Throwing Roses: A Novel

By Elizabeth Ridley

Following a serious automobile accident, seventeen-year-old Branda Raggan wakes up at the hospital a stranger in her own skin. Therapy for her injuries has little effect, so the doctors send her home with her mother, Margaret, a hard-drinking, tough-talking former country-and-western singer who runs the local tavern, The Bloody Mary, above which she and Branda make their home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504025249

Elizabeth Ridley

A native of Milwaukee, Elizabeth Ridley has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, where she studied under former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion. In 1994 she received a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship in Lasswade, Scotland, and in 2011 she received a Literary Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board for the first three chapters of her novel-in-progress, Cecelia Frost. She is represented by Laurie Abkemeier of DeFiore and Company in New York.  

Book preview

A last love,

proper in conclusion,

should snip the wings

forbidding further flight.

But I, now,

reft of that confusion,

am lifted up

and speeding toward the light.

Maya Angelou

THROWING ROSES

Part One—Summer

It was my grandmother who told me that Jesus lived on my shoulder. She had been a wide, honest woman with broad, bread-baking hands and a temper as fierce as her faith. He’s there, He’s got you in His arms, she would tell me, and I would try to spy Him from the corner of my eye. At night I searched my collars for His footprints and shook out my sweaters to loosen the dust rubbed off from His robe. I rolled up my sleeves to look for His wounds. So where was He when the accident happened? If He had been perched on my shoulder as expected, they would have had to scrape Him from the pavement just like me, so I assume He ducked behind me just in time. I have called you by name. You are mine. Hadn’t He said that? But when I awoke it was His weight I felt on my back and it was His pain I felt pressing down into my spine, as I blacked out, calling His name, swallowed by that all-powerful darkness again.

Branda, Branda, my mother’s voice seeped into me like hot water leaking into my ear. My own name, echoing back and forth and sounding so strange. Branda, Branda, there it was again. She was on her way, coming to claim me. My baby, my baby, I will never leave you, and I had just enough faith left to believe her. Mother roped me down, she held me in. She sat beside me, leaning over me, hovering. I heard her voice, I watched her hands, I tasted her tears in the back of my throat.

Mother? Mother, here I am, I said. Help me along. Then I knew it was no dream, although the way she moved was dream-like, slow, liquidy and bright. Constructed from a static flutter, like the wind off the woodpecker’s wings. Mom? I said. Once she heard me I thought she would crush me. Lying down beside me, gathering my limbs in her arms, she didn’t know how soft my bones had grown. Or my brain. I alone understood that. But she was everywhere at once, and I came out of myself by clinging to her bit by bit—all brassy red hair, gold earrings and lipstick. She wore her leather cowboy belt. My head was full with the smell of her perfume, her warm breath, her bent denim knee. All so real, so close to me. I could have stayed there forever. She held onto me. I was a child again, alive with the memory of her milk.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Where am I? I asked. The white gown I was wearing slid away, revealing my thin gray punctured arms. Something like a film seemed to cling to me, leaving me numb as my fingers reached around, touching my broken front tooth, the bruises under my eyes, the fuzzy scar trailing off into my scalp. Every inch of my insides ached. All my organs felt comparatively bigger, though weaker, and less protected; somehow pushed closer to my thin covering of skin. For a giddy second I thought I might be able to see inside myself, my skin might now be stretched enough to see the tubes and tissues turning pulsing closing, but as I drew back the sheets all I found was the flat gray plateau of my stomach. I saw that most of my left knee was missing, and what was left, black, bruised and hanging, was held together with a metal brace.

Mother, sitting before me, was a vision of beauty, just like in the movies. Her long, loose hair, her gently bobbing jewelry, her crinkled, tear-stained face were just as I wanted her to be.

Branda—I’m so sorry I asked you to go out and get some butter. I didn’t need it that much, honest, she said. She bent her head and choked out some dry hard sobs. She wiped the back of her freckled hand across her nose and tried to compose herself. Really I could have just gotten it myself, she said.

Sorry about your car. I guess I should have turned left, I said, trying to joke, which made the room feel suddenly painfully oppressive.

Awkwardly she reached out and grabbed for my hand, but caught my wrist and squeezed it, very tightly, instead.

Mom, I’m fine, I said, but my voice broke from my throat, harsh and rushed and full of hurt, sounding much more desperate than I wanted it to be. I looked around the hospital room. It was white, quiet, efficient and sexless. Something smelled like ammonia and the fluorescent lights burned my eyes. My first conscious thoughts were to run away, escape. But then I saw I was anchored to the spot, tied down by the tube in my arm. Something whispered to me that I had lost, that I had somehow missed my chance.

Mother grabbed her handbag from the tablestand at the side of the bed. She dumped the contents on my bed. Some pennies rolled into the blanket’s folds, and two breath mints sprung from their foil wrappers. The stub of a pencil bounced as it hit the floor. Don’t worry, Mother said as she grabbed a crumpled blue handkerchief. I’ll make you better. I’m here to help you now, she said, dabbing at my face. Oh, this is too dry, she said, twisting the handkerchief into a ball. She stood up and went into the bathroom. From her back I saw how thin she had become. She had always been willowy, self-confident and cowboy-strong, but now she seemed reduced, grayer and somehow scattered in her thoughts and gestures. I heard her run some water. I looked around the room, which she had decorated to look familiar. She had fixed a baseball pennant on the wall and some of my old threadbare stuffed toys flopped on the vinyl chair. A thin bunch of daffodils drooped in a vase by the window.

I’m just coming, she said, and her voice echoed off the tile in the bathroom, making her sound very far away. Suddenly I felt dizzy and I reached across the blankets to her leather purse with the beaded Indian medallion clasp. I fingered it and let my hand wander over her checkbook, her nail file, her lipstick tube, her nylon hair brush. All the things which had fallen onto my bed seemed wonderful and foreign as I touched them, full of the privileged secrets of everyday life. I knew I had come back from somewhere far away.

Mother came out from the bathroom and I heard the click of her leather boots on the linoleum floor. This will be better, she said, coming to the bed and sitting next to me. The weight of her body on the bed sent a jolt through my knee. She pressed the damp handkerchief against my chin and around my downturned mouth, and my whole body seemed to wake up with a bitter gnawing ache. Don’t, you’re hurting me, I said, trying to push away her hand. Her frantic fingers held my face in place.

Shhh, I’m making it better, she said. She wiped around my neck, my eyes, under my nose, near my ears, anywhere that I was sweaty or sticky or full of open scabs. There, there, she said. Good as new. Momma made it better. See? Momma made it better. She began to cry. Sleep, baby, sleep, she said, grabbing my shoulders and rocking me back and forth.

The shock of waking was subsiding, my sharp aching began to settle down. Shh, baby, sleep, she sang in my ear, but I knew her hot hands couldn’t make me better. I had lost too much of myself. I had changed. Then the tears came, and I was suddenly aware that I hadn’t used my eyes like that for so long. These new fresh tears seemed to come from behind my forehead and through the bridge of my nose and were springing from small slits in my throat. They were warm, slippery, silvery tears, metallic and as fast as mercury. I watched them break from my face and my lips and Mother reached out, quickly smothering them in the soft edge of the blanket. All better, all better, she said, and even though I knew it wasn’t true, a comfort came in remembering I had cried this same way all my life.

Doctors came in with their flashlights and questions, wooden sticks and probing fingers. They discovered the holes in my mind. Some memory loss. Confusion. Problems with sequential order. That was their assessment. They gave me tests to prove my losses. I tried to remember numbers, which slid through my frozen mind like children on skates, and series of words, which appeared to me as ladders of letters, and simple songs like one-two buckle my shoe, three-four shut the door, but I never made it to nine-ten try again. The therapists were patient, I was hopeful, but my mind was dry. The yellow ball in the box kept changing places. Ideas seemed just out of reach. So this is it? I asked myself, amazed at the cruelty which left me injured, but highly aware of my losses.

Mother came into my room carrying a big shopping bag. Her dark sunglasses were tipped up over the top of her head. Hello darling, she said dramatically. Guess what I’ve got in here, she said, pointing to the bag.

A satin party dress, I hope. I mean, I’ve got so many social engagements to go to! I said.

Don’t try to be funny, darling. Wait till you’re well, she said. She pulled up a chair, dropped the bag on the floor and after checking that no nurses were nearby, pulled out a cigarette. As she squinted and lit the end, I was filled with the scent of smoke and outdoors that came off her clothes. I closed my eyes, drinking in what was both familiar and unreal.

Branda, I’ve been reading up. The doctors aren’t doing enough. It’s up to me to make you well, she said, reaching down and taking a bracelet out of her bag. She slipped it over my wrist. What do you think?

It’s nice, I said, playing with the copper inlay design, flicking my fingernail at the small white price tag she forgot to remove.

No, but do you feel any different? she asked anxiously.

No. Should I? I asked.

You should. I was reading this book that said wearing copper on your wrist makes your blood stronger. Something to do with interacting elements, she said, looking slightly disappointed. This was Mother’s plan. Since the accident, I had become her personal project. She would get me better. She would prove no other mother had ever loved a child more.

Positive thinking is important, she had said. For twelve minutes out of every hour you must visualize feeling stronger, she told me, and set the timer. Put those red blood cells to work, think about rivers of little healers. So I imagined tiny men inside me, wielding picks and hammers. When that hadn’t worked she decided I needed colorful bath salts, sticks of flowery incense burning in a vase, a cluster of crystals to string around my neck. In a plastic container she brought pieces of steak fat for me to chew and a vial of rosehip and dandelion wine.

Every day, and in every way, I am getting better and better, she would quote like a mantra as she came into my room every afternoon. But bringing in the ice cream was my idea; my plan and my triumph. Although that moment made me understand the difficulty of my condition. Only the desperately ill, the dying, or the permanently damaged are in a position to have all of their wishes granted.

I want a tin roof, I told Mother as she spoon fed me gravy and wet green things. Tin roofs, which consisted of vanilla custard with hot fudge and crushed pecans, were our favorite kind of sundae. Not just for me. For everyone on the floor, I said weakly, letting my voice rattle a little.

Just say the word and it’s yours, Mother promised. I had forgotten my request by the next day, when suddenly the nurses wheeled in the crates of custard, the buckets of bubbling fudge, the burlap sacks of crushed pecans and the girls in white smocks, armed with gleaming metal scoops following close behind.

What? No cherries? I asked sarcastically.

Mother made a sundae and spoon fed it to me, in between bites for herself. Ice cream, ice cream, I heard the rolling whisper passing from room to room, hushed and hopeful, like a rumor of impending liberation. I wanted to be wheeled around to watch the others eating but Mother wouldn’t let me, saying I would be too depressed by the sight of ghostly old women dripping custard down their withered inner arms. Perhaps she was right. So instead I allowed myself to dream of stickly-lipped children enjoying tin roofs while resting their battered and plastered little limbs in the children’s wing just down the hall.

As Mother brought the spoon to my mouth I crossed my fingers in anticipation. So this was the essence of my life after the accident: I was at the mercy of others, but about to receive some unexpected benefits. I felt connected again. She brought the spoon to my lips. Mmmm, yum yum, I mumbled, childishly, reverting to infancy in seconds, foolishly making my Mother happy. I let it touch my tongue.

Some for Momma, some for baby, Mother said, giving one spoonful to me, then keeping one for herself. The custard slid down my throat quickly. In a second it was gone; brief, delicious, and just as I expected, much too cold and sweet.

I didn’t tell Mother, but after several days passed, I began to understand what they meant by damage. It wasn’t a question of what was missing, it was a question of what had been left behind. I became aware of the section of my brain tethered to my head. I could feel it moving sometimes; rattling, surging, or sputtering and sinking. I knew that organ, it wasn’t the cool distant stranger it had been. It rose up in hot spots above my ears, butted itself against the back of my neck, pressed against