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ADMIN PASSWORD: Remember Me

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gabriel
Love and ferrets and pretending to be a writer.

2006-12-09 4:57 PM
It's Dave's birthday

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Mood:
Contemplative

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The ferrets are: asleep in a heap

Weather: gray, smoky and rainy

Reading: The Skeptical Feminist: Discovering the Virgin, Mother and Crone, by Barbara G. Walker. Just finished reading two books by Lani Diane Rich - wonderful!

Knitting: Christmas presents

I remember Dave. He was a high school boyfriend and I might have always remembered him only as that - one in a chain of several, except for the accident that he was in the weekend before the beginning of my senior year. I am thinking of him this morning because of typing the date at the top of the page. Today is his birthday.

I say “is” because he is still alive, as far as I know. Not to me, because I didn't get to see him enough to keep on knowing him after the accident. I went to visit him in the hospital, then later in the nursing home, but after while my parents wouldn't take me any more. They'd take me once a month, and then they didn't want to take me any more at all. I had his high school ring and when he could talk again, he asked his grandmother to ask me for it. I thought he just wanted it back; it was his. I didn't realize the significance of the gesture. If there was any. I am still not sure. I do know that his former girlfriend, Mary, visited him regularly. I do not know whether they got back together. I don't know what his life is like now. I am pretty sure that I saw him one day at a bus stop. But I didn't meet his eye. I was afraid. Afraid to confront him, I suppose. Or myself? I am not sure.

He broke up with Mary, and maybe I was nobody but his rebound girlfriend. He loved her, and she loved him - that was apparent when they were going together. I have a picture of them taken at a beach trip we all went on when I was going with his friend, another guy named Dave. They were in a band together. A crummy band, I'm pretty sure, though they sounded only a little off to me when I was in high school. Maybe it was just the volume that made them sound a little off. Maybe.

Dave and I were engaged; had been for a couple of weeks. Or rather, well, yes. I guess we were. Everyone that I went out with wanted to marry me and I could almost envision myself with them, if only to get out of living at home with my parents and the other kids. I am the oldest of five kids. I don't know now if I was in love with him. I thought that I was. The Dave I went with before that, I felt closer to him than I did to the Dave I'm writing about today, closer as a friend. We went together for a long time for high school kids. It was about a year, an academic year, or close to it. I was only with this new Dave for a spring and a summer.

The man at the bus stop. He looked like Dave except slimmer. He was the same height Dave was after high school - he had already graduated a year before I did and had been working all summer in construction and had some muscle. He loved building things, seeing them take shape and knowing that he was a part of something like that, and part of a team working for a common goal. I think his dad was on the crew, too, that Dave was working for him. Dave was about the height I was then, but I grew nearly another two inches after high school.

The man at the bus stop used a cane. I was glad to see that he could walk. He had facial scarring the same as Dave's. He was at a what do you call it, transit center. This makes sense, because if you want to go anywhere in this town, you eventually end up at one or more of those. I mean if you are going anywhere on a bus or train. I can see why Dave wouldn't have been a driver any more. He had only one eye after the accident. And he was walking with that cane, so I think that one of his legs didn't work very well. Plus maybe he developed a fear of driving. I think that I would have, after what happened. I bet he didn't though. He was strong and worked on conquering every fear and obstacle.

I drive now. I wasn't in the accident, and I wasn't a driver at the time of his accident. And I wasn't a racer. Never have been, never will be. He apparently was - people who analyzed the accident said that he had to have been going very fast. There was a towel in the car that had wiped up some of the blood, so maybe someone had been in the car with him. Had they made a dare? I don't know. There were probably more things that came out about the accident, maybe Dave could remember it later on, but this is what I was told in the beginning, so that is all I know.

Dave had no alcohol in his blood. He was alone when he was found, the tape deck in his car playing the same track over and over. The car was in a pig enclosure, and one of the fence rails came through the windshield and into Dave. It hit his cheekbone and took out his eye. He was in a coma for a long time. It seems to me now that it was eight or nine weeks. I haven't thought about all of the details for a long time. I think about Dave once in awhile, not as often as I used to. A person forgets even important things if they don't run them through their mind often, or write them, or tell them. I don't remember how long the coma was, and then gradually he started to wake up.

His mother told me while he was in the coma that they were talking to him all the time and reading to him because they didn't know how much he could hear and the doctors had told them that they should talk to him and act naturally around him, talk to him and about him and beside him as if he were listening but could not talk. Which might well have been the case; I really think that it was. He had a sister named Nancy. I liked her fine until the accident. She had a severe dramatic streak. When she called me - I don't know why she was the one who called me - to tell me he'd been in an accident, what she said was, “if he lives, he'll never be the same.” It was true, but it terrified me.

As an experiment, they played Dave the tape (it was an 8-track) that had been playing in the car when he was hurt. When he heard that music, when he was still in the early waking up phase, his eyes filled with tears. So he wasn't a “vegetable” as so many are so cruel as to say of someone who was in a coma. No. He was in there, somewhere. I knew he'd come back out. As for talking to him while he was in a coma, I couldn't. When everyone left me alone with him, I just sat at his side and held his hand. I'd cry if I started to talk, and he didn't need to hear that shit.

One of the times I did manage to go see him at the nursing home he tried to talk to me, but I didn't understand. The nurses could understand him, and so could his family, and probably Mary. The people who stayed in touch with him the way that I couldn't. He looked away when I kissed his cheek. I wonder what it was that that made him ask for his ring back? Did he just want the evidence that he had graduated from high school? That he had learned, and could learn again? Or was he letting me off the hook, was his concern for me? I thought a few times that it was. Or was he in love with Mary? She was there, she was his friend, at the very least, a better friend than I was. Or did he think that I should have been there more? Did he think that I would never be able to deal with his disabilities? I don't know. And could I have? I don't know that, either. We had not been going together very long, I didn't know him as well as I would have needed to to make a real commitment. I was young. I was young and still had a lot to learn.

The reason that I didn't go to see him on my own was because he was clear across town. His parents lived in a town forty miles away, before the accident, which was far enough, but the second nursing home was in another town, which was sixty. I didn't have a car, I didn't drive. My parents wouldn't take me - it was so far. And they wouldn't let me find my own way there on a bus, or by getting a ride from them to the bus in my town, then getting on a bus and going to his parents' town, where I could connect with Dave's family. My parents were opposed to it; they didn't want me to be a burden on anyone else, even for a short ride that they would share with me because they were going there anyway, and they didn't want me trying to navigate on buses by myself. I was very smart, still am, but also very sheltered in a lot of ways. I have a lot of fears, I don't want to get lost, I am still afraid of that, in spite of having driven cross country and driving all over this town, even at night and in the rain. Sounds like no big deal to a lot of people, I'm sure. Oh, and I managed to go to college at a great age in another state, too. Talk about overcoming fears. I can do that.

But I could have visited, I would have done it. I would have gone to see him every single Saturday (the bus schedule was too bad on Sunday, and there was no time on week nights) if I had been allowed to. Dave's mother even said that she could come out to my house to get me, but I knew my folks would never allow that, someone coming all the way out to get me and then take me back. It was too far, it was too much to ask. I wasn't asking her to do it, though. I wouldn't; I would have gotten there most of the way on my own. I know now, since I have children of my own, that she wanted what was best for Dave. Me visiting would have been good for him.

I would have visited every Saturday. I never did tell Dave, though. I don't think that he ever knew how much I wanted to keep on seeing him. No one knew except my parents, as far as I know. I have always had a hard time, an impossible time, talking about my feelings. I told my closest friends about the accident, and that I wanted to visit Dave. One of them had no sympathy. Another also never talked about her feelings. I developed a crush on another of them; I tend to develop crushes on unattainable people whenever I can't deal with something in my life. I supposed it's better than drinking or an eating disorder. I didn't tell Dave that I wanted to see him every weekend. I didn't tell him a lot after the accident. It was too hard to talk to him. I did tell him once, when he was in the first nursing home, or maybe it was still the hospital, that he was getting skinny and needed to eat more. It was true. And he was delighted. “Skinny!” He called. “Skinny!” It was the first word I heard him say after the accident. It came out like “Skeeny” but I was glad to hear him say something.

I don't know how much of his intellect he recovered. If he was the man at the bus stop, who stood beside me looking at the schedule - and I think that he was - then he could read. Or at least he could read faces and knew that it was me standing there. Maybe he was looking at me instead of the schedule. Maybe. I don't know. Until several minutes after he walked away from me, I couldn't see much of anything.

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:: JOURNAL HOME :: SUBSCRIBE TO THIS JOURNAL :: Click on Kathy Gabriel and read my stories :: 2-in-1 Romance by me (but the back cover's misspelled!. grrrrr.) :: November is National Novel Writing Month! :: The Feel Good Manual - happiness can be learned :: Mugs with the wet ferret :: Fractured Frugal Frieds - the best frugality site around :: The ferrets, and other pics by a talented local (very local) photographer :: Kettins_Bob's journal :: Clarion SF & F writing workshop :: Genevieve's journal (Clarion classmate) :: Phil's website (Clarion classmate) :: Nnedi Okorafor's blog (Clarion classmate) :: Online magnetic poetry :: Dave's interactive html tutorial :: Make a snowflake here - WARNING: Addictive! ::