“Love is not a victory march/It’s a cold and it’s a broken/Hallelujah”
– Rufus Wainwright
Somewhere, buried in an old photo album, is a photograph my father likes to bring up in family conversations. Apparently it was all the rage in 1983 to bring your infant to the local pool and, quite simply, fling them in. My father says it was a program called Aquababies, designed to familiarize children with water before they were old enough to fear it. In the photo, I’m dog paddling just below the surface of the unnaturally blue water, clad in a frilly navy kiddy suit. As was a strange habit that has lasted into my twenties, my eyes are wide open regardless of the chlorine stinging them. I like to see where I’m going. I imagine my mother taking the photo while standing off to the side, camera trained on me, bubbles streaming from my nose as I paddle toward the arms and hands stretching over from the far right side of the frame—my father’s arms. My father compares this photo to one he’s taken of me in full scuba gear, eyes wide open under the goggles. He says I’ve always sort of looked like a bug, under water. I don’t remember Aquababies at all. I do know that I swim quite well.
In recalling old photographs and bringing them up, at dinner, family barbeques or when a relative comes to visit, my father reminds me that, no matter what, I am still his little girl. He doesn’t say it outright; he’s a quiet man, one who is awkward (although not visibly) around crying women—my mother, for example. When we talk on the phone now, although I am an adult of twenty-five and can talk about ‘adult things’, he would rather discuss the state of the laptop he bought me for graduating with my BA. It is not that he doesn’t converse; he does, but he sometimes ends up sounding like an instructional video for bow hunting or Macintosh computers or Republican politics. (These, of course, are three things close to his heart.) We yell at each other from time to time, over who’s right about inconsequential things: how long it really takes to grill a salmon fillet, which happened first in a series of events, what to listen to on the radio in the car (my pick: music; his: Michael Savage on talk radio). Yet my father’s smile widens in his handsome face when he talks about those old photographs, and underneath what could be inconsequential words is that unspoken message: You are my child and I love you. This is what I hear when I hear my father, telling my aunt about the swimming pool picture, “She still looks like that sometimes.”
*
I cannot tell you what I don’t remember, and so I cannot tell you what it feels like to fly, to exist as nothing but a dark object in motion against a black sky. I cannot tell you the color of the truck that slammed into the Ford Bronco I was riding in, and I cannot tell you how long it was before I regained consciousness. What I can tell you is this: it was cold. When the paramedics arrived, they cut off my new sweatshirt, a fifty-dollar waterproof one; my mother had purchased it for me earlier that day. I touched the chilled and dripping gash in my forehead; it felt like a half-frozen steak. What I looked like immediately following that terrible car accident is not something I can tell you either; I had no mirror. Until the ambulance arrived, I lay sprawled on the side of the road, covered in someone’s jacket. The two friends I’d been in the Bronco with appeared overhead, their faces pushed in around me. If I looked like a bug at all, it was of the variety you might find mashed on your windshield. Apart from my two friends, Tim and Sarah, who’d wanted to go bowling that night despite the icy roads, I didn’t know anyone else who was present. I can tell you that my right arm felt detached from my body, and that after reaching up to touch the bloody left side of my face, I didn’t have enough energy to move again. I briefly saw the face of the kid who had t-boned us hovering above me; inexplicably, I seem to recall noting that he was good-looking. For the duration of the ride to the ER, the tight, restrictive C-collar around my neck had me in a state of panic. I worried little about who was going to break the news to my parents. Everyone had cell phones, I figured. I wouldn’t be lost in the ER, on a gurney somewhere all by myself. Someone would come for me.
*
I believe it must be a supreme act of faith—in what, I’m not quite certain—to do what my parents did at the swimming pool. To pick your child up, to bless them or pray over them or think nothing at all, and then to fling them forth into what might harm. Some people might call it the ultimate aberrant act—chucking your baby into a swimming pool on purpose. It is one thing, I think, to let go of your child, to offer him over to an unknown deliberately, all the while standing by, controlling the variable that is yourself—your fear, your parental instinct, the impulse to dive in after. It is one thing to willingly fling your child into the water. It is another when the world does it for you. No one but she herself will ever know what it is my mother was thinking when she received the phone call telling her that very thing: that one of her children had been flung headlong into the water without her consent, without arms outstretched to catch her.
For a woman who chose to marry an avid hunter and fisherman, who has spent much of that married life cleaning, gutting, quartering and grinding moose, or scaling and beheading dozens of fish at a time, my mother occasionally displays a desperate panic when faced with blood. I suppose, given that this is when one of the six of us injures ourselves, her fear of blood is not of the blood itself, but of what’s happened to the bleeder. She has dealt admirably with split lips and eyebrows, with one brother’s chin gashed all the way across (Gabe tripped and fell on the metal lip of the shower; we got at least a few lollipops each out of that one), with the screwdriver lodged in another brother’s palm (Levi claims he was fixing the trucks on his skateboard; none of the rest of us even knew what a skateboard truck was.) She, fairly calmly, has even handled my little sister belting Gabe in the face with a rock. I suppose the deciding factor in her level of calm the night of the accident was what she later told me the doctor had said:
If she had been in any worse shape, or if she’d been any older, she would have been dead.
The only thing I remember hearing the doctor say was that it would be no problem to stitch up my eyebrow, right there in the ER. All he needed, he averred, was some local anaesthetic and a suture kit. He did just what he’d said, my mother standing somewhere else, refusing to watch as the needle slid in and out of my skin. My mother remembers but that single statement, the one that brought that latent motherly terror to life. She masked her fear from her children, usually, accustomed to running through her ‘crying child’ checklist before pulling out the first aid kit or calling my father to come take a look:
Are you bleeding?
Is anything broken?
Are you dying?
Is anything on fire?
Then you’re fine.
I was not fine. And so my mother was not fine, every maternal fear there is solidified into one. Although I was well aware that she disliked the sight of blood, and especially of her children bleeding, her reaction surprised me. Sometimes the strangest reactions are those of the person who hasn’t been hurt, who’s visiting you in the hospital, just someone bringing flowers or a paperback novel. I had assumed my mother, being my mother, would do something, well…motherly. Touch my hand, perhaps, or stroke back my hair. Instead, and this I saw from the usual hospital-bed angle, which is to say hovering over my face slightly to the left; she leaned down a little, frowned hugely at my newly-stitched forehead, and said, I’m going to go call your father.
*
I do remember a ragged series of vignettes that is most of my family arriving in the ER. First, my sister. She wouldn’t come near me. I was not given the opportunity to see her face hovering above mine as I had my mother’s, but, in a disorienting fashion, I could hear her. I guessed she was standing at the foot of the gurney, but I couldn’t tell. Since they hadn’t cleaned the blood from the left side of my face, I was afforded vision only from my right eye, and only straight up above me. My ears, however, were perfectly fine, and they told me my sister’s reaction quite clearly. She was sobbing over there somewhere: Oh my god. She’s all broken…
A number of minutes later, Gabe, the eldest of my younger brothers (there are four). In his usual manner, he stuffed his hands in his pockets (I heard him do this, as he stood close to my head) and nodded down at me. His slightly gruff and awkward manner reminds me very much of my father; neither of them is good at talking about ‘feelings’; when Gabe and I see each other off at the airport after a visit, it’s a quick one-armed hug, a pat on the back. We don’t really say ‘I love you’. Gabe’s reaction didn’t surprise me when at last he said something: Huh. You look like shit.
Too young to drive themselves over, and exactly young enough to potentially get in the way, the youngest three brothers—Steven, Levi, and David—were still at home. It was just as well, I suppose, since after Gabe arrived, I was moved around, wheeled off down a hallway for x-rays and MRIs, the buzzy-bright hospital lighting hurting my eyes. The x-ray room is the last thing I remember; I must have fallen asleep for the first time shortly thereafter, and would spend most of my six-day hospital stay doing nothing but sleeping. Here is something I do not remember: my father’s arrival to the ER.
*
On one of those six days, having woken up for a little while, like a free diver simply coming back up for air before heading back underwater, I was greeted by all three of my youngest brothers and one of my cousins. Grandma Ann—my father’s mother—was up in Alaska visiting, and she accompanied them. My three youngest brothers—Steven, Levi and David—and cousin Alison had pooled their money to buy me a gift: a new sweatshirt to replace the one cut from my body. Grandma Ann had brought one too, later, Gabe brought me a present of his own; yet another hooded sweatshirt, this one black with red lettering. When something is lost, my family is the kind who replaces it: stuffed toys, shirts or hats that remind us of favorites stained or shredded, especially if one of us has been sick, when we’ve been afraid for one another. Once, when I was a toddler, having my fingers pricked for blood tests, Gabe appeared at the doctor’s office with a stuffed Rainbow Brite dog—this is one of my first memories, in fact. But for our ability to give gifts to one another, we are unable to express what we really mean: that we have been sleepless, worried, and in despair; that when someone we care for may be taken from us, or is hurt, we fill the spaces made by our fear with things—my mother bakes bread or cookies for sick neighbors; we buy novels and books of crosswords when someone is in the hospital; my aunts proffer bottles of wine and movies for a break-up. The fears of my brothers, my cousin, my sister, my grandmother—these are spaces filled with fleece and pull-strings, with the sweatshirts they brought me because they feared that I would be lost.
My father was there from time to time, I’m sure. I heard his voice as I came out of long naps several times, radiating out from his position at the foot or by the side of my bed. The quietude, the air of organization and knowledge that have comforted me always, were there without question. While I can’t recall him ever touching me, or adjusting my pillow, or bringing me drinks of water, I liken the atmosphere created by his presence to a specific memory from childhood. I was probably seven, maybe eight years old, very sick with a fever that caused me to have bizarre nightmares. In these nightmares, I was surrounded by nothing but undulating, pulsing black and white shapes, and a high-pitched continuous whine rang in my ears. For whatever reason, these nightmares forced me into a state of panic on that particular night. I was exactly lucid enough to remember where my parents’ room was: out my bedroom door, take a right, take another right before the kids’ bathroom door, down the hall, through the living room, into what we called the ‘new addition’. My parents slept on a bed that folded down from the wall, big and comfortably. My father had built it himself. Even in my terribly ill state, the one thing I can recall is this: I knew my father would be in that room sleeping. I needed to get to my father. As soon as I crawled into the big, foldout bed with my father, I fell asleep. I know this because I remember my mother—who had been out at my aunt and uncles’, I believe—coming home, which woke me up; she asked my father why I was there. He replied with something, picked me up, and carried me back to my own bed. This did not frighten me over again. I knew my father was there. This was not true of the ER. I fill my father in: present, as he is in the pictures from the swimming pool, yet periphery, there because he must have been, because otherwise, whose arms were those, stretching out toward me?
*
My mother is the one who nurses us when we are sick. She is the one who, faced with a child so sick they refused to eat, would park one of us at the dining room counter and ask if we wanted some ice cream for breakfast. She once camped out on our living room floor with a stomach-achey, crying me and called it ‘our picnic’; never mind that the picnic consisted solely of flat 7-Up. My father is the man who taught us to shoot bows and arrows in the backyard, who once forced a trout hook back out of my chin after I’d been hooked by Gabe’s botched casting. As I spent the few weeks following my discharge from the hospital back on the couch in my parents’ house, my parents, together—Mom with her offerings of cold juice, Dad rising early in the morning to check on me—pervaded my senses, dulled as they were by too much sleep and pain medication. More healing than the medication and the bandages, this sense of being back at home, surrounded by my mother—care and concern, ice cream for my sickness—and my father—the arms outstretched from the corner of the photograph. Once again I was learning to swim. I couldn’t bathe myself without someone helping me drag my useless right arm out of its shirtsleeve. Everything I did, I did left-handed, shuffling around the house in a pair of my father’s old sweatpants and one of my new sweatshirts Once, at dinner a few days after being discharged, I was praised for slowly eating almost all of a baked potato. My parents were a team through all of this, doling out pills, giving pillows, checking back with the hospital about bills and aftercare and checkups. Another way to fill the space: You are living. We will put your life back in order. Gradually things returned to their normal movement. Although I can’t remember doing much but sleeping and watching TV for some weeks, these boring sequences—sleep, bathe clumsily, eat, take pills, watch T.V.—are nevertheless memories. It wasn’t until over a month afterwards that I would learn how my father’s memory of the accident, layered over the accident itself, consisted of what sounded at first like nothing but a song.
I was sitting at the kitchen table one evening listening to music. My father was nearby—perhaps making dinner or doing the dishes. My mother was in their bedroom, probably sitting on the fold-down bed, doodling plans for a new dream house or taking a nap. My brothers and sister were all off on their own, watching TV or at friends’ houses, or outside playing basketball in the driveway. The ways in which we’d lived with each other, eaten, played, slept—all these small routines filled the house with the white noise of family, a white noise that I was drawn out of by the melody of a Rufus Wainwright song:
I heard there was a secret chord
that David played and it pleased the Lord.
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth.
The minor fall, the major lift,
the baffled king composing
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
It’s a beautiful song, touching in its simplicity, just a guy and his piano and a simple chord progression. It was on a movie once, “Shrek” I think it was. My father, who will only listen to songs like this—just guys and their guitars or pianos, simple, like those he remembers from his own childhood—looked up from his cooking or dishes, and paused for a second. He leaned out of the kitchen and said,
“You know, when you were having your car accident, I was listening to this song.”
It was said in his regular, matter-of-fact voice, and yet what it meant caused a wave to wash over my core. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what it meant, even though simply hearing the words had such an effect. For a long time I attempted, using the exaggerated tries at reason that occur when I am faced with moments like these, moments I ought, I suppose, to simply let be in their import, the way they change what I remember and what I think about what I cannot recall. I tried to logically piece together the timeline. When did the song begin? Was it playing before or after my mother made the call from the hospital? How could my father possibly have known that the two things occurred at the same exact time? Finally I realized that none of that mattered. Finally the revelation of what this memory meant to my father, and therefore to me, came about. What it meant was this:
Because, at the time of the accident—the time of car hitting car, of bitter Alaskan winter night’s cold, of my body hurled into darkness—the word ‘Hallelujah’ was pronounced in a song, my father had never doubted that I would live. Some might call it out of place: ‘hallelujah’ is a word of rejoicing, what some call the highest word. How could it be joyful, against that scene in the darkness, that scene that might have resulted in my death? But because my father is faithful, and because he remembers what I do not, I believe that the song was a comfort to him, that it was joyful because of what he knew then. I believe that the simple chorus replaces my own lost memories, gives me over to my father’s knowledge that I remained among the living, although I myself was unconscious. I am grateful for having survived, yes, although to what or whom precisely I don’t quite know. I am grateful to others’ memories for filling in my spotty one—my father’s, my mother’s, those memories running in tandem while mine could not.
If the accident were a movie, its soundtrack would be Rufus Wainwright, singing his hallelujahs over the ringing of the telephone. Its visual sequences would play out simultaneously: my father at the computer, turning up the song; my body flung through the cold, clear sky, or strapped to a gurney, speeding to the hospital; my mother picking the phone from its cradle, unsuspecting. What my father remembers: that a single, bright word struck him—‘hallelujah’ from computer speakers. What my mother remembers: mostly that she was terrified, that she went to the hospital alone. That her checklist of fears was real. What I remember: only waking up.
*
The accident was, of course, many years ago, and the injuries have all healed. There remains a scar through my left eyebrow, one that surprises people—most only notice it in the right lighting, or when I’m not wearing make up, and immediately they ask me to recount what happened. I’m getting pretty efficient at detailing everything, but only up to the moment of impact. After that, I rely on what I’ve been told: bits and pieces from Tim and Sarah, some from the doctor who stitched me up, some from my mother. The ordering of events doesn’t always sound the same. I don’t always include the same details or names or descriptions of vehicles; the announcement of it all seems superfluous, the scar itself enough a memory. I cannot describe to anyone that the most vibrant recollection is not a true memory, not that sequence of images dredged up by sight or smell or sound.
I remember the accident most vividly when that Rufus Wainwright song comes on. Sometimes, in need of reassurance or a reminder that I’ve lived, I play it repeatedly, turning the volume up. In place of that hour of unconsciousness, my memory fills up with a vision of my father, sitting as he must have been that night—in front of his computer, reading the daily news online, some awareness woken by the first moments of the song. These are his memories, not mine, and yet I can feel them, the immersive realizations he came to covering up the fear he must have felt. There’s a montage running through my head at moments like these, much like the motion picture I imagine my body’s flight to be, a series of half-lit images that in fact I never saw. I play the song so that I don’t forget what never, in so many respects, actually happened to me, and the blank space in my memory fills up like an empty vessel with something strange and overwhelming. I’m recovering once again, having almost drowned each time in renewed astonishment that I’ve survived. These things I don’t remember play over in my thoughts as the song does through its fuzzy speakers, a voice under water telling me what I’ve come to know—faith, my father, ‘hallelujah’.
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