The Kiss: A Memoir by Kathryn Harrison Page B

picked up speed, crossed a ditch, and hit a tree. On impact, the door to the glove compartment popped open, and, not wearing a seat belt, I sailed forward and split my chin on its lock mechanism, cracking my jawbone. My grandfather was not hurt. He got me out of the wrecked, smoking car and pressed a folded handkerchief to my face. Blood was pouring out of my mouth and chin, and I started to cry, from fear more than pain. I was struggling against this makeshift compress when, by a strange coincidence, my mother, enroute to the law office where she worked as a secretary, saw us from the street and pulled over. Her sudden mate rialization, the way she sprang nimbly out of her blue car, seemed to me angelic, magical, an impression enhanced by the dress she was wearing that morning, one with a tight bodice and a full crimson skirt embroidered all over with music notes. Whenever she wore this dress I was unable to resist touching the fabric of the skirt.
    I found the notes evocative, mysterious, and if she let me, I traced my finger over the stitched dots as if they represented a different code than that of music’s, like Braille or Morse, a message that I might in time decipher. My mother was unusually patient and gentle as she helped me into her car. We left my grandfather waiting for a tow truck and drove to a nearby medical center, where I was x-rayed and prepared for suturing. I lay under a light so bright it almost forced me to close my eyes, while a blue disposable cloth with a hole cut out for my chin descended over my face like a shroud, blocking my view of my mother. I held her hand tightly, too tightly, perhaps, because after a moment she pried my fingers off and laid my hand on the side of the gurney. She had to make a phone call, she said, she had to explain why she hadn’t shown up at work. I tried to be brave, but when I heard my mother’s heels click away I succumbed to animal terror and tried to kick and naw my way after her. All I understood was that she was leaving me again this time with strangers and it took both the doctor and his nurse to restrain me.
    Once they had, I was tranquilized before I was stitched and then finally taken home asleep. Later that afternoon, I woke up screaming in a panic that had been interrupted, not assuaged, by the drug. My mother, soon exhausted by my relentless crying and clinging to her neck, her legs, her fingers to whatever she would let me me to a practitioner whose name she picked at random from the listings in the back of The Christian Science Journal. The practitioner was a woman with gray hair and a woolly, nubby sweater that I touched as she prayed over me, my head in her lap and one of her hands on my forehead, the other over my heart.
    Under those hands, which I remember as cool and calm, even sparing in their movements, I felt my fear drain away. Then the top of my skull seemed to be opened by a sudden, revelatory blow, and a searing light filled me. Mysteriously, unexpectedly, this stranger ushered me into an experience of something I cannot help but call rapture. I felt myself separated from my flesh, and from all earthly things. I felt myself no more corporeal than the tremble in the air over a fire. I had no words for what happened I never will have and in astonishment I stopped crying. My mother sighed in relief, and I learned, at six, a truth dangerous to someone so young and so lovelorn. I saw that transcendence was possible, that spirit could conquer matter, and that therefore I could overcome whatever obstacles prevented my mother’s loving me. I could overcome myself. Every day the sun rises and sinks over the Grand Canyon, each time filling it with shadows the color of blood. On the road we are free, and yet it is a freedom too exhausting to sustain.
    There’s no place to light or to rest, and though for now it goes unrecognized, denied, there will always be the knowledge that what we felt during our first stricken week together is the truth, We lost