A skinny breastless thirteen, I ached for Jonnie, the boy who’d moved from three towns over to our little borough, where he commandeered a following. I wasn’t surprised. He’d always been like that. One day in art class I asked him, Do you remember me? I’d lived in his old town for a few years, gone through grades one, two and three with him, taken the daisy he’d offered one late afternoon by the creek, pressed it in my favorite book. And the lollipop in cellophane, I’d kept that too until it dissolved in a sugary red mess in my jewelry box, stuck to heirloom pearls and special occasion silver barrettes. But that day before art class I clipped the silver barrettes in my hair and when I stood next to Jonnie by the window his eyes rested on the barrettes and he reached up and said, Sure I remember you and then he touched the tip of my chin as if to wand a dandelion beneath it and say You like butter. I closed my eyes, felt that hot buzz like being too close to a bonfire, the sense that if you move one way or the other you’ll burn or freeze, and so I held still like a rabbit that knows it’s in danger.
Later that fall afternoon in the gym the air felt prophetic, as if a god held a trumpet to his lips. A sweaty and dank miasma hovered even with the fans blowing. A chink of light. Chalk motes in the air. The slap of feet on matts, the squeal of the pommel horse, the groan of the kip bar. Coming out of the locker room Jonnie walked by and pressed a daisy in my palm, but when I looked it wasn’t really a daisy, it was a white slip of paper with a trembling heart, sound waves on both sides. Bad art, he whispered. He was right, but he was magic in the gym, his black ponytail flipping during floor exercises, me on the sidelines, watching, stretching. My fingertips reached for the sky as I lifted and tucked my landlocked leg while he synchronized his solemn bounces on the jumping mat with the words to the nursery rhyme we’d sung by the creek, When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen. His wink pierced me and I touched my beating throat, as if to say Yes, you. A breath, a breather, a magnetic stare. Jonnie on the trampoline, bouncing so high my heart followed and not wanting to be caught I looked away and so I only heard the crack and thud.
I ran to him, the gym teacher pushed me away but not before I pressed the slip of paper in his hand. It was there on the floor alongside a roll of surgical tape left behind after the paramedics took him away. I tucked them in my bag, cushioned them in my jewelry box when I got home. From our house on the ridge I watched the scarab-like cars wind around the medical center with it backdrop of yellow lights, strobing in the dark. A grim medley of days passed before word came, Visitors allowed.
In the hospital, his long body immobilized, his head and neck in a padded metal brace, his toes humped beneath the white sheet, his eyes tear-wet and focused on a silver butterfly someone pasted on the ceiling. His mother turned when I knocked and her face registered nothing as she said Jonnie, Another girl is here, and she sounded anything but grateful. Do you remember me? I asked. No, he said, but I returned every day for forty days until he said Yes, now will you go away.
Quadriplegic: paralyzed from the neck down, legs, arms, torso.
The world and all the people in it transformed, imprisoned. Seasons of admonitions. Be careful on everyone’s lips. The mothers spoke of tragedy, whispered fear in a chorus of pity and relief. There but for the Grace of God but what God allows this, I demanded. Grounded for a week, and in those seven days I dismantled creation and let loose chaos. On the eighth day I returned to the hospital. Jonnie encased in metal and silence, his eyes shut, his mouth weeping drool and only when his mother suggested cutting his ponytail did he speak. No.
Days where nothing but snow and exhaust-tinged snow melted. Crocuses erupted, each one a wish. Outside the stone house down the road from me construction workers sawed and hammered, building a ramp that went up the front steps, across the verandah and to the door. A blue van with wide side doors sat in the driveway. I walked my dog past the house. Hard sidewalk cement beneath my feet, privets brushing my legs, the sun beating down on my arms. The dog whined when we got to Jonnie’s house. I hadn’t known he lived there. His mother stepped out to talk to the builders and when she saw me she didn’t wave. She stared at my trembling legs and I felt naked and ashamed to be alive.
Summer came like a lie. The Rotarians purchased a motorized wheelchair for Jonnie, but still he did not leave his house. Unkind tongues wagged and hinted at ingratitude, a secondary caution This is the thanks we get. Night after night strange clicks and whirrs filtered in through my open bedroom window, unbearable harmonizing crickets and owls, creaking branches, and swooshing leaves that stole my sleep. On the tenth noisy night, I understood and rushed outside and hid behind the dogwood. The smell caught me, that ever-present hospital smell of disinfectant, sweat and excrement. There he was in the wheelchair, his back to me yet so close I could have touched him, his mother down the road training a flashlight on him. He puffed on a clear straw, each exhalation a click and whirr forward. His grunts and moans landed on me like bricks and I slipped back to the lawn and into the gray shadows. I no longer remembered who he was, only what he was, what he could not be.
Still, when the note showed up in the mailbox I followed the instructions and waited at the foot of Jonnie’s driveway at midnight. The door opened and Jonnie’s mother backed out, pulling the wheelchair down the ramp to the road. The straw – clear tubing taped to the corner of Jonnie’s mouth – stood at attention. He pursed his lips around it and puffed, hard, and the wheelchair jerked forward. I stepped in front of him, his mother handed me the flashlight, and if he could have looked away he would have. He said I don’t need your pity. But I surprised myself when I said I don’t need your shit. His mother smiled. Even then I knew it wouldn’t end well, but we got good at it, racing up and down the road getting as far as the bungalows, ablaze with light, at the intersection with Main.
Jonnie and his mother moved away before school started that fall, no forwarding address, and I mourned. For years I filled my heart with miles, crossing latitudes and longitudes, wheeling about the globe like a gyroscope, worshipping no god known to man, tasting delights, but nothing compared to the childish brush of our lips by the creek. Once, in a museum in a little Italian town, I saw a sublime vase, sacrosanct and inviolable yet hotter than a bonfire. On it a woman, a queen I imagined, shook a magic wheel as her lover approached. A goddess, no doubt Aphrodite, watched them from above, hollow-eyed and mordant. My reflection trembled in the glass case.
Remember me? I whispered. I have come for you.
