BEAUTIFUL FACES

     They were coming. Crackling up the driveway, their car pulled in slowly. I was placed on a corded armchair that snagged at my clothes. An image took shape in my mind. It was me, running. The ground flew away under my pounding legs and my fingertips touched the clouds. I stared at my broken ankle, feeling paralyzed.

     My father went out to greet them. My mother stood by me, her hands a brittle chalky white. My hands were still and cold.

The other girl’s parents walked in. They were not scary looking. Small and middle-aged, their faces were made like the thin stretched soft skin of flower petals in the morning. In the corners of their eyes dewdrops clung.

     I knew I would have to face her parents, that we would give and take from each other. I thought I was prepared for what they would take from me, but terrified of what they might give.

Their hands were smooth and took mine. Dry and cool and soft. The mother whose daughter bled to death lifted up her hands and touched my forehead. She kissed my hair with lips that had birthed the wails I remember shrinking from behind the hospital door. In the space between her cries, three centimeters, six centimeters, ten centimeters, I had known this mother’s pain better than I knew myself. The father whose daughter slammed into the steering wheel stood away. His eyes trembled in his head when he looked at me, but his smile was steady.

     Words fell from my mouth that did not make any difference. These people had known me as soon as they got the call, the call they had never feared. They now knew my lies and my secrets. No one had ever known these things before.

     I didn’t understand everything that happened that day. Sometimes I couldn’t hear the metal crashing over their daughter’s breath. Most of the time I didn’t want to.

They sat down. We all spoke haltingly. Our words were the rocks skipping across the dark river between us. My rocks never went very far before sinking. Time was the current pulling us forward, but no one seemed to reach the opposite shore.

     He showed us his daughter’s face on his arm. Small and fuzzy with ink, it did not breathe. I stared at it like I had stared through her car window, waiting. Was the window open, or closed? Was the glass broken, or whole? I wanted to scream her name like I had before.  I wanted her eyes to see me. I needed them to see me.

     Her mother talked of smudgy paper. I remembered the smudgy paper in her daughter’s hands. I can hear her daughter tracing something with a light pencil, it doesn’t matter what it was. It might have been a hard-lined heart, a butterfly wing, or a pretty curse. I just remember her scratching something softly into the paper, the sound leaving hairline cracks across the clear windshield. The next morning they were still pulling the glass out of our hair.

     My mother’s face was so loose and open to everything. My father’s face was stiff. I hadn’t been able to feel my face for days.

     But their faces were beautiful. Somehow, their faces understood. She kissed my forehead again. Her kisses were warm.

     I turned away from their beautiful, beautiful faces, knowing in my heart our secrets were the same.