“Ha-ha—I’m glad you think it’s funny, to lose a chunk of my mind.”
“Hey, come on. I thought your doctor said—”
“He said it might come back. He can’t write me a prescription. ‘Here ya go—take this pill and get your six, seven weeks of memory returned, presto.’ ”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I’m sorry. But look. Maybe it’s for the best. It’s not like you forgot that you got elected president or you can’t remember how to play concert piano.” Kidding all the way, so was it my imagination that Rachel had gone tense? Averting her eyes, cracking her knuckles down the line. As if waiting for me to admit something.
“What?”
“What…?” Rachel repeated. Then she blew through her cheeks, her eyes scanning the room. “What the yuck is that?”
“Oh.” I reached and picked it up. “It’s plasticized teeth. I had them for a couple of months before I got my veneers.”
“Ew! What’s it doing here?”
“I guess I wanted to keep it. Sentimental, maybe. I thought I could hold pennies in it or something.”
“Ember, that’s vomit-worthy. But lucky you, because I’m making an executive decision.” Rachel grabbed my teeth and made a show of dangling them between her thumb and forefinger. Then she dropped them, used-Kleenex-style, into my jewelry box.
“Were you always this bossy?”
“I’m not as bossy as you are gross.”
“Gross hurts nobody. Bossy has the power to annoy. Bottom line, poor me.”
“Gross offends everyone. Bossy can be helpful. Bottom line, poor me.”
Our “bottom line, poor me” routine was an old joke, worn thin as a favorite T-shirt. Pretty dumb, but it had been such a long time since we’d done it that I had to smile.
“I’m so glad you’re back,” said Rachel. “And the best part is I can tell it’s the real you.”
My smile lost heart. “What do you mean, the real me?”
“No, I didn’t mean— Nothing.” She flinched, barely. “I mean, you’re always Embie. But you’re more Emberish to me when you’re actually here. And here you are. That’s all I meant.”
“Ookay.”
Suddenly Rachel jumped at me and hugged me again, hard. “Forget it. Don’t listen to me. I’m overly happy. I missed you like crazy and now everything’s back to normal and that’s a good thing. And that’s all there is to it.”
“I missed you, too.” The time for questions wasn’t now. But Rachel had lodged the thought, and now it was stuck. If there had been a real and a not-real me before the accident, then…which one of us had come home?
3
Good as New
“What? You’re cold? How?” Dad got noisy when he felt doubtful. He didn’t mean to be. Mom liked to say that Sam Leferrier’s voice was the loudspeaker to his soul.
“Not so much,” I lied as I accepted the platter of wild rice. Frozen, more like. I’d pulled on my ugly-comfy pajama-jeans and a baggy cable crewneck right before we’d come downstairs for dinner. Rachel hadn’t noticed, and I didn’t want to tell her, but my body temperature had suddenly plummeted.
I’d had similar moments at Addington, and they still spooked me. It was as if my veins were getting pumped with an injection of ice water. My still-healing body was a mystery to me. I randomly seemed to switch on and off, on and off, in jets of heat and frost, tears and laughter, sleep and sleeplessness, dreams and nightmares.
Of course, Dr. P’s case studies had already proven that this was normal.
“But it’s sixty-eight degrees!” Dad reproached, following me into the dining room with a platter of roast chicken. Mom and Smarty were finishing setting places.
“I know.” I set down the rice and the mat for the chicken. Dad’s face was rosy from cooking. I’d inherited his love of it. “Dr. P calls them ‘abreactions,’ ” I told him, aware that Mom was listening in. “It’s like an energy purge. There are physical and psychological kinds. They’ll get better.”
“But he never told us about that,” said Mom. She looked upset—she never liked to be caught by surprise when it came to any detail of my recovery.
“Yes, yes he did, Natalie. He did once, to me. It’s a post-traumatic symptom—yes, yes he did,” Dad overly assured her. They were always in a back-and-forth, making sure the other knew everything. Full shared custody of their broken treasure.
“Just be sure you keep regular contact with Dr. Pipini,” Dad reminded. “You’ve been under rigorous medical surveillance for eight months. And now you’re almost totally unmonitored.”
“Except by you and Mom, my twenty-four/seven EMT monitor team.”
“Hmm, funny.” Dad’s tone said that I wasn’t, not really. But I wasn’t exactly joking, either. Appeasing my parents’ concerns had become as routine as breathing.
Sunset fell through the dining room windows as we all seated ourselves around the table. The light dappled the herbed roast chicken, the wild rice and string beans, the blackberry cobbler in sundae glasses. Across the table, Rachel was happily inhaling all the potato salad like it had been a week and not a year since she’d last dropped by our house for supper.
“I can taste the rosemary, Dad,” I mentioned. Conversations about Dad’s window-box herbs were a better choice than conversations about medical surveillance. Taste, my best sense, hadn’t been exactly spotlighted by the Addington cafeteria experience.
“All summer I watched it grow, thinking about you coming home to us, Emb,” said Dad.
“It feels like proof I’m really here.” I yawned.
“You’re overtired. Maybe you shouldn’t go to school tomorrow.” Mom spoke quickly, as if she’d been waiting for the right way to work this in. “Honey, I was thinking. You might need a few more days at home to get your bearings. And we could use the free time to go into the city and neaten your bangs, maybe get you a new winter coat.”
“I kind of like my bangs looking a little wild,” I said.
Not the right answer. Mom pretended she hadn’t heard. “School will seem awfully intense, probably, with all the academic demands.”
But now Dad was restless, folding his dinner napkin into small triangles. He didn’t agree with Mom; I could sense it before he spoke. “Come on, Nat. Ember starting back at school is the smarter, more proactive move. She’s got a net, with all her same friends and teachers there to support her. And it’s a gentle transition, no matter what happens. We’ve all been over it.”