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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Teens
- Theme: Family & Friends
- Subject: Survival / Healing / Renewal
- Published: 10/15/2011
INVISIBLE GIRL
Born 1931, F, from Albany, CA, United StatesINVISIBLE Girl
A SHORT Story
by
Barbara Mullen
Under a fragile April sun, five foot heaps of snow had begun to crust and melt alongside the roads and sidewalks and trickle down gutters toward the lake. Molly was frankly sick of the extra long frigid 1940 winter anyway and finally even bored with ice skating after school every day. That morning she took extra time on her walk to school, enjoying long breaths of the slightly warmer air that for the first time since November didn’t turn the snot under her knitted face scarf to ice.
This first promise of spring had cast a genuine spell over her causing her attention to drift over to the windows of her third grade classroom all morning. What lies beyond this Oak Street school, she wondered. If I were a beautiful Canadian goose I would flap my widespread wings and fly far far away from Winatoba, Minnesota to find out. In all her seven years she’d never stepped a foot outside her little town. Her friends had bragged about trips they’d taken with their parents, Patsy to Minneapolis, Jeannie to Detroit. But what’s the use of comparing myself to friends who come from normal families she’d decided once more.
To Molly’s way of thinking a normal family had a maximum of three children making her own family with its noisy, raucous six kids embarrassingly abnormal. Older brother Michael and twin sisters Margaret and Mary had come along first, Molly next, and then before she was two, brother Johnny and three years after that, Dennis. All gifts from God, their mother promised them.
“I want to be an only child,” Molly had screamed loudly on her fourth birthday when baby brother Dennis toppled headfirst into her birthday cake. That was the day she began to fantasize about the mother and father God ought to have given her. Her dream mother would have been serene and loving, her imagined father understanding and caring and he’d have loathed the very taste of whiskey on his tongue.
In her real-life family home, Molly spent a lot of time reading in the upstairs bedroom she shared with her teenage twin sisters, Margaret and Mary, who for the most part overlooked her existence. Whenever she tried to enter their conversations they scowled at her, turned away and began to whisper secrets to one another at the other end of their dormitory sized room. The boys, Michael and Johnny and even little Dennis were tight as a gang of no-good thugs. When they noticed her at all it was to tease her and call her names. Day in, day out, her mother cooked, cleaned, nagged the girls to finish their chores and issued orders at the boys that they simply ignored. Molly never fooled herself about how things were.
Abruptly wakening Molly from her daydreams, Miss Fisher instructed the class to study their multiplication tables for fifteen minutes. Since Molly knew the tables backwards and forwards, she used the time instead to make after school plans for herself. This is a perfect day for a nice long walk somewhere, she decided. Mom is substitute teaching today and won’t be home till five o’clock. Mary and Margaret will invite friends over to our unwatched house to raise hell in the upstairs bedroom. And ha ha, the gangsters as usual won’t even notice my absence. Molly smiled behind her multiplication sheet and glanced back at the classroom windows where the sun still shone brightly.
With lunch over and a math test cinched, Molly kept her eye on the third grade clock as it crept toward three o’clock. As the principal’s office bell shrieked out its declaration of freedom, Molly shot up from her desk and ran toward the exit door. Once outside, she glanced down Oak Street, first in the direction of home and then the other way toward, well, she didn’t know. But her galoshes, like they had minds of their own, swirled around on the slushy sidewalk and headed toward the place of mystery. Spring sunshine warmed her face and neck as if God himself were cheering her on. She hummed a favorite song and then started to sing the words: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…,” for a few blocks.
Four or five blocks further on she noticed there were larger and larger spaces between the two story shingled houses. Next, she realized that Oak Street had gotten wider and in fact, had sprouted a whole new passing lane down its center. At the side of the road she noticed a tall black and white sign that read: “Minnesota Highway 34, 10 miles to Big Bay.”
“Wow! Big Bay!” Molly howled outloud while guessing that ten miles wasn’t that far. I bet if I make a dash for it I can be there in no time, she thought. While speeding up her gait she recalled the morning Miss Fisher had shown their class gorgeous pictures of clear fresh water Big Bay that emptied into Lake Superior.
With no houses in site now she could see ahead to where the sun was now sinking lower in the sky. Sunshine glinted off a tin roof on one lonely farmhouse on the horizon. Scattered patches of un-melted snow still clung to the each side of the three lane highway where tiny sprigs of growth had started to shoot up out of the brown damp earth. Every few minutes a single car whizzed by in either direction. On Molly’s side of the highway steep rocky hills left almost no walking path. No question, Molly decided, it would be easier walking along the flat land on the other side than dodging rocks on her side.
Looking one way, then the other, up and down the three lane highway, she spotted only one car in the distance heading back toward town. “RUN NOW!” she screeched at herself. Her legs raced across the first lane, then the middle lane, then into the far lane. Suddenly, from the corner of her eye, she spied the vehicle that had seemed so far away only a moment ago coming up on her. Without a second to spare, she leaped backward into the middle lane but at the same moment the car, trying to avoid her, swerved into the same lane.
Molly felt the full blast of the impact, then the jolt and swift thrust of her body through the air. She heard the thud when she collided with hard earth. At once blackness swirled around her and then closed in on her. She didn’t know how much later, but through the darkness, she felt the touch of unknown hands on her cheeks, then heard a woman scream, “Wake up. Wake up! Please don’t fade away! Oh, Christ, the blood! Where did you come from? How will I get you from the highway through the field to my car? Jesus, Girl! Don’t die while I’m gone! I’m getting my car.”
Molly heard it all, then nothing, until she sensed herself being tugged at and lifted. Soon after that, she felt the motion of car wheels under her. Forcing an eye open and gazing through a gray haze she recognized her own body spread across the back seat of a car. Next, she caught a glimpse of her right leg below her knee. Almost detached, it dangled at a strange right angle while spurting blood up onto the car upholstery and falling onto the floor.
She moved her hand to her right side where the pain was the worst and saw that the corner of a Minnesota license plate was pasted to her hip. She looked away, shut her eyes and wished that the total blackness would return.
Molly opened her eyes again when the car shrieked to a stop and from the car window she saw a hospital emergency room sign. Her driver swung open a car door and screamed, “Help! Help! An injured girl in the back seat. She may be bleeding to death!”
In the dark she had imagined her driver to be an older woman but now saw that she looked only twenty or so. Brave for someone so young, Molly thought, while feeling disconnected from the real activity swirling about her. Three men in blue jackets removed her from the car, laid her on a rolling cot and placed the almost detached sections of her right leg carefully onto a pillow. One of the blue jacket men slapped two hands down on one end of the cot, shoved it through the emergency entrance and pushed it rapidly down a corridor and through two more swinging doors.
Two men in what looked to be doctors’ white coats lifted her onto a high table. Under bright round ceiling lights, Molly’s eyes tried to follow them as they and three or four nurses dashed about her. One of the doctors stuck a rubbery mask over her face and told a nurse, “I’m turning on the ether now. Tell her to count backwards from fifty if she can.”
Just before passing out, Molly heard one of the doctors ask the other, “Any chance we can save the leg?”
The next voice Molly heard was her mother’s asking, “How long has she been out?”
“Several hours,” a man answered.
Molly struggled to raise her eyelids just enough to see she was in a big comfy bed in a green room with flower pictures on the wall. Through a large square window she saw that it was night time. Her gaze wandered back to her own bed where the blankets on her right side were draped over a foot high tunnel shaped object. “Is my leg under there?” she cried out.
“Oh, my God, she’s awake, Doctor!” Her mother bounded across the room and bent over Molly. “I’m here, honey,” she said. “They called me. I came right away.” She kissed Molly on the forehead. “I’m so sorry. They’re taking good care of you. Are you in terrible pain?”
Molly pointed to the hill under the blankets. “Mom, is my leg still on me?”
“They pinned the separated bones together and covered the leg with a cast. They hope it will grow back together. We have a lot of praying to do now.”
“Okay,” Molly said, her eyelids closing again. “You can go home now, Mom. How did you get away at supper time? What about the rest of the kids? I’m surprised you’re here.”
“Of course I’m here,” she said. “Where did you think you were going? I didn’t even know you weren’t at home until the police called.”
Molly pulled the blanket up over her head and drifted off again.
Ten days later, the nurses told Molly how lucky she was to be going home. Molly smiled but wasn’t sure about the lucky part. She’d never had as much attention as she’d had in the hospital. She loved the sound of food wagons clanking down the halls and the aroma of a meal rolling into her room. She’d pretended she was a princess waiting for a maid to slide a silver tray onto her bed table. After lunch in the lovely quiet of her very own room, she’d read “The Secret Garden,” “Snow White,” and “Black Beauty,” all books that kind nurses in stiff white uniforms had brought her from the hospital library. Every afternoon, she had looked forward to the nurse’s aide in a pink uniform with a lace trimmed apron arriving with ice cream in a little round container with a teeny wooden spoon pasted on top.
No, Molly wasn’t sure at all how she felt about going home.
Lying across the back seat of the taxi with her bulky plaster cast resting on a pillow, Molly went over her biggest worries in her head: How would she wash herself and change her clothes with her fanny stuck to the seat of a wheelchair? Where would she sleep? She and her cast wouldn’t fit on her tiny cot in the girl’s room. And what about the two months of school before summer vacation? She swallowed hard. In a family where I’m practically invisible, I might be shoved into the shed bedroom at the back of the house and forgotten, maybe for days.
The driver parked in front of their gray shingled house, got out and pulled a wooden wheelchair from the trunk of the taxi. He lifted Molly from under her arms, pulled her from the back seat and then settled her in the chair. “This way,” her mother instructed rushing ahead. With Molly and the wheelchair finally settled in their front hall her mom thanked the driver with ten dollars and told him to keep the change. She whirled around and wheeled Molly down the hall.
Molly expected at best to be pushed into the living room or a downstairs bedroom but her mother pushed her all the way to the kitchen. “Thought I’d let you keep me company while I start supper,” her mother said. “You have two choices of food tonight. Hamburger patties, mashed potatoes and green beans or a big pot of chili con carne. What’s your pleasure?”
“I can decide?” Molly took a moment before stammering, “A pot of chili.”
“Chili it is,” her mom said while bending down to kiss her seven-year-old daughter on the cheek. Surprised by her mother’s unusual behavior, Molly watched her every move with cautious curiosity as she prepared supper. Her sisters and brothers, straggling in one or two at a time from school, eyed Molly with newfound interest. The boys who had either ignored her or made her their target of insults in the past stood speechless before her. Noting their lowered heads and sidelong glances, Molly fantasized that these brothers, past officials-in-charge of torturing her, were now regretting their earlier meanness. Perhaps even admitting I had done a risky thing for a little mouse of a girl, she hoped.
She imagined a different mind-set, plain jealousy, on the part of the fourteen-year-old twins who now glared at her with squinted eyes from across the kitchen. Chattering about their day at school, they bragged about how many of the boys had huge crushes on them; then argued as always about which of them was more popular. As hard as they tried to regain their usual center of attention position in the family, though, everyone present continued to focus silently on the girl in the wheelchair.
Shortly, Molly’s father, returning from his manager job at a woodenware factory, burst into the kitchen. “Well, if isn’t the runaway girl honoring us with her presence.” He removed his woolen cap with an exaggerated flourish and bowed from the waist. “So you’re rejoining the family, are you?”
All three boys, Michael, Johnny and Dennis, sounding like three balloons exploding air held hostage too long, hooted. “Dad, that’s good,” Michael said and they all howled one more time.
Their mother sent them a withering glance and turned to her husband. “Walter, don’t spoil her coming home party. Supper will be ready in ten minutes.”
“Okay, okay, Kathy,” He glanced down at Molly. “So you going to stick around for a while or maybe you’ve booked yourself on the next cruise ship leaving for Europe?”
In the next instance he whipped off his jacket and headed down the hall to the whiskey cabinet.
Molly didn’t know if he expected her to laugh or cry so she did nothing.
“Pay no mind to him,” her mother said.
Margaret and Mary finished setting the table as their mother placed an immense bowl of thick rich bean and meat chili and a tray piled high with buttered toast in the middle of the table. She called to the boys who were playing Chinese checkers at the dining room table. “Boys, go wash up and bring your father back to the kitchen.
As they all finished dinner, their mother got up and went to the pantry. Returning in a couple of minutes, she declared, “Look what I’ve made in your honor.” She marched over to Molly’s wheelchair. “Your favorite. Vanilla cake with fudge icing.”
Molly yelped, “Terrific!”
“I guess she’s alive after-all,” Margaret said.
Mary groaned. “Geez. I never heard that much noise out of her in seven years.”
Their mother set down the cake at Molly’s end of the table. “Now read the pink frosting letters out loud,” she said.
Stunned by her seemingly transformed world, Molly stammered, “Welcome Home, Molly,” and then said, “Thank you, Mom.”
“Just for you, Princess,” their mom said. All five sisters and brothers gasped, “P r i n c e s s?”
After Molly’s dad and brothers and sisters had left the next morning her mom lifted her from her pillows and comforter on the living room sofa into her wheelchair and took her to the bathroom, and, a few minutes later, to the kitchen. She took out a bottle of freshly delivered chocolate milk from the refrigerator and filled Molly’s glass.
“Chocolate! Whew,” Molly sputtered. “How did you keep the boys’ grubby hands off it?”
Her mom grinned and sat down at the table next to her. “Threatened them,” she said popping four slices of bread into the toaster. “How about toast with raspberry jam”?
“I thought you were saving the last bottle of jam for your bridge club?” Molly said. She looked more closely than usual at her mother and the way she had tied her thick reddish brown hair together with a ribbon at the back of her neck. She had never noticed before that her mom’s eyes weren’t ordinary blue; they were actually a deep deep violet blue.
Her mother patted Molly’s hand. ““Nothing’s too good for my girl after what she’s been through. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together for the next two months or more, Molly. I think we should make some plans. First thing, starting tomorrow, we’ll have the twins pick up your school work from Mrs. Fisher each day. I’ll help you with the assignments and they can return them to your teacher the next morning.”
"Great,” Molly said. “And maybe they can bring some books from the school library for me to read?”
“Of course, good idea.” her mom said.
After their chicken noodle soup lunch, Molly’s mom suggested they go for a little walk.
“A walk? How can we do that?” Molly asked.
Her mom frowned. “Hmm. Not sure. But let’s give it a whirl.”
Minutes later, her mom was shoving Molly and the wheelchair through slush and un-melted chunks of snow down Center Street. Every little while they stopped in front of another house much like their own to clean off the rims of the wheelchair. Friends of her mom waved them on from behind windows and sent kisses to Molly from their front porches.
Back home again, her mom tucked her into her sofa bed for a nap. "When you wake up we’ll have a cup of tea. How does that sound?”
At the end of eight weeks, the doctors informed them that it was time to exchange Molly’s wheelchair for a pair of crutches. As heavy as her cast was, Molly took a first shaky step with the crutches in the doctor’s office, then three or four more. Later at home she struggled inch by inch down the hall to the kitchen and back. By the end of three weeks she told her mother she wanted to take a walk outside. “Please,” she begged. “The sidewalks are bare now.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” her mom answered.
“I can do it. I know I can do it,” Molly pleaded.
“I know you’re dying to get out of this house again. So, okay, we’ll do this together, but here’s how. We’ll pass one house the first day, then two more each day after that until finally we reach Bertha’s place at the end of the block. If we get stranded in between, one of the neighbors who’ll be straining to watch us out a window anyway will surely come to our aid.”
When Molly tired, her mom encouraged. “Come on, girl, you can do it." Every day when they returned home her mother heated the tea kettle and laid out napkins and cookies on a plate. As they sat together in the quiet kitchen, Molly and her mother talked, moving easily now from silliness to serious topics.
Gradually, Molly had begun to see her mother as somebody other than just Mom.
“When you were my age what did you hope to be when you grew up?” Molly asked her one afternoon. It was the first time she’d tried to conger up an image of her mother as a child. But, of course, she must have been one, and been my age once. And she must have had dreams. A girl my age wouldn’t have dreamed of becoming a housewife, would she? Who would choose to do all that hard work to take care of everyone else? But what had she wanted to become, Molly wondered.
Without a moment’s hesitation, her mom tossed her head back and answered, “A dancer.”
Flabbergasted, but impressed, Molly sputtered, “A dancer?”
“Unbelievable you may think, but I was the best to ever graduate from Miss Martin’s Dance Studio, the same one that still performs classic ballets every spring in the high school auditorium. I never miss one of their performances.”
She took a long sip of tea before going on. “I starred in their production of “Nutcracker” as Clara, the young girl who receives the nutcracker as a Christmas gift, when I was eleven. And I was Odette, the Swan Queen of “Swan Lake,” who turns into a beautiful woman, when I was fourteen. In my senior year of high school I was Cinderella in the “Cinderella” ballet. On our opening night that year a dance school director from Ann Arbor, Michigan, attended the performance. He’d been traveling around the northern Midwest in search of talent to recruit for his ballet company at the University of Michigan. He came backstage after the Cinderella performance and right then and there asked me to join his company as an intern when I graduated from high school."
For a few seconds, Molly felt as if she was suddenly in the presence of a stranger, perhaps just like her Odette, the Swan Queen, who had turned into a beautiful woman. When Molly found her voice, she could only ask the question for which she feared to hear the answer. “And did you accept his offer?”
“As you see, I didn’t. Your dad talked me out of it and I had nobody to talk me into it. At eighteen, your dad and I had already promised to love each other forever.” She lowered her head a moment and sighed. When she looked up she reached for Molly’s hand. “But I was good, Molly. I was really good. Would you like to see my secret scrapbook?”
“Wow, would I,” Molly said, her heart jumping with astonishment and anticipation.
On the tenth day she and her mom reached their goal at the end of the block where Bertha and four other women waited to congratulate them with cake and ice cream. A month later Molly waited in the hospital for her cast to be removed. Molly wanted so badly to run and play hopscotch again, but was of two minds. Surely each move toward getting better brings me a day closer to the end of my days with my mom, she realized. Following the nurses orders, she lay still on the white table and answered the doctor, “Yes, I’ll be glad to see my leg pasted together again.” She was happy that Dr. Murray was the doctor on duty to take off the cast. More like a grandpa with his curly white mass of hair and a voice so deep you knew it could never say anything to hurt you. He had been her favorite doctor all along.
She watched him pick up an eight inch saw. Then listened to the grinding buurrrrrrr noise of the blade cutting through layers of dirty plaster and ragged adhesive tape. She heard the thud each time another hunk fell into the bin alongside her table. How does he know he won’t cut my leg into pieces again, she asked God.
At last the doctor set his saw aside and picked up Molly under her arms. He lifted her off the table and a nurse rushed across the room with Molly’s crutches. She tucked them into place and told Molly to stand up straight and put her weight on her good side. Then the doctor said, “It’s okay. You can look now.”
Slowly Molly glanced downward. What she saw she’d have never recognized as a leg if the doctor hadn’t called it a leg. For a full minute she stared in silence at the shriveled up twig that dangled uselessly from a bony knee attached to a bluish, fleshless, splinter of what had been a thigh. And then she let out a scream, “You lied! You did to. You lied to me!” And then her body folded over into the doctor’s arms.
“Bring some water. And a cold rag,” the doctor ordered as he lifted Molly back onto the table.
When she revived minutes later, the doctor sat next to her on the white slab table with his arm around her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Molly. I should have prepared you better. But I didn’t lie. Don’t worry, little girl. The x-rays tell us the two portions have adhered to one another as we’d hoped. The leg will fill out and slowly grow stronger as you learn to put weight on it again, first with crutches and one day without them.”
At home an hour later, under her sofa bed quilt again, Molly took stock of her immediate future. Before I know it I will be one of this motley bunch again, another chicken in the coop, another hungry dog in this old barn. She sat up and thought hard for a few minutes. Okay, but remember, she told herself, things are different now. I’m no longer just one of this raggedy herd. I refuse. One, two, three, four, five, six. No way. I’m special. A PRINCESS, no less. Holy Cow! Who would ignore or insult a princess, I’d like to know? Nobody, that’s who, she answered, and then promised herself: From now on I’m going to look past mom’s cranky moods and headaches and yelling orders into a room of deaf eared numbskulls, and remember her real self, the secret mom I know, the one who knows what it’s like to have dreams.
Months later, with her leg plumped out and her crutches shed for good, their mother’s sister, the dreaded Aunt Catherine, came to visit for a few days. With her face set in a fearsome frown, Aunt Catherine cast her disapproving eyes upon Molly. Pointing a finger within an inch of Molly’s nose, she snarled, “I hope this adventure has scared the devil out of you, Girl. At least we know you won’t be wandering off from home ever again, don’t we?”
“Oh, I think she will do that all right, when the time is right,” Molly’s mom responded. “Molly has plans. There’s a whole world out there waiting to be explored by our girl.”
Molly looked up at her mother, then turned back to her homework at the kitchen table and grinned into her open book.
INVISIBLE GIRL(Barbara Mullen)
INVISIBLE Girl
A SHORT Story
by
Barbara Mullen
Under a fragile April sun, five foot heaps of snow had begun to crust and melt alongside the roads and sidewalks and trickle down gutters toward the lake. Molly was frankly sick of the extra long frigid 1940 winter anyway and finally even bored with ice skating after school every day. That morning she took extra time on her walk to school, enjoying long breaths of the slightly warmer air that for the first time since November didn’t turn the snot under her knitted face scarf to ice.
This first promise of spring had cast a genuine spell over her causing her attention to drift over to the windows of her third grade classroom all morning. What lies beyond this Oak Street school, she wondered. If I were a beautiful Canadian goose I would flap my widespread wings and fly far far away from Winatoba, Minnesota to find out. In all her seven years she’d never stepped a foot outside her little town. Her friends had bragged about trips they’d taken with their parents, Patsy to Minneapolis, Jeannie to Detroit. But what’s the use of comparing myself to friends who come from normal families she’d decided once more.
To Molly’s way of thinking a normal family had a maximum of three children making her own family with its noisy, raucous six kids embarrassingly abnormal. Older brother Michael and twin sisters Margaret and Mary had come along first, Molly next, and then before she was two, brother Johnny and three years after that, Dennis. All gifts from God, their mother promised them.
“I want to be an only child,” Molly had screamed loudly on her fourth birthday when baby brother Dennis toppled headfirst into her birthday cake. That was the day she began to fantasize about the mother and father God ought to have given her. Her dream mother would have been serene and loving, her imagined father understanding and caring and he’d have loathed the very taste of whiskey on his tongue.
In her real-life family home, Molly spent a lot of time reading in the upstairs bedroom she shared with her teenage twin sisters, Margaret and Mary, who for the most part overlooked her existence. Whenever she tried to enter their conversations they scowled at her, turned away and began to whisper secrets to one another at the other end of their dormitory sized room. The boys, Michael and Johnny and even little Dennis were tight as a gang of no-good thugs. When they noticed her at all it was to tease her and call her names. Day in, day out, her mother cooked, cleaned, nagged the girls to finish their chores and issued orders at the boys that they simply ignored. Molly never fooled herself about how things were.
Abruptly wakening Molly from her daydreams, Miss Fisher instructed the class to study their multiplication tables for fifteen minutes. Since Molly knew the tables backwards and forwards, she used the time instead to make after school plans for herself. This is a perfect day for a nice long walk somewhere, she decided. Mom is substitute teaching today and won’t be home till five o’clock. Mary and Margaret will invite friends over to our unwatched house to raise hell in the upstairs bedroom. And ha ha, the gangsters as usual won’t even notice my absence. Molly smiled behind her multiplication sheet and glanced back at the classroom windows where the sun still shone brightly.
With lunch over and a math test cinched, Molly kept her eye on the third grade clock as it crept toward three o’clock. As the principal’s office bell shrieked out its declaration of freedom, Molly shot up from her desk and ran toward the exit door. Once outside, she glanced down Oak Street, first in the direction of home and then the other way toward, well, she didn’t know. But her galoshes, like they had minds of their own, swirled around on the slushy sidewalk and headed toward the place of mystery. Spring sunshine warmed her face and neck as if God himself were cheering her on. She hummed a favorite song and then started to sing the words: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…,” for a few blocks.
Four or five blocks further on she noticed there were larger and larger spaces between the two story shingled houses. Next, she realized that Oak Street had gotten wider and in fact, had sprouted a whole new passing lane down its center. At the side of the road she noticed a tall black and white sign that read: “Minnesota Highway 34, 10 miles to Big Bay.”
“Wow! Big Bay!” Molly howled outloud while guessing that ten miles wasn’t that far. I bet if I make a dash for it I can be there in no time, she thought. While speeding up her gait she recalled the morning Miss Fisher had shown their class gorgeous pictures of clear fresh water Big Bay that emptied into Lake Superior.
With no houses in site now she could see ahead to where the sun was now sinking lower in the sky. Sunshine glinted off a tin roof on one lonely farmhouse on the horizon. Scattered patches of un-melted snow still clung to the each side of the three lane highway where tiny sprigs of growth had started to shoot up out of the brown damp earth. Every few minutes a single car whizzed by in either direction. On Molly’s side of the highway steep rocky hills left almost no walking path. No question, Molly decided, it would be easier walking along the flat land on the other side than dodging rocks on her side.
Looking one way, then the other, up and down the three lane highway, she spotted only one car in the distance heading back toward town. “RUN NOW!” she screeched at herself. Her legs raced across the first lane, then the middle lane, then into the far lane. Suddenly, from the corner of her eye, she spied the vehicle that had seemed so far away only a moment ago coming up on her. Without a second to spare, she leaped backward into the middle lane but at the same moment the car, trying to avoid her, swerved into the same lane.
Molly felt the full blast of the impact, then the jolt and swift thrust of her body through the air. She heard the thud when she collided with hard earth. At once blackness swirled around her and then closed in on her. She didn’t know how much later, but through the darkness, she felt the touch of unknown hands on her cheeks, then heard a woman scream, “Wake up. Wake up! Please don’t fade away! Oh, Christ, the blood! Where did you come from? How will I get you from the highway through the field to my car? Jesus, Girl! Don’t die while I’m gone! I’m getting my car.”
Molly heard it all, then nothing, until she sensed herself being tugged at and lifted. Soon after that, she felt the motion of car wheels under her. Forcing an eye open and gazing through a gray haze she recognized her own body spread across the back seat of a car. Next, she caught a glimpse of her right leg below her knee. Almost detached, it dangled at a strange right angle while spurting blood up onto the car upholstery and falling onto the floor.
She moved her hand to her right side where the pain was the worst and saw that the corner of a Minnesota license plate was pasted to her hip. She looked away, shut her eyes and wished that the total blackness would return.
Molly opened her eyes again when the car shrieked to a stop and from the car window she saw a hospital emergency room sign. Her driver swung open a car door and screamed, “Help! Help! An injured girl in the back seat. She may be bleeding to death!”
In the dark she had imagined her driver to be an older woman but now saw that she looked only twenty or so. Brave for someone so young, Molly thought, while feeling disconnected from the real activity swirling about her. Three men in blue jackets removed her from the car, laid her on a rolling cot and placed the almost detached sections of her right leg carefully onto a pillow. One of the blue jacket men slapped two hands down on one end of the cot, shoved it through the emergency entrance and pushed it rapidly down a corridor and through two more swinging doors.
Two men in what looked to be doctors’ white coats lifted her onto a high table. Under bright round ceiling lights, Molly’s eyes tried to follow them as they and three or four nurses dashed about her. One of the doctors stuck a rubbery mask over her face and told a nurse, “I’m turning on the ether now. Tell her to count backwards from fifty if she can.”
Just before passing out, Molly heard one of the doctors ask the other, “Any chance we can save the leg?”
The next voice Molly heard was her mother’s asking, “How long has she been out?”
“Several hours,” a man answered.
Molly struggled to raise her eyelids just enough to see she was in a big comfy bed in a green room with flower pictures on the wall. Through a large square window she saw that it was night time. Her gaze wandered back to her own bed where the blankets on her right side were draped over a foot high tunnel shaped object. “Is my leg under there?” she cried out.
“Oh, my God, she’s awake, Doctor!” Her mother bounded across the room and bent over Molly. “I’m here, honey,” she said. “They called me. I came right away.” She kissed Molly on the forehead. “I’m so sorry. They’re taking good care of you. Are you in terrible pain?”
Molly pointed to the hill under the blankets. “Mom, is my leg still on me?”
“They pinned the separated bones together and covered the leg with a cast. They hope it will grow back together. We have a lot of praying to do now.”
“Okay,” Molly said, her eyelids closing again. “You can go home now, Mom. How did you get away at supper time? What about the rest of the kids? I’m surprised you’re here.”
“Of course I’m here,” she said. “Where did you think you were going? I didn’t even know you weren’t at home until the police called.”
Molly pulled the blanket up over her head and drifted off again.
Ten days later, the nurses told Molly how lucky she was to be going home. Molly smiled but wasn’t sure about the lucky part. She’d never had as much attention as she’d had in the hospital. She loved the sound of food wagons clanking down the halls and the aroma of a meal rolling into her room. She’d pretended she was a princess waiting for a maid to slide a silver tray onto her bed table. After lunch in the lovely quiet of her very own room, she’d read “The Secret Garden,” “Snow White,” and “Black Beauty,” all books that kind nurses in stiff white uniforms had brought her from the hospital library. Every afternoon, she had looked forward to the nurse’s aide in a pink uniform with a lace trimmed apron arriving with ice cream in a little round container with a teeny wooden spoon pasted on top.
No, Molly wasn’t sure at all how she felt about going home.
Lying across the back seat of the taxi with her bulky plaster cast resting on a pillow, Molly went over her biggest worries in her head: How would she wash herself and change her clothes with her fanny stuck to the seat of a wheelchair? Where would she sleep? She and her cast wouldn’t fit on her tiny cot in the girl’s room. And what about the two months of school before summer vacation? She swallowed hard. In a family where I’m practically invisible, I might be shoved into the shed bedroom at the back of the house and forgotten, maybe for days.
The driver parked in front of their gray shingled house, got out and pulled a wooden wheelchair from the trunk of the taxi. He lifted Molly from under her arms, pulled her from the back seat and then settled her in the chair. “This way,” her mother instructed rushing ahead. With Molly and the wheelchair finally settled in their front hall her mom thanked the driver with ten dollars and told him to keep the change. She whirled around and wheeled Molly down the hall.
Molly expected at best to be pushed into the living room or a downstairs bedroom but her mother pushed her all the way to the kitchen. “Thought I’d let you keep me company while I start supper,” her mother said. “You have two choices of food tonight. Hamburger patties, mashed potatoes and green beans or a big pot of chili con carne. What’s your pleasure?”
“I can decide?” Molly took a moment before stammering, “A pot of chili.”
“Chili it is,” her mom said while bending down to kiss her seven-year-old daughter on the cheek. Surprised by her mother’s unusual behavior, Molly watched her every move with cautious curiosity as she prepared supper. Her sisters and brothers, straggling in one or two at a time from school, eyed Molly with newfound interest. The boys who had either ignored her or made her their target of insults in the past stood speechless before her. Noting their lowered heads and sidelong glances, Molly fantasized that these brothers, past officials-in-charge of torturing her, were now regretting their earlier meanness. Perhaps even admitting I had done a risky thing for a little mouse of a girl, she hoped.
She imagined a different mind-set, plain jealousy, on the part of the fourteen-year-old twins who now glared at her with squinted eyes from across the kitchen. Chattering about their day at school, they bragged about how many of the boys had huge crushes on them; then argued as always about which of them was more popular. As hard as they tried to regain their usual center of attention position in the family, though, everyone present continued to focus silently on the girl in the wheelchair.
Shortly, Molly’s father, returning from his manager job at a woodenware factory, burst into the kitchen. “Well, if isn’t the runaway girl honoring us with her presence.” He removed his woolen cap with an exaggerated flourish and bowed from the waist. “So you’re rejoining the family, are you?”
All three boys, Michael, Johnny and Dennis, sounding like three balloons exploding air held hostage too long, hooted. “Dad, that’s good,” Michael said and they all howled one more time.
Their mother sent them a withering glance and turned to her husband. “Walter, don’t spoil her coming home party. Supper will be ready in ten minutes.”
“Okay, okay, Kathy,” He glanced down at Molly. “So you going to stick around for a while or maybe you’ve booked yourself on the next cruise ship leaving for Europe?”
In the next instance he whipped off his jacket and headed down the hall to the whiskey cabinet.
Molly didn’t know if he expected her to laugh or cry so she did nothing.
“Pay no mind to him,” her mother said.
Margaret and Mary finished setting the table as their mother placed an immense bowl of thick rich bean and meat chili and a tray piled high with buttered toast in the middle of the table. She called to the boys who were playing Chinese checkers at the dining room table. “Boys, go wash up and bring your father back to the kitchen.
As they all finished dinner, their mother got up and went to the pantry. Returning in a couple of minutes, she declared, “Look what I’ve made in your honor.” She marched over to Molly’s wheelchair. “Your favorite. Vanilla cake with fudge icing.”
Molly yelped, “Terrific!”
“I guess she’s alive after-all,” Margaret said.
Mary groaned. “Geez. I never heard that much noise out of her in seven years.”
Their mother set down the cake at Molly’s end of the table. “Now read the pink frosting letters out loud,” she said.
Stunned by her seemingly transformed world, Molly stammered, “Welcome Home, Molly,” and then said, “Thank you, Mom.”
“Just for you, Princess,” their mom said. All five sisters and brothers gasped, “P r i n c e s s?”
After Molly’s dad and brothers and sisters had left the next morning her mom lifted her from her pillows and comforter on the living room sofa into her wheelchair and took her to the bathroom, and, a few minutes later, to the kitchen. She took out a bottle of freshly delivered chocolate milk from the refrigerator and filled Molly’s glass.
“Chocolate! Whew,” Molly sputtered. “How did you keep the boys’ grubby hands off it?”
Her mom grinned and sat down at the table next to her. “Threatened them,” she said popping four slices of bread into the toaster. “How about toast with raspberry jam”?
“I thought you were saving the last bottle of jam for your bridge club?” Molly said. She looked more closely than usual at her mother and the way she had tied her thick reddish brown hair together with a ribbon at the back of her neck. She had never noticed before that her mom’s eyes weren’t ordinary blue; they were actually a deep deep violet blue.
Her mother patted Molly’s hand. ““Nothing’s too good for my girl after what she’s been through. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together for the next two months or more, Molly. I think we should make some plans. First thing, starting tomorrow, we’ll have the twins pick up your school work from Mrs. Fisher each day. I’ll help you with the assignments and they can return them to your teacher the next morning.”
"Great,” Molly said. “And maybe they can bring some books from the school library for me to read?”
“Of course, good idea.” her mom said.
After their chicken noodle soup lunch, Molly’s mom suggested they go for a little walk.
“A walk? How can we do that?” Molly asked.
Her mom frowned. “Hmm. Not sure. But let’s give it a whirl.”
Minutes later, her mom was shoving Molly and the wheelchair through slush and un-melted chunks of snow down Center Street. Every little while they stopped in front of another house much like their own to clean off the rims of the wheelchair. Friends of her mom waved them on from behind windows and sent kisses to Molly from their front porches.
Back home again, her mom tucked her into her sofa bed for a nap. "When you wake up we’ll have a cup of tea. How does that sound?”
At the end of eight weeks, the doctors informed them that it was time to exchange Molly’s wheelchair for a pair of crutches. As heavy as her cast was, Molly took a first shaky step with the crutches in the doctor’s office, then three or four more. Later at home she struggled inch by inch down the hall to the kitchen and back. By the end of three weeks she told her mother she wanted to take a walk outside. “Please,” she begged. “The sidewalks are bare now.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” her mom answered.
“I can do it. I know I can do it,” Molly pleaded.
“I know you’re dying to get out of this house again. So, okay, we’ll do this together, but here’s how. We’ll pass one house the first day, then two more each day after that until finally we reach Bertha’s place at the end of the block. If we get stranded in between, one of the neighbors who’ll be straining to watch us out a window anyway will surely come to our aid.”
When Molly tired, her mom encouraged. “Come on, girl, you can do it." Every day when they returned home her mother heated the tea kettle and laid out napkins and cookies on a plate. As they sat together in the quiet kitchen, Molly and her mother talked, moving easily now from silliness to serious topics.
Gradually, Molly had begun to see her mother as somebody other than just Mom.
“When you were my age what did you hope to be when you grew up?” Molly asked her one afternoon. It was the first time she’d tried to conger up an image of her mother as a child. But, of course, she must have been one, and been my age once. And she must have had dreams. A girl my age wouldn’t have dreamed of becoming a housewife, would she? Who would choose to do all that hard work to take care of everyone else? But what had she wanted to become, Molly wondered.
Without a moment’s hesitation, her mom tossed her head back and answered, “A dancer.”
Flabbergasted, but impressed, Molly sputtered, “A dancer?”
“Unbelievable you may think, but I was the best to ever graduate from Miss Martin’s Dance Studio, the same one that still performs classic ballets every spring in the high school auditorium. I never miss one of their performances.”
She took a long sip of tea before going on. “I starred in their production of “Nutcracker” as Clara, the young girl who receives the nutcracker as a Christmas gift, when I was eleven. And I was Odette, the Swan Queen of “Swan Lake,” who turns into a beautiful woman, when I was fourteen. In my senior year of high school I was Cinderella in the “Cinderella” ballet. On our opening night that year a dance school director from Ann Arbor, Michigan, attended the performance. He’d been traveling around the northern Midwest in search of talent to recruit for his ballet company at the University of Michigan. He came backstage after the Cinderella performance and right then and there asked me to join his company as an intern when I graduated from high school."
For a few seconds, Molly felt as if she was suddenly in the presence of a stranger, perhaps just like her Odette, the Swan Queen, who had turned into a beautiful woman. When Molly found her voice, she could only ask the question for which she feared to hear the answer. “And did you accept his offer?”
“As you see, I didn’t. Your dad talked me out of it and I had nobody to talk me into it. At eighteen, your dad and I had already promised to love each other forever.” She lowered her head a moment and sighed. When she looked up she reached for Molly’s hand. “But I was good, Molly. I was really good. Would you like to see my secret scrapbook?”
“Wow, would I,” Molly said, her heart jumping with astonishment and anticipation.
On the tenth day she and her mom reached their goal at the end of the block where Bertha and four other women waited to congratulate them with cake and ice cream. A month later Molly waited in the hospital for her cast to be removed. Molly wanted so badly to run and play hopscotch again, but was of two minds. Surely each move toward getting better brings me a day closer to the end of my days with my mom, she realized. Following the nurses orders, she lay still on the white table and answered the doctor, “Yes, I’ll be glad to see my leg pasted together again.” She was happy that Dr. Murray was the doctor on duty to take off the cast. More like a grandpa with his curly white mass of hair and a voice so deep you knew it could never say anything to hurt you. He had been her favorite doctor all along.
She watched him pick up an eight inch saw. Then listened to the grinding buurrrrrrr noise of the blade cutting through layers of dirty plaster and ragged adhesive tape. She heard the thud each time another hunk fell into the bin alongside her table. How does he know he won’t cut my leg into pieces again, she asked God.
At last the doctor set his saw aside and picked up Molly under her arms. He lifted her off the table and a nurse rushed across the room with Molly’s crutches. She tucked them into place and told Molly to stand up straight and put her weight on her good side. Then the doctor said, “It’s okay. You can look now.”
Slowly Molly glanced downward. What she saw she’d have never recognized as a leg if the doctor hadn’t called it a leg. For a full minute she stared in silence at the shriveled up twig that dangled uselessly from a bony knee attached to a bluish, fleshless, splinter of what had been a thigh. And then she let out a scream, “You lied! You did to. You lied to me!” And then her body folded over into the doctor’s arms.
“Bring some water. And a cold rag,” the doctor ordered as he lifted Molly back onto the table.
When she revived minutes later, the doctor sat next to her on the white slab table with his arm around her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Molly. I should have prepared you better. But I didn’t lie. Don’t worry, little girl. The x-rays tell us the two portions have adhered to one another as we’d hoped. The leg will fill out and slowly grow stronger as you learn to put weight on it again, first with crutches and one day without them.”
At home an hour later, under her sofa bed quilt again, Molly took stock of her immediate future. Before I know it I will be one of this motley bunch again, another chicken in the coop, another hungry dog in this old barn. She sat up and thought hard for a few minutes. Okay, but remember, she told herself, things are different now. I’m no longer just one of this raggedy herd. I refuse. One, two, three, four, five, six. No way. I’m special. A PRINCESS, no less. Holy Cow! Who would ignore or insult a princess, I’d like to know? Nobody, that’s who, she answered, and then promised herself: From now on I’m going to look past mom’s cranky moods and headaches and yelling orders into a room of deaf eared numbskulls, and remember her real self, the secret mom I know, the one who knows what it’s like to have dreams.
Months later, with her leg plumped out and her crutches shed for good, their mother’s sister, the dreaded Aunt Catherine, came to visit for a few days. With her face set in a fearsome frown, Aunt Catherine cast her disapproving eyes upon Molly. Pointing a finger within an inch of Molly’s nose, she snarled, “I hope this adventure has scared the devil out of you, Girl. At least we know you won’t be wandering off from home ever again, don’t we?”
“Oh, I think she will do that all right, when the time is right,” Molly’s mom responded. “Molly has plans. There’s a whole world out there waiting to be explored by our girl.”
Molly looked up at her mother, then turned back to her homework at the kitchen table and grinned into her open book.
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