In my dream, Mom walks out of Isabelle’s room and Dad follows. I can’t believe that Isabelle isn’t coming with us. Suddenly I am gasping for breath. I am begging my parents to stay there with Isabelle and me.
“We need you to put a stop to this, Giz,” Dad says in his best forceful army voice.
“We’re going to have Izzie’s service without you,” Mom says. “You’re not going to be able to say a proper goodbye.”
Mom wheels Dad away.
I rush out behind them, begging them to return, but they disappear. They are gone.
The hospital hallway stretches out like a long tunnel ahead of me. It’s completely empty now. There is no one there but me.
I am still gasping for breath. I can’t believe my parents have just walked away from both Isabelle and me.
I keep shouting for my parents.
I keep shouting for Isabelle.
“Come back! Come back!” I yell.
“Hi.” The redheaded nurse is looking down at me when I wake up. Her hair looks like it’s on fire, each individual strand, part of a fading glow.
“Welcome back, honey,” she says. “It’s awfully nice to see you.”
DAD TAKES HIS US Army Survival Manual everywhere he goes. Not the real thing but a reprint, the kind you can buy in any bookstore. The real one he left behind in the Kuwaiti desert after coming home from Operation Desert Storm, the first Iraq War.
Dad and Uncle Patrick left Haiti to go to boarding school in upstate New York around the same time that Grandma Sandrine, Mom, and Aunt Leslie moved to Miami, after their father, Grandpa Napo, died.
Dad always knew that he wanted to be a lawyer, but after his high school graduation, he saw a TV ad for the US Army and decided to enlist. The recruiter put a rush on his green card application, and soon after he signed the papers, Dad was shipped off to boot camp.
A few weeks after Dad finished boot camp, Operation Desert Storm broke out and Dad was deployed to Kuwait. He didn’t let Mom, Uncle Patrick, or his parents know that he’d joined the army until it was too late for them to do anything about it.
If not for being so worried about him, Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine would have never spoken to him again. When he was deployed overseas, even though he wasn’t allowed to tell them exactly where he was, they’d send him care packages filled with candy bars and clean underwear, through an army post office address, every week. They’d also send him books—law books, novels—anything that could take his mind off whatever he was doing over there. Not that this was so easy, he wrote in what Isabelle and I called his “war letters.”
Nothing is easy here, he would write to Mom in almost every letter. I can’t live without you.
“What was he expecting?” Isabelle would say, less sympathetically after the separation announcement. “He was in a war after all.”
Dad’s time in the desert lasted only four weeks. Then he caught some kind of raging eye infection, which helped him get the discharge that sent him to Mom in Miami, where he started college, then law school.
Dad and Uncle Patrick were supposed to become architects like Grandpa Marcus, the kind of architects who would rebuild Haiti. That was the deal they’d made with Grandpa Marcus when he sent them to boarding school in the United States. Instead, Dad fell in love with the law and he stayed in love with Mom. Uncle Patrick fell in love with music and with a whole bunch of women until he met Alejandra.
Almost nothing worked out the way Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine thought it would, except Izzie and me, their only grandchildren.
After he left the army, Dad mainly concentrated on his studies and on Mom. He tried to leave everything from the army behind, except his army pals, and the copy of the survival guide he always carried with him. I bet it was even with him the day of the crash.
If you take a poll of people who survive anything, Dad likes to say, you’ll find that most of them have an iron will. Before all this, I would have never thought of myself as having an iron will.
When Dad comes into my hospital room with Mom and Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus and Aunt Leslie and Uncle Patrick, I can feel the iron will etched on my face.
“And she wakes up on the fifth day,” Dad shouts. “We can improvise this thing now. Gizzie’s going to be okay.”
Everyone lines up, or wheels up, in a half circle around me, then they each take turns asking me the same questions.
“How are you feeling?”
“Are you hungry?”
“Are you thirsty?”
Before my family came in, the head duck doctor said I could have water and a few creamy foods, some soup. The redheaded nurse started me with applesauce.
“Make room, make room,” Dad says. It’s the strongest I have heard his voice since the crash.
Uncle Patrick pushes Dad’s wheelchair forward. Dad has his fighting face on, even though his body doesn’t quite match it now.
“Let’s go home soon,” Dad tells me.
“I don’t think you get to decide, Dave,” Aunt Leslie says.
They all start talking at the same time. This makes me feel like I’m at one of our loud Thanksgiving dinners where everyone talks and no one listens. Rather than being awful, the way it usually is when everyone wants to have a say, this time it’s kind of nice, though not nice enough for me to want it to go on forever.
Besides, my head starts to hurt and I feel queasy, like I’ve just jumped off someplace really high and am floating down in slow motion towards the ground.
“Please,” I say. I think I’m yelling but it comes out as a whisper. “I’m tired.”
The inside of my mouth feels stuffed and dry, like it’s filled with cotton balls. Rather than being quiet, my family cheers. Dad cheers the loudest of everyone.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he says. “Se sa!”
After the duck doctor and his ducklings come back and clear the room, I remember the reason Mom and Dad want to be out of the hospital so soon. They want to have a funeral service for Isabelle and they don’t want to do it without me.
“You might just be able to make your sister’s funeral,” the head duck doctor says.
“Don’t sound so cheerful about it,” I say, now continuing out loud the running conversation I’ve been having with him in my head.
He flinches, but he also looks proud after hearing my raspy voice.
Still, I can tell that he’s also embarrassed. He got too used to me not talking back.
THE ROOM SEEMS a lot brighter later that afternoon when I am supposed to get up and stand on my feet. Suddenly the things around me—the glass bricks on the wall, my painting from Jean Michel—finally seem more real than the world in my head.
Somehow I am going to get out of this bed and walk. Even if I walk just a few feet, to the wheelchair. I am going to take my first few steps outside of my dreams.
I am also seeing everybody in a new way. Their mouths are no longer mute, their faces no longer sad. Everyone is now in Technicolor, a whole range of pink, blue, grey, and green hospital gowns and scrubs.
Everyone is smiling. I am actually smiling, too. I’m happy to see the back of the bed rise, happy to see the railing collapse as it’s being pushed down by the head duck doctor, who looks very pleased with himself.
He looks like he wants to channel Victor Frankenstein and scream, “She’s alive! She’s alive!”
He lowers the bed as far down as it can go, to a place where it seems possible for my feet to reach the ground. My leg muscles tense up and my body starts shaking. My head feels like it’s spinning even before my feet hit the ground.
“Easy, easy,” the head duck doctor says.
I can actually feel the ground. It feels cold, wet, snow cold.
Miraculously, as the head duck keeps saying, I have no broken bones.
The redheaded nurse rushes forward and drops a pair of slippers in front of me. My slippers from home. No, Isabelle’s black satin slippers that someone mistook for mine. Mine are white
and made with terry cloth. Whoever picked the slippers to bring to the hospital might have been thinking that taking these first steps in Isabelle’s slippers would inspire me.
I have to fight to stay upright, I tell myself, so I can go to Isabelle’s service. And right then, a bolt of what feels like lightning shoots through me from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head. My ears start ringing. I hear gasps around the room. I hear Grandma Régine shout, “Jesus, Marie, Joseph!”
“You go, Gizzie!” Dad calls, with a voice that sounds stronger than his body might ever be again.
I fall backwards, into the duck doctor’s arms. I will have to learn his name. I’ll have to write him a letter one day. A thank-you note like the kind Mom always made me and Isabelle write when we got any kind of gift. A gift is never truly yours until you say thank you, Mom likes to say. The gift the head duck and the others have given me is part of my life back. How do you write a thank-you note for that?
The head duck cradles my back until the ducklings and the redheaded nurse rush forward to help hold me up.
“Give her some space,” he says.
I look into his coffee-colored eyes and realize how determined they are. He’s mouthing words to me that the rest of the room can’t hear.
“Are you a runner?” he asks.
Is he worried that I’m going to start running? Away from him and everyone here?
“I don’t run,” I say, meaning I won’t run away. I won’t flee. I won’t give up.
“So you don’t jog or anything?”
Couldn’t think of the last time I did. But Isabelle did jog, mostly for her PE class, the one where she and Ron Johnson became friends.
“Do you exercise at all?” he asks.
“I swim,” I whisper.
“Not for the next couple of weeks,” he says, “because anything that raises your heart rate can increase the speed at which blood flows to your brain, which would not be a good thing.”
“Okay,” I say, pretending I fully understand him.
“Do you like movies?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“You won’t be able to watch any for a while. No tablet or computer screens, either.”
But those things don’t raise heart rates, I want to say. Or they might.
“You like reading?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“No reading for a while,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. He is starting to sound like a broken record.
“I hear you like to draw,” he says.
Let me guess, I’m not going to be able to draw for a while.
“No drawing,” he says.
And she wins …
“There is some good news, though,” he says.
I really want to find out what that good news is.
“Dark glasses, shades, what do you kids call them? You’ll be wearing shades now whenever you go out.”
“For how long?” I ask.
Most of my voice still gets caught in my throat, and I’m not sure how much of what I’m saying he hears. He makes me repeat myself, then says, “For as long as it takes. A couple of weeks or so. And I have to tell you that if you hit your head again, it wouldn’t be a good thing.”
Okay, then.
He’s been holding me so long now that I feel like we’re dancing some kind of slow waltz of horror. I want him to help me go back to bed so I can lie down and rest, except I want to get out of here. I want to leave this place. I don’t want Isabelle’s funeral service to happen without me.
“Go ahead,” the head duck says. “You can do this.”
I’m not sure what the “this” is that I can do. Is it taking one step? Two steps? Is it walking out of the room and never looking back?
I let my feet sink into Isabelle’s slippers. Isabelle would want me to stay on my feet. She would want me to attend her funeral. Actually, she’d probably ask for her slippers back. I want to take that step as much as I wanted to move my toes not so long ago.
“I can do this,” I mouth to the head duck. I am now heaving, sweating, breathless, trying to stay upright. I can do this, I keep telling myself. I will do it.
The head duck offers me his arm. I don’t just reach for it, I grab it and let my hand slip through the crook of his elbow.
“Here you go,” he mouths back. I press one side of my body against his, taking some of the weight off my feet.
“You can trust your legs,” he says. “It’s okay.”
At first I slide more than I raise my legs. I feel no parasitic drag. Then my neck starts to feel like it’s strong enough to hold my wobbly head again. My breath slows down, too, and I feel less afraid.
I raise my legs, and Isabelle’s slippers come up with them. They are my propellers, my engines, the way Isabelle was.
I take a first step. Then another. Then another. I feel the head duck’s hand slip away from mine. I take a few more steps, until I’m standing next to Mom and Dad and the rest of my family who have come out to see me take my first steps, this time on my own, without my sister.
Everyone is clapping by the time I reach them. I’m close enough to smell the hospital on both my parents, the alcohol swabs, the citrus-scented soaps, the strong antibacterial gels. I smell the same way.
“Let’s go home,” I say as Mom raises her hands to her face and sobs in her fingers.
“Not so fast, baby bird,” the head duck says.
LAST HALLOWEEN, ON a Saturday morning, Dad found a small brown owl in our backyard, by the pool, under our avocado tree. He called us all out of bed to see it, wobbling back and forth on our deck. It looked like its wing had been broken.
I had never seen an owl before, except in pictures, but the flat face and super-massive eyes gave it away.
We stood at a safe distance and watched it struggle to lift itself off the ground, only to fall back down again. Mom was worried that it would hurt itself even more if we allowed it to keep trying to fly, but she ordered us not to get too close so it wouldn’t bite us. The only thing left to do was to call the Miami wildlife center.
We stood there and watched the owl flap its wings again and again. It could not get off the ground. It would occasionally stop to rest, bobbing its head up and down, as if it couldn’t believe what was happening.
Dad thought it had fallen out of its nest in the avocado tree and had wounded itself when it landed on the ground.
Being nocturnal, it probably couldn’t even see us, Dad said. Thank goodness it didn’t fall into the pool.
“We have owls in our avocado tree?” Isabelle asked. “What else is up there? Bats?”
“Do you want to climb the tree with me and find out?” I asked.
This is what we would have done when we were little.
Isabelle shot me a horrified look. She thought it was too creepy that this owl had landed on our back porch, on Halloween of all times.
When the man from the wildlife center arrived, he said that we were smart not to have gotten too close to the owl, because it could have bitten us pretty hard if it felt it was in danger. It turns out that our owl was a type of burrowing owl that was on the endangered species list in the United States. The fine for hurting or killing one was ten thousand dollars.
“Is there a reward for finding one?” Isabelle asked him.
“Unfortunately no,” the man said.
Unlike other owls, burrowing owls are pretty small in general and they’re not strictly nocturnal, he explained. They stay active during the day when they gather food and burrow in holes in the ground.
Even though she hadn’t seemed that enthusiastic about the owl, every day after that, for at least a couple of weeks, I saw Isabelle checking the deck and around the pool after she woke up.
One night after dinner, a few weeks later, she looked out on the deck and said, “I wonder where our owl is?”
“In a better place,” Dad said.
“Don’t joke about that,” she said, as if she thought he was saying the owl was dea
d.
“I mean the safer place that is the wildlife center,” he explained.
“We should visit it sometime,” she said, though we never visited or even called to find out what had become of it.
Now I am like that owl. I am heading someplace that is like home, but not really home.
Our house would never be the same place it had been that evening, when we all got into Dad’s car and left for the concert.
MOM AND DAD are discharged from the hospital later that afternoon. It’s been five days since the car crash, but it feels like it’s been five years.
I have to show the head duck that I can follow instructions before he can let me out in the next couple of days. I have to follow his fingers back and forth with my eyeballs. I have to count backward and forward, then repeat the days of the week and the months of the year. I have to pass a vision test and get a prescription for sun and glare glasses. I have to organize word lists. I have to solve math problems verbally and show that I can remember important moments from my life. I have to tell him and some other duck neurologists the names of my teachers and friends. I even have to sing the US national anthem to a speech therapist. I have to be told over and over to let my parents know if I ever feel depressed or suicidal.
Every now and then, pain randomly shoots through different parts of my still-black-and-blue body, but I choose to ignore it. I am going to pretend that on a scale of one to a billion, I am a zero.
The fact that I’ll have Aunt Leslie as my own in-house pediatrician reassures the head duck that I’ll be “compliant” once I’m discharged. I hear him tell Aunt Leslie that she should observe me closely and rush me right back here if needed.
“You do know that your aunt and I went to medical school together, don’t you?” he asks, grinning at her, like an employee trying to impress his supervisor.
I didn’t know.
My parents’ doctors order them to stay home and rest before Isabelle’s service. Aunt Leslie agrees that any trips back and forth would be too much for them.
Instead, Aunt Leslie and Grandma Régine come to visit.