I get sober. I was at rock bottom, had lost my marriage, my child. When I started to pray, I really did feel that I wasn’t alone, that I would be okay, and even though I never thought of myself as religious, I have come to find enormous solace in prayer.
So I pray now. The prayers I know. The Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
The Third Step Prayer: God, I offer myself to thee, to build with me and to do with me as thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of thy power, thy love, and thy way of life. May I do thy will always.
And then simply God, help her. Help her, God. Help her be okay.
I say them over and over, my eyes squeezed shut, my lips moving, my hand clutching Sam’s. Over and over.
We pull up, and I jump out of the car, edgy, jittery, desperate to see my daughter, terrified of what I will find. I am forced to slow down, to not burst in through the doors of the emergency room of this tiny cottage hospital, flanked as I am by the two police officers.
We are led to a room, a curtain is pulled aside, and there is Annie, alive, and I burst into tears.
“Ow!” she cries when I gather her in my arms, shocked at how scratched she is, her arms and legs covered in blood, her face, thankfully, unscathed.
“A broken arm,” says a doctor who suddenly appears in the room. “And a nasty gash on her head. We think she may have a concussion, so we’d like to keep her in for observation overnight. She’s remarkably lucky. Other than that, scratches and bruises. Her friend just got out of the operating room. We think we’ve saved the eye. We won’t know for sure for a few days. They’re both lucky girls. We can’t get hold of the other girl’s mom.”
“Friend?” I look at Annie, who starts to cry, the hiccupping, sobbing, hysterical crying of a child.
“Trudy,” she says. “She was driving the scooter.”
* * *
The story doesn’t come out until later. Their neighbor, who was away, has a scooter, and the movie was boring, and someone came up with the brilliant idea of “borrowing” the scooter and going for a ride around the island. Of course there was alcohol involved. I didn’t know that then, that both girls had blood drawn when they got to the hospital, that the police had the results, that there might be further action.
The keys were right there. Of course they were. This is Nantucket, not London. Trudy said she knew how to drive, and Annie climbed on behind her.
The car came out of nowhere. Sailed out of India Street and knocked the bike flying, Trudy diving face-first into a car, Annie on the cobblestones.
My little girl. My little girl buried in books, quiet, nerdy, painfully shy, now stealing scooters and getting into car accidents.
I think about my instincts that morning, how I knew it wasn’t a good idea, and I wonder, at what point will I start to listen? At what point will I trust my own voice?
* * *
Trudy has a bandage over half her face, is fast asleep. Oddly, she isn’t nearly as bloody as Annie, but her wound is more serious. We think we’ve saved the eye. Please God, let them have saved the eye, let this night, tonight, be nothing more than a bump in the road, something from which they will learn, something that will change them, but only for the better.
I pull a chair up to the side of her bed, astonished at how young she is when asleep. This little girl, who could have been Annie. I take her hand in mine and lean over to kiss her cheek, the one that is bandagefree. I stroke her hand and I stay there a while, knowing that if this were Annie, I would want someone, a mother, to sit with her, to stroke her hand, to kiss her cheek and whisper that she is going to be okay. I have no idea if she will ever know, but it is what I would want for my own child.