Sewanee Review

The class is a Scene Study. Method technique. Tuesday evenings; seven to eleven officially, though I never once leave before midnight. The studio sits on a vague blank eastern stretch of Melrose, walking distance from the Paramount lot. It takes me an hour to drive there from our canyon—the PCH to the 10 and off at Crenshaw, crosstown through Mid-Wilshire; past the faded billboards and treeless concrete of Koreatown, past the manicured lawns on Rossmore. By the end of the summer, this commute will be second nature to me, but this first time, I follow my mother's directions vigilantly, clutching the orange Post-it she gave me between one damp palm and the steering wheel. Its ink begins to blur.

June, 2009. A year and a half since the accident. I have been studying philosophy and art history and French in historic Greenwich Village buildings; writing my papers in a library that overlooks Washington Square Park. From its floor-to-ceiling windows I can see the spire of the Empire State Building, track the changing colors of the elms. Nineteen years old in downtown New York City, [End Page 527] my nights a fast blur of rooftops and undergrounds. I have fallen in love with cobblestones and streetlamps, with new buds trembling on trees. Lights sputtering on in the distance at dusk and late-night taxis with the windows cracked and even the screech of a subway car pulling into a station, even the biting cold and melting heat, even the smells—ripe garbage, exhaust, cigarettes, street meat. In New York it is easy to forget where I came from; become someone else.

But it has to end, this feeling—and it does, with a blunt sick thud. Back to California for the summer, back to the house on the hill. It all comes back: the past seventeen months. The coma, the needles, the wires and tubes. The seven stitches, the spider-shaped scar. Hot cars, cold hospitals, hushed voices of doctors like snowfall. My father's body—his head—changing shape and size and color with each passing day. The rehabilitation center in the Valley, its walls the color of chewed bubblegum, game-show applause echoing through each room. All that is over now—and yet it persists, a spectral haze. Here is our front door, the yellow rosebush—the wooden wheelchair ramp we had built after our father came home from the hospital. Here is the hallway, and the stairs; the dining-room table no longer a mess of screenplays, receipts, and recipes. There are the French doors, and beyond them, the mountains.

Here is our living room. Stone fireplace, faded red couch. Rocking chair, grand piano. Art books, oil paintings, photographs. All those photographs. There I am at five, at the helm of my father's sailboat, squinting—no glasses, yet—salt-bleached hair French-braided by my mother; yellow life jacket zipped up to my chin. My father smiling proud behind me. There is my mother at twenty-seven, scowling in a suit and tie—he used to tell her not to smile in photographs. Artier that way; or maybe it was just because she hadn't yet had her teeth fixed. There are my parents, nose-to-nose. Their wedding day. She's eight months pregnant, dark hair full and feathered in that late-eighties way, bulging in blue velvet. She [End Page 528] refused to wear white—of course she did. He's in his New York Yacht Club blazer, the one with the gold buttons. The one we kept. Hair combed neatly, blue eyes blazing. Old enough to be her father.

Turn right at the archway. Parked beneath it, in the space where my father and I used to practice violin: the hydraulic lift, like some poorly-designed torture device. The finger-smudged metal, the too-bright blue of the polyester sling. Across from that is the mahogany music stand, and splayed across it, still, the yellowed pages of Vivaldi's "Concerto for Two Violins in A Minor." I quit after his accident. Haven't touched my violin since. Walk through the arch and into the...