Chapter 3
Emerson
I held on to the keys so tightly that they left a little zigzag across the palm of my hand. I breathed in deeply, then out again. All you have to do is open the car door, get in, start the ignition, and just go. That’s it; it’s that simple.
But nothing is ever that simple, is it? It had been months, and I had not yet managed to get behind that wheel again, even with all the people in my life telling me that I could.
I just couldn’t. For weeks, my mom had been driving me to and from group sessions, waiting patiently in the car, wondering if this session would be the one to make me want to drive us home.
That night, however, she was doing some overtime hours at work, and couldn’t wait outside.
So instead, she dropped me off and handed me the keys on her way to the bus stop.
“You can do this,” she insisted, squeezing my hand.
“It’s not long. Just drive home, maybe put the radio on.”
She was right; it wasn’t a long drive home—twelve minutes, in fact.
I loved my mom, of course, more than anything.
She was the person who stroked my lips with ice chips and fed me through a straw when I couldn’t feed myself.
I felt guilty always begging her to drive me around, and I couldn’t ask her not to go to work.
But this overwhelming sense of positivity she had, that I could just slide back into the driver’s seat if only I tried with all my might, was difficult to live with.
My mom was the most understanding person I knew, but at the same time, she didn’t get the fear or the mess in my head right now.
I would do anything just to drive myself down the road, but instead I was standing there, staring at my reflection in the window, completely frozen.
“I can drive you home, Emmy.”
I turned and Winnie stood beside me, her floral tote bag slung over her shoulder, leopard-framed glasses askew, far down the bridge of her nose.
“With that prescription?” I countered.
She grinned, completely unfazed. “I’ll have you know my eyes are still as sharp as they were at your age.”
“Then why do you need me to read to you?” I asked.
She ignored my question and held out her hand.
“Go on,” she said. “I’ll drop you off and have some coffee and strawberry cheesecake with your mom.”
“But what about your car?”
She shrugged lightly. “I can collect it later; I’ll walk from your place. It’s good for me, and it’s only a couple miles.” She tapped her legs. “If I don’t move them, these old things will freeze up.”
I sighed. “Strawberry cheesecake is Mom’s Achilles’ heel. You’ll be talking for hours.”
I offered her the keys, but then closed my fingers around them before she could pick them out of my hand.
“Winnie, do you think this is ever going to get better?”
She paused for a few seconds. “Yes,” she said simply. “It will. It will never leave you, but you’ll learn to live with it.”
When? was what I really wanted to know, but of course she didn’t have the answer.
I silently slid into the passenger seat, and Winnie put the key in the ignition.
This was my brother Sebastian’s car, on loan while he was finishing his final year of college.
I was supposed to go to college, too—UCLA, the same as him.
I’d had it all planned out. I’d managed to secure a gymnastics scholarship at the end of my senior year, my boyfriend Brady securing one for football to the same college.
We were going to drive my old Jeep Wrangler from Colorado to California together.
A once-in-a-lifetime trip, he would whisper in my ear as he held my hand during those final months of senior year.
It’s all gone now.
Five weeks after we had graduated, I was driving to Brady’s house.
It was a normal Friday afternoon. I’d finished a run, watched Brady play football, and was going to meet him at his house for dinner.
I was eighteen. The weather was normal. It was not raining, it was not snowing, the wind wasn’t even blowing.
I was sober. My phone was in my backpack, which was zipped, on the back seat.
And yet, somehow, I lost control of the vehicle.
I plowed through the guardrail and into the forest. I hit several trees before slamming into a giant Douglas fir.
I remember the glass shattering and the smell of pine, right before everything went black.
I have no clear memory of anything else, although sometimes it comes back in pieces: the car skidding, the stars dotting the night sky as I looked up at them, and the feeling of heat.
I woke up nineteen hours later in the intensive care unit, with third-degree burns across 6 percent of my body, mainly the left side of my face, my neck, and my shoulder.
I’d fractured my pelvis, torn my ACL, and suffered a severe concussion.
The hospital had shaved half of my head, and I was wrapped in bandages and covered in IVs and tubes.
The detective investigating the crash had told me that upon impact my seatbelt had snapped; I had then been thrown through the windshield and onto the hood of the car, which had exploded into flames.
He had told me that, because I had lost consciousness, I had slid off the hood of the car and landed behind the same tree the car had slammed into.
It had been the only thing that had shielded me from even further injury and, as the officer put it, certain death.
Ironic that a tree could both ruin and save my life.
When it comes to burns, I learned, there were many different kinds.
There were first-degree burns, which damage the outer layer of skin, the epidermis.
You might get a sunburn and have to rub aloe on yourself.
Or maybe you scald your hand on a hot pan, drop some f-bombs, and run it under cold water. Easy peasy.
Then there were second-degree burns, which damage both the outer layer of skin and part of the underlying layer, the dermis.
Those could sometimes be mild and treatable at home—think of when you’re riding your bike really fast and you skid and fall onto the sidewalk, badly scraping your knees and getting gravel stuck in your skin.
Not fun, but also not the end of the world.
Then we graduate to the big leagues with third-degree burns, which destroy both layers of skin and the nerve endings where you burned yourself. Ouch.
Oh, and you thought we were done? Nope. There were also fourth-degree burns, which destroy not just the skin but the muscle, tendon—even the bone. Those kinds of burns don’t just scar your body, they change your entire life. That is, if you don’t die.
I needed multiple surgeries on my face, neck, and shoulder, as well as my hands, and I also needed skin grafts.
The bathroom cabinet at home was stocked with every kind of antibiotic out there.
It was also stocked with antidepressants.
My open wounds were replaced with lighter skin, which was starkly noticeable against my darker complexion.
I had always wanted to stand out, and yet now all I wanted to do was hide.
I was obsessed with trying to lessen my scarring, so I wore pressure garments and splints.
Sometimes these hurt. I had invested so much of my life into gymnastics and now I wasn’t even sure I could ever do it again.
My injuries completely derailed my training, my scholarship, my ability to even think straight.
It’s like growing up near the ocean, living and breathing the ocean, and then being told you could never swim ever again.
Also, people stared at me. All the fucking time.
But even after all of this, and with the medical bills stacking up and Mom’s health insurance only covering some of it, the one thing that changed most drastically was, well, me.
Before, I would walk into the gym at school completely unafraid.
As a gymnast, I would spend hours of my life dedicated to tempting death: throwing myself into the air and trying to land on my feet on a thin wooden beam, raised four feet in the air.
I would run and hurl myself into handsprings, then backflips, twisting gracefully in the air.
Now I couldn’t even bring myself to get back behind the wheel of a car.
It didn’t help that Brady, who had visited me in the hospital only once, broke up with me two weeks later via text.
He said it was too hard for him. Too hard for him.
Getting my heart broken hurt like hell, but it was more than that: I felt ugly down into my bones.
I felt like I really did die that night, and I had been reborn a monster.
I had always loved my skin. I had perfect skin.
That might sound extra, but it was true—I actually had perfect, airbrushed skin and all my friends would constantly remind me about it.
You are radiant, Emerson. Have you ever had a pimple in your life?
Your skin is perfect, you glow like the actual sun.
I didn’t feel like the sun anymore; I felt like an angry, dark cloud. The kind of cloud that brews a thunderstorm. Everybody runs from a thunderstorm.
When I walked in the door, I saw Mom asleep on the couch.
The house was quiet, lit only by the soft glow of a lamp in the corner and the flicker of a pumpkin-scented candle still burning on the coffee table.
She had draped a blanket over herself, her purple fluffy slippers poking out the end.
A crisp breeze drifted in through a cracked window, carrying that damp-leaf woodsmoke smell I loved.
It was the kind of cool that clung to your skin, reminding you that summer was over.
I shook her gently.
“Mom,” I said softly.
Her eyes fluttered open, confused then triumphant.
“You did it! Oh, Emmy, you drove home. I’m so proud of you.”
“Oh, well, I…” I trailed off, struggling to explain to my mother that, no, I didn’t drive myself home; her daughter was still terrified of cars.