m Dr. Voss,” the other blob says, the one on my right. Australian accent. It’s the voice I heard before. Now I see a third blob, moving behind her, hear the sound of cabinets opening and closing, the whoosh of an automatic sink. “You were in a car accident last night,” Dr. Voss goes on. “You’re in the hospital now.”

  Dread pools in my stomach. I squeeze my eyes shut.

  “What’s wrong with my eyes?” I ask thickly. My words are garbled, like I have marbles in my mouth.

  “Your eyes?” Mom. She sounds confused.

  “I can’t—I can’t see.”

  The dark patches go still.

  Then, the doctor’s voice. Measured. Calm. “You can’t see anything at all?”

  “Blobs,” I say weakly. “I just see two dark blobs.”

  “Someone get me a pen light,” Dr. Voss says sharply. Behind her, another cabinet opens. Quick footsteps. An almost inaudible click. The blobs shift and then disappear, burned out by light.

  “Pupillary response is normal,” she says, to someone else, not to me. “Can we bring up her scans on the screen, please?”

  “What’s happening?” Mom demands. “You didn’t say anything about a problem with her eyes. Why can‘t she see?“

  “There’s nothing wrong with her eyes,” Dr. Voss says calmly. “What Jessa is experiencing is called cortical blindness, which originates in the brain. I suspect that some of the blood vessels in Jessa’s visual cortex may be spasming,” Dr. Voss goes on, “which is restricting blood flow to the region responsible for sight. If I’m right, then her vision should return to normal as soon as those arteries relax.”

  and if you’re wrong?

  Footsteps in the distance. Someone else enters the room.

  “Acute bilateral neurological visual impairment with visual acuity of light perception and motion detection only,” I hear Dr. Voss say. Each word lands with a thud in my brain. “No evidence of vasogenic edema. Her vitals are normal.”

  Another blob appears over me. “Let’s try five hundred milligrams of methylprednisolone.”

  I swallow thickly. Out of the void in my skull I have the thought, I want my dad. I try to picture his face in my head, but can’t. My vision blurs even more. Tears
spill over but I can’t feel them on my face.

  oh my god

  I try to sit up. Pressure against my shoulders, someone’s hands, pressing me back down. I try to picture those hands, any hands, but can’t. what do hands look like? fingers? ears? I can’t see anything in my head.

  “Hold still, baby girl,” a new voice says. Female, older, kind. “The doctors are giving you some medicine to help with your vision. Let’s give it a chance to work, okay?”

  “I can’t,” I blurt out. “I can’t breathe.”

  “BP spiking,” someone barks.

  The hands push harder against my shoulders and now the bed is reclining and I am flat on my back. A blob hovers over me. Something cool and rubbery on my chin and both sides my nose. An oxygen mask, pressing against my face.

  I suck air through my nose, feel my lungs inflate. The panic sputters out.

  As I exhale, the blob above me becomes less of a blob, more of a woman, or at least the form of one. Her face is still out of focus, but I can make out the shape of her head, the curve of her shoulders, the difference between the paleness of her skin and the darkness of her hair.

  “It’s getting better,” I say, muffled under the oxygen mask. I hear the relief in my voice.

  The quick step of shoes on my right. Another person appears over me now, out of focus but still a person, another woman, with cropped hair and purple scrubs under her doctor’s coat. pink I can see pink, and all at once I can see other colors, too. The red of the pen in the doctor’s breast pocket, the blondness of her hair, the purple of her scrubs.

  There is a sensation in my skull like someone turning up the color volume, every hue saturating, intensifying, driving itself in. Then, everything sharpens into shape, takes on an edge. The texture of the ceiling, the hairs on my forearm, the fibers of my sheet. Every detail screaming, every molecule jutting out.

  I close my eyes, dizzy from the onslaught. Behind my eyelids there are no colors, no shapes, no light. Out of nowhere, a tune plays in my head, words I only half remember, a song I can’t place.

  was blind but now i see

  “Jessa?” Dr. Voss asks. The song cuts out.

  “It’s better,” I mumble through the mask. “Normal, I think.” normal, there is nothing normal about this moment. I force my eyes back open and immediately flinch. The florescent light above me is uncomfortably bright. “I—I need to sit up.”

  “Sure,” Dr. Voss says, and the bed begins to move. Now my mom comes into view. Her sweater is so black it stings my eyes. Someone lifts the mask off my face.

  “Hi, honey,” Mom says in a voice that is tight with effort, the effort not to cry.

  I raise my gaze to her face and blanch. There’s a dark purple splotch on her jaw, and another one by her temple. My brain fumbles to name them, then grabs hold of the word bruise.

  “Mom. What happened?”

  She glances at Dr. Voss. “You were in a car accident, honey. Last night. On New Year’s Eve.”

  These words bounce off me, unheard. “But what happened to you?” It’s not just the bruise. Her hair is too yellow, her eyes are too blue, her freckles too dark. Her chin is uncomfortably sharp.

  “Nothing happened to me, honey.” Her lips move weirdly. “I’ve just been here, worried to death about you.” She might be trying to smile, but she is failing. Her mouth won’t hold the shape.

  Dr. Voss steps forward, edging my mom out. “Jessa, it’s completely natural for you to feel a bit disoriented right now. Just try to breathe normally and stay relaxed, okay?”

  All of a sudden I feel them. The bandages on my face. The gauze wrapped around my head. The words that bounced off me now dig their way in.

  you were in an accident last night

  you’re in the hospital now

  “How bad is it?” I whisper.

  “This is a lot to take in all at once,” Dr. Voss says gently. There are tiny hairs on her upper lip, a narrow gap between her two front teeth. “How about I give you some time with your mom and we can talk about your injuries after you’ve—”

  “I want to know now,” I say.

  Dr. Voss hesitates, then nods. “Okay. I’ll keep it as simple as I can and we can go over it again any time, alright?”

  I manage a tiny nod.

  “Here’s the big picture,” she says. “The airbag that saved your life gave you a serious knock to the head. It hit you so hard it caused your brain to hit the back of your skull. It also shattered your left cheekbone, fractured your jaw, and cracked the wall of your left eye socket.” She’s matter-of-fact, and that makes me feel better, because if she’s matter-of-fact it can’t be that bad.

  Quick breath, then she charges on. “The left side of your face was essentially in pieces when you arrived. Which turned out to be a good thing, relatively speaking, because the shattered bones helped to reduce the pressure on your brain. It gave your brain room to breathe while we repaired your cheekbone and jaw.”

  “What about my face?” I ask weakly

  “She was talking about your face, sweetie,” my mom says patronizingly, patting my leg again. I twist out of her reach.

  “I mean the outside,” I say. I hear hollowness in my voice, empty spaces between the words where emotion should be. But my feelings are trapped in tiny jars inside me, where I need to keep them, because if I let them out they’ll swallow me. “The glass. After the crash, I felt chunks of glass in my face.”

  Dr. Voss nods. “There was quite a bit of glass in your face. Fortunately, because the window was shatterproof glass, it broke into tiny little balls that made fairly clean incisions. We were able to extract them without much tissue damage. As long as you keep the wounds clean and follow your postoperative care plan, you should end up with thin, mostly flat scars.”

  scars

  In all the you’ll get better, there it is, the end of the sentence: but not all the way.

  “It was lucky you were wearing that leather jacket,” Dr. Voss adds. “A chunk of glass in your neck and we could’ve been dealing with a very different situation.”

  I look down at the brace on my right arm. One of the Velcro straps dangles, half open, exposed, hooks pulled away from loops. I stare at it and something shifts and suddenly the loops aren’t made of fabric anymore, they are knotted wires, tangled hair, spiders’ legs. I feel as if I am outside my body, pulled away from it, a strap hanging loose.

  “I know it’s a lot to take in,” I hear Dr. Voss say gently. “But the hospital has resources,” Dr. Voss says gently. Outside the room I hear two sets of footsteps. “People you can talk to as you—”

  “Jessa?” Wren’s voice cuts through everything. “Babe, are you okay? I tried to come yesterday but they wouldn’t let me into the ICU.”

  A flash of relief. thank god wren is here. Then I smell his cologne, and it flips a switch.

  Scalding water on frozen fingers. The sharp sting of sensation rushing back.

  “No,” I whisper, as the piñata inside my gut cracks open. Fury and envy and sadness and shame, these feelings spew out like spin art, flinging themselves against the wall, except there are no walls, I cannot build them fast enough.

  i am drowning i am gasping for breath

  My ears are ringing, roaring, pressure from the inside out. Every part of me is shaking.

  The doctor looks at me. My eyes lock on her nose.

  “This is Jessa’s boyfriend,” my mom says, and Wren steps into view. His hair is so dark it burns my eyes.

  His lips move hey babe but the sound is drowned out by the roar in my head. I squeeze my eyes shut and the room disappears, Wren disappears, everything blinks out.

  “You can’t be here,” Dr. Voss says sharply. “Family only.”

  “But Wren is like family,” my mom protests. She touches my arm. I yank it away. “Jessa, honey, tell—”

  The doctor cuts her off. “Out. Now. Both of you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” my mom scoffs. “She’s my daughter.”

&nb
sp; “She is, but she’s also my patient.” Dr. Voss’s voice is iron and ice. “And what my patient needs right now is some space.”

  My mom makes a huffing sound. Bracelets jangle as she grabs her handbag. Fall collection, blue anchor printed “Dylan” satchel, the only design of hers to ever make it into Vogue. Named after one of the twins. None of her bags are named after me.

  “Thank you,” I whisper hoarsely when the room gets quiet. My lips are sticky plastic, coated in film. Dr. Voss hands me a tissue.

  “You bit your lip,” she says. I stare at the tissue in my hands, watch it tremble because my hands are trembling. I press my lips together, ball the tissue up in my fist. The trembling stops. I touch the tissue to my mouth, blot away the blood.

  “Can I have some water?” I whisper.

  “Absolutely,” she replies. She fills a blue cup the size of a thimble and holds it to my lips. I tilt my head back to drink it and feel a thunderbolt of pain in my jaw. I focus on the sensation of cool liquid in my throat, the crumpled tissue in my hand. Ignoring the dribble on my chin, the swollen feeling in my lips. I finish the water and hand her the cup.

  Dr. Voss is studying me. “Tell me what just happened.”

  I swallow. “A panic attack, I guess. I get them sometimes.”

  “How often is sometimes?”

  I shrug. “A couple times a year, maybe.” three times last year. seven times the year before that. in eighth grade there were too many to count. “I don’t really keep track.”

  She points at the empty cup. “More?”

  I nod. “Thanks.”

  “So when was your first one?” she asks, her back to me, from the sink.

  the day my dad left. “Seventh grade.”

  “What do you think caused it? That first one.”

  I make air quotes with my fingers. “Generalized Anxiety Disorder.”

  “Ah. Says…?”

  “Dr. Rothschild, therapist to the stars and their dysfunctional children.”

  “So you went to therapy?” She hands me back the cup. “After your parents’ divorce?”

  I drain it, still thirsty, so thirsty, then nod. “Twice a week for three months. My mom’s idea.”

  “Did it help?”