Swim

from various surgeries intended to repair the damage the accident had done. The longest stint was the summer between second and third grades, when I stayed at Shriners Hospital of Boston. The doctors there had big plans, a series of operations that would stretch from June to August. First, I was to have a titanium rod implanted in my jaw, to replace the shattered bone that had been reinforced with pins when I was five but was failing to grow properly. “You’ll be like the bionic girl!” my orthopedic surgeon, a jolly man named Dr. Caine, had announced. Of all my doctors, I liked him best. He had a shiny bald head that glowed under the hospital lights. He carried peppermints and plastic-wrapped caramel squares in the pocket of his white coat, and he looked at me, all of me, not just the parts he’d be cutting and sewing.
    Three weeks after Dr. Caine finished up, I would have surgery on my face, a free-flap skin graft during which doctors would remove a rectangular piece of skin from my hip and graft it onto my cheek and chin. The danger there was reabsorption, the body taking the relocated skin and basically sucking it back into itself. I’d gone to the library after school, had snuck into the adult section and found medical textbooks there. In some cases, patients who’d had this kind of surgery looked almost normal—the new skin raised or stretched or discolored or lumpy, but the shape of their faces essentially correct. Others looked bizarre, grotesque, like they’d had bites taken out of their faces, grinding and swallowing bones and flesh. This, though, my grandmother told me, in a phrase that never varied by a word, was “a state-of-the-art procedure.” I would have it, and we’d hope for the best.
    Finally, the ophthalmologist and the plastic surgeon together would work on my right eye, which drooped and watered and had a tendency to wander when I wasn’t paying strict attention. By the first week of September, I’d be, if not healed, then “on the road to recovery” (another one of my grandmother’s phrases). The doctors had talked about sending me back to school in some kind of protective plastic mask, which I had privately decided to pocket as soon as I was out of my grandmother’s eyesight. Hope for the best, I told myself.
    In those days, the television sets that patients could rent were little boxes that were bolted to the ceiling and got three channels. This might have been fine for regular people, but Grandma decided that it wasn’t good enough for me. When I checked in on a sunny afternoon in June, I arrived with a twenty-four-inch top-of-the-line Zenith, housed in shiny walnut paneling, with a remote control and stereo speakers. Grandma would prevail upon one of the orderlies she’d plied with baked goods to carry it into my room and set it up on a table that she’d convinced a friendly nurse to lend us.
    The week before, Grandma and I had gone shopping together at Lord & Taylor downtown, buying pretty new pajamas and nightgowns, three new robes, slippers, and socks. We’d packed a reading lamp to plug into the wall, and board games: checkers and chess, Boggle and backgammon, decks of cards so we could play Crazy Eights. Instead of the ugly green plastic water pitchers most patients used, Grandma brought me one made of acrylic, with a candy-pink swirl that ran through it, and a matching drinking cup and a pink bendy straw to match. The night before I checked in, we went to the library and chose a dozen books: Caddie Woodlawn and Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables and The Chronicles of Narnia . “I’ll read them to you,” Grandma promised, because the doctors had told us there would be times when reading would be uncomfortable. My face would be swollen, stitched up, and bandaged after the jaw operation. I’d wear compression bandages once the plastic surgeon did what he could for my cheek, and I’d have a patch to let my eye heal, when I wasn’t doing exercises to learn how to track and focus with it again. “Eye gym classes,” Grandma called them.
    I spent my summer on the fourth floor, in the bed by the window in a room for two, where a bulky air conditioner wheezed and rattled day and night. Most of the children on the floor with me were there for simpler surgeries. They were having their tonsils or appendixes taken out, getting tubes put in their ears, having broken bones set or birthmarks removed. These kids would come and stay for a night or two.