Rubber

I didn’t remember much when I woke up. The last thing I can think of before blacking out is being surrounded by a strong smell of burnt rubber. After waking up, the days seemed to blend together. Mom would take me to every specialist she could find, from hospital to hospital all the doctors turned us away. That is, until Taipei. She said it was to “travel” and “visit” my grandparents, but I knew those were just cues for hospital and surgery. “I was 16,” I keep saying to myself, I was 16.

You’re probably wondering what happened to me as everyone wonders what happened to the once pitch-perfect Lee family. A few years ago, my mom, my brother and I were driving around when suddenly a car slammed into my brother Phil’s side and flipped us over. It was a rattling 2 hours and 17 minutes before they managed to get me out of the car and 3 hours and 56 minutes before they got Phil out, only to decide that he was dead. I had been paralyzed from the waist down, but it was nothing compared to what had happened to Mom. She came out with minor physical injuries but she never got over that day. Every day she blamed herself for what happened. Instead of taking time to grieve, she tried to fix what she hadn’t caused. We had travelled to China, Mexico, and Russia, but this year it was Taipei. Mom had tried every year since the crash to not only fix my paralysis but to bring my brother back. She had given up on conventional medicine and moved to spiritual healing.

In Taipei, we didn’t go to a hospital. This made me think maybe, just maybe I could get a break from all the scans and tests that the doctors told me to do. Perhaps we would finally go to the beach, and eat street food instead of the strict diets I was to stay on because of all the tests. We entered a narrow alley where my wheelchair was barely able to squeeze by. After a couple of minutes, I could barely see the sky above me and before I knew it I had entered a small shop filled with herbs and brews that smelled like boiled plastic. While Mom prayed to the Buddha with a woman who had convinced her that doing this would bring Phil back and heal my spinal cord injury, I waited in the corner thinking to myself, “Huh, maybe this isn’t so bad. At least I’m not being tested on or even noticed.”

Naturally, I took this opportunity to look around her shop and soon discovered a back door hidden behind what looked like a storage cabinet. Quietly moving the cabinet with the back of my wheelchair, I saw a door, opened it and went inside only to discover it wasn’t a room at all, but a vertical tunnel and I fell straight down. For what felt like an hour of endless wind flushing through my hair, I landed in a pile of what seemed to be my broken wheelchair and woke up to the smell of burnt rubber. As if someone could hear my concern, I heard a screeching sound causing me exploding pain as if it were driving into my brain. It said nothing, but I knew what had to be done. 

I was to travel back to the day of the crash and attempt to undo what had been done. However, I will only get 8 chances, one for each year before the crash. For each day I fail, there will be blood on my hands.

To be continued…