Faceless Page 8

  “Good.” Chirag rubs his hands against each other like he’s cold. I shift, curling my legs underneath me. It’s too hard to keep my scarred left hand in my pocket now that I’m sitting down so I cover it with my sleeve and then hide it beneath my undamaged right one for good measure.

  Chirag seems determined not to stare at me, so I turn on the TV to give him a place to focus his gaze, even though it’s the middle of the day and nothing’s on. We haven’t spoken in months and should have so much to catch up about, but instead we both pretend to be interested in a talk show about cheating husbands until Serena shows up, late as always, bounding through the front door without knocking.

  Serena pounces on me and then bounces right back as though she’s touched something hot. It’s not that Serena can’t read my signals every bit as well as Chirag can—it’s that she chooses to ignore them. And I guess I love her for that, the same way I love Chirag for paying attention.

  Serena’s ebullience has remained unchanged since we met in kindergarten. She never seemed to develop that self-conscious streak that kicked in for the rest of us around middle school.

  She sits down right smack between Chirag and me on the couch. Shyly—perhaps the only time I’ve ever seen her shy—she gazes at my face. The opposite of Chirag, she takes it all in, piece by piece by piece: my new nose and chin, my round cheeks. I keep my eyes on the TV, trying not to feel her staring, trying not to feel her disappointment that I don’t look like the best friend she’s had since she was five years old.

  If it’s this hard when people who love me look at me—though, in Chirag’s case, the love is unofficial, and perhaps nonexistent at this point—what will it be like when everyone else who knew my old face—acquaintances, teachers, classmates—sees me for the first time?

  Gently, Serena puts her arms around me and gives me the tiniest of squeezes. My mother comes in, arranging Chirag’s flowers in a vase, which she sets on the coffee table in front of us.

  “Those are so pretty,” Serena says. “Chirag, did you bring them? Maisie, I should have brought you a present. I hated not being with you on your birthday.”

  If Chirag weren’t here, I might ask Serena to tell me how I look. She’d be honest with me. My parents say that I look great and the doctors are mostly focused on how I’m healing. But I don’t want her to say anything in front of Chirag, as though deep down I believe that if we don’t point it out, he might not notice that I’m not pretty anymore.

  “Thank god you’re back,” Serena says. “You should have seen how this poor boy pined for you—”

  “Pined?” Chirag interrupts. He laughs but it sounds forced. “Are we in a gothic novel or something?”

  “It’s a legitimate expression,” Serena insists, a giggle escaping from between her lips. “And the perfect one to describe you for months and months and months.”

  Not months and months and months, I think weakly. Really, just summer. And some of the spring. We missed prom. And my birthday. And in between, the Fourth of July. Chirag and I had planned to watch the fireworks together. He promised to take me up into the mountains behind the Golden Gate Bridge, to bundle me up with blankets and hold me close. My parents and I used to do that when I was little. But a few years ago, we stopped, and I’ve missed it ever since.

  But of course, I was in the hospital on Independence Day. I wouldn’t have even known it was Independence Day at all, if Marnie hadn’t come in for PT that morning shouting Happy Fourth of July! instead of her usual chipper Good morning!

  “Maisie,” Serena adds now, turning toward me, “you are one lucky girl. Not many high school boys would be faithful for so long.”

  I almost groan: Even Serena is calling me lucky. I wish I could strike that word from the English language.

  “Do you know how many girls wanted to go to prom with him?” Serena continues. I shake my head, happy for just a second that I can’t blush. Something to do with the blood vessels beneath the skin, and the new skin that isn’t fully integrated yet. If Chirag knew all the times I pictured us at prom together; all the dances I imagined we were dancing, the words I pretended we were whispering.

  “You’ll never believe what he did—”

  “Serena,” Chirag interrupts sharply. Serena turns to face him and he shakes his head firmly.

  “What did he do?” I ask. Maybe he showed up with a dozen girls, six on either side of him. He could. All of the sophomores had crushes on him last year.

  Serena shrugs awkwardly. Unlike me, she blushes bright pink. Biting her tongue has never come easily to my best friend, but I know that she’s not going to say whatever it was she’d been about to share now that Chirag has asked her not to. Instead, she finally offers, “I have plenty of pictures. Wait till you see my dress.”

  As though prom weren’t months ago, as though whatever dress Serena wore isn’t shoved into the back of her closet, never to be worn again. Right now, she’s wearing a peach T-shirt so sheer that I can see the bathing suit underneath and short denim shorts that show off her legs. Serena’s mother is from Ecuador and her father is almost as pale as I am; the result is breathtaking. Right now, her normally golden skin is a few shades darker than usual, the result of spending summer in the sunshine, instead of inside a hospital. Her thick dark hair is pulled back into a messy bun at the nape of her neck.

  “Are you wearing a bathing suit?” I ask, eyeing her T-shirt.

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d want to go to the pool later. Your mom said you’d been so cooped up since you got home.”

  Our school, Highlands High, has a pool that students are allowed to use in the summer. Right now, it’ll be packed with kids desperate to soak up as much sun as possible before school starts. Last year, Serena and I spent half the summer in that pool, even though I had to get out of the water every hour to reapply sunscreen so my pale skin wouldn’t burn.

  Showing up in a bathing suit isn’t Serena being insensitive. I think she wanted to be prepared for whatever scenario I might throw at her today. But before I can say anything, my mother says, “That’s a nice idea, Serena, but Maisie is on medication that makes her very susceptible to melanoma, so she’s been avoiding the sun this summer.”

  I could laugh at the idea that the immunosuppressive medication is the reason why I haven’t been spending a lot of time outdoors lately. It’s not like I’ll ever look halfway decent in a bathing suit with these scars on my left side. I’ll probably never wear a bathing suit again.

  I’ll just add it to the list of things I’ll probably never do. I glance at Chirag. He gives me a tiny smile, and then he winks, standing up.

  “I guess you guys have a lot of catching up to do,” he says. “I don’t want to get in the way of your girl talk.” A few months ago, I would have made fun of him for sounding like a middle-aged bachelor instead of a teenager. Now I just look up at him and nod. I’m not comfortable with him here, and he knows it.

  “You’re leaving?” my mother says.

  “Yeah. But I’ll be back tomorrow. I want to take Maisie out to dinner for her birthday.” He looks at me, his eyes asking if it’s okay. I nod quickly, forgetting for a split second that everything is different now, feeling for just an instant that this is a normal invitation: My boyfriend wants to take me out to dinner to celebrate my recent birthday. But just as quickly, I remember why he missed my birthday to begin with. We used to hold hands under the table at restaurants. Now I keep my left hand hidden beneath my right, hoping Chirag hasn’t noticed the missing freckle on my knuckle, the one that he used to kiss.

  “Eight o’clock?” he asks.

  Again, Mom doesn’t give me a chance to answer before she speaks. “That’s a bit late. Maisie’s on a strict regimen of pills now.” Since I’ve been home, Mom has adopted the doctors’ war-ish lexicon, like she wants to make sure I don’t forget that we’re engaged in battle. “And she takes her evening pills at eight o’clock.”

  “How about six-thirty instead?”

  You only want to
spend ninety minutes with me? I think but do not say. After all, ninety minutes is a long time to spend looking at this face across from you at a restaurant.

  “Perfect,” Mom says, clapping her hands as though she’s the one being taken out by her boyfriend. Maybe Chirag will kiss her good-bye.

  I don’t stand up. Chirag can’t hug me when I’m sitting down, with Serena between us. But he surprises me by bending down, and before I can duck out of his reach, he gently kisses the top of my head. For a second, he’s close enough that I can smell him, and I’m relieved that my new nose still loves his scent, even if it doesn’t love lilacs. He lingers, pressing his nose into my hair. Maybe he missed the way I smelled, too.

  I hold my breath until I hear the front door close behind him, like I’m trying to hang on to him. But really, I’m trying not to cry. Because that was a perfectly sweet kiss. But it was exactly the way my father kissed me after my nightmare last night.

  What did I expect? That he’d French-kiss me in front of Serena and my mother and the people on TV? That he’d take me into his arms and say, “Don’t worry, I still love you” even though he never actually said he loved me out loud before?

  And what would I have done if he had? Maybe my face doesn’t know how to kiss the way it used to. Marnie said I didn’t need that kind of physical therapy, but what if she was wrong?

  Here’s the thing about not being able to feel most of your face: It is very, very strange. Stranger maybe than not having a face at all. I meet with Marnie at the hospital twice a week, and lately she’s teaching me how to breathe in through my nose. I can’t feel the air moving in and out of it. I can smile, but I can’t feel my cheekbones rising when I do.

  And, I’ve started walking into things. Losing my balance. The doctors say it’s a side effect of the CellCept, but I think it’s a response to the unfamiliar physical sensation—or lack of physical sensation. After all, this new face doesn’t weigh what my old face did, though it doesn’t feel as heavy as it did when I was in the hospital. Guess that means my nerves are reintegrating, or whatever Dr. Boden said they had to do.

  When Chirag picks me up promptly at six-thirty, I’ve already done the math in my head: Whatever restaurant Chirag is taking me to, it’s probably about a fifteen-minute drive away, right? And we’d have to leave in time to be back here by eight p.m. And knowing Chirag, he’ll want to leave some extra time for the drive back—he’s not a fan of cutting it close—so we’ll leave the restaurant by about seven-thirty. Which means he’ll only have to sit across from this face for forty-five minutes. In the car, he can stare straight ahead, eyes focused on traffic, hands placed firmly at ten o’clock and two o’clock, just like they teach you in drivers’ ed.

  Not that Chirag ever used to drive like that. We used to hold hands in the car, our arms tangled across the gearshift. He glanced over at me at every stop sign, every red light. A traffic jam was just an excuse to spend more time together.

  Tonight, I tuck my left hand under my legs the instant I sit down in the passenger seat. I stare straight ahead. Chirag does the same, and I wonder if it’s because he’s following my lead or because he doesn’t want to look at me any more than I want him to.

  I never knew how much effort it took to avoid reflective surfaces, but I’m becoming something of an expert at it. The key is concentration; let your guard down and you’ll catch a glimpse of yourself in a rearview mirror, in the tinted windows of a passing car or the sunglasses on your boyfriend’s face. (Fat chance; I haven’t even looked at him once since he picked me up.) I’m so focused on reflective surfaces that I can barely hold up my end of the conversation. I answer each of Chirag’s questions monosyllabically. Chirag must take my semi-silence to mean that I’m scared he’s going to ask me something about my accident or the surgery, so he sticks to safe topics like whether I’m taking AP physics this year (I’m not), or the traffic in downtown Tiburon (not so bad tonight), or—after one particularly desperate silence—what nice weather we’ve been having (quite nice).

  In addition to avoiding my own reflection, I’m thinking about the fact that we should have said I love you sooner. Or anyway, I should have said it. I knew that I loved him long before he held up that sign for me. I should have said it while I had the chance.

  I can’t say it now. Not looking like this. It wouldn’t be fair to ask him to say I love you, too, not to this face. And thinking about the silence that would follow if I did say it makes me want to jump out of this moving car. With my luck, I’d probably survive the leap, too. I’d just have another set of scars to add to the ones I already have.

  So the words that I haven’t said hang between us, taking up all the empty space that used to be taken up by our intertwined arms and hands and fingers. I close my eyes and imagine a blinking neon sign hanging down from the rearview mirror: You are not holding hands, it blinks in an ugly yellow scrawl. You are not saying I love you. Blink, blink. You are not touching each other. Blink, blink. You may never touch each other again.

  Blink. Blink.

  I wonder if my donor had a boyfriend. I wonder if they got to say I love you before she died. I wonder if he’s moved on, or if he’s still mourning her, staring at a picture of her before he goes to bed every night, longing to kiss a face that doesn’t exist anymore.

  To fill the silence, I finally decide to bring up a topic that I’ve always been able to spend hours talking about. It used to embarrass me, but right now it seems the least awkward of the subjects I have to choose from. At least it has nothing to do with us, with Chirag or me.

  “So my parents are sleeping in the same room again.”

  Chirag slows down gently as we approach a red light. Did my mother tell him that my donor died in a car accident? It sounds like such a reasonable way to get hurt. So much more likely than being struck by lightning. Though I guess, technically, I wasn’t struck by lightning. The tree was.

  The tree is completely gone. There’s not even a stump left. It must have been young enough that its roots didn’t interfere with the pipelines.

  “Wow,” Chirag says once we’re at a full and complete stop. “How long has it been since that happened?”

  “At least six months, that I know of. Though it’s not like I know exactly when they started sharing a room again. I just got home from the hospital and there it was.”

  “Weird,” Chirag says, and I nod. For most kids, it’d probably be weirder if their parents weren’t sleeping in the same room, but Chirag knows that in my house, it’s weirder the other way around.

  I try to picture just how it happened. Maybe it began the very day of my accident. Maybe they were so traumatized that they couldn’t stand the idea of sleeping alone. But the day of my accident, they were probably at the hospital, waiting to see if I’d make it through the night. And then maybe by the time they got back home, they were too exhausted to remember to sleep in separate rooms and just fell asleep in the nearest available bed. But I don’t think they ever actually left me alone when I was in the hospital—even when I was in the coma—I think they took turns sitting by my bed every night. So maybe it wasn’t until my first night home that they found themselves sharing a room again.

  “I wonder how it happened,” Chirag says, and I have to remind my left hand to stay firmly tucked under my leg instead of reaching out to squeeze Chirag’s right one because he knew exactly what I was thinking.

  “So where are you taking me tonight, anyway?” I ask.

  “I thought we’d go to Bay Leaf,” Chirag answers.

  “Seriously?” Bay Leaf is my favorite restaurant. I’m pretty sure I’ve asked Chirag to take me there on every date we’ve ever gone on. “You never want to go out for Indian food. I thought no one’s cooking could stand up to your mom’s.”

  “Well, no one’s cooking can.” I accidentally insulted Chirag’s mother months ago when I noticed a handful of bay leaves on her kitchen counter and said, “Bay leaves. Like the restaurant.”

  Now I say, “So you’re t
aking me to Bay Leaf, you’re just resigned not to enjoy it.” The blinking neon light disappears from my imagination.

  “Hey,” Chirag says, “it’s a special occasion.”

  “At least now I know what I have to do to get you to take me to Bay Leaf,” I deadpan as we pull into the restaurant’s parking lot. “What do I get if I lose a limb next time?”

  Chirag is silent and my hands—well, my right hand—goes clammy. Just like that, the neon light is back: What were you thinking? it blinks over and over again, this time accompanied by a loud buzzing. Apparently, cracking a joke was a bad idea. Chirag is taking me to Bay Leaf because he feels sorry for me. And there’s nothing funny about that.

  The instant Chirag pulls into a spot, I open my door and get out of the car. Chirag hasn’t even turned off the motor yet. I’m so intent on walking away from him that I don’t remember that Bay Leaf has a dark, reflective window on its front door.

  The pink scars on my cheeks are so bright that from far away, you might think I was bleeding. The hollows beneath my eyes are so deep that I look like a heroin addict, an insomniac, a ghoul. Which I guess I kind of am: What’s more ghoulish than wearing a dead girl’s flesh on your face?

  No wonder I can’t sleep. I’m haunting myself.

  I never really liked how I looked when I smiled. My nose went down when my lips went up. I had a dimple in my left cheek that I thought made me look like a five-year-old, though my mother always said that by the time I reached middle age, the dimple would make me look older because it would just look like a wrinkle. I think she was trying to make me cherish looking young when I could, but it just made me hate the dimple more.

  I smile into Bay Leaf’s front door, just the tiniest bit, just for a split second, just long enough for me to see that even though I still have the same mouth, my smile looks nothing like it did before. This nose stays perfectly still when I smile. And these cheeks are dimple-free.