I heard the sound of an engine gunning, the stars coming at me at a dizzying speed before the world turned black again, and then the scratch of facial hair on my cheek, a hand groping at my chest with the impatience of a sixteen-year-old boy. A hasty man pawed at me, tearing at my blouse. What buttons remained clung to the fabric by strings, as he pushed me into the back seat of the car, moving with the deftness and agility of someone who knew what they were doing, of someone who had a history of strange women in the back seats of cars.
I felt the force of my skirt getting thrust clear up to my rib cage. The scratch of a fingernail as he tore at my panties, pushing them aside. The sound of a moan, my own forced moan tolling through the airless space because, even with the continuous thrust of his hips into me, I felt nothing and I wanted more than anything to feel something, to feel anything, because feeling something was far better than feeling nothing, and in that moment all I felt was nothing. Nothing that mattered anyway.
Instead, hot breath on the lobe of my ear. Handfuls of hair being clenched between hands, tugged consciously or unconsciously, I didn’t know. Reggae music on a car stereo.
He panted out a name in rhythm, “Anna, Anna.” Did he think that that was my name, Anna, or was there another woman in his life, a woman named Anna, and he was only pretending that I was her? I replied with “Yes, yes!” deciding that I would be his Anna if that’s who he wanted me to be. A seat belt buckle drilled a hole into the small of my back, plastic plunging itself into me with every thrust of his hips, leaving its mark, though still I felt nothing, nothing at all, not until finally a spasm tore through him like a lightning strike and he collapsed against me, and then there was the weight of him, no longer supported by his own hands.
The weight of him. That I felt.
And then weightlessness.
A car door opened and closed and then there was silence.
He was gone.
I woke up in the morning in the back seat of my car, parked at the far edge of a public playground parking lot, beneath the shadow of a tree, my skirt still thrust clear up to my rib cage, the rest of me exposed, hidden only by the dewdrops that had settled on the windows overnight.
jessie
My heart beats inside me like a cheetah. I’m screaming.
“Psst. Hey you, hey, Jessie.”
There’s a hand at my shoulder, rattling me. It’s gentle, but insistent. I jerk away from the hand, arms flailing. I’m no longer falling.
A mouth presses closely to my ear, speaks in a breathy voice. A stage whisper. “Earth to Jessie,” she says, and it’s a numbing voice. A hypnotic voice. The perfect opiate.
I imagine where I am. On the grass. Body in bits on the ground, bleeding and broken, hardly able to move. In the distance, the sound of an ambulance’s wailing siren as my father walks away from the scene unscathed.
The voice says it’s okay, it’s okay, three times or more while stroking my hair. I can’t open my eyes. And yet I see her, a woman hunched over me on the lawn, while others crowd around her. She’s gawking, her eyes fixated on the most gruesome parts of my battered body. A leg that bends backward, organs that protrude from the skin.
I know the voice. I’ve heard it before. But I can’t place it.
I’m swimming beneath water. Sounds are muffled above my head. The dropping of a needle onto an old vintage vinyl record. Voices talking. A measured, high-pitched ping. Ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing. Ping, ping. Voices in the background. Talking. Saying things like morphine and slipper socks and ice chips.
When I go to open my eyes, they’re sealed shut. Taped down. Impossible to open.
My hands rise and I’m surprised to find that I can still move them, my arms and hands. That they’re not broken after all. Not shattered into a million pieces across the concrete.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and rub hard, wiping the crusty discharge. Inside, my heart pounds hard. A song begins to play. Quietly. Background music. It’s a song I know well because it’s Mom’s favorite song.
When I finally get my eyelids to lift, all I see is yellow. A blinding yellow light.
And that’s when I know that I’m dead. That’s the first clue.
The yellow light charges my eyes. It stuns and overpowers them, making them close again because I can’t stand to keep them open; it hurts too much. I blink repeatedly, trying to adapt to the light. To orient myself, to find a reference point, to figure out where I am.
The second clue that I have that I’m dead is Mom. Because Mom is also dead. And yet, as I open my eyes, she’s here, sitting five or six feet from me. She sits upright, on some sort of reclining armchair with castors on its feet, her gaunt legs propped on the chair’s footrest. She’s dressed in a roomy gown that slips carelessly from a shoulder, the hair on her head merely fuzz, as it was the last time I laid eyes on her alive. Which is why I know this is some sort of afterlife we’re stuck in. Mom and me.
The room around me is blue. Blue walls. Blue sheets. A comforting, pastel shade of blue. I’m not on the lawn after all. I’m not outside, lying in the shadow of the building from which I fell. Rather I’m in a room, on a bed.
A woman stands beside Mom, lathering lotion onto her arms and hands, massaging the purplish, blotchy skin. I know who she is because I’ve seen her before, at the hospital before Mom died. She was Mom’s nurse, one of them anyway. A woman named Carrie who was more religious than any about applying lotion to Mom’s hands and feet, about turning her so she didn’t get bedsores. Even when I begged for them to leave her alone so Mom could sleep.
She looks over at me and says, “Well, it’s about time,” and that’s when I know that we’re all dead. Mom, the nurse and me. They’ve just been waiting for me to arrive.
I know how Mom and I died, but I wonder, how did she?
“That stuff knocked you out cold,” says the woman who squats on her haunches beside me, a second nurse. Her hand rests on my shoulder, the very same hand that only moments ago rattled me, mouth purring into my ear, Psst. Hey you, hey, Jessie. Earth to Jessie.
“What stuff?” I ask, feeling dazed and confused. Behind me, from a record player, Gladys Knight sings to me. There’s the greatest sense that I’m still falling, though I’m well aware that it didn’t hurt when I hit the ground. That when I crash-landed into the concrete beside the apartment building, I felt nothing. I don’t even remember it happening. I must’ve been dead by then, I decide. A heart attack, a broken neck.
The room whirls around me. I push myself up so I sit, perpendicular, no longer lying down on a bed. There’s a puddle of blankets on the floor, a pillow beneath my head. The second woman rises from the ground beside me and pulls the strings of a window shade so that they rise. I’ve seen her before. She’s the same woman who kept me company the night before Mom died, and now she too is dead like me. How can that be?
How can we all be dead?
More blinding yellow infiltrates the room, making it hard to see much of anything clearly. But Mom. I see Mom. My eyes go back to Mom. To Mom sitting there. Mom, in the flesh. No longer listless. No longer bed bound. She looks sleepy still, her eyes glazed over, and yet on her face, a smile. “How about some ice chips, Miss Eden?” Nurse Carrie asks, offering a single piece of ice from the end of a spoon.
“The clonazepam,” I hear, and it takes a minute to realize the nurse is talking to me, that I asked a question and she’s answering it for me. “The stuff doc gave you to sleep. He’ll be happy to hear it worked. You needed a good night’s sleep. You were dreaming,” she says. “Calling out, kicking in your sleep. Must’ve been one hell of a dream.”
And as I finally start to get my bearings, I realize where I am. I’m in Mom’s hospital room. Mom. Who sits six feet from me, upright, sucking on a cube of ice. Not six feet under, but six feet from me. No longer ashes, but now whole.
The clonazepam. The melatonin. That I remember. My own bloody, inflamed eyes. The doctor, concerned, offering something to help me sleep. Watching a newsmagazine show on the TV, a story about identity theft, while waiting for the pills to kick in, the nurse tucking me into bed, telling me about her daughter, dead in a car accident at the age of three. The purple swimsuit, her daughter collecting shells from the sea. That I remember.
By the time I woke up Mom was dead, except that she wasn’t dead.