The Circle of Life

There are sounds that go with this picture, sounds that I am unable even today to recreate or explain, but anyone who's ever been in an accident will know what I'm talking about. The sounds come to me in the dead of night, even now. I try to blow them away, chant them away, pray them away. But they always find their way back to me.

I woke up in a white room. There were gray machines with green numbers and red lights beside my bed. But this wasn't my bed. I turned my head both ways. I was alone.

I bent my arms, wiggled my toes, blinked, stuck out my tongue. Everything seemed to be working, and I was pretty sure this wasn't a dream. Sometimes it took me a while to figure that out.

"Hello?" I said, but it was tentative. I cleared my throat, then remembered.

I had been smack in the middle of using my voice, standing up for myself, when the shark came.
I mean the white car.

"Georgie?" I looked at the empty bed beside me.

I took a big ujjayi breath, heard the ocean inside my head, closed my eyes, and fell back asleep.


Impossible, to lose a person who had been by your side from the very beginning, and yet here I was, and Georgie was gone. That's what my mother said of her when my parents finally found me. I guessed they had been with doctors, maybe with Georgie until then.

"She's gone." My mother didn't look right at me but kept her eyes down. I watched in wonder as giant teardrops fell from her eyes to her lap.

I had never seen this, my mother, crying. Not once, even when our dog, Tumbleweed, died a couple of years ago. At the time, Mother had explained that what's inside our bodies stays alive forever, probably just moves into another body and starts all over again, and I thought that made sense. From that day on, every time I saw a dog on the sidewalk, I wondered if Tumbleweed's soul was inside of it.

But now she cried. My mother cried like those ladies on the soap operas do, only with lots more snot and goop coming from her nose and mouth.

I was woozy and sleepy.

My dad? He couldn't talk. And they didn't talk. Together, I mean. None of us did. He stood at my window, looking out on the traffic, and each time I fell back asleep I saw his Wheel of Fortune card on my closed eyelids.

They operated on my back for the first of many times that night; I never counted how many surgeries there were, but it was a big number. Lucky for me, I wasn't taking dance like Georgie, and I wouldn't have to quit anything. Except maybe my square dancing with the Poplars.

One day, while I waited for another operation and stared out my window at the snow swirls in the sky, Minnie Pinnister came to visit me. She didn't stay long, but she showed me what she had smuggled into the hospital in her giant carpetbag: a tiny gray ball of fluff that mewed. I think that was probably the first time I cracked a real smile since the bad day.

Minnie let the kitten play on my bed and told me that she was a very special kitten, not just your average kitten. Minnie said she had already talked my parents into letting the kitten keep me, and that's how she phrased it, the kitten keeping me, forever. And now I had to figure out a magical name for her.

At first I was worried.

"Will she die?" I asked.

"Sure, just like we all do," Minnie answered. "But I've confirmed she will live as long as you do."

"Is she magical?"

"Of course she's magical. Why would I give you anything that wasn't magical?"

I thought for a minute about witches and magic and cats, my mind naturally landing on my favorite TGIF show, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which of course made me think about Georgie for the millionth time that day, and how she had claimed to not like that show anymore. But I knew better.

My tongue played around with that word Sabrina while I watched my kitten roll around on the hospital bed.

"Is there a magical name that's kind of like Sabrina?" I wondered out loud.

"Lots, sure," Minnie said. "But hmm, you need one that has to do with magical healing powers, I'm thinking. For your back, for your legs, but especially for your heart." She reached into her carpetbag again and pulled out a big book. "This will help us."

She dragged her finger down a few pages while I closed my eyes and thought.

"Here's Sirona!" she said, and my eyes had to open with her booming voice. "Sirona was the Celtic goddess of health! That's a good one!" She looked up at me and I looked down at my kitten, so tiny and weak.

"Maybe?" I patted her little head, and she grabbed my finger with her needly claws.

Minnie went back to her book. "How about this one? Sekhmet? She was an Egyptian deity, that means goddess, and her name means 'Woman of Power'. That's good, right?"

I looked again at my kitten, rolling down my leg.

"I don't know, Minnie, she doesn't look very powerful or goddess-y to me. Sirona was better than that Sikmut one, or whatever the Egypt one was." Thinking of Egypt made my mind flash pictures from that mug that Zana the tarot lady had lent to me, the one with the giant cat and the pyramid on it and my eyes got heavy again.

Las Vegas. The desert.

I opened my eyes. "Got anything that means vortex?" I tried to sit up but my back wouldn't let me.

Minnie was quiet for a couple of seconds.

"Wow," she said. Her finger stopped on the page she was on, and her eyes locked on me. "You really are magic, aren't you, little Madeline?"

I turned my head to her, scooping my kitten to my chest. "Why?"

"It's a name that sounds like Sirona, but it symbolizes a special vortex on earth, in Arizona. It means 'rock' or 'steady', and it's a sacred, powerful spot that people travel to see from all over the earth, red and rocky and...sacred."

"What is it?" I whispered.

"Sedona," she whispered back.

I looked down at my kitten and she was staring at me, unblinking.

"That's it," I said, and my Sedona smiled and nodded her soft head. She couldn't talk yet. That was still to come. But Sedona was my first magic, and the magic that has always mattered the very most.


When we were finally discharged from the hospital after that first long stay, it was just my mother and me. I don't know, maybe Dad had to go back to work on the Street? Maybe he was just sad and didn't want to come to the hospital ever again?

Either way, it was just Mother and me. Her hair hadn't been done for a long time, and there were actual chips in her fingernail polish. I couldn't rip my eyeballs off of those things as she helped me with the new coat she'd brought with her.

"Wait!" I said, suddenly coming out of a silence that had lasted so long I wasn't even sure I still had a voice. My throat was all gunky like it had oysters in it or something. My mother reached for the plastic cup of water by my bed and tipped it into my mouth.

"My coat," I said. "The coat I wore that day! Where is it?"

"It's gone, Madeline."

She said it the way she had said it when she was talking about Georgie.

"Gone? Gone? I need it!" I said. "I had something in my pocket for you!"

"We had to throw it out. What was it? In the pocket?" She stopped buttoning me and looked into my eyes for the first time since I'd been here.

"Origanum dictamnus," I whispered. "I stole dittany from the dittany of Crete plant at the Cloisters. For your papercut."

Her lips made a little one-sided jerk of what could have been trying to be a smile. "That was kind of you. But we don't steal, Madeline." She breathed a ragged breath and for a horrible moment I thought maybe she was going to cry again like that first day.

"Is it stealing if the branch had already fallen on the ground?"

"I guess not, no. They would've thrown it out anyway."

"That's what I told Georg..."

Before I could get the whole word out, we both froze.




I don't know that we've ever mentioned my sister's name since then. In hindsight, I know that what I wanted to ask my mother was a stupid kid's question, and I'm glad I never asked it, but what I wanted to know more than anything was whether my dittany would have saved my sister if I had been awake to rub it into her wounds. What were her wounds, anyway? Did she suffer? Did that big white car with its grilled shark teeth smoosh her flat like in the coyote cartoons? Was there blood everywhere on the highway? Did my father find his giant car phone and call for help?

I suppose there's a newspaper article somewhere. But what I really ache for are the stories told from each of my parents' perspectives, so that I might be able to weave the two together and make some sense of it.

Instead, what I'm left with is a memory of fighting over the front seat, finally using my Stand Up For Yourself Voice against my big sister, and having her disappear because of it.

These days, I grow dittany in my shop, of course. How could I not? I touch its fuzzy leaves as I water it, say a prayer to Venus, (not Aphrodisiac, after all), and whisper words to Georgie, hoping she hears my British accent, hoping I can still make her laugh.