As I clung to my tiny home, the only world I'd known for eight months, the doctors lifted my twin sister out. I know she went first not because I remember but because I have reliable sources that have told me so. Well, somewhat reliable. I suppose one of these sources was at the time split open like a melon and high on some medical cocktail, her drugged blood glimmering on sanitized scalpels and sheets. The other source was tucked behind a camera, documenting his wife's c-section, the birth of their first children. But he couldn't have possibly captured everything. What if he was scoping out the room for the best angle the same moment the slick latex gloves hoisted me up from the broken womb like treasure from a sunken ship? What if I'd been the first one out but there'd been a mix-up because when my dad realized he'd missed the shot, he'd asked the doc to rewind--to set the baby back down in the cramped swamp of my mother's ravaged reproductive system...to lift her back up again, now that the angle was right, and the doc had set me down but had then picked up my sister, his OCD flaring up in the instant, his hands seeking balance, his mind seeking an even number?
It is really of no consequence who came out first, I guess. What is remarkable are the minutes after liftoff.
I'm sure she cried right after they cut the cord. My sister always cried when she was uncomfortable. And when she screamed, the nurses must have rejoiced, impressed by the power of those tiny lungs, glad this baby wouldn't be A Problem.
Once they'd gotten the Not A Problem baby out of the way, they turned their attention to the one who was still attached, the breech baby--the reason the woman on the table had to be cut open. In my imagination, a white-gloved hand picks me up by the leg, like one might pick up from the floor a pair of underwear, spins me slowly under the fluorescent lights, inspecting my body with the careful scrutiny of a diamond collector looking for flaws. As he slowly turns me, the umbilical cord looped around my neck falls away, and my jaundiced body radiates like a sick sun. This one, the doctor says, his voice muffled behind a paper mask, is A Problem.
The loosening of the noose around my neck is my first second chance.
And then: She's not breathing right, the doctor says. In reality, what he probably said involved a lot more medical jargon, words like pulmonary and arrest and apnea. In any case, The Problem is hooked up to a cardiorespiratory monitor and set under bili-lights and eventually left in an isolette while her sister, who is 10 ounces heavier than she is, and their parents go home to bond, where, in fact, they will live for weeks, even celebrating Easter together, before The Problem is finally sent home attached to electrodes and a machine that beeps loudly whenever she forgets to breathe.
The machine delivers my second second chance.
I develop fairly normally, despite all the complications of a premature birth. And when I reach toddler-hood, I even do the usual things toddlers do, like touch hot stoves and run into the sharp corners of coffee tables and nearly drown. I am three years old when I jump into the deep end of a pool in a seemingly perfectly orchestrated moment when my parents aren't watching. I sink like a stone but am almost immediately hauled up by my mother and thus miraculously escape the cliche CPR scene. The hands pulling me to the surface, that sharp rush of air; this is my third second chance. But I am old enough to know what I might have lost, so I refuse to take baths for half a year, and my mom has to bathe me in the sink like I'm a baby.
A few years later, I slip into a scummy duck pond at the park when my father isn't watching. I have not yet begun swimming lessons, though I will soon, but I am stronger and wiser than I was the first time I found myself in over my head. I kick and scream against the weight of my OshKosh B'gosh pants soaking through to my skin. My sneakers may as well be filled with sand. Everything I touch is slick with green slime, and soon the brownish-green water is in my mouth, dampening my pleas for help. Fortunately, my sister witnesses my plunge. And fortunately, she runs to my dad to tell him. And lucky for me, he is not too bothered to follow her to the slippery edge where he leans over and thrusts his hand into mine. "I got you, Carol Baby," he says, pulling me out.
The tears running over my swamp-stained cheeks: my fourth second chance.
When I am ten years old, I start to lose my appetite.
It's strange but not so strange, as I've never been much of an eater, anyway. The problem is that I'm already skinny to start with, and the not-eating stretches out for weeks. Ironically, the less I eat, the more pronounced I become. I'm not disappearing, but growing sharper, like the glimmering tines of a clean fork left by an untouched plate of pasta. My elbows are daggers; my cheeks could slice cheese for someone else to consume. But while most of me sinks into the gaps between my ribs, there is a part of me that is a riddle, that grows larger by the day even as it fades away. My left knee, once solid and dependable as a door hinge, has vanished. At least, the joint is no longer recognizable, having swelled to the size of a cantaloupe.
There is pain. The kneecap, arrested within the locked joint, white knuckles the bars of its cage. I don't sleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time. My knee bangs against the walls of its cell. It howls invisible sounds into the dark bedroom I share with my sister, who sleeps peacefully in the bunk below. I am glad every morning when the alarm goes off and I can pull myself down the ladder, away from the impossible bed. This goes on for months until the skin around my knee is so tight, I think it will burst. I am aware but unwilling to admit to myself or to anyone else that my pain is excruciating, that it may be the worst pain I will ever experience, in terms of its depth and duration.
It is only when it becomes impossible for me to even pretend to walk, to hobble across a classroom or up the steep hill of our driveway, that I am forced to reveal the monstrous joint. My grandmother has been watching me and my brother and sister because our mom and stepdad are out of town. Despite my protests, Grandma keeps me home from school the day they will return. I am a good student, a good kid. I never miss school. I lie on the couch and watch Wheel of Fortune with her and try not to think of what my parents will say when they see what I've been hiding. Will I be in trouble? I let the question spin away and try to keep my leg straight.
When they arrive, they gasp when they see me on the couch. I am already apologizing. I should have gone to school. I could have gone to school. It is nothing, my pain. My grandmother peels back the blanket over my legs, and I tug the hem of my red and gray striped nightgown down below my knees. "It's nothing," I say, close to tears, embarrassed I've hidden the knee for so long, but more than that, deeply ashamed I allowed myself to get sick in the first place. Somehow, I know this is my fault.
"Let me see it," my mother says, firm but not accusing. She lifts the soft cotton gown, I cringe as the air touches the volcano of my knee, and she inhales sharply. I can't look at my stepdad. I imagine he will spank me later, but I'm not sure whether I will be punished for hiding this part of myself or for staying home from school for something so...lame? I'm not sure if it's serious. And that's the problem. Part of me thinks the knee is ridiculous, worth less in worry than a scrape requiring a bandaid. The other part of me knows that not being able to walk is a lot more grave than a cut that scabs over.
"I'm taking you to the Emergency Room," my mom declares, and now the whole of me is on fire. I do not want this attention. It's just a knee! Emergencies, I feel, are for gunshot wounds and car accidents and flaps of skin hanging off the bone and burn victims. Tears scald my cheeks as I anchor myself to the couch. My knee is no more than a bee sting, I reason. I cling to the cushions, but I am a skeleton, and my mom picks me up as easily as she might pick up a throw pillow.
My leg bounces painfully as my mother hustles us out of the house and sets me in the passenger's seat of her Toyota. I am grateful that my stepfather does not come with us. I cry all the way to the hospital. I cry in the emergency room where I am ashamed to be taking up space that someone with a burn or hole in his body might need. I cry on the gurney in the curtained cubicle as we wait for the doctor. I wipe my tears away as he arrives. I try to laugh when his face pales at the sight of my knee. "It's not so bad," I say, as if I haven't not slept in two months, as if I could run a marathon if I wanted. I want to be good. I want to be Not A Problem. But I am A Problem. The doctor takes one look at my ruined knee and excuses himself.
He returns with a syringe the size of a cannon. He assures me this will not hurt. The needle is as thick as a pixie stick. I almost expect my knee to pop, but I don't even feel the prick. As he pulls back the plunger, slowly because the yellow pus inching up the plastic cylinder is thick and unwilling, I feel only relief, a deep thanksgiving that fills me up as my knee deflates. He takes off for the lab, and my mom tries to get me to eat the red gelatin that has appeared on a tray to my right. I tell her I'll wait for dinner at home.
When the doctor (nurse?) returns, my knee has already begun to reinflate, as if it's grown lungs. This should concern me, but it doesn't because I can bend my knee again, and without pain, and that's all that matters. I'm ready to go home. I thank the doctor and lean up, prepared to step down and walk like a healthy ten-year-old girl. But he's talking to my mom, and then they are talking to me, and I can hardly believe what they're saying. I have to stay the night. They want to run some tests, find out what's causing the swelling. I feel as if some part of me left in that syringe. My mother will go home to my stepfather and my brother and sister. I will have a whole room to myself. I have never had a whole room to myself. Just one night, my mom says, and they lead me to a nice room and show me how to use the hospital bed, how to press the button if I need a nurse. I crawl into the cool darkness and flex my left leg, drawing the knee up towards the ceiling, letting my heel careen down the length of the bed, over and over again until I fall into a deep, unbroken sleep.
In the morning, I work my leg like a piston, turning the air over my bed into a makeshift bicycle. My leg still bends, but the knee has gained some weight. I walk to the bathroom and pee in a cup a nurse handed me the night before. My urine is the color of raw apple juice. Bits of something float in it, and I am reminded of the murky pond water I like to collect in margarine containers as a sort of experiment. When the nurse comes to collect the cup, I apologize. "It's not usually so dark," I say, knowing that my pee is A Problem, that I am A Problem, that my knee has become everyone's issue.
They take my blood. They bring me trays of food that I won't eat. They give me my first IV. They have to use butterfly needles to catch a vein in my arm. I cry. I am not used to needles. One day turns into another and another, and my parents have begun stocking the simple oak armoire in the corner with my clothes. They bring me my homework and my books and my stuffed animals. Friends visit. I am sent to a room where I am cloaked in lead aprons and x-rayed. My veins collapse perpetually until the soft crease of both arms is a mess of bruises, useless, and the back of my hand has become the new go-to-place. Nurses arrive every few hours to flush my lines and change the bags dripping into me. I hate the cold push, like a sharp winter breeze in my vein. I hate the medicines. Some of them make me groggy. Some of them make me itch from the inside. My knee stops growing, but I am not allowed to leave yet. They send me to Physical Therapy, explaining that I'll have to use crutches for a while because the muscles around my knee are weak and damage has been done to the joint. A kind woman teaches me how to walk on the metal sticks, how to climb stairs, one-by-one.
Finally, after six or seven days, they release me to outpatient care. A nurse comes twice a week to take my blood and check my progress. My stepfather, unexpectedly, becomes my daily caretaker, flushing my line throughout the night, holding my hand when a tired vein forces a nurse to open a new one. I never get used to the shots. If anything, my fear of the needle only grows. At one point, after a week of an intravenous medication that makes me want to claw the skin off my bones, I tell them I would rather die than continue the treatments. I am a guinea pig, and they aren't sure what to do. At least something they are doing is right because my appetite has returned. And then, finally, they discover the cause of my sickness. Lyme Disease. Late stage. They tell me I will have early-onset arthritis in my knees (both knees--the other had been imperceptibly inflamed when I'd gone to the ER). That I may have memory loss down the line. And my mother tells me I'm lucky to be alive, that my white blood cell count was down to nothing when she brought me in. And this is my fifth second chance.
The next ten years see a few possible second chances or half-chances--my stepfather's rage, a faulty seatbelt on an amusement park roller coaster, my mother's driving through the deer-filled backwoods roads of Pennsylvania--but nothing definitive happens until I am twenty years old.
My sixth second chance happens in a small, dark bathroom in the on-campus apartment I shared with my then-girlfriend. She has just confessed to kissing another woman, and unbeknownst to both of us, has triggered the shit of all my other second chances. I have locked the door and shut off the light. The hard floor presses into my ribs and hip as I curl on my side and wish for an end. The cabinet is a finger's length away, and I open it and cradle the large bottle of aspirin I turned to whenever I had menstrual cramps. I scream through the door, "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you," and a net of fiery thorns spreads through me. I hate her, and I hate myself for wanting her, for hating her, and I hate my life and what I've done to it, wasting hours playing video games and holing myself away from people, too scared to connect with anyone outside of my girlfriend. But most of all, I hate God. When I am done screaming about my hate, I turn onto my back, the pills shifting in their container like plastic beads in a baby's rattle, and I implore God. "Where are you?" I say, tears swelling the darkness. And then I'm saying it over and over like a mantra until finally I run out of words and I am housed only in darkness and silence and the soft whoosh of my blood running through me. I am here, my child. I am here. My pulse tells me this. And then I remember that I want to be published, that I'm going to school for writing, that I have loved words since before I could speak, that this is worth something, that if I never try, I'll never see if I'm capable of repaying the words that kept me company all my life, I'll never know if my words could help someone else. I tuck the bottle back onto its shelf and get off the floor to live again.
It's 2007, and I'm driving a friend and myself home from our favorite dance spot. It's late, and we're tired from a long day of teaching, writing, and dancing. We're talking, stopped at a red light that shines over us like a great omen of the moment to come. The lights in the other lane shift comfortably from green to yellow to red, and then the light above us blinks green, prompting me to move my foot from the brake to the gas pedal. We're a few feet into the intersection when I stomp on the brakes. A renegade delivery truck whips past our hood, a congested blur of gray and white that streaks the intersection from left to right and leaves the two of us clutching our chests. "Thank God you were driving," he says. "I didn't see that coming." This is my seventh second chance.
It's 2012, and, knock on wood, I've had no second chances recently. But I keep up with the news as best I can--I see the dangerous ignorance prevalent in so many of our leaders; I see the sheep and the wolves--so I have to perpetually remember why all of the second chances I have had matter. I have to see the patterns in them, have to see where the fear of my own voice comes from, have to know that this fear will not benefit a world already so filled with it. I have to appreciate my life, even when I feel my efforts amount to nothing or worse, even when my heart is broken or my job is asking more of me than I think I can give (or than I think I should give).
I have to remember that this is my [eighth] second chance and that I may not have another one. And when I really think about it, the thought of a second chance is liberating. It means I've already seen the end, that I'm past the red lights, that I can go anywhere I want, that my world is larger than a womb or a bathroom or a hospital bed or a pool of standing water. Any problems I have are nothing in the light of these second chances. So I won't settle for less than the world. I won't accept niggling thoughts that tell me I am A Problem. I won't cling to relationships that feel like faulty seat belts and work situations that suffocate me. I won't hide the truth or apologize for it, and I won't own what doesn't belong to me. It's 2012, and I've lived seven lives at least, and I'm going to continue making this one count.
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