Marked By Scars

“It’s scar tissue.” She runs his hand over the lump on her left thigh. It's soft against the muscle under her skin. Just under the lump is a firm indentation. She worries that he, as her new lover, will just think it's fat. “I was hit by a car when I was seven and was never supposed to walk again. The impact fractured my femur. “The accident happened when we lived on Saipan, an island in Mirconesia, in the middle of the Pacific. A pencil dot on a globe. Do you know where that is?” “Yes,” he answers, and becomes the listener she's been seeking to finally tell this story. "I was on the bus to day camp. It was parked along the curb, across the street from a little store. The store's screen door creaked and moaned when pulled open. I was in love with grape Fanta at the time. The can of it in my lunch must have sweated. My lunch sack was wet, and falling apart, so I got off the bus to get a new sack from the store. I left the bus, with permission of course, because that was the kind of child I was. I looked both ways, stepped out, and started across the street in the cross walk. “This is what I remember. I stepped out, and heard honking--loud, big car honking that wouldn’t stop. I jumped back, trying to get behind the face of the bus. I remember falling. I hit the back of my head. I lost one of my new flip-flops, bought for me especially for camp. My leg stung and hurt and swelled so quickly that my pants became unbearably tight. I cried because I thought I was going to get in trouble for crossing the street carelessly. My seven-year-old mind fixated on explaining that I had looked, I had held to the protocol of stop, look, and listen. “Then time moved, though I don’t know how quickly or slowly. I was worried about my lost new sandal. I remember noise and confusion and faces above me. I remember people lifting me--I think even the man who hit me, and it was into his car--and they put me in the back seat of a big sedan, a Cadillac, maybe. I remember the word hospital said again and again. I didn’t want anyone to take me to the hospital without my parents. This must have happened before my dad was there, and that’s what made me worry--the illogical sense that these people would drive me away without my parents knowing that I was hurt. It was sunny, and then my dad was there. Medics must have come, because I remember them cutting my jeans off my swollen leg and checking my head. My white-blonde hair was matted with blood. The nurses at the hospital had to cut out a patch from the back of my head so I could have stitches." She pauses, realizing she has forgotten the mark on her body that holds that part of the memory. She takes his hand and places it on the back of her skull. Maybe this scar marks the secret she can’t tell even herself, the fear of not being able to catch herself, fear of being found guilty of causing her own pain. She realizes this the instant he moves his hand around the occipital ridge of her skull. “I don’t know if my mom came to the accident site. I don’t remember her being there. It would make sense that she was there, but also that she stayed back to watch my little sister. “At camp, we’d been learning to sing You Are My Sunshine. I hate that song." She pauses for a moment as they rearrange themselves, adjusting sheets and pillows to better mold the coil of their bodies. “But I can walk.” She stares into the darkness. To herself she thinks, away from it all. This is the biggest secret, the one she never tells, that she wants to walk away from the pretty little mess of her life. This is just one story. But, the memories are stuck in her body, held by the scar tissue in precise dimensions of her flesh, immobilizing her. “Healing took a long time. I was in the hospital for over a month. A Navy hospital. On Guam. Most days, my mom was there with me. She taught me how to crochet and how to embroider. We made squares for a child's quilt. My mom traced simple figures I selected from a coloring book onto fabric, and I'd do the needlework. I never put the squares together. “I was in traction. I had a steel pin in my left knee. From it, my left leg was suspended in a 45-degree angle, in the air, so gravity would straighten my femur. I still have the pin-marks. I was on my back all that time. My right leg lay still and flat. Because of the traction, my left leg is longer than my right, and I have a spinal misalignment." She moves his hand against those indentations on her skin. He pulls her closer and says, "keep telling me..." "I remember the man who hit me with his big car tried to visit. Even now, I can see and hear my farther arguing with him, blaming him, confronting him with the evidence, gesturing toward the small me, lying there. “My worst memory of my hospital stay is the blood transfusion. That day, my dad had flown over from Saipan. My parents left the hospital to eat. My dinner came while they were out--liver, of all things. And then the nurses rolled in an IV full of blood. Again I tried to argue that my parents should be present before these other adults took over my body. Adding blood to it seemed a big deal to me, so big that, surely, my dad would object. The nurses wouldn't yield to my logic. I looked at the liver on my plate, and at the blood seeping into my arm, and cried, my eyes not straying from the door as I watched for parents to return. “I was in a body cast for, I think, about six weeks. At least I was out of the hospital and home. The cast was a weird contraption--all the way down my left leg, and to my knee on the right, with a cross-bar between my legs. I had to lie flat most of the time. My dad was in conspiracy against the doctors who said my destiny was a wheel chair. He devised a way to prop me onto a dining chair so I could at least sit at the table for meals. He also stood me upright at the kitchen counter, and I learned how to swivel on one foot to the next so I could walk around, at least as long as I had something to hold onto. Because of these secret activities, I wore through the first cast and had to have another one put on. "When the cast was removed, I had a spindly left leg. No muscle, no strength. It couldn't bear weight. “My father put me in the ocean. The water held me, buoyed me, so that I could strengthen my legs. I'd float and kick and he'd hold my hands. Once I'd mastered floating and kicking, he put me in the swimming pool. There was only one on the island, at the Hotel Hafa Adai. I'd hold the edge and walk along the bottom, back and forth, from the pool steps until the water got too deep. After I'd mastered using my legs again in the weightlessness of water, my dad taught me how to walk around my bed by steadying myself along the edges and with him holding my elbow. Eventually, I could make it all the way around without his help. Then, he called my mom into the room, telling her we had a present for her." She recedes into her own mind. Her thoughts meld with the sensations of his touch. She thinks that her survival, her triumph, marked her first sense of self, though the little girl could not yet realize her strength. As the darkness retreats into the grey dawn, he moves his hand over the scar tissue, and she knows this won't be their last night together, tangled in sheets and stories.