Loud Awake and Lost

By Adele Griffin

There was an accident. Ember knows at least that much. She was driving. The car was totaled. Eight months later, Ember feels broken. She can’t even remember the six weeks of her life leading up to the accident. Where was she going? Who was she with? And what happened during those six weeks that her friends and family won’t talk about?

In the wake of her critically praised young adult psychological thrillers, Tighter and All You Never Wanted, National Book Award finalist Adele Griffin has created another triumph in this unflinching story of loss and recovery that Booklist called “exquisite” in a starred review.

In pitch dark I go walking in your landscape —Radiohead

The Time of Your Life

I got back from lunch to find they’d cleaned out my room. They’d even taken my nameplate off the door. According to Addington Hospital, EMBER LEFERRIER had already left the building.

And I would be on my way, in just a few minutes. Strange that I’d slept in this narrow metal bed for eight months. Looking around, I could already feel my time here losing shape. I’d never felt real at Addington. I’d never been me here. I’d been a restoration project, and now I was done.

Earlier this morning, I’d jammed eight months into two brown cardboard boxes that were now in the lobby, ready to load into my parents’ car. I’d rechecked under the bed, in the cupboard, inside each desk drawer.

Yep. I was finished. I was gone.

Maybe I needed a final gesture. A secret note for the next broken person. Should I use a file to scrape my initials E. G. L. into the windowsill? Or I could carve out some vintage Green Day: “I hope you had the time of your life.”

Or . . . was that just mean?

Skip it. Mean was the last thing I felt.

Fragile. Freezing. Lonely. I felt crudely refashioned, like a Frankenstein monster. Barely on this earth, like a ghost.

You’re Always Embie

But the terror didn’t hit me until I buckled in. My parents had driven up in their new Prius—a different car, of course, from the family Volvo that I’d totaled. They’d leased it some months ago, but I’d never seen it.

Now they were taking me home in it.

On the hospital’s front steps, I hugged Summer and Gab, my two favorite nurses. Even Dr. P had braved the cloudless glare of October sunlight to leave his office. He fit his arm around my shoulders—“okay, and you’ve got my email, my cell”—shook hands with Dad, and kissed my mother on the cheek.

Then he whispered something in Mom’s ear, something kind and supportive, probably. I couldn’t hear what, but I saw her eyes fill. I wanted to do something, too. Squeeze her hand, tell her I was okay. But it felt more important to be still, to show calm. I’d had so many meltdowns, there had been so many tears. If I could stay on the verge, then I wouldn’t tip over.

And now we were off.

It might have been my father’s harmonizing to the radio. Or my mom’s twist-arounds to check that all of my needs had been met.

“Are you cold, honey? Or maybe it’s stuffy, a teeny bit hot in here? Would you like some water? Hang on, I have a bottle.” Mom always had deep concerns about hydration.

Or it could have been that final turn out of Addington’s harp-shaped iron gates.

Whatever it was, being confronted with it—that the thing I’d wanted most for eight months was now actually happening, right now, in motion—the fear began to take hold of me. I wasn’t ready. I’d been put in a dunk tank, only instead of water, I’d plunged into a bottomless panic. I bit the insides of my cheeks. What was scaring me? This didn’t make sense. There were no surprises where I was going. Just nice, boring home with my nice, boring parents and my nice, boring life before the accident.

The accident, the recovery. What had happened in February sometimes sounded like another person’s dream, endlessly retold to me. Even yesterday, Dr. Pipini was still warning me about case studies where brain-trauma victims are forever attacked by headaches and auras or episodes of vertigo. That we’re susceptible to night sweats, tremors, and ringing in the ears. Sometimes we regain memory—a smidgen, or about half, or sometimes even all of it.

But sometimes everything is lost.

Studies had proved so much. In fact, every single thing I’d experienced in connection with my accident seemed to have another person’s case study already stapled to it. Dr. P said I was lucky to have lost only six weeks of memory before the night of February 14th. According to Dr. P, this wasn’t a lot.

Studies had proved the normalcy of my ordeal.

As the car E-ZPassed over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and then hooked up with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to Atlantic Avenue, I breathed through the kink in my stomach. For weeks, the urge to get back to Brooklyn had been strong as a riptide inside me. So why did every mile that widened between me and Addington increase my desire to return to the safety of the hospital?

I felt lightheaded, empty-handed. Like I’d forgotten to pack things. Big things. Things I needed. No, no, no, I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t complete, I couldn’t face down the real world.

Because Addington hadn’t been the real world. It had been a space to rebuild myself from parts. To practice being human again.

Dad drove impossibly slowly and smoothly, as if the car were filled with crates of eggs and bowls of goldfish. Onto Atlantic, left on Hicks, and another left.

Same thin brownstone. Same balding olive carpet, same rummage of catalogs and flyers on the front hall table. My parents were a tag team of worry.

“Ember, why don’t you leave your suitcase for us to take up with the boxes?”

“Some tea, sweetie? You look tired.”

“No, I can handle it. I’m not thirsty. I feel fine.”

I left them downstairs. Would it always be like this? Then again, it had always been something like this. Mom was a math professor and Dad up till his retirement last year had taught music, and their personalities played out along those roles. Right down to my mother’s logical list-making and Dad’s inability to exist in a room without layering a harmony into it.

But when it came to me, my parents wore their worry in a matched set. Batting at me like catnip with the nervous paws of their excess fears.

On the landing, I felt faint. I caught the stairwell and my breath. I waited a moment, gathering myself, before I opened the door into my past. Hello bedroom of slanted pine floors and wildflower wallpaper. Hello faded friendship quilt. Hello braided rug, ballet bar; hello farmhouse door that Dad had refinished three years ago, the summer I’d turned fourteen. All that July, I’d watched him sand and finish it, then paint it my specially-picked-at-Sherwin-Williams color, periwinkle, and mount it on blocks for me to use as a desk.

The room had that same walnut-gingerbread smell, but it was also musty and unused—despite the ferny bloom of marigolds Mom had placed on my windowsill. Almost everything in this room was as natural as my own voice.

Almost.

The back of my neck prickled hotly. My room wasn’t quite as I’d left it. Something was wrong here. Something was off.

Deep breath. I was just in shock to be home.

And maybe I was overreacting to tiny things, like these fancy arty pens, fanned out in the lopsided glazed pot I’d made in fourth grade. When had I bought them? Slowly, I picked up a silver pen, popped its cap, sniffed the ink, and then marked my hand with a funny-looking sideways A.

Huh, why had I done that? So automatic, almost thoughtless.

Now I was teetering on the verge of being on the edge; I went as still as the room as my eyes roved around for the next oddity. What was this, wedged in the upper corner of my door mirror? A ticket stub for a movie I’d never seen. I darted to it. I didn’t remember anything about that movie—the title was in German, I couldn’t even pronounce it.

And here, what was this? A black business card for a dance club called Areacode out in Bushwick. Areacode? I must have gone to that club, right? And it had been memorable enough that I had a souvenir.

The poster tacked to my wall corkboard startled me most.

Whoa, how had I not seen that, first thing? When’d I put that up? I didn’t know any group called Weregirl. I stared. Against a rusted sunburst apocalypse posed three guys and one girl, all dressed in old-fashioned military jackets.

My heart was pounding. But I hadn’t heard this band’s music. I hadn’t tacked up this poster. Or bought those. Or seen that. Okay, okay, calm down. This must have happened inside the memory sinkhole. The missing weeks. Dr. P and I had shared multiple discussions about this.

Weregirl: The Reconnaissance Tour

It was lettered in retro-typewriter ink along the bottom of the poster, with a list of dates from last winter. WEST TWENTY-FIRST AND SURF AVENUE was circled in blue, for a March 12th concert. Of course, I’d never made it to the show. By March 12 I was at Addington, relearning how to walk and chew food.

Five minutes home and I was unraveling. My armpits damp, my breath shallow. And I hadn’t even left my room.

“Remember your PBR.” I could hear Dr. Pipini’s voice in my ear.

Positioning, Breathing, Relaxation.

Slowly, I unclenched my hands. My back was pinching—I dropped to a hinge, tried to touch my toes. Forced my mouth into a smile—“smiling helps when you feel worst,” Summer always said—and then rolled up.

Okay. I would finish excavating my room later. Now I unzipped my suitcase, which spilled out the time capsule of my convalescence. It was strangely comforting. All the familiar paperbacks that had been lined up on my hospital shelf, along with my textbooks and progress notebooks. Sweatpants and T-shirts, scrubs and Crocs. Get-well cards and stuffed animals and even my temporary teeth—a bridge they’d created for me to use for a couple of months before I’d gotten my permanent veneer implants.

The temp teeth had been too fascinatingly ugly not to keep. After a moment’s thought, I placed them on my bureau between my sandalwood jewelry box and the photo I’d framed of my parents from a few Thanksgivings ago.

God, my parents had aged drastically. Because of me. My fault, all my fault.

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