Fermata
As a child, she’d wanted to be a bird.
Before the accident, the idea had slipped into the back of her mind now and again, remnants of a distant and foolish past. She was no longer one for wishing of birds and immortality in the air – she had important things, like shallow materialism and cold human indifference, to focus her mind upon. The birds would bring a slight smile, maybe even a laugh, but sometimes a slight longing, a wish to return to the innocent days, because everything is far more beautiful in retrospect.
Now, immobilised and strapped to the cold hospital slab, she wishes for nothing more than the ability to crane and twist her neck so that she can stare longingly at the birds once again.
There was no denying she had been beautiful. But the medics had not cared for beautiful as they worked tirelessly to conserve something far more precious. The scars were misshapen and ugly, running far deeper than her skin. One annoys her more than the others, just under and through her eyebrow, twisting the shape and permanently disfiguring the flesh. The fine hairs will never grow back there, changing the shape of her simple face forever.
They don’t give her mirrors very often, but whenever they do she focuses on the eyebrow, as if to drown out the rest of the scars. She even begins to obsess over it, mutely signalling her terrified yet determined younger sister to redraw the shape of the brow, as if it will repair all the other damage to her body.
Like it will return the arm which had been stolen.
Some of the nurses are confused by her silence. There had been no damage to her vocal chords when the car had wrapt itself lovingly around a telegraph pole. Yet she had not uttered so much as a syllable since her admission, except to groan in pain as nightmares pervaded her sleep each night. The hospital’s psychologist is called in, but can determine nothing from the empty air she gives as answers to his questions. Eventually, it is the boy who answers for her.
He’d visited her at least every second day, only because he could not afford the bus fare to see her more regularly. He knew her through school, and perhaps from something deeper, even though the question was never raised. At any rate, he always stood silently, communicating on some level other than the crass audible with her. Never sitting, never speaking. Never there for more than an hour.
She has been lying there for close to a month when the psychologist and the boy’s visits finally coincide. The boy is surprised at the lack of knowledge.
Don’t you understand what she’s lost? He asks in shock.
The physiologist is not in for a lecture. An arm, three toes, damage to her neck vertebrae and some of her motor communication. It could have been a lot worse – I’ve seen a lot worse. If it weren’t for the shock and this inexplicable depression, she’d have left the hospital weeks ago.
So you don’t know?
Know what?
He looked at her then, as if searching for confirmation or even approval to share her secret. She nodded with her eyes and let him finish.
She was a violinist. Sydney Youth Orchestra Concert Master. She’ll never play again.
Suddenly, everything makes sense to those too blind to see or ask before. She does not merely pity herself for the loss of an arm and some of her beauty, but grieves her aspirations and future as they slowly became less and less real, fading to blips in her past.
Lost aspirations and dreams.
Like the birds.
Even she can’t explain it, but somehow he finds out. Less than a week later, the boy convinces a younger, less sturdy nurse to help him adjust the television set so that she can see it. He’s found an old tape, some sort of nature documentary, with bad sound and flicking pictures. But she only has the strength to watch it muted, preferring the swooping and diving of the exotic birds it documents without the intrusion of a commentator. He sits and watches it with her, staying close to two hours in silence. As the credits roll, naming narrators they will never hear and cameramen they will never care about, he stands and prepares to leave. She makes a noise – something between a gargle and a plea, but the first sound she’s directed at a human being in close
to 6 weeks.
He leans down to kiss her forehead, understanding fully. The tape only goes so far. The footage has its limitations. She cannot hear the wind and feel the dust as she watches the birds, but it’s close enough.
By a silent agreement, he never brings anything with music. He screens the tapes beforehand and they watch them either in silence or with the sound on low so the main sound is the static keening of the video, which he eventually mutes anyway. They sit closer each day, until he watches with his fingers gently resting on her few remaining. Heavy, protruding violin calluses on her hand slowly recede to the uglier marks of a milliseconds misjudgement on a sleeting road.
When the doctor says she is ready to go home, she knows she isn’t. She still hasn’t spoken, and has no intention to. The doctor suggests she return to school, with additional tutoring, to try and pick up the tattered fragments of her old life and glue them back together. She wonders silently when he thinks he is fooling. Trying to piece her life back together is like solving a jigsaw that has half the parts missing. She might get a vague idea of what the image should look like, but will never get back all she has lost.
He’s waiting for her when she arrives home. Her room is clean and smells sharply of disinfectant. It’s like being back at the hospital.
They say nothing, their relationship on built on something far more than words. When he holds open his arms, she steps forward on broken feet and into his embrace. He runs gentle fingers along what was once her bow arm, making her wish for nothing more than a set of wings to escape. There’s a long, slow pause and he holds her, reassuring yet invoking questions of the future.
And with this fermata, she realises that maybe, just maybe, there is something left.
