Dimitri slowed as he sought the words. “First we saw a cat. Then Nick saw girl and called out. Before we realize what was happening, she ran to us.”
Alexis had volunteered for SAR because she was determined to have a better life, a life that didn’t include food stamps, thrift store clothes, and Medicaid. To do that, she had to go to college. But her guidance counselor had said that if she wanted to snag a scholarship, being poor wasn’t enough, not when her grades were unexceptional Bs. Alexis needed something to make herself stand out. And it wasn’t like she was a left-handed bassoon player.
So she had joined SAR and then promptly regretted it. Sure, the outdoors was pretty, but not so pretty when you were freezing and your thrift store boots were rubbing your heels raw. Not so pretty when you were crawling inch by slow inch through a muddy field, looking for evidence the cops thought a bad guy might have discarded. Plus there had turned out to be a lot more math than she had expected.
But when Alexis had helped find a hiker lost in the mountains, her feelings had done a 180. The guy—his name was George—had been on the verge of hypothermia. If SAR hadn’t found him, he could have died. When George had hugged Alexis, pressing his wet, cold cheek against hers, she had realized it was all worth it.
Now Dimitri made the fingers of one hand run in midair. “At the same time, the pickup came around corner”—he balled his other hand into a fist and bumped it into the running fingers—“and hit girl. Her leg, it was broken. Nick held C-spine, Ruby stopped bleeding, and I checked the life threats.”
Jon held up one hand. “And who was responsible for stopping traffic?”
Dimitri, Nick, and Ruby just looked at one another.
Jon spoke into the silence, his voice surprisingly gentle. “Your first responsibility is your own safety.”
Nick kicked the carpet with the toe of his boot. “But it all happened so fast.”
“I’m sure it did.” Jon leaned forward. “The adrenaline rush usually makes people forget step one, which is”—he turned to Dimitri—“what?”
“Scene safety.” Dimitri looked down at his hands. His fist was still bumping into his two fingers.
“That’s right. Our first instinct is to save. That’s why we’re all here. When you see something go down in front of you, you want to help, so you dive right in. But if we don’t take steps to keep ourselves safe, then things could get a lot worse instead of better. We’re just lucky we didn’t end up with four injured people instead of one.” He looked at Ruby. “And what’s step two after scene safety?”
Ruby straightened up. “PPE. Personal protective equipment.”
“Right.” Jon looked around the circle. “We’ll be talking about this more on Wednesday, but we need to make sure that gloving up is second nature.” Nick’s shoulders rose, as if he was waiting to be yelled at.
Instead, Jon said, “This is a learning experience. For all of us. Over the next few days, we’ll be looking at what we did right and what we could have done better. What happened today, a subject getting hurt, was very unusual. Thankfully we are hearing from the hospital that the girl should recover fully. Still, we want to make sure everyone is feeling okay. We don’t want you freaking out on the drive home when you think about what happened. So if any of you would like to talk to the chaplain, he’s out in the lobby. We also have some free resources for therapy visits through the sheriff’s office.” Jon looked at the back of the room. “And good, it looks like TIP was also able to spare us some folks.”
As she turned to look, Alexis would not let herself hope. But then she saw the familiar dark head. Something bloomed in her chest. Bran was here!
Bran—short for Brandon—Dawson was a teen volunteer for Portland’s Trauma Intervention Program. He and Alexis had met a few weeks earlier on a different mission, one where her team had found a body. And later, when her mom’s health had taken a turn for the worse, he had been there for her.
Now he and Alexis were—something. They hadn’t put a name to it. They didn’t go to the same school, so they mostly just texted. In some ways, Alexis preferred texting to real-life conversations. You could be light and funny and just present the side of yourself you wanted someone else to see. You could skip over the depressing or boring parts, and you never had a bad hair day. And if you didn’t want to answer a text, you didn’t—and then later made up an excuse.
She had even kissed Bran once. In a coffee shop in front of a dozen other patrons. Did that really count as a kiss? Because so far the experience hadn’t been repeated.
She grinned at Bran. But Bran didn’t grin back. In fact, he barely even looked at her. Her stomach lurched. Had she done something to make him mad?
After Jon dismissed them, Dimitri ended up talking to Bran in a corner of the room. Alexis didn’t talk to anyone from TIP. Nick didn’t, either, although Alexis guessed he needed it at least as much as Dimitri. Ruby, of course, seemed unfazed.
Alexis loitered in the corner, watching Bran. His mouth was crimped, his face more serious than she had ever seen it. At one point, he put his arm around Dimitri’s shoulders. His straight black hair fell across his eyes, hiding his expression.
Ruby came up to her. “Need a ride home?”
Bran glanced over at them. “I’ve got it, Ruby.”
Alexis flushed as people turned to look, trying to read between the lines. TIP volunteers weren’t allowed to give rides to people they counseled. Friends—and girlfriends—were different.
But when Bran was finally done talking to Dimitri, he didn’t even look at her. He just took his keys from his pocket, saying, “You ready?”
“Sure.” In silence, they walked out into the parking lot toward his small brown Honda. Was he angry with her?
“Is something wrong, Bran?”
“No. Of course not.”
But Alexis heard the lie in his voice.
CHAPTER 9
NICK
SUNDAY
HOT AND BITTER
On his way out to the parking lot, Nick walked behind Alexis and Bran. What kind of a name was Bran, anyway? It sounded like some boring, healthy cereal. Something that would get stuck between your teeth.
Neither one of them seemed to even notice that Nick was right behind them. Alexis was holding on to Bran’s arm, her face turned toward him as if he were the sun.
With her free hand, she reached up and pushed the hair out of Bran’s eyes. Suddenly Nick’s chest hurt, a pain so fierce and sharp it felt like someone had slipped a knife between his ribs and given it a good twist.
The two of them climbed into Bran’s small brown car. And they still hadn’t seen him. Nick got into his mom’s car and slammed the door.
Alexis was nice to Nick, sure. Alexis was his friend.
But that was all.
Even though he had met Alexis first. Even though they sat together in SAR class every Wednesday night and Alexis saved a place for him if she was there before him. Even though she laughed at his jokes and had admired his drawings.
Even though Nick had once saved her life.
But Bran had four inches and forty pounds on Nick. All of it muscle. Plus he was a senior, which meant he was two years older than Nick. And he had his own car, while Nick had a car only if he could wheedle his mom into letting him borrow hers.
And tonight hadn’t helped advance his case, Nick thought sourly as he took the exit for the freeway. Not when Mitchell had forced him to admit in front of Alexis that he had thrown up.
Yakking like that had just come out of nowhere. One moment Nick had been looking at Mariana’s leg—oh my God was that white thing really a bone?—and the next his mouth had flooded with saliva. A second later a column of vomit, hot and bitter, had risen up his throat and pushed past the hand he had tried to hold it back with. It had taken all that he had not to fall to his knees.
After the paramedics had taken over and he had let go of her hand, Nick had realized that his own hand was still wet with either sweat or maybe vomit. Hopefully it
had just been sweat. Dimitri had tried to make him feel better. “You did good, Nick. Immediately, you protected her spine. And do not feel bad for the vomiting. It is hard when it is all fresh like that.”
Now Nick was stuck behind an old beater pickup doing about thirty-five. What was the guy even doing on the freeway? The next lane over was full of trucks, so he couldn’t pass. “Come on,” he muttered, gripping the steering wheel so tightly it cut into his palms.
Nick’s dad must have sucked it up when he was in Iraq. You could bet that he hadn’t been puking on the front lines. You couldn’t be a soldier if the sight of a little blood turned your stomach inside out.
His mom never even talked about his dad, who had been dead for a dozen years. But Nick had seen the medal, snug in its case, in her dresser drawer. A Bronze Star on a red, white, and blue ribbon. He had looked it up on Wikipedia. “Rewarded for bravery, acts of merit, or meritorious service.”
But his mom never talked about the medal or the man. His dad had fallen in combat—that was all Nick had been able to piece together from cryptic scraps of overheard conversation. Sacrificed himself to save others.
Nick had been four when his dad died. Sometimes he wondered if his few memories, now worn paper thin, were even his. Maybe he had imagined them or seen them in a movie. He thought he remembered a deep, booming voice; big hands lifting him into the air; a scratchy cheek against his own.
All his mom ever said was, “The army destroyed your father. You’ll join up over my dead body.”
When it was the only thing Nick wanted.
In the army, he was sure he would feel like he belonged. He had this weird pale Afro. He was too light-skinned to be black, too dark-skinned to be white. Nick had grown up in a white world, but he didn’t really fit there. That world didn’t really want him. If he went into a store with a white friend, his friend would be left alone, while Nick would be followed.
But in the army, Nick was sure he would fit in. All the army asked was that you be fit and strong and fast. And brave. And until tonight, Nick had thought he was well on his way to getting there.
Finally, he spotted a chance to pass the pickup, and he took it, even though his mom’s car shuddered, even though his exit was just ahead.
What would his dad think now if he could see Nick? Vomiting and nearly passing out when he should have been helping a little girl? Yeah, sure, he had eventually pulled it together, but what if it kept happening every time he saw blood? If he joined up, could he even make it through basic training, let alone an actual firefight?
Nick was a failure. As a potential boyfriend and a potential soldier. With an index finger, he punched the button on his mom’s radio so that it switched from the golden oldies station to something a lot more angry. Something that fit his mood.
CHAPTER 10
K
SUNDAY
MONSTER
What had he done? What had he done?
In the small bathroom, he threw up and kept throwing up until all that came out were strings of yellow bile.
He was a monster.
No. What had happened was a mistake. A mistake he would never make again.
That was what he told himself. Over and over.
CHAPTER 11
NICK
SUNDAY
FULL OF BLOOD AND SCREAMS
Nick was too keyed up to sleep. Images kept flickering through his brain. Alexis hanging on to Bran. Mariana’s mangled leg. Alexis brushing the hair out of Bran’s eyes. The weight of Mariana’s skull in Nick’s hands. Interspersed with pictures of other things, darker things.
What kind of dreams would he have, full of blood and screams? He most definitely did not want to go to bed right away.
With luck, Kyle would be up, he thought as he put his key in the door. Or at least he would get up once he heard Nick. He let the front door thump closed. Their mom slept so hard that nothing could wake her, but Kyle was a light sleeper.
Nick needed to let off steam. To get out some of the energy still humming in his veins. He and Kyle could play a little Call of Duty. It would be way more fun without Mom hovering in the background, looking appalled. She claimed COD was too violent.
Violent it might be, but Nick already knew that a two-dimensional image and some shouts and sound effects weren’t much like real life. It sure didn’t include the coppery scent of blood, or the way a girl’s face felt under your fingertips as she walked the frayed rope between life and death. The very falsity of a video game was comforting. When the game was over, you just put down your controller and went back to your real life.
And while they were shooting and stabbing and running, Nick would tell Kyle some of the truth about what had happened tonight. Not all of it, of course. He didn’t want to see Kyle’s disgust. But he would tell him how he had helped save Mariana’s life.
Sure, Ruby had been the one trying to stop the bleeding, but in some ways stabilizing Mariana’s cervical spine—or C-spine—had been even more important. Since the pickup had hit her hard enough to knock her out of one of her boots, it might have also broken something inside the slender column of her neck. And if that had happened and Mariana moved, then those shattered bits of bone could have sliced into her spinal cord. A seven-year-old permanently in a wheelchair—maybe even needing a machine to breathe for her—was even worse than a seven-year-old with a mangled leg.
Until the paramedics arrived with a cervical collar, Nick’s job had been to be the human version. He had laid on the damp ground behind her, propped on his elbows, his thumbs above her ears, his fingers cradling the bones at the back of her skull. Just as they had been taught, he didn’t try to move Mariana’s head, or carry the entire weight of it. He simply held it in place.
Under his thumbs, Mariana’s face had been cool and clammy, which meant she was already going into shock. He and Ruby had told her over and over not to turn her head, that everything was okay, that she needed to lie still, that help was on the way.
When the paramedics showed up, it took them only a few seconds to wrap a real cervical collar around her neck, bandage her leg, and thank all of them for what they had done. He had held her hand until the last possible moment, been rewarded by a squeeze when he told her he had to let go. Then they had put her on a backboard and loaded her into the ambulance.
Nick’s stomach had calmed down since it first rebelled. Now he rummaged through the refrigerator, letting the jars and bottles clank together, listening for the sound of Kyle’s bedroom door opening.
Silence.
He allowed the fridge door to thump into place. No answering sound of Kyle’s bedroom door opening. After pulling a box of cereal off the shelf, he let the cupboard door slam closed.
Nothing.
Finally, he went to his brother’s bedroom door. Nick listened, holding his breath, then turned the handle and nudged it open.
Kyle’s bed was empty.
CHAPTER 12
K
SUNDAY
BEADED WITH BLOOD
He showered until all traces of her were gone. Scrubbed with a loofah until every inch of his body was pink and tender. Every bit of skin was new now. Beaded with blood here and there.
Blood. He couldn’t think about blood, or he would get sick again.
He couldn’t believe he had done it.
Done that thing.
But he hadn’t meant to.
Had he?
And now he might go to jail for the rest of his life.
For a one-minute mistake.
For a mistake he would take back if he only could.
CHAPTER 13
THAD
MONDAY
ONCE YOU KNEW THE TRICK
Thad Westmoreland rode with his head down. Bad enough that it was icy this morning. There was also a wind that seemed to be funneling right down the collar of his jacket.
Riding a bike to work had been great when it had been warm. Now, even dressed in a waterproof jacket and pants, there were many days it wa
s a wet slog. Today it was simply bone-chillingly cold. But on minimum wage and working part-time, who could afford a car? The irony was that his job was at the car wash, where he spent all day telling people, “Neutral, no brakes, hands off the wheel.”
This time of year, most Portlanders didn’t bother to wash their cars. Not when the rain did most of the work for them and there wasn’t any sun to show the remaining dirt. When the weather turned in late October, Thad’s hours had been cut back, but at least his job hadn’t completely disappeared.
He pedaled on, already sweating through the white polyester shirt and the clip-on tie they all had to wear, as if they worked in an office.
If only he’d wrapped a scarf around his neck this morning. He lifted one hand from the handlebars to see if he could pull the zipper on his jacket any higher. As he did, his messenger bag slid around his torso. When he tried to push it back, he started to lose his balance. Just before he tipped over, he managed to get his foot down.
As he readjusted his bag, Thad looked out across the empty patch of land. Years ago, he thought, there had been an apartment building here. Now there was nothing. Part of it was level and part of it sloped. During the wet part of the year, which was about eight months, there was a tiny creek down there, winding between blackberry bushes.
But today the space held something more than just iced-over water and weeds. He squinted. It was a boot. A woman’s black boot.
It was more than just a boot, he realized. There was a leg in that boot. He traced it back. It was like one of those puzzles, the ones with the captions that asked, “What do you see?” When he was a kid, Thad had always liked those puzzles. Where things suddenly fell into place if you stepped back or let your eyes go blurry or even looked away. Once you knew the trick, it was easy to see the truth.