The girl with bony shoulders
When I was young, we used to go to a vacation resort in the mountains during the summer recess. The parents had their leisure, and we kids frolicked around the countryside, did sports and got into the usual trouble, as we had the run of the land. As the years went on, people came and went; some you met again, others you didn't.
One summer vacation I met a girl I hadn't seen before. She may have been 13 or perhaps 14; I myself was maybe around 15 or thereabouts, and we pushed our bicycles along the lake and talked, and when I tentatively put an arm around her shoulders as we sat by the waterside, and smelled the scent of her hair baking in the sun, with crickets chirping and dragon flies buzzing around us and the clean, muddy smell from the lake in the upcoming afternoon wind, I felt the thin bones under her shirt (and to this day, I'm into bones).
I'd grown up with girls all around, but this one was the first I was, well, personally interested in.
So it went, until one day, finally, I walked her home when dusk began to fall.
She was living in a house a bit out of town with her mother (her father was off working somewhere in the city, as fathers used to), and I waited at the garden gate until she had stashed her bicycle near the shed and then quickly disappeared behind the door, when her mother opened it to let her in for dinner.
I don't know today if she had embraced me or not, but I do remember how she laughed and waved at me slightly, just before slipping inside like a lizard. She was one of those taught, almost scrawny little creatures of that age, and I sorely liked the way she was. And as she seemed to fancy me too, we had sort of made a date to meet again the next day. I saw the curtain move, but wasn't sure who had quickly looked out, and left.
However, the next day she did not turn up at our usual haunt, so after a while I jumped on my bicycle and rode it down along the main road, the one that led out of town, to where I now knew she was living.
About halfway there, I caught sight of her, furiously pedaling her new, slightly too big bicycle down the other side of the road in the opposite direction, on her way in, and looking intensely straight ahead. As we were going to miss each other that way, I stopped and called out to her. She heard me, and skidded to a halt. She seemed glad to see me, and had been on her way to meet me by the look of it.
She was wearing, what the kids were wearing then: a sort of green and blue plaid white shirt, a pair of white canvas trousers that ended halfway down her naked calves, with canvas shoes to match. Not really expensive, but good quality. Somehow, I remember the details of her clothing; she looked so natural, so fresh and inviting; just a teenage kid, a thin, skinny little girl on a brand-new pinky girly bike, maybe just half a size to big for her, with a mop of straight, dark blond hair, nice manners and a smile that I found wonderful.
Again, she laughed at me, and, without looking right or left, stepped into the pedals once more, and steered her bicycle across the road with that slight wobble which usually ensues when you get a bike going again. At that moment, our eyes were only for each other, and the last thing I remember was her beaming, happy, radiant, laughing face, when the heavy motorcycle coming down on her side of the two-lane road hit her at full speed.
The rest was carnage. There was no blood... I still remember the oily underbelly of the motorcycle, lying on it's side, that seemed so strangely wrong and out of place; the driver, who had no fault in this, writhing in silent agony on the tarmac some way down the road; the twisted mess that had once been a girl's bicycle, and her screams. Terrified, I threw down my own bike and hurried over; cars had screeched to a halt. But there was nothing I could do, except stare helplessly at her sobbing, shrieking face, cringing and clinging body. He had hit her squarely in the side.
For a moment I was petrified, then bolted back to my bicycle, and tore down the road to her parents' house, and rang the doorbell, still wearing the terrified and silly grin of educated politeness and shock.
Her mother opened, and, recognizing me from the evening before, she smiled, a smile that was slapped off her face instantly when I gasped out what had happened; and seeing that expression change, on the face of a complete stranger, I suddenly had an Idea of what it meant to be a parent. She hurried back inside to shut the house and collect her papers, and came out again to follow me to the scene of the accident with me blurting out the horrid story.
I do not really remember what happened then; it is all a bit fuzzy. I don't even think I told my own parents, or anyone, but I am not sure. I only know that, somehow, I caught the message some days later of where she was lying in the town hospital, and I went there, to visit her. I hardly knew her...
It was that day she was scheduled to be moved somewhere else, and her mother was there, very somber, and told me to be very quiet.
I stepped up to the bottom of the bed, silently; and gripping the cool, metal foot railing, I stared at a lifeless, motionless silhouette under some sheets with tubes coming out, that had once been someone I had not even gotten to know; and in the dim sunlight falling through the drawn curtains, all I could see of the girl I had wanted to meet on that day was a splash of dark blonde hair across a white hospital pillow. Her pale, still face, turned to one side, was so bloodless and white that it was almost indistinguishable from the hospital bedding.
She looked dead.
The medical apparatus was ticking and peeping silently. Not a breath was heard, not a movement seen in that darkened room; and looking at this image in the warm, stuffy, and dimly lit hospital room, I realized her mother would never forgive me. And when after a while she touched my arm, led me to the door, let me out, and, with a drawn face, bade me good bye and slipped silently back in, I felt there was nothing more I could do or say; so I left.
I never saw that girl again, nor any of her family. None of them returned to the school; I never found out whether she had lived, or died; or whether she had recovered, or remained a cripple. They had probably left town, and I hope it was to get treatment elsewhere.
All I know in the end is that it scarred me too. It was not well for someone to like me, and there are things that make you helpless. The incident was never mentioned, but the spectre remained... she had appeared, and disappeared again, and somehow I was at fault.
I did finally ask, much later, but nobody knew where they had gone.
I do hope she became well again.
And if she survived, and if she did recover, I sincerely hope she found someone, and is by now a happy grandmother somewhere.
I earnestly do.
So here's to you, my dear, haunting Stephany, the girl I never really knew.
And can never forget.
I went down to the St. James infirmary... to see my baby there... stretched out on the clean, white table... so still, so pale, and so bare...
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