Counting Sheep

She remembers drinking moosetrack milkshakes from Hardees in the hospital. And people crying and touching her. She heard voices. She says it was like the 6th sense. I imagine waking up and not remembering myself as a 17-year-old who would celebrate my 18th birthday in the hospital, 3 months after my accident, and one month after waking up. To be reborn into the world, with part of me gone but part of me left. To come back to the world and say "Hey! Those are my hands, but why do they look so twisted?" She would remember each day, and then forget it the next, and spend those days, in the beginning, wondering if that image of the windshield, and barreling forward into trees, and the rain, and that fucking white mailbox and red fire hydrant twenty feet from Brittany Lane, from her home--wondering if those images were just in a movie she once saw, or if it had been her life.

It was in that moment, on the curve in the road where there is a white mailbox that I pass every day on my way to her house- it was here that she went from being her 5-year old sister's best friend picking her up from bible school, to someone disabled by a terrible car wreck, disabled by the trauma it caused her physically and emotionally. Now her sister is 9. They do not see each other very often. They never talk about the accident. And Brittany can no longer paint her little sister's fingernails red.

This morning when I got to her door and she did not answer I wondered if she was alive. As morbid as it seems to me now, I remember smelling for her. I called her name. She yelled for me to come upstairs. I had never seen her in bed, all curled up. She looked so safe. She didn't say hello. She asked if I would just come and hold her. She can't cry. The tears will never come, the doctors tell her.

I could feel her breathing under her counting sheep sheets. I imagined her dreams. The ones she must have had just after the accident. One sheep jumps. 2 sheep jump. They all fall down.

I tried to tell her I used to have dreams about the scar on my knee. I went through a period as a child when I wished all day that the scar would go away. I can remember having repeated dreams over that scar- dreams and I would wake up and think that it was gone. B said, "That didn't make it go away." I told her that the scar taught me my left from my right. I could remember that the scar was on my right knee because of the r that ends the word scar. She laughed. But I'm talking about a scar- a cut on my knee I got when I was five and playing hide and seek. But she has tremors down her arms, she falls down every day, she burns herself trying to iron, cuts herself shaving, she has crusty milk stains on her tshirts.

The other day was a bad day so she asked me to dance. There was no music playing. We danced to the crunching sounds of the spilt, dry cereal on the kitchen floor.