Chokecherry (Chapter 3/?)
Table of Contents
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Waking up in the hospital felt like rebirth. The bright, white lights, and pretentious cleanliness were a fuzzy memory of a time so long ago.
My eyes fluttered open, slightly startled at the harsh unnaturalness.
“Oh, Cho!” Instantly, I recognized my mother’s voice. She was crying.
I stared, too tired to move. The skin on my face was tight, stretching to swallow up the cuts on my face. I felt stiff, but somehow weightless.
“What happened?” I asked. My voice sounded papery from lack of use.
“Oh, Cho! Oh, Cho, darling! My sweet, sweet baby girl!” Deep inside irritation bubbled at my mother’s ornate emotional display. Silently, I wished my father were here.
People have always told me how much I remind them of my father, with my dark hair, and hollow cheeks. I take after his personality, too, with a love of stability, and unfailing dependability. The only thing we don’t share is love of my mother.
My mother is a small pale woman, with white blonde hair, and pale blue-grey eyes. She’s like a butterfly - beautiful and elegant, yet fragile and easily flustered. My parents are opposite, but impossibly in love.
My mother was born Peach Afra Lastufka, an only child. She married my father in the summer of 1960, two weeks after she graduated. They moved into a small cottage on the edge of her parent’s farm, where my father was shown the ropes. Mercilessly, my mother tried to be the perfect homemaker. She cleaned, and cooked, and sewed. She obeyed, and chided, and helped. My father loved her, but she didn’t love herself, because of the only thing that was impossible for her to do: get pregnant.
My father is a very mellow man, but the only thing he’s ever truly cared about, more than farming, or his strict morals, is my mother. He did everything in his ability to grant my mother’s wish. Fifteen years, and two miscarriages later, they were landed with me.
She loves me more than anything in this world, but I can’t return the feeling. The unconditional, unearned admiration has always annoyed me. We have nothing in common, and sometimes I feel like her love is just a one-way guilt trip accentuating this fact.
“Mom,” I said, harshly, trying to snap her out of her reverie. “What happened?”
“Oh, Cho! Oh, Cho, it’s horrible!”
I glared at her plainly.
“Baby, you were in an accident. You could’ve died!” I hated my mother more than ever, as she knelt beside me with tearful eyes. I didn’t need her, or her pity. I needed an explanation.
“Where is everyone?”
“Oh, honey!” sobs racked her body, and she doubled over, her arms splaying across my body. “Darling… sweet-honey, baby… Tange is dead.”
“What?” The world did not stop, but my heart did. “You’re lying.” I said. Except I knew she wasn’t, because reality was flooding in, and the hospital was starting to seem less like a heaven, and more like a hell. “She can’t be dead!” I cried. “She can’t be. You’re lying to me. I hate you! I hate you. You’re lying to me!”
“Sweetie,” my mother whispered, stroking my cheek, “I’m not.”
“GET OUT!” I screamed. “GET OUT! I HATE YOU, MOM! I HATE YOU! SHE’S NOT DEAD! She’s not! She can’t be!”
“She is, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.”
“No you’re not!” I spit. “You’re not sorry. You’re glad! You’re happy! Now you can have me all to your self!”
My mother gave me this look, this long hard look. Hitting me wouldn’t have made me feel as nearly ashamed as that look did. She stood up, straightened her shirt, and her skirt. Her make-up was smudged, and her blonde hair - which had waist-long extensions that she kept in curls - was flat on one-side. But I’ve never felt more afraid of her, than I did that day, as she briskly left the hospital room to go find a nurse to sedate me.
***
I did not recognize myself the first time I looked in a mirror. I looked monstrous. It was a day after the accident, and I was washing my hands in the bathroom sink. The bathroom had horrible bright lights, which made your irises look white. The walls seemed to lean in on me, and I had that anxious feeling of being watched. I paused at my reflection, reaching up to touch my face. Most of them were small cuts, made from stray bits of glass. But there was one huge gash across my forehead that they had stitched up. It made me look like Frankenstein. My skin was pale ands waxy, and crawling up my neck were those two red lines from my seat belt. I leaned in, touching everything. I could vaguely remember lying there, hearing sirens, as my warm blood dripped off my face. God.
I stumbled backwards, hitting the wall, and sinking too the ground. I would never be able to escape this.
***
We rode to the funeral in two yellow school buses; one for the adults, and one for the children. It was slightly defacing to ride to her funeral with a group of giggling kids in the back, singing stupid songs, because they never knew her. Sal sat in the front, staring out the front windshield pensively. He had this weird beard-thing going on. I don’t know what that was about.
Everyone old enough to understand what was going on sat in the middle, crying, or talking. A few people tried to offer me their sympathy, which I quietly accepted. There wasn’t much to do after that. The funeral, having branched off from The Crash, made it all the more real. And I didn’t know what to do with something so real, and so painful, there in my head.
This guy called Lonnie was sitting across from me. He had brought his guitar, and was tuning it, playing scales that normally would’ve annoyed me. But today, they were something solid, something that didn’t carry unnecessary emotional weight. I held on to sounds for my life.
Lonnie had this wacky curly hair. He’d bleached it at the beginning of summer. I examined it while he bent over his beat-up acoustic. His roots were growing in.
Lonnie, and Sal were friends, in the casual way that boys were friends. They hung out when there were things to do, and talked when there were things to talk about. Right now, neither of these applied. Lonnie played his guitar, and Sal pursed his lips.
I wanted to scream at Sal. How could he take anyone for granted at a time like this? How could he sit there, so seemingly cool, and collected, with his dark shades, and patchy beard. He couldn’t just turn an off button, and abandon everything. I needed him right then! Logan Parker was drying Cammie Wilkinson’s tears, and Cammie Wilkinson hadn’t even lost anything. I needed him! I thought. Why the hell was he going to decide to fall out from under me now? Now of all times!
I couldn’t scream at him, though, because my voice got lost in this horrible convulsion, and I howled. It was in that moment everyone seemed to stopped, and stare at me in astonishment. They all knew I was going to explode eventually, but they probably didn’t expect it to be so spontaneous. Cammie Wilkinson, Allie Hill, and Ollie Mitchell were the first to rush to my side. Not long later, I was lost in a swirl of ancient suits, and noisy taffeta.
I cried, so hard. I cried all through the service. I cried as we buried them. I eventually stopped weeping, and sobbing, but rather reduced to silent tears that slipped down my already wet face quickly. I didn’t want to be here, passed around like some pathetic rag doll. I knew none of these people really cared and if they did, it didn’t matter, because they never showed it before now. I wanted Tange to be alive, and for Sal to be my rock. Both were impossible.
The food at the reception was pretty horrible. Old ladies who had lost their sense of taste had made it. It tasted like cardboard.
Instead of eating, I drank. In the first half hour, I had downed a whole case of Dr. Peppers, and was still going strong. It was the only thing to do.
She wouldn’t have wanted it like this. She ended too soon. She was going to be an actress. She was going to live in Paris, and marry five times. She would be the Marilyn Monroe of the new millennium. She would die at a nice ripe age, when living stopped being fun. Her funeral would’ve been far away from here. She’d have a marble casket, and string quartet. Hundreds would come to her funeral, and the whole world would mourn her sad end.
I would give anything to be in her place. I never had dreams like her. I deserved to be buried in that sad aluminum box, hidden from the world. I deserved the pathetic reception in the tacky church hall, with bad food, and an even worse seating arrangement (I could hear the old men starting to argue over a stupid chess game sixty years ago).
Tange spoke up, and she helped people. Whenever she entered a room, it was her personal goal to put a smile on ever person’s face before she left it. She was funny, and sociable. She was so pretty. She loved life, and loved people. She was stronger, than I was. She always said what was on her mind. She had hazel eyes, and auburn hair, and a ton of freckles she always complained about. She loved Michael Jackson; she was counting down the days to Dangerous, but it’s not like it even mattered now. We’d seen “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” twelve times in theatre. A week ago that day, we were lying in the cornfield, getting drunk off of beer she’d convinced Rowan to smuggle out of the liquor store he worked at.
Who was I going to call when I didn’t know what to do? Who would help me with my hair? Who would help me with boys? Who would I make plans with to get a taxi to drive an hour out of town to sneak into the nearest club? Who would I later be forced to pull off of some guy? Who would go swimming with me in the summer? Who would I share my clothes with? Who would tell me the truth?
I felt it all coming out, as I rushed to the door. I fell on my knees, vomiting up Dr. Pepper all over the lawn. I hacked for a while after I finished, but most of it was out with that first retch. Being mostly liquid, it was fake, somewhat theatrical hurling. The puke was disgusting, a strange brownish liquid shining in the midday sun. I stayed there, on my hands and knees, closing my eyes, and waiting for more to come up. My mouth had such a strange taste. I wiped my arm across my lip, and leaned back on the heels of my foot.
“Are you okay?”
I rubbed my face preparing to answer with harsh dishonesty, and reassurance that my sanity was in no way jeopardized. Until I recognized the voice.
“Fuck, Sal, no! No, I am not okay!” I screamed. I started crying again.
“Fine,” he replied, “Sorry I asked.” The grass rustles as he maneuvers his chair to escape.
“NO!” I yelled. “DON’T LEAVE!”
“Look, Cho, I don’t know what you want me to do here.”
“I don’t want you to do anything! Just don’t leave me!” I sobbed. “Please. Don’t.”
“I can’t… stay… here.”
“Do”-
“Cho, you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand, Sal?” I screamed. “Because believe it or not, Tange was my friend, too!”
“Like I said, you don’t understand!” He starts to leave.
“Don’t you fucking walk away from me!” There’s an awkward pause. I realized too late my inappropriate choice of words. He’s moving away into a tiny forest off the side of the church.
I get up, and follow him.
“Seriously, though, Sal, what the fuck is your problem? We almost die in a fucking car crash, and then you decide you don’t want to talk to me any more? How the hell am I supposed to deal with losing both of my best friends? What did I do? Is it the cuts, Sal? Is it the fucking cuts reminding you? Or what about the cast? Is the cast”-
“Shut UP!”
“What’s the problem, Sal? Huh? You can’t deal with it? You can’t deal with actually feeling something for once?”
He sits there with his back to me, silent.
“I thought I could count on you,” I said, walking away. “Looks like I was wrong.”