Late Night Trip

The 100% true story of how my sister got the scar on her forehead.

I remember one late night when I was small; I was playing in our living room. It was mostly dark but for a battered old lamp in the corner with a light bulb turned up to the sky so bugs could land on it and start to smoke. If I turned my head back to the ceiling I could see the long white streaks where I'd watched my father rub white paste over the cracks in the plaster. Sitting on the quilt that had probably once been white, listening to my mother, yak-yakking to my grandmother, or possibly my Aunt Jenny on the phone, in the room where I had once watched my father smash our computer with a hammer when it stopped working, we were all absorbed in our own little worlds. I in the living room, my mother in the study, my father in the kitchen. So it was with a crash to shatter windows that the shriek brought our words slamming back into one.
My father is racing down the hall now, rushing into the bathroom , carrying my little sister, Kyly, who is thrashing and wailing up a storm. I peek over to the couch and see this, and then make my way over to linger in the doorway as a ghost, unnoticed. Kyly is lying on the counter of our only bathroom, a tiny thing with a window in the shower that faced the street so you could greet the UPS people as you shampooed your hair. I look at my sister and I know something terrible has happened. There's so much red red all over my baby sister's face, so much blood pouring down the drain with the water as my father rinses her face. The door behind me opens, almost hitting me in the back because the hallway is so small, and my mother screams, I imagine, "Jesus Christ!" or something of the like, the actual words have left my memory long ago.

But my father doesn't react, and look closer now I can see the place from whence the blood is flowing. A deep cut on her forehead, where the skin is split down the middle, like a banana. My mother pushes me from the room, and this irritates me. My father knows I won't get in the way. I can hear my mother's voice, loud a panicked in a tone I recognize well know. It mixes in a cocktail or worry with my father's deep calmness, with underlying fear. When they squeeze back down the narrow hall and back into the living room, coats and shoes are hastily thrust on over rumpled PJs and brightly colored socks. Kyly's head is carefully bandaged in white gauze. The night is silent as we load into the car. I look up and up and out the car window, to the neighbor's house with the RV that never moves. We drive off into the night, and riding down the cracked and bumpy road, I can see the Mary and her husband's house, who have the best decorations at Christmastime, and a huge backyard full of old appliances and things that once belonged to their children, who are all grown-up and gone now. The car ride is terrible, with a choking atmosphere of silence and fear. Because I am so short, I can only look at the sky, spattered with stars, and not much else. My father drives us to the emergency room, the ER and when we open the door, even at this late hour, all I see is people. People lining the walls, filling up chairs and spilling onto the floor, speaking only in hushed whispers and they all turn to look at us when we walk in, except the ones who are crying, and they leave fast. Staring eyes, eyes desperate for hope, fir an answer. Why? Why? they ask. I don't know. I hurry forward to catch my mother's coat in my tiny fist. They put us on a waiting list. Wait? I think We can't wait. That's why we're here, in the ER. But my parents don't protest, only move aside to stand shabby and poor and look about for a seat that isn't there. After a while, when my stubby legs are far past tired of standing, a few people stand a leave. We move to take their seats. But they left only two, so my father takes one, and my mother with Kyly on her lap takes the other, and I sit at my parent's feet on the dirty floor, scratchy with the same blue carpet they use at schools.
Three hours pass in that crowded and smelly waiting room. So long that it began to seem to me that we had always been there, always been waiting for something that I didn't understand. We had only ever existed in this room, there had never been anything before it and I could foresee nothing after it. But at last our names are called, when I am almost ready to cry for lack of something, anything to do. The doctor is young and arrogant, fresh out of medical school, with thin-rimmed glasses. He tears from Kyly's forehead the carefully applied bandage and rips open the tender flesh on her forehead again. He quickly reaches for the glue and uses his fingers to press the wound together. Upon turning for a new bandage, he finds that the glue has caught his thumb fast, and in moving, he has torn open the cut again. He gets his hands on the bandage and clumsily applies it, butterfly style. He hands her back to my parents, seething with anger, but unable to protest. My mother snatches her back and strides from the room, my father and I much slower in her wake.
Many years later, the scar is still there. She doesn't mind it now, hardly even notices it. She doesn't remember that night all those years ago, a night of waiting and fear and midnight car rides. But I do. She told me once, that she used it for show and tell.