The Adoration of Jenna Fox

THE ADORATION

of JENNA.FOX

MARY E.  PEARSON

California

I used to be someone.

Someone named Jenna Fox.

That's what they tell me. But I am more than a
name. More than they tell me. More than the facts and statistics they fill me
with. More than the video clips they make me watch.

More.
But I'm not sure what.

"Jenna, come sit over here. You don't want
to miss this." The woman I am supposed to call Mother pats the cushion
next to her. "Come," she says again.

I do.

"This is an historic moment," she
says. She puts her arm around me and squeezes. I lift the corner of my mouth.
Then the other: a smile. Because I know I am supposed to. It is what she wants.

"It's a first," she says. "We've
never had a woman president of Nigerian descent before."

"A first," I say. I watch the
monitor. I watch Mother's face. I've only just learned how to smile. I don't
know how to match her other expressions. I should.

"Mom, come sit with us," she calls out
toward the kitchen. "It's about to start."

I know she won't come. She doesn't like me. I
don't know how I know. Her face is as plain and expressionless to me as
everyone else's. It is not her face. It is something else.

"I'm doing a few dishes. I'll watch from
the monitor in here," she calls back.

I stand. "I can leave, Lily," I
offer.

She comes and stands in the arched doorway. She
looks at Mother. They exchange an expression I try to understand. Mother's face
drops into her hands. "She's your nana, Jenna. You've always called her
Nana."

"That's all right. She can call me
Lily," she says and sits down on the other side of Mother.

Awareness

There is a dark place.

A place where I have no eyes, no
mouth. No words.

I can't cry out because I have no
breath. The silence is so deep I want to die.

But I can't.

The darkness and silence go on
forever.

It is not a dream.

I don't dream.

Waking

The accident was over a year ago. I've been
awake for two weeks. Over a year has vanished. I've gone from sixteen to
seventeen. A second woman has been elected president. A twelfth planet has been
named in the solar system. The last wild polar bear has died. Headline news
that couldn't stir me. I slept through it all.

I cried on waking. That's what they tell me. I
don't remember the first day. Later I heard Lily whisper to Mother in the
kitchen that my cries frightened her. "It sounds like an animal," she
said.

I still cry on waking. I'm not sure why. I feel
nothing. Nothing I can name, anyway. It's like breathing
—something that happens over which I have no control. Father was here
for my waking. He called it a beginning. He said it was good. I think he may have
thought that anything I did was good. The first few days were difficult. My
mind and body thrashed out of control. My mind settled first. They kept my arms
strapped. By the second day my arms had settled, too. The house seemed busy.
They checked me, probed, checked again and again, Father scanning my symptoms
into the
Netbook
several times a day, someone
relaying back treatment. But there was no treatment that I could see. Each day
I improved. That was it. One day I couldn't walk. The next day I could. One day
my right eyelid drooped. The next it didn't. One day my tongue lay like a lump
of meat in my mouth, the next day it was articulating words that hadn't been
spoken in over a year.

On the fifth day, when I walked out onto the
veranda without stumbling, Mother cried and said, "It's a miracle. An
absolute miracle."

"Her gait is still not natural. Can't you
see that?" Lily said.

Mother didn't answer.

On the eighth day Father had to return to work
in Boston. He and Mother whispered, but I still heard.
Risky . . . have to
get back . . . you'll be fine.
Before he left he cupped my face in both of
his hands. "Little by little, Angel," he said. "Be patient.
Everything will come back. Over time all the connections will be made." I
think my gait is normal now. My memory is not. I don't remember my mother, my
father, or Lily. I don't remember that I once lived in Boston. I don't remember
the accident. I don't remember Jenna Fox.

Father says it will come in time. "Time
heals," he says.

I don't tell him that I don't know what time
is.

Time

There are words.

Words I don't remember.

Not obscure words that I
wouldn't be expected to know.

But simple ones.

J
ump. Hot. Apple.

Time.

I look them up. I will never
forget them again.

Where did those words go,

those words that were once in my
head?

Order

Curious adj.
1. Eager to learn or
to know, inquisitive. 2. Prying or meddlesome. 3. Inexplicable, highly unusual,
odd, strange.

The first week Mother pored over the
details of my life. My name. Childhood pets. Favorite books. Family vacations.
And after each scene she described, she would ask, "Remember?" Each
time I said no, I saw her eyes change. They seemed to get smaller. Is that
possible? I tried to say the
nos
more softly. I tried
to make each one sound different than the one before. But on Day Six her voice
cracked as she told me about my last ballet recital.
Remember?

On Day Seven, Mother handed me a small
box. "I don't want to pressure you," she said. "They're in
order. Mostly all labeled. Maybe watching them will help bring things
back." She hugged me. I felt her fuzzy sweater. I felt the coolness of her
cheek. Things I can feel. Hard. Soft. Rough. Smooth. But the inside kind of
feel, it is all the same, like foggy mush. Is that the part of me that is still
asleep? I had moved my arms around her and tried to mimic her squeeze. She
seemed pleased. "I love you, Jenna," she said. "Anything you
want to ask me, I'm here. I want you to know that."

"Thank you" was the right
response, so I said it. I don't know if that was something I remembered or
something I had just learned. I don't love her. I sensed that I should, but how
can you love someone you don't know? But I did feel something in that foggy
mush. Devotion? Obligation? I wanted her to be pleased. I thought about her
offer,
anything you want to ask me.
I had nothing to ask. The questions
hadn't come yet.

So I watched the first disc. It seemed logical
to go in order. It was of me in
utero
.
Hours
of
me in
utero
. I was the first, I learned. There had
been two boy babies before me, but they didn't live past the first trimester.
With me, Mother and Father took extra measures, and they worked. I was the one
and only. Their miracle child. I watched the fetus that was me, floating in a
dark watery world, and wondered if I should remember that, too.

Each day I watch more discs, trying to regain
who I was. Some are stills, some are movies. There are dozens of the two-inch
discs. Maybe a hundred. Thousands of hours of me.

I settle on the large sofa. Today I watch Year
Three / Jenna Fox. It begins with my third birthday party. A small girl runs,
laughing at nothing at all, and is finally stopped by a tall, weathered stone
wall. She slaps tiny starburst hands against the stone and looks back at the
camera. I pause the scene. I scan the smile. The face. She has something.
Something I don't see in my own face, but I don't know what it is. Maybe just a
word I have lost? Maybe more. I scan the large rough stones her hands rest
against. It is the small enclosed garden of the brownstone where we once lived.
I remember it from yesterday on Disc Eighteen.

"Play," I say, and the scene moves
forward. I watch the golden-haired girl squeal and run and hide her face
between two
trousered
legs. Then the three-year-old is
scooped upside down into the air and the view zooms up to Father's face
laughing and nuzzling into her belly. My belly. The three-year-old laughs. She
seems to like it. I walk over to the mirror that hangs near the bookcase. I am
seventeen now, but I see resemblance. Same blond hair. Same blue eyes. But the
teeth are different. Three-year-old teeth are so small. My fingers. My hands.
All much larger now. Almost a whole different person. And yet that is
me.
At
least that is what they say. I return to watch the rest of the party, the bath
time, the ballet lesson, the finger painting, the temper tantrum, the story
time, the everything of three-year-old Jenna Fox's life that mattered to Mother
and Father.

I hear footsteps behind me. I don't turn. They
are Lily's. Her feet make a different sound on the floor than Mother's.
Movement is crisp, distinct. I hear every nuance. Was I always this sensitive
to sound? She stands somewhere behind me. I wait for her to speak. She doesn't.
I'm not sure what she wants.

"You don't have to watch them in order,
you know," she finally says.

"I know. Mother told me."

"There are discs of when you were a
teenager."

"I still am a teenager."

There is a pause. A deliberate pause, I
suspect. "I suppose," she says. She comes around so she is in my
vision. "Aren't you curious?"

Curious.
It's a word I looked up this morning
after Mother used it to describe Mr. Bender who lives behind us on the other
side of the pond. I don't know if Lily is asking me if I am inquisitive or odd.

"I've been in a coma for over a year. I
guess that makes me highly unusual; odd; and strange. Yes, Lily. I am
curious."

Lily's arms unfold and slide to her sides. Her
head tilts slightly. She's a pretty woman. She looks to be fifty when I know
she must be at least sixty. Small wrinkles deepen around her eyes. The
subtleties of expression still escape me.

"You should watch them out of order. Skip
straight to the last year."

Lily leaves the room, and on Day Fifteen of
being awake, I make my first independent decision. I will watch the discs in
order.

Widening

There is something curious about where we live.
Something curious about Lily. Something curious about Father and his nightly
phone calls with Mother. And certainly something curious about me. Why can I
remember the details of the French Revolution but I can't remember if I ever
had a best friend?

Day Sixteen

When I woke this morning, I had questions. I
wondered where they had all been hiding.
Time heals.
Is this what Father
meant? Or were the words that had been lost in my head simply trying to find
the proper order? Besides questions, the word
careful
came to mind, too.
Why? I'm beginning to think I must trust words when they come to me.

"Jenna, I'm leaving," Mother calls
from the front step. "Are you sure you'll be okay?"

Mother is going to town. It is the first time I
have seen her leave the house since Day One.

"I'll be fine," I tell her. "My
nutrients are on the counter. I know how much to take." I can't eat
regular food yet. When I asked them why, they stumbled over each other's words
trying to explain. They finally said that after a year of being fed through a
tube, my system can't utilize regular food for a while. I never saw the tube.
Maybe that's what's on the last disc that Lily told me to watch. Why would she
want me to see that?

"Don't leave the house," Mother adds.

"She won't," Lily answers.

Mother is going to town to interview workmen.
She is a certified restoration consultant. Or was. She had a business in Boston
restoring brownstones. It was her specialization. She was busy. Everyone wants
to restore everything. Old is in demand. Lily says she had a respected
reputation. Her career is over now because of me. There are no brownstones in
California. But Mother says the Cotswold cottage we live in needs lots of
restoration, and now that I am feeling better, it's time she began making it
livable. One restoration is not that different from another, she says. Fixing
me and the Cotswold are her new careers.

She is halfway down the narrow front walk when
I ask her my first question. I know it's not a good time for her.

"Mother, why did we move
here?"  

She stops. I think I see a slight stumble. She
turns around. Her eyes are wide. She doesn't speak, so I continue. "When
the doctors, Father, and your career are all in Boston, why are we
here?"