late. My nakedness wakes me up more.
I don’t want him to see me. Not yet. I’m not ready.
Everything falls away from me, and my pale, never-seen breasts meet the cool air. I think about how naked I am while Brian prays and the men work. My mind stops remembering. I fall back asleep as my insides spill into each other, ruptured spleen bleeding inside me, punctured lungs purring under fractured ribs, neck broken.
I’m alive. If I had been hit by anyone else but a first responder, someone who knew not to move me, who knew I needed to be stabilized, I could be dead.
* * *
My mom is tossing a salad at her supper club in St. Francisville when she finds out. My daddy is just one room over drinking gin and tonics and telling jokes. It’s November 2, his birthday; he’s still full from the chocolate pie we ate in the afternoon and he’s not sure he’ll fit into the new clothes we got him from his Filson catalogue. He’s peaceful when the police call with the news but he’s not sure why.
“Marsha, Ruthie was in a wreck,” he tells my mom calmly. “Everything is going to be okay.”
Her arms drop to her sides; they’re so heavy she can barely lift them. Mr. Carter, my godfather, leads them to his car. The hospital calls him on his boxy car phone and tells him I might be paralyzed. He prays while he drives. I have a 5 percent chance of survival and a 1 percent chance of walking again.
Tim is at our farmhouse doting on beautiful blond-haired Laura, his first girlfriend, whom we’re all absolutely certain he will marry. They walk in the door from a trip to New Orleans and see the red square on the answering machine blinking frantically. He presses the button and before the message is complete, they get into the car. Lile is getting drunk and grilling meat at our hunting camp on the grassy fringes of Lake Rosemound just a few minutes from home. He does it every year with his work friends from Fred’s Bar near LSU. My daddy sends two policemen for him since he knows they’ve been drinking Michelob since morning and nobody can drive. The cruiser bumps along the dirt path and scares the shit out of everyone when it gets there. As soon as they say my name, Lile jumps into the back seat, where they put the hoodlums, and begs the officers for more information. They don’t have any, so they talk about their deer stands and wives instead while he falls to pieces behind the cage. They drop him at the local station and another unaffected cop takes him the rest of the way to me.
I wait for everyone at the hospital in Baton Rouge woozy and drunk on the strongest medicine.
“Excuse me, I’m very uncomfortable,” I say as they send me through the MRI machine. They give me more medicine so I won’t try to talk anymore. They tie my long arms and legs down with buckles because I don’t want to be still.
My parents arrive just in time to see me. I’m shaking.
“Daddy, I don’t think I can play basketball.”
They roll me back under the big white movie-set lights to open my body and try to fix the mess inside. Lile won’t get to talk to me before I go in but once he does arrive, he refuses to leave. He sleeps at a little desk in the waiting room with his head on a stack of phone books.
* * *
Exactly three weeks before, I am under another set of big white lights. It’s halftime and I am waiting to find out if I’m homecoming queen. I change out of my cheerleading uniform, skirt cut extra long just for me, and into an ugly brown suit with too-short sleeves; they make all the girls wear them and none of us knows why. I walk out onto the field and stand beside my daddy. He tells me I look beautiful even though I’m dressed like an accountant and he makes a smile so big it wants to jump off his face. He knows I’m going to win. My mom watches on the sidelines in her cashmere sweater with tears beading at the edges of her eyes. In watching these milestones, she is completed in me, her only girl. She joyfully claims a part of the crown that they are about to balance on my frizzy hair,