Because that’s what my mother taught me to do.
And she never even told me everything I had to accept. Everything she’d done in the past, that affects me now . . .
Except she has tried to tell me now. The last time I looked at my e-mail account, there were twenty messages from her I never opened.
I look up, because I could ask to read Mom’s e-mail on Mr. Armisted’s phone right now. I kind of feel . . . ready. But Avery’s holding the phone in her hand, complaining, “Dad, I’m trying to look up the directions, but Google Maps isn’t coming up at all.”
“Never mind,” Mr. Armisted says. “It’s such a small town, I’m sure we can find the restaurant just by parking near the main square and walking around a little.”
We’re not even to the town yet. We’re curving through a roundabout where the spokes point to a hospital in one direction and El Escorial in another.
“Is it just one kilometer to El Escorial the town, or El Escorial the palace?” Avery asks.
“The palace is in the middle of the town, if I remember right, so it doesn’t really matter,” Mr. Armisted says, shifting gears to pull back out onto the straight road.
The gears grind a little, and I think about Grandpa being upset that my driver’s ed class back in Crawfordsville only included training in an automatic car. He borrowed a friend’s pickup truck and took me out in the country to practice how to coordinate easing up on the clutch at the same time I pushed down on the gas. I wasn’t very good at it.
“If Edsel Sparks finds out how much I’ve let you strip his gears, he’ll never speak to me again,” Grandpa said.
I never told Grandpa my problem with driver’s ed was thinking about my father lying in his nursing home bed, and three other people dead, because of how one person drove.
Maybe even if Mom had had the money to insure me as a driver, I would have been too freaked out to pass the test. Maybe that will be true even after I go home.
Is that something I’m going to fret over when I’m an old lady lying in a nursing home?
Maybe Mr. Armisted isn’t that great with manual cars either, because as he shifts again, one of the front tires veers slightly off the road, bumping down onto the berm.
“Dad!” Avery shrieks. “What are you doing?”
Mr. Armisted slumps to the side.
The car keeps going, shooting toward the ditch.
Avery, Anguished
“Grab the wheel!” Kayla screams from the backseat.
“What?” I say. “Dad?” His head lolls toward my shoulder. “Dad, wake up!”
Suddenly, Kayla is in my face—what was she thinking, ripping her seat belt off when the car’s gone crazy?
“Get his foot off the gas!” Kayla yells.
I don’t do a thing, and she reaches past me, knocking at Dad’s knee. The car shudders violently and comes to a halt, half on and half off the road. I shove at Dad’s arm.
“Dad, this isn’t funny,” I complain, because maybe he’s just joking around. Oh please, let him just be joking around. . . .
“Daddy, stop it!” I yell.
Kayla grabs his shoulders from behind and shakes.
“Mr. Armisted! Mr. Armisted!”
Dad’s body flops around like he doesn’t have a spine. His eyelids don’t even flutter.
Kayla puts two fingers against his neck.
“CPR,” she says. “Call nine-one-one.”
My brain translates as if she’s speaking Spanish. She’s saying she’ll do CPR; I’m supposed to call 911. I can tell because she’s already opening her door and Dad’s, already reaching for Dad’s chest. I look at the phone in my hand like I’ve never seen it before. My hand shakes so much I need two tries to hit the right icon. And then I can’t get the number keyboard to come up. . . . Finally, I manage to hit a nine and two ones. And then I remember that Spain has a different emergency number.
I just can’t remember what it is.
“Is Spain one-one-nine?” I scream at Kayla. “Or . . .”
I drop the phone and have to swipe at the car floor to pick it back up.
Kayla’s reaching in through Dad’s car door. She’s pressing on his chest with one hand, and reaching for something on the side of his seat with the other. Oh, the seat release. His seat plunges backward, so he’s almost lying down.
A dinging noise keeps coming out of the car dashboard. Kayla ignores it and keeps pressing down on Dad’s chest, again and again and again. His arms flail out like he’s waking up—
No, that’s just from Kayla giving him CPR.
His face is blank.
“Call!” Kayla screams at me.
“I don’t remember the number!” I scream back at her. But then I do: 112. I hit those numbers and put the phone to my ear.
Nothing. There’s only the slightest buzz at the other end of the line. No ringing.
“There’s no service!” I shout, my voice squeaking with panic.
“Please, God, please, God, please, God,” Kayla moans. Then she shouts at me, “Get out of the car! Flag someone down!”
I drop the phone and jerk on the door handle. I fall to the ground because my legs are shaking too much to stand up. But then I do stand up, and I dash out to the middle of the road. I don’t care if someone hits me—they’ll have to stop, then.
There’s not a single other car in sight.
I run back to our car. Dad’s head bumps up and down with the force of Kayla shoving on his chest. But his face stays empty. Empty of life. Empty of him. It’s like he’s somebody else now.
Or something else.
“Does he . . . does he have a pulse?”
“Get somebody! Get help!” Kayla screams. Then she goes back to, “Please, God, please, God, please, God . . .”
Sweat drips from her face down onto Dad’s shirt. Her face is so red it looks like she’s going to have a heart attack.
Heart attack. Did Dad have a heart attack?
Is he going to die?
Is he already dead?
“Nobody’s coming!” I scream at Kayla. “Do something!”
“Please, God, please, God, please, God . . .”
What if she gives up?
It feels like she’s been doing CPR on Dad for a million years.
I jerk my head around, scanning the horizon, just willing another car to appear. Or a nearby house I overlooked before. I gaze up and down, too, as if the horizon is tilting, as if I think a car or a house might fall from the sky.
I twist my neck farther—and the sign pointing to the hospital comes into sight.
“You drive him to the hospital!” I yell at Kayla. “You’re sixteen! You know how to drive!”
I don’t actually know this—it’s not like I ever asked. But again, I’m trying to will something into being true.
And Daddy’s not dying. He’s not dead. He’s not going to die. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy . . .
Now I’m crying so hard I couldn’t see a car coming even if it ran over top of me. The dinging sound coming out of the car’s dashboard blends with Kayla’s “Please, God, please, God, please, God . . .”
Kayla lets out a horrific wail.
“Don’t stop!” I scream at her.
“You,” she says, gasping for air.
And my brain translates again:
It’s my turn to do CPR.
Kayla, Frantic
“I don’t know how!” Avery screams at me.
“Try!” I scream back at her. There’s so much else I don’t have enough air in my lungs to say: I can’t drive a stick shift and give CPR at the same time! I’m not sure I can drive a stick shift, anyhow! But we have to work together! Or else your father’s going to die!
I feel like I’m going to faint. I remember what my health teacher said when he taught us all CPR: “Basically, if the person you’re trying to help needs CPR, he’s already dead. His heart has stopped, and that’s the definition of death. So you can’t hurt them. You’re bringing them back to life.”
&
nbsp; I’m just Kayla Butts from Crawfordsville, Ohio. I’m not good at anything, let alone bringing someone back to life. I don’t even feel like I can breathe myself, right now.
Please, God, please, God, please, God . . .
I give Mr. Armisted’s chest an extra hard push, and then I reach over and yank Avery back into the car. She’s almost as rag-doll limp as her father.
“Shut the door,” I order her.
Avery’s crying so hard, I’m not sure she can see the door, but she grabs the handle and tugs it closed. She sprawls sideways in the passenger’s seat, and I grab her by the wrists and put her hands on her father’s chest.
“Up down up down,” I coach.
“I don’t know . . . how many times per minute,” Avery whimpers.
“Please, God, please, God . . . ,” I say robotically. “Please—down. God—up.”
Finally, she pushes hard enough that she doesn’t need my hands on her wrists. I shove Mr. Armisted’s legs to the side and perch on the very edge of the driver’s seat. My forehead is practically touching the windshield, but I slam the door against my own hip.
“Keys,” I whisper to myself.
I reach to turn them in the ignition, but there aren’t any keys.
“Push button,” Avery says behind me. “Push—down—the button. Up.”
The car is too new to have keys. I’ve never driven a car like this.
Avery reaches past me and crams a finger against a button on the dashboard. Maybe it says START or POWER or something like that—I don’t even take the time to read it.
The engine turns over and dies.
“What happened?” I scream. “What?”
But it’s like I can summon up Grandpa’s voice in my head: “You don’t turn the keys in the ignition until you’ve got the brake and the clutch mashed clear to the floor.”
Hitting that button is like turning keys in the ignition.
The car died because I didn’t push in the clutch at the same time.
I hear Avery behind me chanting, “Please . . . God . . . Please . . . God . . .”
I don’t even know if she believes in God. We’ve never discussed it. I don’t know if she feels more like she’s praying or cursing.
But the words help me.
I put my feet on the brake and the clutch, and I push the ignition button, and this time when the engine roars to life, it stays alive. I put the car into first and move my brake foot to the gas and the engine roars like an angry tiger.
It’s Grandpa’s voice I hear again: “Get your foot off the ding-dong clutch!”
I take my foot off the clutch and the car lurches forward. I swing the steering wheel back toward the direction of the road again. I should have checked for traffic first, but if there weren’t any cars coming when we needed them, why would there be a car coming now?
Because this is the summer of everything breaking, everything falling apart, everything going wrong . . .
I can still hear Avery behind me: “Please, God, please, God . . .”
By some miracle, I manage to swing the car in a wide loop, and settle into a wobbly path back toward the roundabout. I really thought I’d have to stop and back up and do a three-point turn just to keep from going into the opposite ditch—and who knows how many times I would have killed the engine then?
Too late, I realize I’m going the wrong direction through the roundabout—clockwise, not counterclockwise—but that gets me to the spoke that leads toward the hospital sooner.
I hit the gas coming out of the roundabout because it looks like an uphill climb. The engine roars again, but the car only inches forward.
I have to shift gears.
Please, please, please, please . . .
I stab my foot against the clutch and . . .
We’re in second gear.
Nobody in the history of the universe has ever been so grateful to shift gears without killing the engine.
I hit the gas again, and I barely have time to be happy before it’s time to shift to third. And then fourth.
And then Avery screams, “Is that the hospital? Is that the emergency room over there?”
She points past me, and I yell, “Keep doing CPR! We’re not there yet!”
I roar through a parking lot—is there a fifth gear I really should be shifting to? Who cares? Either the parking lot is designed like an obstacle course or I have no understanding of curbs, because we jerk and bump toward the entrance Avery pointed out. I slam on the brake when we reach the door and the car bucks to a halt.
Oops. Forgot to downshift.
“Run!” Avery screams at me.
I look into her eyes and it’s like we’re connected, both of us thinking it’s faster for me to go in than for us to switch off and let her go beg for help.
I shove the car door open and almost crash face-first into the hospital’s doors before they part silently before me.
I don’t even look to see if there’s a receptionist behind the doors. I just start screaming, “¡Ayúdame! ¡Ayúdame!”
A woman wearing scrubs runs up to me like I’m the one in pain, I’m the one having the emergency. I point out the door and scream in her ear, “¡El padre! ¡Su corazón!”
I don’t know the word for “attack” in Spanish, only “heart.” So I pantomime it. I clutch my chest and make my body quiver. Then I flail my arms out and go limp.
“Sí, sí,” the woman says.
What seems like an entire herd of paramedics stampedes out the door.
And then my body really does go limp. I practically fall to the floor.
Because there’s nothing else I can do for Mr. Armisted.
And I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.
Avery, Hoping, Fearing, Hoping . . .
Medical personnel flood out of the hospital doors, and for a moment I think it’s just a mirage. But then they’re swarming the car and pushing me back—and pulling Daddy away.
“Vaya, vaya,” someone says, opening my car door and pointing me toward the hospital doors.
“But is he going to be okay?” I ask. They have Dad on a stretcher now. “Let me see—”
Someone pulls me out of the car and actually shoves me toward the hospital doors. Something’s wrong with my ears—I think someone says, “This is the best way for you to help him now” in Spanish, but I can barely make out the words. Even though I can see the woman’s mouth move, just three inches away.
I stumble into the hospital—and practically trip over Kayla. And then I’m hugging her and sobbing, “You helped me. You helped me. Even though you hate me.”
“I don’t hate you,” Kayla says. “Is he—is he—”
Then there’s someone leading us into a private room, and I start to get frantic all over again.
“Is this where you give people bad news?” I cry.
But Kayla is holding on to me. She pats my arm and says something to the woman leading us, and the woman points to a computer and says what must be the Spanish word for “paperwork.”
At first I answer the questions: “David Armisted.” “105 Hanover Court, Deskins, Ohio. En los Estados Unidos.” “Fifty- four. He’ll be fifty-five on September twenty-fourth.” I try not to think about how far it is to September twenty-fourth, how many heartbeats away that is. And then the questions get harder, and I blank out. Maybe Kayla answers a few on her own; maybe she’s explaining to the woman why nobody should expect me to answer anything right now.
Not while I don’t know. Not while I’m waiting to find out.
It feels like anything could happen now, and that’s why I can’t let myself think or feel.
Kayla shakes me.
“Next of kin,” she says. “They need to know an emergency contact.”
“Me,” I say. “I’m all he has now.” The tears stream back into my eyes. “He’s all I have too.”
“No, he’s not,” Kayla says irritably.
“My mother doesn’t count,” I blubber.
“Who just drove
you here?” she asks. “Whose arm are you crying on right now? You’ve got me, too, you idiota.”
And then I start laughing, because of all the words to use Spanish for, why does Kayla go for the one calling me an idiot? Why does she make that the thing the woman taking our paperwork answers is actually going to understand?
And then I can’t stop laughing, and the woman says something that is probably the Spanish for asking if I need a sedative.
“No!” I say, because what if something happens? What if my dad comes back to consciousness and wants to talk to me, and I’m knocked out?
“She’ll be all right,” Kayla tells the woman in Spanish.
Kayla even sounds like she knows what she’s talking about, and that makes me calm down.
I wish she’d tell me that my dad’s okay.
Kayla starts asking if Dad has any brothers or sisters, which he doesn’t. Dad’s an only child and Mom’s an only child—no wonder they both always wanted to get their way. (Will Dad ever get his own way, ever again?) Kayla tries a different question: Is there anybody from Dad’s work that the hospital should call?
“No!” I say, and then I can’t explain how Dad always says it’s better not to show any weakness in a business setting.
A shadow falls across the woman’s desk. A man stands in the doorway.
“Is he—” I cry.
“Vuestra cosas,” the man says. He’s just talking about our things. He’s brought us our purses and Dad’s phone from the car. He says he moved our car for us.
“¡Pero mi padre!” I scream. “Cómo—”
“This is just someone helping out,” Kayla whispers to me. “He doesn’t know any more than we do.”
She takes the purses and the phone. And then the parking lot guy hands her the key fob to the car.
“He took that out of Dad’s pocket! What happened? Where’s Daddy now?”
The parking lot guy holds up his hands like I’ve accused him of stealing and rattles off a lot of Spanish I could probably understand better if I weren’t hysterical.
Kayla goes back to patting my arm.
“Calm down,” she says. “I think he’s saying the key fob was on the floor of the car. It must have fallen out of your Dad’s pocket.”