Swim

Parents and siblings and grandparents and friends would crowd into the room with balloons and presents and get-well-soon cards, cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with the orange-and-pink logo, and sheet cakes from Stop & Shop. They’d draw the curtains and imagine I couldn’t hear what they were saying through the flimsy cotton. What’s wrong with her? Jesus. Poor thing. Theah but for the grace ah God, I heard somebody’s mother say in a thick Boston accent . Well, can they fix it? a boy once asked, and his mother had shushed him and hadn’t answered. Once, someone’s little sister wandered through the curtains. She stood at the side of my bed, looking down at me thoughtfully.
    “Do you have cancer?” she’d asked. She was, I guessed, maybe five or six years old.
    “Uh-uh,” I said, and shook my head back and forth the few inches I could move against the pillow. This was between Surgery Two and Surgery Three. Most of my head and face was swathed in tape and gauze. The left half of my mouth worked fine, but the right half was immobilized by the bandages, so everything I said came out of the corner of my mouth, sounding like a secret. “I was in a car accident. I’m having operations to fix my face.”
    She looked at me steadily, staring in a way the grown-ups and older children wouldn’t let themselves. “What’s it look like underneath?”
    “There’s a scar.” With my fingers, I traced the scar that extended from the corner of my right eye to the edge of my mouth.
    “Does it hurt?” asked the girl.
    Because Grandma wasn’t there yet, I could tell the truth. “Yeah, it does,” I said, “but it’s going to get better.”
    She considered this for a moment. “My brother had food poisoning,” she confided. “He’s ten. He throwed up everywhere.”
    I smiled, wincing as the right side of my mouth tried to mimic the upward motion of the left. “Is he feeling better?” She frowned. “He got a new bike! And he says I can’t even use his old one!”
    The side of my face was throbbing. It felt like the flesh was being squeezed by a giant, invisible fist, a hand that would never let me go. A tear leaked out of the corner of my right eye and trailed underneath to soak the bandage.
    “I wish I had food poisoning,” the girl said. “I’d throw up if someone would give me my very own new bike. I’d throw up everywhere.”
    Rage swelled inside me. I found myself suddenly furious at this girl, at her desire to be sick, to be here, and furious at her brother, who, I knew from experience and eavesdropping, would puke and poop for a few days and then go home a few pounds lighter, essentially fine. I was beginning to suspect that I would not ever be essentially fine. My face might never stop hurting, and, even if it did, it would probably never look right, no matter what the doctors kept saying
    Just then, a woman pushed through the curtain, coming to collect the little girl. Her gaze touched my face; then she quickly looked away. “Katie, are you being a pest?”
    Katie, who had clearly already decided that the universe was a cruel and unjust place, screwed up her face in preparation for a tantrum. “I’m not bothering her, I’m just telling her about how stupid Jared got stupid food poisoned!”
    The woman gave her daughter a tight smile, then gripped her shoulders and looked at me . . . or, rather, looked in my direction without looking at me directly. It was something I’d noticed grown-ups doing a lot that summer—some of the nurses, most of the parents of my roommates. “I’m sorry if she disturbed you, honey.”
    “’S okay,” I said as clearly as I could with the half of my mouth that moved. Distaste flickered across the woman’s face. I could see it before she turned away. I thought about how I must look, my head like a baseball, white and round, with stitches; my hair, normally long and pretty, in two greasy pigtails that lay limp and curled and crusted with blood and the reddish-gold stuff that oozed from my drains, because the doctors hadn’t yet given Grandma permission to wash it. It’s human nature, Grandma had told me, when I asked her why people looked at me the way they did, why their eyes went cold and disgusted, like they were insulted by my face, like it was my fault. People don’t like to see things that aren’t perfect. It reminds them of what could go wrong in their own lives, I guess. Their own mortality. When I’d asked what mortality meant, she had told me.