Chapter 39: #TBT: A selfie of Amy hyperventilating.
Back to the future: Amy and Wendy, ten years earlier.
To fully understand what happens next, you have to rewind Amy’s life, get into a #throwbackthursday from ten years earlier. You have to scroll past old photos of Katarina, a brooding Swiss-German, who broke up with Amy six or seven months before I met her on that Toronto to Cleveland flight; past Vera, a short-lived relationship with an American ex-pat in northern France who still wanted to live la vie boheme; and past Terri, a professor Amy dumped after two years when it became apparent that Terri was never going to be capable of settling down and offering any kind of actual commitment. The end of Terri had been the beginning of Switzerland; Amy agreed to the transfer because it got her away from southern New Jersey, away from an Ivy League lover who was ultimately more interested in organic farmer’s markets and attending conferences on social justice than she was in Amy.
But before all of them — before serious Katarina and Peter Pan Vera and Pretentious Princeton Terri — there was Wendy.
Wonderful, wacky Wendy. The girl who would rush into a restaurant with paint streaking her hair and putty beneath her nails, dropping a breathless kiss on Amy’s cheek before sitting across from her.
“Sorry I’m late, honey,” Wendy says. “You know I’ve been blocked around that commissioned piece for the last week or two. But I finally figured out what I wanted to do with it today…” She waves her hands while she talks, describing colors and light, textures and brushstrokes, barely noticing in time that she’s about to knock over her glass of water.
And Amy? Amy listens. She moves the innocent glass of water out of the way before Wendy knocks it over, and she listens. Not so much because she cares about light and color and brushstrokes, but because there’s no one she cares about more than Wendy. There’s no one who makes her feel freer than Wendy, no one else who sands down the sharp edges of her strict military upbringing in quite the same way. Because Amy is composed of timetables and deadlines, spreadsheets and mathematical models. And listening to Wendy describe her work this way… it’s like Wendy’s voice itself unwinds the uncomfortably tense knots deep inside Amy’s heart.
Wendy doesn’t bother to look at the menu before her. She’s too intent on describing her latest revelation. But it’s okay; Amy knows what Wendy likes. She ordered for her girlfriend ten minutes ago. It’s only when the food comes that Wendy realizes that Amy ordered on her behalf. She stops talking long enough to look from the hot plate before her to Amy.
“You ordered for me?”
Amy nods.
Wendy smiles. She plants paint-stained palms on the table, leans across her hot plate to plant her mouth on her girlfriend’s, not caring that they’re in the middle of a restaurant in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, not caring that people stare. Amy has always loved that about Wendy — the easy obliviousness to what other people see and think. Amy has always cared what others think far too much; Wendy is changing her without even meaning to.
#
It’s a month after that bold restaurant kiss that Amy comes home to find the door to their apartment unlocked. It’s not terribly surprising — it’s Wendy, after all, and no matter how many times Amy reminds her to lock the door, the woman’s flighty, dreamy brain just can’t seem to hold the instruction.
“Wendy?” Amy calls as she steps inside, closing the door with her butt and dropping her keys into the hand-blown glass bowl on the coffee table. “Wen?” She thinks she hears noise coming from the bedroom, so she heads in that direction. She expects to find Wendy on the bed with her sketchpad in her lap, music playing softly on her laptop as she stares out the window in pensive silence.
Wendy’s on the bed, alright. And there’s something in her lap. But it isn’t a sketchpad. It’s a face. And the sounds Amy heard? The sounds are coming from Wendy. They’re sounds Amy knows and loves, but they are private sounds, and she never thought she’d be hearing them like this.
Wendy’s eyes are closed, her head is thrown back, her mouth is open. And the face between her legs — the face that, judging from the rest of the bare body attached to it, must belong to a male — is obscured by Wendy’s thighs. Even though Amy’s never seen the naked legs and back and hairy ass before her, she recognizes the back of the head. It’s something about the bald spot, the way the wispy hair is combed over it but only poorly conceals it. It’s the bald spot that belongs one of Wendy’s MFA professors. Amy can’t quite remember his name. Not now. Not in this moment.
The bundle of textbooks and binders cradled in Amy’s arms tumbles to the ground with what might be a loud clatter, but Amy can’t hear it. She can’t hear anything anymore — she can’t hear the traffic outside the apartment, she can’t hear Wendy’s whimpers of pleasure, she can’t hear the sound of licking. The only thing she can hear is the sound of her heart, which sounds like a military marching cadence sped up to an unnatural rate. Blood rushes into her ears. Her legs water as if they are melting away from her. Without willing them to, her hands fly to her face, covering her nose and mouth.
My God, the rational part of her brain thinks, I’m having a heart attack.
When the books hit the wooden floor, the man’s head jerks up from between Wendy’s legs, and Wendy’s eyes open.
Amy can see Wendy’s mouth moving, can see words forming, but Amy can’t hear them, either.
Amy? is what the mouth looks like it’s saying.
Amy should know; she’s seen that mouth say her name hundreds of times before. Under all circumstances. For many years.
But never a circumstance like this.
Amy? the mouth seems to ask again.
There’s movement now; Wendy’s trying to get up, the MFA professor with the bald spot rolls away from her, looks in Amy’s direction with an expression on his face like a guilty child caught eating sweets. Except it’s not chocolate that smears the black-and-grey hairs of his thin goatee.
If it really was a heart attack, I’d probably be dead by now, Amy reasons.
It’s the last thought she has for a couple minutes, because she turns her back on the nightmare scene before her, intending to walk out of the room. But she doesn’t get far. She takes only one step, and somehow the world goes black.
She regains consciousness on her own bedroom floor three minutes later, flat on her back, Theories of Management and Leadership textbook digging into her spine. Wendy’s concerned face hovers inches above her own, damp palms on Amy’s cheeks. Damp palms coated in the unfamiliar scent of a stranger.
“Baby? Amy?” Wendy says. And Amy observes that she can apparently hear again, which she takes to be a good sign. “Oh — thank God. Thank God, you’re awake. When you fell, I thought — I really thought that maybe you — ”
“Get your hands off of me,” Amy says. She can hear, but she can’t see clearly anymore, because tears blur her vision. Amy blinks away the tears, pushes her girlfriend back, manages to stand on two unsteady feet. She grabs her keys from the hand-blown glass bowl, slams the apartment door on her way out.
It’s the first panic attack she’s ever had. The second one comes when she’s driving away from the apartment complex five minutes later, and she doesn’t even see the silver pickup truck until the moment before it slams into the driver’s side. The world goes black yet again, and this time it’s Grace Adler’s face that hovers above her own when she wakes — not in an apartment this time, but in a hospital bed.
“Ames? Are you actually awake?” Grace asks. “You had me worried out of my mind.”
The panic attacks become a regular feature of Amy’s life after that. They come on unexpectedly and predictably at the same time. Every time a meeting at work gets a little too stressful. Every time her step-mother calls her to give her more bad news about her father’s health. Even when it seems like there’s no reason to panic, a panic attack comes on. It comes on, and she tries to laugh at herself, Why are you doing this, now? This is stupid. Stop it, but telling her body to knock it off never works.
She tries medication. She gets counseling. But although they get fewer and further between, the attacks never leave. Neither do the scars that crisscross her abdomen, the left-over battle wounds from the car accident on the worst day of her life.
#
Back to the present
Like the rest of me, like my mother, like my sister, I have a big motherfucking mouth. And I’ve never been shy about using it. But with Amy standing there? Her feet rooted to the floor, her hands over her nose and mouth? Staring at me with these huge brown eyes full of a pain so sharp I can practically feel it slicing through my fucking soul?
I lose the ability to speak.
Not that I don’t try. I open my big mouth. I try to will a sound to come out — even a single syllable, a squeak. But nothing comes. The moment stretches out like Silly Putty, going on and on and fucking on without breaking, Amy and me and Jenny all standing in middle of Dillan’s women’s restroom in a collective, dumbfounded silence.
Amy’s the one who moves first, swaying a little as she spins on her heel and heads away from us.
“Amy? Wait,” I call as she walks away.
But of course my words are already too late.
I don’t think anything about her unsteady gate. At the time, it doesn’t even register. We’ve both been drinking, after all, and she’s smaller than I am, and the fact that she’s stumbling a little as she pushes out of the women’s bathroom doesn’t seem surprising, given everything.
But that’s because I don’t know about Wendy and the MFA professor and the panic attack and the car accident. I don’t know about Katarina or Vera or Terri. I don’t have any #throwbackthursday photos of Amy. Not yet.
Someone at this party does know about Amy’s panic attacks, though. Which is why a few seconds later, when Amy collapses, pitching forward against a table to the dramatic accompaniment of splashing drinks and shattering glass, Grace Adler is the one who reaches her first, just as she collapses to the floor.
“She’s having a panic attack!” Grace yells on the way to Amy. “Give her some space. Did she hit her head? Did anyone see if she hit her head? She’s bleeding. Oh, God, there’s blood everywhere! Somebody call an ambulance!”