As soon as the gate folded shut behind the truck, I dashed back inside and ran through the house to my bathroom to double-check the counter and drawers for a prescription painkiller bottle. Nothing. And there was no way something like that would have gotten lost under the surface. I'd just moved back in, after all, and I kept my room and my bathroom neat so I never misplaced anything.
I sank onto my bed, reached for my cell phone on my bedside table, and held it facedown in my lap for a few seconds, wishing. I needed my mother right now. If I hadn't checked my phone since the football game last night, this was the longest I'd gone without making sure there was no message from her. I actually crossed my fingers and turned the phone over.
Nothing. I was still alone.
So I headed out back to the pool on a fact-finding mission. When my parents built this house a few years ago, I'd said, and my mom had agreed, that it was silly to build a pool overlooking an ocean. Wasn't the ocean good enough for us? Wasn't that why people vacationed in Florida in the first place? Building a pool at your oceanside house was like the theme restaurants in town--Jamaica Joe's, Tahiti Cuisine, California Eatin'--all evoking a different place on the ocean as if the place we already had on the ocean was somehow inferior. Jamaica and Tahiti and California probably had restaurants named Florida Foodie. It was like my dad and Ashley living in a beach house on the Emerald Coast and flying to Hawaii to get married.
But my mom had said people who'd grown up with money, like her, and me, didn't care about showing off that they had it, whereas people who'd grown up without it, like my dad, cared very much. All the other houses in the neighborhood had a pool overlooking the ocean, so my dad needed one too. He also needed a Benz, a Rolex, a flat-screen TV that took up his entire bedroom wall, a mistress, a love child, and a divorce. And now, with a wedding in Hawaii, a trophy wife.
"Good morning!" Ashley called brightly as I dragged myself out the back door. She and my dad, wearing matching robes, lay in cushioned teak lounge chairs in the shade of a potted palm. The roar of the ocean, which my dad had moved here to be near, could hardly be heard over the wall protecting the pool. My dad stubbed out his cigarette.
"Good morning!" I replied even more brightly. Normally I tried to stay out of Ashley's face. I didn't want to be the spoiled brat my dad expected me to be. However, a post?car crash greeting as enthusiastic as hers begged for such a response. Doug was right: I'd become sarcastic overnight. Or maybe it was just the headache. I sat down on the foot of the chair next to my dad's.
Still grinning at me, she reached for my dad's hand. He did her one better and massaged between her fingers with his thumb. Like I was a threat to their relationship and they needed to show solidarity.
I didn't care. My head was about to fall off. "Where are my pain pills?"
They looked at each other. At least, they turned toward each other, but I couldn't see their eyes behind their his-and-hers designer sunglasses. They turned back to me. My dad said, "The hospital didn't give you anything. Y ou're not supposed to take anything stronger than Tylenol because it might mask symptoms if there were something really wrong with your head. They told you this four times last night!" He sounded angry with me, and then I understood why. He spat toward Ashley, "There goes Hawaii. We have to take her back to the hospital. And another hurricane's forming in the Gulf. God knows how long we'll be grounded if we miss this flight."
I found myself concentrating on how handsome he was, how manly and tall and tan, as he said to me, "Y ou'd better be damn sure you have amnesia."
I wasn't sure what he was getting at. The pain in my head brought tears to my eyes, but through the throbbing I was beginning to realize I was in big trouble with my dad. "What?"
He let go of Ashley's hand, leaned forward with a creak of the lounge chair, and counted off the offenses to him on long, shaking fingers. "Ashley and I plan this trip," first finger, "and your mother picks that very week to crack up," second finger, "you total your car the day before we leave," third finger, "and now you have amnesia ?" He moved his extended pinky finger close to my face. "If that's your story, I will take you back to the hospital." He made a fist. "But by God, I will make sure they lock you up in the loony bin with your mother." 5 In my mind I was back in my mother's bedroom, trying to fix everything, but I just sat there, helpless, with one hand pressed to the throbbing in my head, watching my mother die quietly.
Ashley shook her head at me and rolled her eyes as if my dad was being silly. As if what he had just said to me could be considered a silly, impatient thing to say to his daughter when he was under a lot of stress with a Hawaiian vacation planned.
Then she reached for my dad's hand and spoke in that calming, motherly tone I did not like at all. "Clyde. They said the concussion confused her and that's very common. They said she might not remember the entire night, and if she didn't, there wouldn't be anything they could do." She turned back to me. "Y don't remember last night?"
"Oh, sure, I remember," I lied. My words came out gravely. I cleared my throat. "My head really hurts. I was hoping a nurse had taken mercy and slipped you some pills for me on our way out."
"Sorry," Ashley said with an exaggerated sorry face, bottom lip poked out. "The nurses were preoccupied with your boyfriend."
"Doug?" The gremlin in my head had given up on the balls of increasing size and was now taking whacks at the inside of my skull with a baseball bat. "Y know my boyfriend, Brandon. He worked at Slide with Clyde with us this summer? Y hired him?"
ou ou
"Ohhhh." She and my dad gave each other another look through their sunglasses. Ashley said, "We thought you'd gotten together with Doug, the way the two of you were acting last night."
"Right. That was because of the wreck. We were so relieved to be alive." I hoped I sounded embarrassed instead of mortified. No wonder Doug had thought we were together now and I would break up with Brandon for him. What had I done? Had I freaking humped Doug Fox in the ER?
"Wasn't he the one there with the policeman last Monday at the emergency room?" my dad barked. "And suddenly you're in a wreck with him?"
"I have almost every class with Doug, and we're on the swim team together." I had been ready to accuse Doug with some conspiracy theory a few minutes ago, but now that my dad verbalized it, I heard how ridiculous it sounded.
"Honey!" Ashley patted my dad's hand insistently, glancing at her diamond watch. "We need to leave for the airport right now and we haven't finished packing, haven't showered . . ."
My dad stood and held out a strong hand to help up his fianc?e. Ashley continued to fill the void among the three of us with busy talk until they escaped inside, leaving me alone on the edge of my seat, straining my ears for the familiar breath-sounds of the ocean.
Dizzy and sick, I wandered into my bathroom and found a bottle of over-the-counter pain pills. I took two. Examined the label. Under absolutely no circumstances was I to take more than two at a time. I shook out another and swallowed that. Read the label again and wondered who had written it and how serious she was. Then slammed the bottle into a drawer. It was too much, calculating the line between reasonable under the circumstances and overdose.
I filled the bathtub. This would use all the hot water and ruin the showers for my dad and Ashley, but they probably were taking one together anyway. Then I pulled off my damp clothes. And got another shock when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
Mottled purple extended from my left shoulder diagonally down my breast and disappeared at my waist on my right side.
I squinted into the mirror and tried to picture the wreck. It was dark. It was raining. A deer appeared in the road. I swerved and stomped the brakes. My car skidded on the slick road and crashed into Mike's Miata, hard enough to heave me forward and snap my seat belt. My head whacked the rearview mirror. I sat up and saw the boys past the crumpled hood of the Miata, in the front seat: Mike trapped behind the wheel, fumbling for his phone, Doug in pain and struggling to open the passenger door.
No, I didn't remember a bit of this.
I shook my head--mistake, renewal of throbbing--and sank into the bathtub. This would make me feel better, to scrub off the dirt and germs and God knew what from unknown people and places. I wanted clean, dry clothes. I wanted straight, smooth, tangle-free hair.
But first I wanted to soak. Not to relax, exactly. That would have been impossible with the noise of Ashley and my dad in their room over my head, rushing around getting ready for their trip (or just Ashley rushing around and my dad lying on the bed watching CNBC). At a particularly hard bump overhead, I jumped, sloshing water against the sides of the tub. That was okay. The way I felt, I would never relax again. I just tried to clear my mind and start over, like rebooting a computer when it got clogged with spyware, so I could make sense of what had happened.
My mind wouldn't reboot. The same window kept popping up, the one snippet of the last twelve hours I did remember: Doug coming to my car and pulling me out of the wreck. I suppose it was because of the concussion, but I didn't recall the snippet with shock or fear or pain or anything but giddiness at being saved by Doug. If my memory of this was accurate, I'd acted like such a dork, no wonder he thought we'd connected and I'd fallen for him for real.
His wet black hair lay against his skin glowing white in the headlights. His voice rumbled in my ear. He smelled like chlorine. After twenty replays, I realized my subconscious was trying to tell me something. The wreck had been awful, but some elements of it I needed to be true, only changed a bit. I'd had sex with Brandon last Monday, and despite my best efforts, I hadn't seen him since--or if I had, I didn't remember. What if he'd been in the other car instead of Mike and Doug? What if he were my hero?
"Zoey," said Brandon. Did he have a broken leg like Doug? No, he wasn't hurt--at least, not yet. He reached into the Bug, lifted me out, and carried me across the grass. Behind us, the Bug exploded (the deer was clear of the blast zone). Even as big and solid as Brandon was, the shock wave slammed him to the ground. He twisted in midair so he took the brunt of the landing and I was cushioned on top of him.
"Brandon, I'm so sorry," I murmured.
"Sorry!" he groaned, in pain because of his heroics. "It's not your fault. Hush now." He stroked his fingers across my scalp. My hair didn't tangle. It wasn't raining.
This new and improved scenario was less satisfying. Maybe I'd been with Brandon earlier in the night, and that memory was more appealing than this fantasy, if only I could access it. After making love with Brandon at the beach party and dropping him off at his house in the main part of town, maybe I'd been headed home when I wrecked.
The thought made me flush in the hot bathwater. If we'd done it, would I be able to tell? The first time I'd felt it the next day. How about the second?
I glanced into the corners of the ceiling as if cameras would suddenly materialize in my bathroom, of all places. I pressed my fingers into myself, then outside. I rubbed my fingertips in wider and wider circles. I wasn't sore.
That didn't mean anything. I'd taken painkillers for my head. They might have dulled the soreness. Maybe Brandon and I had done it after all.
What if we'd done it? I was on the pill. I reached into the drawer nearest the bathtub to check and, sure enough, I'd taken my pill yesterday like a good girl. Right after my seventeenth birthday, my mom had suggested I get on the pill. At the time I didn't bother to tell her she had nothing to worry about.
Now she did. God bless the pill. But that wouldn't protect me against a venereal disease. Surely Brandon had used a condom again. I wouldn't have let him do it otherwise. I hadn't hit my head and gone crazy until the wreck after.
The more I invented worst-case scenarios and dismissed them logically, the more deflated I felt. Catching a venereal disease or getting pregnant because of something Brandon had done to me would be the end of me. Y the idea seemed so normal and teenage and, dared I say, romantic
et compared with everything else going wrong in my life just then. Comforting. I was scaring myself.
Reboot, reboot, reboot. I sank deeper into the water and massaged myself again. Testing for tenderness gave way to making myself feel better. It helped with my headache. I forgot all about my headache and Brandon as I opened for Doug. He slipped his hands into my jeans and explored me with his fingers, and finally took me there in the wet grass.
I STEPPED FROM THE BATHTUB WITH a smaller headache (marble-sized) and a resolution to stop being so screwed up.
After drying my hair (which still didn't cover the bruise very well), putting on makeup (which did), inserting fresh contact lenses, and pulling on dry clothes, I sat on the living room sofa, waiting for my dad and Ashley to leave. As I painted my fingernails, I brainstormed for ways I could find out exactly what I'd done last night without revealing the extent of my amnesia and getting myself committed.
I would ask around carefully. If that didn't work, I would hope Doug wasn't out to get me after all, and admit to him that I'd lost my memory not just of the wreck but of the whole night. If, and only if, I exhausted all my other possibilities, I would trust him with this.
I smudged the paint on that fingernail and had to remove it and start over.
And otherwise, I would keep my own counsel. In middle school I dreaded the rare times I rode somewhere in the car alone with my dad. He wouldn't say a word the whole time. Maybe I remembered it wrong (and I sure wouldn't place any bets based on my memory now ), but it seemed we'd gotten along fine when I was little. He wasn't home much, but on weekends he would play with me. Swim with me in the ocean, before we built this new house with a pool. Lie on his back in the sand, balance me on his feet raised above his head, and let me play airplane.