1
Will today be any different?
The white clapboard church standing in red clay looms in her windshield, the arrow on the church marquee pointing West for no particular reason. The scene zooms past her, and the phrase from the church sign bounces around the interior of the car, gets stuck in Sloan's brain for about a mile. Any different? How about now? Warm air blasts through the open window like a dog panting in her face. Eric Heatherly plays "She's So Hot" loud inside the Mustang, and if not for the sound rushing in her ears, she would have heard the cracks of thunder in the distance. By the time the guitar solo vying with Heatherly's vocal vamp fades, the air rushing through the window of her Mustang turns cold. Hail strikes the windshield followed by rain swirling in a playful dance, and heavy vines swing wild from the cedar trees lining the two-lane. She hits the "Stop" button on the CD player, hears thunder coming in long rumbles, like ocean waves singing a deep baritone.
Then, everything stops, and that gets her undivided attention.
She is not surprised by the funnel cloud. When two join up to form a tornado a mile wide . . . that worries her. She thinks about life insurance, wonders if she actually bought double indemnity.
Yes, she says to the Baptist Church sign begging the rhetorical question. Today will be totally freaking different.
The car flips door over door, side panel over side panel, and finally, end over end, like a ballet dancer pirouetting into nothing but air. Her head strikes hard on the car door. The phrase "Over and over" turns in her consciousness. The twister slams the Mustang through a wood fence painted white, the corner of a barn, then slams the buckled car back onto the two-lane straight into two other cars. Her head bounces off the gear shift. This is where it ends. And how.
When she wakes, she hears a chopper in the distance and a voice, right up close.
"Ms. McCandless."
Sloan thinks about answering. Her brain swims in irrelevant, unrelated activity, disconnected words and phrases. The word "unremarkable" burns its evil five syllables somewhere deep in her head. The phrase "blanket reduction" turns like a coin end over end. Sloan tastes music. Her tongue is thick with it, lyrics piling up to be consumed. Her own musical history. Good Morning Girl. How ya been? Each word tastes cool, like shaved ice. She doesn't possess this particular recording, but Steve Perry's voice soars just the same. Shatters glass on "Good Morning Girl," somewhere in her brain. Departure, an album she bought as an eighth grader with money squirreled away in a Mason jar. Yep.
"We're close," she hears a voice say. Metal stretching, cracking.
"Just get her the hell out of there," someone says.
"Workin' on it," a voice answers. "She's young."
"Not as young as you think," the other voice says, bass notes like musical scales. "Everybody looks young when they're scared."
"How do you know her?" This is the rescue squad guy.
The man with the star on his chest says, "Long story," and then, "Stand aside," the bass notes ringing in her head. Heaves the crushed door out of its former spot amongst the wreckage of the twisted Mustang.
Sloan squints her eyes against the image of a man, tall, thick in the waist, a voice like J.D. Sumner singing up the Bottom of Everything for the Stamps quartet.
"Ms. McCandless," the voice calls.
Sloan registers the voice as familiar, speaking to her from a distant place. A place she no longer lives.
"Sloan. Honey, help is on the way. Stay with us."
#
They have been reading "The Pearl" by John Steinbeck for so long, now. Mrs. Canton reads it aloud, stops and dramatizes, explains, asks questions, and reads some more. The pregnant wife is walking barefoot in the high desert forever. It is day four of the reading and still she walks. I get it, Sloan thinks. The baby is the true Pearl born out of the ragged jaws of his parents' lives lived in desperation. The clam breathes, twists its great tongue into a word, ushers forth the Pearl. We were all this baby, full of hope, carried around in loving arms where we could not see the feet bloodied from walking so many miles. So many sacrificial steps. No, Sloan thinks, I was never this Pearl, nor Hester Prynne's illegitimate Puritan child, either.
A machine breathes in rhythm. You could play "Only Love" by Wynonna Judd, keeping in sync with each gasp. She tastes the lyric on her lips, cannot make the sound. The first words, "I have sailed a boat or two," linger on her lips like first kisses, but they will not come. She is not back, she thinks. More bloodied steps required.
The Man Mountain appears at the foot of her bed.
"Sloan." Again, the familiar feeling. She should remember. Nothing surfaces.
Again, the words form, team up for delivery, but it's no go. Her face feels bruised. She squints, takes in the hazy image of the tall presence wearing the five-point star. Pain like a knife slicing through the top of her head, and, for the first time, the sensation of her face tightly wrapped like a mummy.
"Sloan, I just wanted to tell you. I mean, I just wanted to see you. To see if you needed anything. I don't know if you can hear me. Something tells me that you can. Jake was back in town, Sloan. I know you all have been separated for some time, but, he died, Sloan, in the hotel where he was stayin'." A baritone voice like a dam breaking. "You're gonna have to wake up." Sighs. "I don't have anybody else, Sloan. You're my best girl. I need you."
Sloan sifts the revelations. She must have loved Jake once, but nothing comes swimming up out of her memory. She must have meant something to this mountain of a man. There's just oceans of white space and florescent lights, flickering, vast deserts of eternity without meaning.
What is carved deep is Mrs. Canton reading "The Pearl," over and over, beginning at the ending, ending at the beginning, step by bloody step.
#
It's raining outside the hospital window overlooking Twenty-First Avenue, pooling on the roof of Vanderbilt Medical Clinic. Sloan knows enough about Vandy to ask herself an intelligent question. What floor am I on? At Vandy, knowing what floor you're on reveals all you need to know about your condition. From her bed, she can look down on the parking lot and the clinic, but not by much, and that means it's as bad as it gets before it doesn't matter anymore.
She touches her face, feels the bruise on her lips, as if her first word, when it launches, will land brutal, perhaps spit on a plate. White linen hangs in folds covering the mirror over the sink. The evil, dripping faucet grinds her headache deeper in a rhythm, the constant companion of her apocalyptic dreams. Sloan squints, makes out the calendar promoting Vandy Children's Hospital turned to June. Kids in bathing suits next to an ice cream truck, very convincing, insisting that she has somehow misplaced two whole months, like a stylus skipping grooves on vinyl and jumping two songs ahead.
Obviously, she still has a concussion, and just as obvious from the IV bags, she's been in a drug-induced coma. She touches her jugular. Finds the beat wild and fast.
The nurse steps in, takes her vitals.
Sloan manages the word, "Doctor."
"He's on his way. You've been sleeping for a while."
Yeah, Sloan thinks, but I'm awake now, and I wanna talk.
The man in the white coat looks to be about thirteen.
"How're ya doin'?" The ID badge on his coat reads, Everhardt.
The words line up, but all Sloan can manage is, "Face."
"Ah," he says. "A gift from Dr. Langston." Without a fuss or a drum roll, he removes the bandages. "He does good work."
Sloan blinks, manages the word, "Plastic."
"Yes, the best. You were his last patient, his triumph, I suppose. He's on his way to West Texas for a sabbatical. Might be there six months, he said, might be a year. In the middle of nowhere."
"Talk hurts." Sloan delivers two words this time. A sentence, a subject and a verb. Jesus Wept, and so forth. The pain convinces her to revert to single nouns.
The doctor unwinds one last segment of gauze. The mummy revealed, Sloan thinks, expects him to shrink back, maybe run and hide in the closet.
"Yes, I expect it does. You've had substantial reconstruction on the face." Attaches a hand mechanically to her shoulder. "To say the least, Miss McCandless, you may not recognize yourself in a mirror. You sustained serious facial injuries, bone and tissue. Dr. Langston worked on you for ten hours. He may have been inspired to improve upon nature just a bit."
"See?" she asks.
"Sure." Hands her a mirror.
Sloan catches the doctor and the nurse in a shared glance.
One look, and Sloan has the face memorized, the way you learn the faces of Hollywood stars or country music icons. It is a face for fold-out photos in men's magazines and heroines in graphic novels. The mirror falls to the floor but it doesn't crash, only bounces and cracks on the linoleum.
Langston. She turns the word around in her head. It lands like a slap.
#
They move her from the third floor to a different building, one of many on the sprawling campus of Vanderbilt Medical Center taking up major real estate on the heavily forested Twenty-First Avenue across from the university. She has to learn to walk again, among other things. Talking is a big ass chore, Sloan thinks, as she endures an hour of speech therapy. For some reason, they start with phonics, proceed to preschool words. I haven't forgotten the language of the Anglo-Saxons, Sloan wants to tell them, it's just that I can't freaking use it correctly. It actually hurts to say almost anything, and Sloan goes to great lengths not to speak, writing notes, gesturing. She makes up her mind to speak with purpose for the rest of her life and never waste words again.
More than once, male members of the medical team have told her she's the woman of their dreams, not because of her face, which is still healing, but because she doesn't say a fucking word. Same sad joke, hour after hour. Yankees, West-Coast types, and Good Ole' Boys. What unity to be had in sexist humor.
I'd only have to learn four words. Honey, you're so good. Or something like that.
The shrink is another story. He tries to give her a battery of psychiatric meds. She won't take any of them. He tries to get her to remember aspects of her life, but the jolt to her head shorted out the electrical system. Memory banks all on reserve power, Captain Kirk. I can't give ya any more. I'm an electrical engineer, not a miracle worker, for God's sake.
The impact resulted in trauma to the right temporal lobe where language and emotion form a kick-ass creative relationship. As a result, she can think of the words she wants to use, but she can't actually say them with any degree of reliability. It's hit and miss. She's batting a thousand. She has a particularly nasty case of aphasia. She can sometimes think of a word that's close to another word, such as plankton when she wants to say "pickle." Plankton is a hell of a lot more complicated a word as compared to pickle. Meaning-wise, it's not even close. Still, it's the one that's there. As the brain tissue heals, she'll be able to say "pickle" with the best of them, but she can't think why she would want to. She doesn't like pickles. That much she remembers.
They start with the day of the accident.
Dr. Castigliori wants to know if she went into work that day. And why was she heading home so early. Was it because of the storms in the forecast?
Sloan tilts her head. She went home early? From where? Where does she work?
"No," she says, brushing back a lock of blonde hair. "I woodena gone hommme 'cause of storrrmmms." The words come out in a slur, like a drunken sailor, she's drunk with her first freight train procession of them. He nods. Did the box cars line up? Did she manage to leave Plankton out of this? She's not sure.
She's lived in Tennessee all her life. Not in Nashville, though. Close enough to work there, but far enough to keep her distance, keep her work and her home life separate. Home. The image nearly swims up, then fades. Damned accident wiped out everything in the memory banks, except for the rating scale for twisters, F for Fucked, 1-5. Tornado warnings every other damned day this time of year. She wouldn't have bailed out of work just because some asshole saw a funnel cloud.
Jake. She remembers him. Remembers this hospital. She's been here before on a different floor, all because of him.
"What is it, Miss McCandless?"
She chooses her words carefully. "Jake."
"You remember?"
She nods. "He hurt me."
"Do you remember the police officer coming in to tell you what happened to him?"
She nods again. "He died. Tornado." Poor bastard.
"That's right. Anything else you remember about him?"
"I remember enough."
He nods. "I think that's enough for today."
"Wherrrre's Mountain Mannnnn?"
Purses her lips. "I'm not sure who you mean. Are you talking about the deputy? We haven't seen him in a while."
She wants to say, "Thank you," but the words are missing from her arsenal. She manages, "Take care."
The red-head looks familiar. Middle-aged, a bit heavy around the mid section, well-dressed, she sticks her head in the door, raises her eyebrow, suspicion on her face.
"Sloan?"
Sloan nods.
The red-head walks to the bedside. "The nurse said you had some holes in your memory."
"And my head," Sloan says.
"I can't get over . . . how different you look."
"Like those pennies . . . that get run over . . . by trains."
"Do you remember me?"
Sloan shakes her head. "Name. Maybe I--"
"Candy."
Sloan nods. "College."
The red-head grins. "Right. Shakespearean Tragedies."
"I'll say."
"I can't believe it's you. Why the blonde hair?"
"Bastarrrrrd Plasssstic surgeonnnn," Sloan says. That's all she can manage for the moment. The result requires no explanation. Black eyebrows and platinum blonde hair. Absurd.
"I liked your black hair," Candy says. "Kinda goth. What kind of doctor is this? Where is he?"
"West Texas. Sabbatical."
Candy frowns. "One last hurrah? Don't get me wrong. I love the look, it's just--"
"Can't go . . .public."
"Honey, I hate to tell you, but I can't go out in public with you like this." Her mouth twists into a sour smile. "I might as well be fried liver. How'd you lose all that weight?"
Sloan glances around. She's lost weight? Was she fat before? "Jake's dead."
"I know. Who told you?"
Sloan nods. "Mountainnnnn Man."
"Ah, Overton. Big Surprise. Well, I'm worried about you," Candy says. "When do you get out of this place?"
"Walk and chew gum."
"You couldn't do that before."
"Don't remember."
"What would you like to know?"
Sloan nods. "Job. Foggy."
"You're on staff at Warner Brothers."
"Cartoonnnns?"
Candy smiles. "Well, the song publishing branch, actually."
"I write?"
"Well, you go out to lunch a lot and take your guitar. Your name winds up on a song once in a while, and then the checks start coming. So, yeah. You got real mad about a year ago, though."
"I did?"
"Plum angry. Unglued. But you stayed in the business."
"Why?"
"Why did you get angry, or why did you stay? Well, doesn't matter," Candy says. "I don't know the answer to either."
"What else?"
"You sang backup for Shane Landis when he had to let his regular girls go."
Cheap labor, Sloan thinks. Think about that later.
"Do I have a car?"
"Do you ever. While you were in the coma, they read the will. Jake left you his old Camaro."
"Donnnt Wannnnit. I like Mustangs."
"Well, you've driven the damned thing, and it still runs great. I'm sure you're gonna need it. They're still finding pieces of that Mustang all over the state."
Sloan sulks. The words sting, a reprimand, as if Sloan could have stopped the twister, should be dutifully scouring the Mid-South for pieces of her trashed muscle car.
Candy leaves Sloan to contemplate two lost months and the Calendar Kids forever licking melted ice cream. Sloan thinks about the sky raining water pumps and exhaust pipes, and she knows she is not awake.