Her, Not Me

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. I did not know this face, this nose. I squeezed my eyes shut tightly, pinched the softest area of skin around my wrist, thinking this was just a fever dream. When my eyes shot back open and refocused on the mirror the doctor held up for me, the stranger was still there, with the same shocked expression on her face - well, my face… my… new face.

“This face…” I whispered to the room.

Dr. Muneca smiled kindly at me, saying, “Your face.”

My mom, choking back happy sobs, was next to me on my hospital bed and she wrapped her arms gently around me.

“Sweetheart, you look beautiful. Your medical team said the surgery went better than they could’ve ever hoped for! Oh!”

Was I the only one in the room not 100% okay with this? My medical team, my doctor, my mother - all of them - smiling and proffering kind sentiments to me while I was afraid, uncertain, and a stranger to the woman who was going to be the reflection I saw for the rest of my life. All I could do was tremble as tears pearled my cheeks and my mind was lost in thought. Who is she? How long would it take before I understood, accepted, that this was now me?

I woke up screaming for the third night in a row since being back home from my months-long stay in the hospital. Fighting to catch my breath and ground myself in reality, I was still haunted by the nightmare. The car, crunched up tinier than I imagined it could ever be. The rest of the world, seemingly non-existent because I couldn’t see past the smoke and fumes surrounding the car. I at least knew I was upside down because I could feel the blood dripping from my mouth into my eyes. My dad was sitting in the driver’s seat, me in the passenger seat, but his head was nowhere to be seen. The throbs of pain in every nerve of my body were nothing compared to the pain my face felt and every lick of the breeze made it feel cold and wet, and every pulse of my heart and breath of my lungs made me wish I was dead so I couldn’t feel a thing.

My mom burst through my door and rushed to my side, shushing me, arms around me and rocking me, soothing me as best as she could.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” my mom repeated.

No, actually, it wasn’t okay. Where I should’ve felt comfort, I felt pain and rage. NO. IT WAS NOT OKAY. Nor was it okay for the woman’s face I’m wearing now because I wouldn’t be wearing it in the first place if they were alive. Now their face gets another shot at life through my shoddy existence.

The next morning on my way to the kitchen, I caught a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror and I gasped, shrinking against the opposing wall in fear. When would I ever get used to seeing her? Me?

Regaining my composure, I entered the kitchen where I sat silent at the breakfast table as my mom tried to gab about the things we used to talk about before the crash.

I felt embarrassed. Annoyed that she was pretending like nothing happened. We could never go back to normal. At least I couldn’t.

“Mom,” I interrupted. “I want all the mirrors to go away.”

“What?”

“I can’t see this…” I gestured at the new face, “anymore. At least not right now. Everytime I see her I get scared and then I remember why I look like this now and…” I was choking up, “...and then all I can focus on is the crash and dad and who I was and I can’t handle it! I can’t handle any of it!”

“Honey, I can see how that can be reality for you, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to take down all the mirrors. Dr. Kreenie said we need to keep going with cognitive-behavioural therapy. She said graded exposure is a healthy way to start. So would trying new makeup looks. We can go shopping this weekend for some makeup and we can play around with different looks. What do you think?”

“Play around with different looks,” I recited in a monotone voice. “No thanks.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make light of it, that wasn’t my intention at all, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”

I could tell she really meant it, and I knew it would hurt both our currently delicate states of mind for me to get upset about it.

“It’s fine,” I mumbled, trying to make a twitch of a smile, but even smiling isn’t something I could do again yet. They said it’d be months before my facial motor skills would be back up to par. I spooned up some cereal and milk, but as I chewed slowly, milk dribbled out of my mouth and onto the table. I excused myself from the table and went back to my bed.

For the rest of the day, I left my room only to go to the bathroom. Instead of sleep, whirlinds of intrusive thoughts mixed with questions like What will my friends think? What if her friends see me in public? What if I get teased or called a liar when I say I’m Trina Kittsen when I look nothing like my driver’s license? I’ll have to work up the courage to go out in public to get my photo updated… no, not updated. Changed. Changed because that’s my new name now, at least it might as well be.

I felt like I’d lost all mental, emotional, physical and even spiritual ties to my old self. Where was God in all this mess? Sure, some called it a blessing that I was alive after what I went through, but no one helped me fully think and prepare for the aftermath of surviving what happened. What will my kids say when I show them old photos of me? Will I even have kids? If I do, they won’t look anything like me and people will think I cheated.

That night, I looked to my left and saw my father again. His head was still missing.

The next morning, I awoke to find my vanity mirror in my room gone. I went to the bathroom and that mirror was gone too, as was the one usually in the hallway.

“Thanks, mom,” I uttered groggily. The darkening circles under her eyes clearly showed that sleep was no friend of mine as of late.

Already knowing what I meant, she smiled softly, but cautiously, at me and nodded gently. “But, I do think we still need to do this today.”

She pulled out a small compact mirror from her purse on the countertop.

My jaw clenched, and I felt a surge of fight or flight panic.

“For thirty seconds. That’s all I ask and we can do it together. Just thirty seconds today and thirty seconds tomorrow and we can start there. I just want what’s best for you, honey.”

Finally surrendering, slowly, I sat down next to her at the kitchen table. I bit her lip. Mine never was quite that full or plump. Mine were thinner on the top lip but these lips were the same fullness on the top and bottom lip. I braced myself to look into the mirror.

“Ready?”

The mouth I wore twitched and tears started to fill my eyes, but I blinked them away and looked at the woman in the mirror. “Mom,” I whimpered.

“15 more seconds, baby.” She held my hand and squeezed it tightly.

My voice was coming out of her mouth - those full lips. She has my voice.

“Five… four… three….”

I was breathing shakily, fingernails digging into the palm of the hand my mom wasn’t holding.

“Done.”

Thirty seconds looking in that mirror was like an hour of torture for me.

Since getting home from the hospital, I felt repelled by anything with a reflective quality - my cell phone, the tv, my laptop, the sliding glass door to the backyard, every window in the house - so I would kill time between my immunosuppressive medications and follow-up visits to the doctor with my favorite books, watercolor painting kit, crocheting, and laying in my bed, occasionally listening to the AM radio stations on my old crank radio I’d gotten at a thrift shop years ago.

Today was my birthday, but I didn’t want to celebrate it. I should’ve told my mom that before she brought me a buttercream frosting vanilla bean cupcake with a singular candle on it the morning of me turning 24. I made my wish and blew out the candle. The only thing I’d ever want for the rest of my life would be to see my own face again.

Just about anything involving hospitals, surgeries, doctors, care teams, follow-up appointments, and or drugs tend to come with ungodly medical bills. Months after getting home from the hospital, I knew we were struggling financially and we ended up moving out of our family house and into a small, old, but affordable, apartment. Whoever lived next to us was a chain smoker and the neighbor above us had a dog that seemed to constantly be rehearsing his howling.

A 2-bed, 1-bath, coin laundry in the basement, but it was a roof over our heads and within walking distance to the hospital. My biggest grievance with the place though was that each bedroom’s closets had sliding mirrored doors. The first thing I did on move-in day was put up a rod with curtains over mine and though it was a bit of a pain moving the curtains carefully whenever I needed to access my closet, it was worth having the mirrors covered.

“DAD!” I wailed being wrenched from my nightmare by the sound of the car crashing and flipping over into the ditch. The clash of my metal curtain rod against the cheap tile flooring in my room had timed just perfectly with my nightmare as if they had plotted this all day to wake me up in this way. What was even more frightening though as I stared across from the foot of my bed, was her. I thought I’d gotten rid of her by covering up all the mirrors but now she was mocking me by wearing the same expression of panic and fear on her face.

“Go away! Go away from me! Go!” I shrilled, pulling my giant feather pillow over my head. The dense feathery pillow was cool, soft, muffled out any sound trying to intrude my safe place in the folds of the feathers, the pillow lining and the pillowcase. Even better, I couldn't see her and she couldn’t see me.

She couldn’t get to me in here.

I layed back down, trying to control my breathing, and I arranged my pillow to where it was still covering my head. I landscaped the fluffy thing to have just enough of a breathing hole for my nose to peek partially through.

8:00am sent my alarm clock into a beeping frenzy. I wasn’t going anywhere today but keeping myself on a set sleep time and wake time helped me feel like I still had pieces from my pre-accident life that I could interact with.

No! My mirror was exposed, crap! I didn’t want her to see me again so I pulled a blanket around me and whisked off my bed - except to notice that my curtain rod and curtains were hanging perfectly… as if they’d never abandnoed their duties the previous night.

My mom. She must’ve come in early to check on me when I was still sleeping and put them back up.

“Mom, thanks for putting my curtains back over my closet doors,” I said, making a cup of green tea and feeling oddly sprite.

“Your curtains? What happened to your curtains?” she asked, genuinely bewildered.

“My… my curtains… they fell down in the middle of the night and now this morning they were back in place. Are you sure you didn’t come in to check on me, saw they’d fallen and put them back up?”

“Hon, are you sure they actually fell down? It could’ve just been a dream.”

I blinked at her. “Hm. Right, yeah, it…” I shrugged, accepting this possibility, “yeah, it could’ve just been a dream, I guess. Never mind.”

Time began to hold less and less of a meaning. The apartment, the tiny, shifty, cracking communal cement patio with cigarette butts and two long-dead mystery plants in old pots in the back of the building became my world. Until I made peace with her and with myself, this little world was my jail cell. I was the prisoner and the jailor, but also the judge who could clear myself of all charges and walk out again a free woman.

My mom had severely reduced her hours to be by my side after the accident, the loss of my dad, and my surgeries that brought her into my life, but she had begun resuming a more regular workload and often it was just me at home with her and alone with my thoughts. A dangerous thing. This alone time afforded me the silence and space to contemplate my life from every existential angle I could catch my neurons on, and one thing that occurred to me was I had never really checked in with my mom through all this. My dad and her had divorced when I was young but I can’t say his death didn’t have an effect on her. They’d become amicable since my teen years and I’d venture to say almost friends. What’s more, never seeing the face of her only child again. Loving a stranger’s face as if this was something or someone you’d always loved.

A week into moving into the apartment, I was standing outside on the back patio of the building. Arms crossed, eyes squinting in the overcast sunshine, standing with my back on a portion of brick wall that wasn’t covered in ivy, I was practicing smiling and making other emotional expressions with my face.

“Tanya?!” a voice directly to my left bellowed.

I nearly jumped out of my skin, startled.

“What?” my panicked voice yelped.

“T- oh….” the woman’s eyes, with their dark brown black irises, shrank back to normal size as she realized I wasn’t who she thought I was, until another stark reality hit her. “Oh my…. You look just like her. I’m sorry to startle you, I thought you were someone who used to live here.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes out her apron pocket and lit one, inhaling as if it was the breath of life she needed.

“Vern,” Vern said, dipping her head in a quick greeting and shooting me a wink. Her lips shaped an exhaling smile as toxins curled into the air from her mouth.

“Hi. Erm, nice to meet you,” deciding at the last minute to shoot her a smile I’d been practicing. “So, who… is Tanya?”

There’s no way… no way at all… I thought.

“Was, dear, was. She passed away in her sleep a few weeks ago. Actually died in the room you sleep in now. I hear you scream at night and Tanya would have night terrors so I’d hear her scream too. Anyway, it just doesn’t feel real yet that she’s gone. Well, gone but not gone. The people special to us always find ways to live on and remind you they’re there. Anyways, that’s why I was so startled to see you. You look so much like her.”

I stared concretely at her, not sure if I truly wanted to know the answer to what I was about to ask.

“What… what was Tanya’s last name?” it camed out sounding like a frightened demand.

“Um, well, it was Rettleson,” Vern replied, eyeing me with caution, “but why do you… want to know that…?”

My head was spinning. I had to sit down, head between my knees, and was borderline hyperventilating.

“I… I… have her… her face! I’m wearing her face! She enrolled herself though into her donations. I’m sorry,” I spluttered, crying uncontrollably. Any semblance of partnership I had started to feel with my new face - her face - was completely gone and I began to feel like I robbed the dead girl of something even though she had died and her family approved it, and it was a great match, but I still felt so sorry that I was walking around wearing a dead woman’s face meeting people she knew in her lifetime. Right now, it was her former neighbor, but what if I run into any friends she had, coworkers, siblings - worst of all - what if I see her parents? It’d be like losing their loved one all over again seeing their dead daughter’s face on a living stranger’s body.

I didn’t wait for Vern’s reaction. I bolted inside and locked myself in my room with the lights off. I screamed and cried into my pillow, crying so hard I could barely breathe.

“Tanya.” A loud whisper interrupted by subsiding wimpers, but I ignored it. I wasn’t beyond considering myself currently being in a state of insanity. Or mania. Or both.

“Tanya, Tanya, Tanya!” the whispers grew into the frantic wailing of a woman.

“No!” I screamed.

“Tanya!” the woman’s wailing escalated into sob-choked shrieks seething with unbearable sadness.

“Honey! What’s wrong? Are you okay?” My mom yelled, bursting into my room and running over to me.

“My name’s not Tanya! I’m not Tanya!” I screamed, my hands covering my ears.

“Tanya? No, sweetie, no one’s calling you Tanya. It’s okay, just breathe, come here, it’s okay. Just breathe,” my mom pulled me into her embrace.

My mom and I talked late into the night about Vern and what she’d told me. Tanya, the young woman who just happened to be a match from the donation center, had lived here in this apartment we’d just moved into. My sanity felt like it was slipping away from me as I told my mom about the night before, and finally explaining as best I could that a woman was screaming my face donor’s name in my room.

“What can I do to help, honey? Anything. Whatever I can do to help you through this, I’ll do it. I don’t care how much time, effort, or money it costs. I just want you to find your peace and happiness again,” my mom said, starting to choke up.

“I feel lost, mom. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“Tanya! Tanya! TANYA!” The wailing woman was back.

“No. No, no, no, no, no, no…” I mumbled obsessively to myself as if this would ward off her name.

“TANYA! TANYA LOOK AT ME! TANYA, PLEASE! LOOK AT ME!”

The voice went on for what felt like an eternity, and it had done this exact thing the past three nights and I had barely slept in that time. This wailing woman was robbing me of any chance of sleep.

My closet curtain rod clattered to the floor of my room, revealing the giant mirrored closet door panels once hidden now fully exposed, just as it had done the past three nights.

My body was drenched in sweat, my head was spinning, my throat hurt from screaming. Why did my mom agree to switching to working nights? I couldn’t handle the nighttime hours alone. My heart was in my throat, and my entire body thrummed with each rapid heartbeat.

“TANYA? TANYA LOOK AT ME, PLEASE, COME ON, BABY, PLEASE! NO!”

“Stop!” I wailed, finally even louder than the bodiless screams and cries trapping me deeper into the solitary confinement of my room, and the jail cell of my broken mind.

Panting, trying to catch a steady breath, I noticed the voice had ceased. I opened my eyes, taking a minute to stare at the floor to regain focus.

But then -

“Hi, Tanya.”

I looked at the source of this voice. It was coming from my closet door mirrors. It… was me. Me. My old self. Before the accident. My own face - complete with a small mole above my left eyebrow. A barely visible scar on my chin where a dog had bitten me when I was 9. My freckles that were light this time of year, and sunkissed a darker brown in the summer sun, sparsely flaked my cheekbones. It was me.

Standing up from the floor I’d been curled up in fetal position on, I walked over to myself in the mirror. I lifted my hand, and the me in the mirror lifted hers too. I slowly, unblinkingly, touched my face to the mirror, not breaking a millisecond of eye contact with myself.

“Tell me, Tanya,” the mirror me said softly.

I shot back from the mirror. “No, I’m NOT Tanya!”

“Yes, look in the mirror. You are!”

Before I could process a reaction, the mirror panels on my closet doors shattered and flew in my direction, leaving small cuts all over my exposed skin.

“No, come back, come back!” I yelled to the mirror me. “Please, please come back,” I sobbed.

Snatching up the largest intact piece of mirror I could find, I tried one last time to see myself and -

I breathed a sigh of relief. There I was. Me. Tanya.