The Broken Girl
Two years ago, my daughter Mia would race me to the mailbox every single afternoon.
She’d hear my key in the front door and come tearing down the hallway, socks sliding on the hardwood, yelling, “Mailbox, Mom! Go, go, go!” And we’d run down the driveway together, her little legs pumping, her hair flying, and she’d always win because I always let her.
She’d stand there at the end of the driveway holding a fistful of grocery flyers and bills like she’d won a prize at the fair, grinning up at me, gap-toothed and out of breath.
“I beat you again,” she’d say.
“You sure did, baby.”
I would give anything to go back to those afternoons. Anything at all.
But you don’t get to go back. That’s the first thing life takes from you when something like this happens. It takes the going-back.
Let me tell you how it happened, and then let me tell you what my ten-year-old daughter did at her cousin’s wedding, because if you only remember one thing about my Mia, I want it to be that. Not the accident. The wedding.
But you have to understand the first part to understand the second.
It was a Thursday in February. The roads were bad — that thin, mean layer of ice that hides under a dusting of snow so you can’t even see it. I’d picked Mia up from her friend Hannah’s house, and she was in the back seat behind me, buckled in, telling me some long complicated story about a game they’d been playing.
I remember she was in the middle of a sentence.
I remember I said, “And then what happened?”
I never heard the end of that story.
A truck came through the intersection. The driver said later he’d tapped his brakes and just kept sliding, that there was nothing under his tires to grab. I believe him. I’ve never blamed him. The ice didn’t care whose fault it was.
He hit us on the back left. Right where Mia was sitting.
I don’t remember the sound. People always ask about the sound and I can’t tell them, because my brain took it and hid it somewhere I can’t reach. I remember the world spinning. I remember the airbag. I remember tasting blood and thinking, strangely, calmly, about whether I’d left the oven on.
And then I remember the silence. That’s the part that comes back to me at night. After all that noise, the terrible quiet, and my own voice screaming her name into it.
“Mia? Mia! Baby, answer me. Mia, please—”
Nothing.
I walked away from that car with bruises. A cut on my forehead that needed four stitches. A sprained wrist. That’s all. I walked away.
Mia woke up two days later in a hospital bed, and she couldn’t feel her legs.
The doctors used words I didn’t understand at first and then understood too well. Spinal cord. Incomplete injury. T-something, a number, a letter. They talked about swelling and time and hope and no-guarantees. They were kind. They were careful. And what it all came down to, underneath the careful words, was this: my little girl who raced me to the mailbox was never going to run again.
She was eight years old.
I want to tell you I was strong for her. The truth is more complicated. In the hospital, in front of Mia, I was a rock. I smiled. I told her we’d figure it all out together. I braided her hair and read her books and lied to her face about how everything was going to be okay.
And then I’d go down to my car in the parking garage, sit in the driver’s seat, and come apart. I’d cry so hard I couldn’t breathe. I’d grip the steering wheel and scream where nobody could hear me. And then I’d wipe my face, check my eyes in the mirror, and go back upstairs and be a rock again.
That’s what being a mother is, I’ve learned. It’s falling apart in the parking garage and being a rock upstairs.
The first year home was the hardest thing I’ve ever lived through, and I say that as a woman who’s buried her own parents.
Because the injury was only the beginning. The wheelchair, the ramps, the way we had to tear apart our own house and rebuild it around her — all of that was hard, but it was practical-hard. You could measure it. You could order the equipment and pour the concrete and check the boxes.
What you couldn’t fix was what it did to Mia inside.
She stopped smiling. My chatterbox, my little narrator who couldn’t get through a car ride without three stories — she went quiet. She’d sit by the window and watch the neighbor kids play in the street, and I’d watch her watching them, and neither of us would say anything, because what was there to say.
She hated the wheelchair. Wouldn’t look at it for weeks. When the physical therapist first brought it, Mia turned her whole body toward the wall and wouldn’t turn back until it was gone.
“I don’t want it,” she said. “I’m not sitting in that thing.”
“Baby, it’s going to help you get around. It’s going to give you your freedom back.”
“It’s not freedom. It’s a sign that says I’m broken.”
Eight years old. Where does a child even get a sentence like that.
And then one day, she said the thing that split my heart clean down the middle. We were getting ready to go to a doctor’s appointment, and I was trying to get her into the chair, and she was fighting me, and finally she just went limp and started to cry and said:
“I’m the broken girl now, Mom. That’s all I am. I’m the broken girl and everyone’s going to look at me and that’s all they’ll ever see.”
I got down on the floor in front of her. I took her face in my hands.
“You listen to me,” I said. “You are not broken. Do you hear me? You are Mia. You are my whole entire world, and there is nothing broken about you.”
But she just looked at me with those big wet eyes, and I could tell she didn’t believe a single word. And the worst part — the part I’ll carry forever — is that some small, terrible corner of my own heart wasn’t sure I believed it either. Not because it was true. But because I was so tired, and so scared, and I didn’t know how to give her back something I couldn’t even hold onto myself.
She stopped wanting to go out. School was the worst. She’d come home and tell me nobody was mean to her, exactly, but that they looked at her different. That a girl named Presley had asked, right in front of everyone, if Mia was going to be “like that forever.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said I didn’t know.” She shrugged. “Because I don’t.”
She stopped asking to go to the store. Stopped asking for the park. She’d make herself as small as possible, tuck her arms in, keep her eyes down, like if she just didn’t take up any space, maybe people would stop seeing her at all.
My bright, loud, mailbox-racing girl was trying to disappear.
And I didn’t know how to stop her.
I tried everything. I really did. New toys, old favorites, her grandmother, a counselor, a support group with other kids in chairs — which she sat through with her arms crossed and refused to speak. I tried a puppy, if you can believe it, a little rescue mutt named Biscuit, and she loved him, she did, but even Biscuit couldn’t reach all the way down to where she’d gone.
I was starting to lose hope. I’m ashamed to say that, but it’s true. A year in, I was starting to believe that the daughter I’d known was gone as surely as if she’d died in that car, and that this quiet, folded-up child was who I had now, and that I’d better learn to love her too, even as I grieved the one I’d lost.
And then Claire’s wedding invitation came in the mail.
Claire is my cousin. She’s younger than me by about ten years, closer to a big sister for Mia than a cousin-once-removed. Claire had been coming around all through the hard year — she was one of the only ones who never got weird about the wheelchair, who talked to Mia exactly like she always had, who’d flop down on the floor next to the chair and paint Mia’s nails and gossip about celebrities.
Mia adored her.
When the cream-colored envelope came, I almost didn’t show it to Mia, honestly. I figured a wedding — with dancing, with all those people, with everyone on their feet celebrating — would be exactly the kind of thing that would hurt her. I figured she’d say no.
But she saw the envelope on the counter. She saw Claire’s name.
And she picked it up, and she read it, and something happened to her face that I hadn’t seen in over a year.
She lit up.
“Mom.” She looked at me, and her eyes were shining, actually shining. “Mom, it’s Claire’s wedding. Can we go? Please? I want to be there so badly.”
I stood in that kitchen and I could have wept. Because there she was. There was my girl, somewhere down inside, still alive, and something about Claire had reached her.
“Of course we can go, baby,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “Of course. We wouldn’t miss it.”
“I want to look really pretty,” she said. “Can I have a new dress? A fancy one?”
“You can have any dress you want.”
She hugged the invitation to her chest. “Claire’s going to be so beautiful.”
For the next three weeks, that wedding was all she talked about. It was like a light had switched back on. She asked me about the dress every day. She wanted to know what Claire would wear, who’d be there, if there’d be cake, what kind of cake, could she have two pieces. My silent, folded-up girl was unfolding, one question at a time, and I would have driven that wedding to the ends of the earth if that’s what it took.
I called Claire to tell her how excited Mia was.
Claire got quiet on the phone, and then she said, “Oh, that makes me so happy I could cry. You know what? I’m going to do something special for her. I don’t know what yet. But that little girl is going to feel like a queen at my wedding, I promise you.”
I didn’t know then what she meant. I found out at the wedding.
I wish to God she’d never had the idea. And at the same time — I’m getting ahead of myself.
We found the dress at a little shop downtown. It was a soft lavender, Mia’s favorite color, with a full skirt that draped down over her lap and legs and a little sparkle at the collar. When she saw herself in the mirror in that dress, sitting in her chair, she went very still.
And then, quietly, she said, “I look nice.”
Not “I look broken.” Not “everyone’s going to stare.”
“I look nice.”
I turned away so she wouldn’t see me crying. First time in a long time it was the good kind.
I need to tell you about my sister Donna now, because she’s the villain of this story and I won’t pretend otherwise, though I’ll try to be fair.
Donna is my older sister. Two years older. And Donna has always, her whole life, believed she got a raw deal. That the world owed her something it kept forgetting to pay.
Some of that came from real places. Our parents weren’t easy, and Donna caught the worst of it, being the first. I’ve tried to remember that over the years, on the days she’s made it hard to love her. But somewhere along the line, Donna’s hurt turned into something else. It turned into a kind of hunger. A need to be the center of every room, to win every contest, to make sure that whatever good thing was happening, it was happening to her.
Weddings were the worst for her. Because Donna was forty-four and had never married, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. There’d been a string of men over the years, and every one of them had ended the same way — with Donna calling me at midnight, furious and heartbroken, explaining how it was all his fault, how she’d been wronged again, how she just couldn’t understand why these things kept happening to her.
She never once wondered if the common thread might be her. That kind of wondering wasn’t in Donna’s makeup.