“What happened? Is she burned?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about smoke inhalation?”
“Mom, I don’t know!”
Silence. “I’ll call your father.”
“Yes. Fine.” I don’t care.
A highway sign looms up out of the darkness. We’re still so far away. Hold on, Arden. Hold on, sweetheart. I’m coming.
“What else can I do? Should I come to the hospital?”
“No. The boys.” I struggle to latch on to something solid, routine. “Soccer. They have a game tomorrow.”
“I can take them.” She sounds relieved to have a task.
I press END, then redial. The hospital operator answers. “How may I direct your call?”
“Someone just phoned me about my daughter. She was in a fire…”
“Hold, please.”
The rain comes harder, pounding the roof. Faraway lights blur in the wet.
“Anything?” Theo’s focused on the road, his mouth set. The needle on the odometer nudges seventy-five, eighty.
“I’m still on hold.”
“Try Rory.”
Yes. She’ll know something. But Rory doesn’t answer. All I get is her merry voice telling me to Go ahead and do it. You know you want to. The beep sounds. I open my mouth to leave a message, but I’m suddenly flooded by all the things I want to say. Words clog my throat, choking. In the end, I hang up without saying any of them.
Theo puts his hand on my knee. “Hang on. We’re almost there.”
Your daughter has a tattoo? the man had asked.
Yes. A small green-and-purple butterfly.
In the distance, sirens shriek.
—
The emergency room’s a blaze of light. The woman at the information desk says she’ll get a doctor to talk to us; we just need to take a seat in the waiting room. Theo finds us chairs but I can’t sit. I want to run down the hall, banging on doors until one opens to reveal Arden. People in lab coats walk down the hall toward us. I look at each of them in turn, searching their eyes. Are they going to take us to our daughter? But they walk past. “What’s taking so long? Why don’t they just tell us where she is?”
“Someone will be out soon.” Theo’s face is ashen.
“She needs us.” The time Arden fell off her bike and split open her chin; the time she ran a fever so high she trembled, her eyes wide and fixed on mine. She must be so scared. Then I realize she’s not scared. She’s unconscious. I’m the one who’s afraid, who needs to see her face, to hold her, to cry.
“I know, Nat. They’ll tell us something soon.”
People are everywhere, sitting, leaning against walls, looking weary, looking defeated. A little girl holds her arm to her chest, her red tights ripped. College-age kids huddle in a corner, blankets draped around their shoulders. “Where’s Rory? She should be here somewhere.” Arden and Rory are inseparable. The two of them on the boat, their laughter trailing across the lake. Wait. “Maybe she’s with Arden?” Keeping her company until we got here.
“I bet she is. I bet that’s exactly where she is.”
Another man in a white lab coat strides past. He doesn’t look over. The TV plays silent jumpy images. Outside the window, a police cruiser flashes red and blue lights.
“Mr. Falcone? Mrs. Falcone?”
A woman in green scrubs is holding a clipboard. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Dr. Sisneros.” She’s young, plain-faced, and stocky, her brown hair scraped back from a square forehead. A green surgical mask hangs around her neck. “Let’s talk in the family lounge.”
What terrible thing does she have to tell us that she can’t say out here? But she’s already turned away, and so we follow her as she walks briskly down the hallway through a series of doors that swing open when she smacks the metal plate on the wall. The sounds from the emergency room fade and now it’s quiet. We are crossing from one world to another. At last we step into a room. It’s empty, a washed-out space.
“How’s Arden?” I ask. “Where is she?”
She looks at me with an odd expression. “Your daughter’s sustained several fractures and has second- and third-degree burns on her arms and torso. We haven’t ruled out spinal involvement yet. We’ve put a tube into her airway to help her breathe, but right now we’re mostly concerned with the swelling in her brain. We’re about to take her into surgery.”
Her spine, her brain. Arden’s rushing away from us, in bits and pieces.
“For what?” Theo says. “No one said anything about surgery.”
“We need to insert a drain into her skull, but we have to have your signed permission.”
They want to drill a hole into my daughter’s skull. I’ve cradled that head in my hands, seen the shadowy soft areas Theo and I’d been warned to protect lying between thin cranial plates of bone. The world tilts. I sit hard on a chair, grip the cold metal arms. “Is it dangerous?” My voice comes from far away.
“Well, there are risks with any operation.”
I force myself to look up at her. Her eyes are pale blue, as clear as water. “But is it dangerous?”
“It’s more dangerous to let the fluid build up unchecked.”
I let out my breath in a whoosh, then nod. She extends the clipboard to Theo. After a moment, he takes it and clicks the pen. “How long will this take?”
“Not long. It’s a fairly quick procedure.”
Theo hands the clipboard back and sits beside me. I reach for his hand and knit my fingers with his, familiar and comforting. “Can we see her?”
“I’m sorry, but we have to take her in right away. You can see her as soon as she’s out of surgery.”
“Is she going to be…all right?” Is she going to die?
“We’re doing everything we can.”
“Are you the surgeon?” Theo asks.
“I’m the resident.” She’s at the door, wanting to leave. “I was here when they admitted your daughters.”
“Daughters?” I repeat.
—
The ICU’s a circular spaceship with glass-walled rooms radiating out. A large reception desk hovers in the center. Rory’s room is dark, the curtain drawn across the glass wall facing the hallway, tiny red blinking lights on various machines casting an amber glow across the bed against the wall. Beside it, a ghost rises from a chair. Gabrielle, her slight form swaying. “Natalie, our girls…”
“I know. I know.” I hug her close. Her head presses against my shoulder, her hair slippery against my cheek. She sobs, her shoulders shaking. The anger between us vanishes. This is what matters. “Oh, Gabrielle,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” She shudders, and I hold her closer. Over her shoulder I can see the bed, the shadowed figure lying there. Rory?
“My God,” Theo says hoarsely.
She lies flat beneath a heavy web of looping plastic tubes. A thick helmet is fitted around her head; the white cast on her arm glows dully. All I can see of her face is the rise of puffy cheeks and eyelids behind the plastic straps of the helmet. Her lips, curved around a dangling plastic tube, are grotesquely swollen.
This isn’t Rory. It can’t be.
“Oh, Gabrielle,” I say again, and she nods, pulls away. She snatches a tissue from the box on the nightstand and pats her eyes. “They say it’s the fluid they’re pumping into her. They say it will go down in a few weeks. But I don’t know.”
Should we be talking like this in front of Rory? It’ll only frighten her. She hasn’t moved since we came in. She hasn’t made a sound. “Hi, my darling,” I whisper, leaning close. I can’t see if her eyes are cracked open. “It’s Aunt Nat and Uncle Theo.”
“She can’t hear you. She can’t hear anything. She’s…she’s in a coma.”
I’d better prepare myself. This is how Arden will be when she comes out of surgery. “What do the doctors say?”
“She broke her leg. It’s quite…bad. They’re going to operate in the morning.”
Gabrielle’s accent is th
icker. She’s stumbling over her words. I slide my arm around her shoulders and give her a reassuring squeeze.
“They’re worried about her lungs,” she says. “They say she breathed in hot air and did a lot of damage. They have her on a ventilator so her lungs can heal. I don’t know. Is that how it works?”
I have no idea. But Christine might. She’s a pediatric surgeon. “I’ll call my sister,” I say. “I’m sure she can explain a lot of this.” Can Christine come? But she has that surgery coming up, a pair of conjoined twins flying all the way from Brazil. Christine’s been preparing for months. Is it fair to ask her to compromise other people’s lives? I don’t know.
“Yes, that would be good.”
Rory’s so still. I can’t see the rise and fall of her chest.
“Where’s Vince?” Theo asks.
“He’s on his way.”
“We’ll stay with you until he comes.”
Gabrielle fidgets with the top button of her jacket. “How’s Arden? Have you seen her yet?”
“No. She’s still in surgery.” What if we had gotten here thirty minutes sooner? Fifteen? Would that have made a difference? Only to me.
“I asked them to put her in the room next door.”
“Yes. Good thinking.” We’ll all be together. We can help each other.
“What happened, Gabrielle?” Theo’s looking down at Rory. His voice is confused. “All we know is there was a fire. And that the girls jumped from their window.”
“That’s all I know, too. But they told me the police are going to want to talk to us.”
The police. They’ll have answers. They’ll tell us how this happened. “Were other students hurt?”
She looks at me. “You don’t know?”
I shake my head. I have the feeling of something widening around us.
“The rescue workers found Hunter inside. He…didn’t make it.”
Hunter. I’ve never met him, but Arden’s dropped casual comments for weeks about him. He’s Rory’s boyfriend. He’s a sophomore. He plays baseball. Arden had blushed whenever she said his name. She hadn’t wanted me to know what she felt for him, but how can you hide that at eighteen? I had seen it all the same. Sadness crests inside me. Hunter’s dead.
Gabrielle wraps her arms around herself. “Rory’s so afraid of fire. She must have been so panicked. And when she was…falling.”
I go there. I go right to that narrow ledge so far from the ground you can’t see it when you’re standing below and looking up. Just a few inches wide, but Arden had crawled onto it. Had she looked down, or had she simply let go? Did she stretch out her arms, trying to grab hold of something to break her fall? Had she screamed, clenched her eyes shut? Did she lie there in terrible pain, wanting me? Needing me?
I’ll call tomorrow, Mom. But she hadn’t.
Arden
I TAKE OFF all my clothes.
It’s mid-afternoon and Rory’s in class. The dorm is quiet all around me, but I lock the door because you never know, then crank up my iPod. I’m experimenting with jazz. Classical music puts me to sleep and alternative rock makes me only want to use dark colors. Hip-hop makes my hands shake. Lame-o, I can hear Rory say. You are an embarrassment to your generation.
I stand perfectly still in the middle of the room and close my eyes. Music swirls around me, the molten sound of the saxophone draping my body in warmth. I lift my arms, feel the muscles stretch along my rib cage. I sway, let the pictures come. A round, fat moon sagging low. An ear of corn, butter sliding slowly to a puddle on the plate. A sturdy little bee crawling down the throat of a flower. The gleam of Hunter’s hair as he slides into home base. He didn’t know I was standing by the bleachers, watching. It wasn’t like I planned it. I was just on my way back from the pool when I heard his voice and went to see. He’d pushed himself up from the ground, smacking at his dusty knees, and high-fived another player as he jogged past. The low sun hitting the side of his face and making him squint into the distance. That’s the one. I open my eyes and uncap the tube of cadmium yellow.
I love doing portraits. Last year, the seniors all lined up for me to draw them in charcoal. Even Mackenzie. I made her look prettier than she really is, straightening out her nose and making her eyes just a little rounder. She actually blushed when I handed the drawing to her and I had to bite back a laugh. I could so easily have pushed her eyes together a little too closely, made her forehead look like King Kong’s. I could really have messed with her mind.
My art professor says we don’t need a lot of different paint colors. We can mix every color of the rainbow and then some, just from the primary colors plus white and black. We’re working on a color wheel in class, and then next week we’re going to start self-portraits in oil. I’ve never worked in oil. I’ve never painted my own self.
I’ve got Hunter’s face roughed out. The jazz is making me work fast and loose, so it’s just the suggestion of cheeks and jaw and forehead. Hunter’s eyes are slashes of blue, the way he looks at a person and lasers all the way inside. I’m bouncing on my toes and reaching for the tube of Alizarin crimson so I can start on his baseball uniform when I hear a loud banging on the door and someone yelling. “Hey!” Bang bang bang. “What’s going on in there?”
—
“What do you think that is?” a guy asks me, pointing to the food behind the glass.
“The sign says lasagna.”
“Looks more like roadkill, but I guess I’ll take my chances.” He nods to the lady behind the case and she dumps a spoonful of pasta on a plate and passes it to him. She looks at me and I shake my head. “Hey, don’t I know you?” he asks.
I look at him now. He’s a little taller than me, with scruffy blond curls and bright blue eyes, and a wide grin that makes me want to smile right back. His gray polo shirt is open at the neck. A prep—just like all the boys I’d gone to high school with—and somehow, not. “I don’t think so.”
“Seriously. That’s not a line. Aren’t you in my art history class?”
Now I know. “I think you mean my cousin, Rory.”
“Rory.” He says her name like it’s delicious, filling him up. “I’m Hunter, by the way.”
“Arden,” I tell him, and shove my tray down the line. Hunter.
That afternoon, I tell Rory, “I met some guy you know.” We’re in our dorm room and she’s lying on her bunk flipping the pages of a textbook with an irritated look. I know what she’s thinking, what she wants from me, but that’s over. I told her and she’d agreed. Still, I can’t help the dread that fills my stomach. “Who?” She doesn’t sound the least bit interested.
“Hunter. He thought I was you.” This will annoy her. She hates it when people mix us up. She can’t understand it. She’s the thin one, but she never says this.
“I don’t know a Hunter. What did he look like?” She turns another page.
“Blond hair, kind of wavy. Blue eyes.”
“Sounds like half the guys on campus.”
“I think he’s in our art history class.”
At this, she looks up. “Oh, right. He invited me to a party Friday night. Want to go?”
My mom’s a list-maker. I make them, too. The one I made over the summer says Stop biting nails. Also Start swimming again. Rory didn’t even react at that one. At the very top of the list, the number one item: Take chances.
So I say, “Okay.”
It’s a frat party, crazy with people. Music thumping out the windows as loud as airplanes taking off. Everywhere I look people I don’t know are holding red plastic cups, dancing and laughing. Hunter’s a frat guy. He appears out of the crowd, that grin lighting up his face, and I suddenly feel warm all over, like he’s smiling just at me. He comes toward us, but it’s Rory’s hand he takes. They dance, their bodies close but not touching. Rory has her arms up over her head as she swings her hips this way and that. It’s obvious they’re going to have sex that night. I hope it’s not in our room.
“Come on,” Rory calls to me. I danc
e with a dark-haired guy around my height with bloodshot eyes. “Try this,” he says, holding out a tiny square of paper.
Take chances, right?
I let him place the paper under my tongue. Colors rain from the ceiling, bounce and break apart into confetti. I laugh and ribbons of pure gold spin all around me. He rubs his cheek stiff with bristles against mine. I pull away, but he grabs me back to kiss me.
My skin tingles in that pins-and-needles way. It burns and I realize I’m standing too close to the flames.
—
The bonfire leaps in the round fire pit. It’s so pretty in the dark woods. It makes the tall trees look friendly. I hold my palms to the heat until my mom tells me to take a step back.
I share a cabin with five other Brownies. The plastic mattress squeaks when I kneel on it to spread out my sleeping bag. I don’t care about the bugs and bears. They feel very far away. Later, we make s’mores when it gets too dark to see anything but our hobgoblin faces in the firelight. In the morning, we squish eggs in sealed plastic sandwich bags and drop them, one by one, into boiling water in the pot balanced on the metal grate. The whole time, Rory hides in the cabin. I bring her eggs, lifting the tail of the sleeping bag and passing her the soggy paper plate.
Fire makes me brave. It’s the strong black line that separates me from Rory.
—
Am I awake? My throat hurts, but it’s my head that’s killing me. Dimly, I hear someone say, “Pulse one twelve.”
“Blood pressure?”
Brisk hands on me, pulling the sheet taut, adjusting the thing in my mouth. It snakes down my throat. I try to spit it out, but my tongue won’t move. My eyes are sealed shut. Tingling starts in my fingertips and down in my toes, angry bees buzzing in my veins, swarming up my wrists and calves, headed for my soft, helpless heart. They are determined. They climb over one another in their eagerness. I can’t get away.
“One twenty-four over ninety. Maybe she’s dehydrated.”
“It’s probably pain. Let’s increase the drip, see how she does on it.”
The bees slow down, fall asleep in gentle heaps.
Rory