That Moment

4. My first recital

I am pondering these things when the medic with the freckles and red hair who has been working on me answers my question. "Her Glasgow Coma is an eight. Let's bag her now!" she screams.

She and the lantern-jawed medic snake a tube down my throat, attach a bag with a bulb to it, and start pumping. "How much time does she have?"

"Fifteen minutes," answers the medic. "It takes thirty minutes to get back."

"We're going to get her there in fifteen if you have to speed like a demon!"

I can tell what the guy is thinking. That it won't do me any good if they get into a crash, and I have to agree with that. But he doesn't say anything. Just clenches his jaw. They load me into the ambulance; the redhead climbs into the back with me. She pumps my bag with one hand, and my monitors with the other. Then she smooths a lock of hair from my forehead.

"You hang in there," she tells me.

I played my first recital when I was ten. I'd been playing the violin for two years at that point. At first, just at school, as part of the music program. It was a fluke that they even had a violin; they're very expensive, fragile and crazy costly. But some old mathematics professor from the university had died and bequeathed his Hamburg to our school. It mostly sat in the corner. Most kids wanted to learn to play guitar or saxophone.

When I announced to Mom and Dad that I was going to become a violinist, they both burst out laughing. They apologized about it later, claiming that the image of pint-size me with such a hulking instrument between my spindly shoulders had made them crack up. Once they'd realized I was serious, they immediately swallowed their giggles and put on supportive faces.

Maybe supportive. But their reaction still stung- in ways I never told them about. I'm not sure they even would have understood. I look nothing like the rest of my family. They are all blond and fair and I'm like their negative image, jet black hair and dark eyes. Sometimes I did feel like I came from a different tribe. I was not like my outgoing, ironic dad or my tough-chick mom. And as if to seal the deal, instead of learning to play electric guitar, I'd gone and chosen the violin.

But still, playing music in my family was more important than what type of music you played, so when after a few months it became clear that my love for the violin was no passing crush, my parents rented me one so I could practice at home. Rusty scales and triads led to first attempts at "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" that eventually gave way to basic études until I was playing Bach suites. I hated the music classes in my school, they didn't exactly teach classical music. They'd directly start with songs instead of scales. I didn't like their way of teaching too. So Mom found me a private teacher, a college student who came over once a week. Over the years there was a revolving batch of students who taught me, and then, as my skills surpassed theirs, my student teachers played with me.

This continued until ninth grade, when Dad, who'd known Professor Helen from when he'd worked at the music store, asked if she might be willing to offer me private lessons. She agreed to listen to me play, not expecting much, but as a favor to Dad, she later told me. She and Dad listened downstairs while I was up in my room practicing a Vivaldi sonata. When I came down for dinner, she offered to take over my training.

My first recital, though, was years before I met her. It was at a hall in town, a place that usually showcased local bands, so the acoustics were terrible for unamplified classical. I was playing a violin solo from Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy."

Standing backstage, listening to other kids play scratchy cello and clunky piano compositions, I'd almost chickened out. I'd run to the stage door and huddled on the stoop outside, hyperventilating into my hands. My student teacher had flown into a minor panic and had sent out a search party.

Dad found me. He was wearing a vintage suit, with a studded black leather belt and black ankle boots. "You okay, Sel Oh-My-Uh-hm?" he asked, sitting down next to me on the steps.

I shook my head, too ashamed to talk.

"What's up?"

"I can't do it," I cried.

Dad cocked one of his bushy eyebrows and stared at me with his gray-blue eyes. I felt like some mysterious foreign species or element he was observing and trying to figure out. He'd been playing in bands forever. Obviously, he never got something as lame as stage fright.

"Well that's sad. I had gotten a recital present for you. Better than ice cream."

"Give it to someone else." I said, panicking. " You could give it to Gwen. I'm not like you or Mom or even Gwen. I can't go out there." I still agree with that. Gwen looked like a photocopy of mom. And of course, she was blond and blue-eyed. And she loved jazz at the age of 10. I assure you that. My ears never healed.

"It's true." he said, amused. " When Gwen had her first ballet performance, she was as cool as a cucumber. Such a prodigy."

I laughed through my tears. Gwen had fallen down on her performance as she had sneezed.  And Gwen was never ashamed when we made fun of her and called her sneeze-head. She too laughed it off. Dad put a gentle arm around my shoulder. "You know that I used to get the most ferocious jitters before a show."

  " You're just saying it right?"

He shook his head. "No, I'm not. It was god-awful. And I was the drummer, way in the back. No one even paid any attention to me."

"So what did you do?" I asked.

"Of course he got wasted." Mom interjected, poking her head out the stage door.

"Your mother is probably right," Dad said. "Besides, when I dropped my drumsticks and puked onstage, it was punk. If you drop your bow and smell like a brewery, it will look gauche. You classical-music people are so snobby that way."

Now I was laughing. I was still scared, but it was somehow comforting to think that maybe stage fright was a trait I'd inherited from Dad; I wasn't just some foundling, after all.

"What if I mess it up?"

"I've got news for you, Sel. There's going to be all kinds of terrible in there, so you won't really stand out," Mom said. Gwen gave a squeal of agreement.

So I went on. I didn't blaze through the piece. I didn't achieve glory or get a standing ovation, but I didn't muck it up entirely, either. And after the recital, I got my present. It was sitting in the passenger seat of the car, looking as human as that violin I'd been drawn to two years earlier. It wasn't a rental. It was mine.

When my ambulance gets to the nearest hospital—not the one near the outlet of my neighborhood but a small local place that looks more like an old-age home than a medical center—the medics rush me inside. "I think we've got a collapsed lung. Get a chest tube in her and move her out!" the nice red-haired medic screams as she passes me off to a team of nurses and doctors.

"Where's the rest?" asks a bearded guy in scrubs.

"Other driver suffering mild concussions, being treated at the scene. Parents DOA. One adult DOA. Girl, approximately 18 years old, just behind us."

I let out a huge exhale, as though I've been holding my breath for the last fifteen minutes. After seeing myself in that ditch, I had not been able to look for Gwen. Not in that condition. If she were like Mom and Dad, like me, I . . . I didn't want to even think about it. But she isn't. She is alive.

And that kept me going. For now.