Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  “What about a meeting—think she’d be at one?” Nate asks. He’s been driving me around the city for the past hour.

  “She just got back from one,” I say.

  Ben leans forward, as close to me as he can be from the backseat. “Is there anywhere else she used to get her pills?”

  We went to Harvard Square. We checked the angel at the garden. Drove all around our neighborhood. Went to the coffeehouses near our place. She’s gone.

  “I don’t know. Jo said it was just Harvard Square. She’s looking, too.”

  I call Drew. My sister can be mad at me for calling him later. I know she’ll be ashamed that he knows her business like this, but I’m beyond caring about things like that right now.

  “Hello?” His voice is uncertain. Maybe he’s hoping it’s her. Sometimes Nah borrows my phone, since hers is never on her.

  “I can’t find Hannah. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  “What do you mean you can’t find her? What happened?”

  He’s trying to sound calm, but he isn’t, not by a long shot.

  “I underestimated maybe how hard the first birthday without them would be, and then we found out—”

  “Wait—it’s her birthday? Today?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  He swears quietly. “No. She’s not on social. We never … I had no way of—Shit. Where are you?”

  “We’ll come get you. I’m putting you on speakerphone. Tell Nate how to get to your house.”

  Nate pulls back onto the road while Drew directs him. Ben rests a hand on my shoulder. I grab hold of it. I wish Hannah could stay clean and I wish our parents weren’t dead and I wish my aunt and uncle weren’t moving and that the waves would stop coming just when it seems like the sea is calm.

  Drew’s waiting outside a run-down house when we pull up, hands shoved deep in his pockets. He still looks like a drug dealer to me, with his hoodie and the way his shoulders hunch up, like he’s trying to disappear. Nah has kept Drew in the loop enough that he knows she has a sponsor, knows she’s clean. But I haven’t seen him since that night at the hospital.

  He jogs over to the car and dives into the back seat next to Ben.

  “Hey.” Drew leans forward. He’s thin. Gaunt, even. Like not being with her is eating him away. “Do you have Jo’s number? Hannah might have—”

  I shake my head. “She’s the first person I called.”

  “I checked in with everyone I know from school—she hasn’t showed up at any parties. I don’t know if she’d know about them anyway,” he says.

  Nate glances at me. “Should we go back to Harvard Square, where her hookup is? Maybe it took her a while to get across the city—she got on the T.”

  I look at Drew, and he nods. The car is silent for a few moments, except for the sound of the tires going over bumps.

  “What happened?” Drew finally asks.

  I tell him and he rests his head in his hands, like he’s going to be sick. “Why the fuck does she keep shutting me out?”

  “She’s not shutting you out. Jo thinks Nah needs to go it alone for a while, and I agree,” I tell him. “Nah just…” I glance back at Ben, who’s looking at Drew with concern. “Maybe you and Ben can talk later. He can explain, I think.”

  Ben nods. “I speak Winters now.”

  “If she’s using…” Drew looks up at me, his eyes too bright, wild with fear. “If she goes back to her old dose—”

  “She’ll call Jo,” I say. “I know she will. She’s almost made it to five months. There’s no way she’d go back to day one so quick. She hates day one.”

  “Every addict does,” Drew says. “But that doesn’t stop them.”

  Hannah is not going to die tonight. This is just a sim. Another death sim.

  It’s easier to face things when you’re ready for them. Not even death can blindside you then.

  We get to Harvard Square, but there is no Hannah. We talk to messed-up kids outside the train station, where they all congregate, steps from the university. One of them thinks he may have seen someone like her, but he can’t remember. He’s too high. Too gone.

  When we get back in the car, Drew’s phone buzzes, and he goes pale as he reads whatever text came in. His fingers fly across the screen.

  “What?” I say. “Is that her?”

  He shakes his head, brings up GPS. “I know where she is.”

  Nate glances at the screen. “Good—we’re already going in that direction.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “It was my cousin, not her,” Drew bites out. “They ran into each other on the T.”

  He swipes through his phone and holds it up to his ear, eyes scanning the passing cars. I can hear it ring. The ringing stops, and someone on the other end starts to say something, but Drew cuts him off, his voice full of fury.

  “I am going to fucking kill you for taking her there,” he says. His cousin—I’m guessing it’s his cousin—starts to speak again, and Drew growls, “Shut up. How much?”

  The guy on the phone says something, a number I guess, and Drew curses. How much? means: How many milligrams? How many pills? How many chances to die?

  Nate and Ben and I sit, silent, as Drew loses his mind on his cousin, anger masking the sheer terror I can see in his eyes. This doesn’t feel like a sim. Not even a little bit.

  Mom. Mom, please. Fix this, please.

  When Drew hangs up, he falls back against the seat and stares out the window, the phone clutched in his hand. His face is so pale.

  “Is she … She’s using? He gave her something?” I can’t breathe.

  She’s been sober for so long. It’ll be too easy to overdose if she takes the same amount she used to. It says that in the books, the websites. The pamphlets from all the rehabs and doctors and places that were supposed to make her better.

  “Yes. My cousin left the party, so she could have taken more.” Drew grips the back of the driver’s seat. “Faster, Nate.”

  “On it,” my cousin says.

  I have been here before. A pocket of spacetime that keeps happening, over and over. And I can’t change the outcome. It is not up to me at all. It never has been.

  “Creation. Destruction. Creation. Destruction.”

  I don’t realize I’m saying this out loud until Nate says, “Buzz, you’re freaking me the fuck out.”

  As we race toward Hannah, I feel a quickening, like I’m in the lab and five things have come together all at once, suddenly making sense. Making one thing true.

  I close my eyes. Breathe.

  Maybe we will get a chance to save her life again tonight. But in the end, Hannah has to save herself. She’s going to have to believe she can do right by the miracle.

  Tonight, my sister will live or she will die.

  I can’t work this problem.

  I am not in control.

  A strange peace settles over me. The fear and anxiety and horror of it all is still there. The urgency, too. I’m not giving up, not ever. But it’s like when I’m meditating: That’s all on the surface. Underneath: quiet.

  Nonattachment doesn’t mean not loving Nah. But this peace, this stuff under the surface of all the waves—that’s the place I can be, no matter what happens. Death to the waves. Or … not to the waves themselves. Death to letting them sweep me off my feet. I can just … ride them.

  This is what River meant.

  It’s just a ride.

  Nate presses on the gas.

  45

  Mae

  ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

  Earth Date: 10 May

  Earth Time (EST): 20:06

  Ten minutes later, we’re pulling up in front of a house on the other end of Cambridge, and Drew is out of the car before it stops. I run to catch up with him. A few people are smoking on the porch, but he ignores them, just walks right through the front door like he owns the place. He grabs the first guy he sees in the hallway.

  “A girl—black hair. Pretty. Where is she?”


  The guy holds his hands up. “Whoa, the fuck you—”

  “Where. Is. She.”

  A girl sitting cross-legged on the couch glances at us after taking a massive hit from a bong. “She’s with Sean. Down the hall. I’d knock if I were you.”

  Drew’s face drains of color, and he lets go of the guy. He looks at me.

  I shake my head. If she’s with some other guy, then things are so bad. Hannah doesn’t want anyone but Drew.

  “Come on,” he growls as he turns and heads down the hall. He stops for just a second in front of a closed door, then pushes it open.

  “What the fuck?” a guy yells as Drew storms in.

  Terror and misery and a thousand unnameable things flash over Drew’s face, and then he lurches across the room. I run to follow him, barely seeing the shirtless guy who’s fallen off a bed onto the floor.

  “Hannah,” Drew’s saying, already on his knees, leaning over the mattress. My sister’s lying on it, topless, and he’s shaking her. “Baby, wake up.”

  I am screaming words and she’s not moving. I can’t, she’s—“NO.”

  I reach into my bag for the Naloxone, but it’s not there. It’s not there.

  “Drew, I don’t have it. The Naloxone. It must have fallen, I don’t know, I don’t have it—”

  “911,” Drew says, not looking at me.

  “I thought she was sleeping,” the guy says, staring at the bed. “Fuck. She was just—we were—”

  Drew starts doing CPR, and I’m trying to unlock my phone, but my hands are shaking too bad. One of Nah’s arms is dangling toward the floor, and everything I ever thought I believed or knew goes out the window because I am praying to who or what I don’t know, but somebody has to be in fucking charge and I am praying praying praying to a God I don’t believe in.

  “911, what’s your emergency?”

  “My sister, she’s … I think she’s overdosed and—”

  “Is your sister unconscious?”

  “Yes,” I sob. “Yes.”

  “Is she breathing?”

  “I don’t know. Drew, is she breathing?”

  He shakes his head, intent on his work. Ben’s in the room now, and I’m crying too hard to speak or think or hear, so he grabs the phone and talks to the woman on the other end and I fall next to Drew and grab Hannah’s hand, which is cold, the fingers tinged slightly blue, and I know what that means because I researched overdoses and my sister isn’t breathing.

  “Hannah,” I whisper, my forehead falling to the pillow. “Hannah, please.”

  Drew is working so hard, his mouth against hers, giving her all he can. “Come on, baby, come on,” he says, pumping her chest.

  I turn to the guy. He’s staring at her, at us, but totally out of it.

  “When did she stop breathing?” I shout.

  “I don’t know, I … I thought she was sleeping, I don’t know. Look, I didn’t do anything, she just—”

  Brain damage begins four minutes after loss of oxygen, death eight minutes after.

  Nate pushes his way into the room, and he’s on the guy in seconds. “What did you give her?”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  My cousin shoves the guy, hard, and I’m surprised, but that’s stupid—just because he’s wearing one of my blouses doesn’t mean he’s not strong.

  “Listen, you Harvard fuck, you tell me what you gave my cousin or I’ll—”

  “Okay, fuck, stop. Oxy, with a little—just a little—fentanyl in it.” The death drug. The one killing everyone. “But it wasn’t—”

  “How much?” I say.

  “Come on, baby,” Drew says just as the other guy says he can’t remember, maybe eighty milligrams, but she’d had something before he gave them to her and Drew says, “Fuck,” and I have never seen someone look at another person with so much love and terror as Drew looks at my sister and then I hear the sirens.

  My sister is dying.

  “Come back,” Drew says. Because she left. Because she’s gone. “Come back.”

  Nate runs out and then the paramedics rush in and Drew moves away, his eyes never leaving Hannah. We all talk at once.

  “What’s her name?” the paramedic says, all business. She checks Hannah’s pulse, frowns.

  “Hannah,” I say.

  “Nalaxone,” she says, holding out her hand. Her partner places a syringe in it and she takes Nah’s arm, finds a vein, and slides the needle in. Nothing.

  We wait.

  Nothing.

  My sister is dead.

  Then—

  Hannah gasps, her back arching as the air rushes into her lungs. I call out to her, and she looks at me, eyes glazed and wide with fear.

  “You’re okay,” I say. “It’s me. You’re okay.”

  She doesn’t say anything. I push past the paramedics, grab her hand. It’s so cold.

  “Hannah. It’s me. It’s me.”

  I wait, and the longer I wait, the more my heart sinks. Brain damage. I’ve lost her after all.

  A sudden, deep knowing fills me: I will survive this. I love her, and I will survive loving her. Loving anyone.

  “Mae?” she rasps.

  “Yes.” I’m sobbing hard, and I can barely get the words out. “It’s me. You’re okay? You’re okay. You’re okay now.”

  There’s movement out of the corner of my eye, and Drew is turning around, his back to us, shoulders shaking, his forehead against the wall.

  Nah turns over and vomits all over the floor. Everyone but me jumps back. I keep my eyes on my sister, one hand in hers, and I wipe her mouth with the sheet while the paramedics do things.

  “Don’t be scared,” I say. “There’s help.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

  “It’s okay. Everything’s okay now,” I say.

  I have to move so the paramedics can do their work, but I keep my hand in hers. They shine light in her eyes, and she winces.

  “I was drowning,” she says as they load her onto a stretcher. “But it was nice. Warm. I don’t think it hurt them. Not the whole time, at least. Not at the end. I think it wasn’t so bad.”

  A weight lifts off me then, as though a heavy bird of prey had been sitting on top of my chest since the wave. That had been the worst part, maybe, about all of this: not knowing how much it hurt when they died.

  Hannah closes her eyes and sighs. I think she’s asleep, but then she says, “It’s okay that they weren’t together. You’re never really alone. I know that now.”

  “Miss?” The male paramedic gently taps my arm. “We need to get her in the ambulance. You can come with, if you want.”

  I nod and let go of Hannah’s hand, then turn to my cousin.

  “Nate, can you—” I start, but he pulls me into his arms and my words get lost against his shirt.

  “Go,” he says. “We’ll see you there. Text me which hospital.”

  “Okay.”

  Nah opens her eyes for a second. “Thank you,” she whispers to the paramedic.

  She looks at my sister, surprised. Hannah’s eyes close, and the woman turns to me.

  “You’ve got a fighter here.” She wheels Hannah out, past the throng of partyers, who stare at us all, shocked.

  Drew is still in the corner, looking in the direction Hannah went.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  He blinks and looks around, as if he’s just noticing we’re here. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You kept her here,” I say. “You saved her. Again.” I wrap my arms around him. “My parents would have loved you.”

  It’s the highest praise I could give anyone.

  When I pull away, Drew looks down, overcome, and then I kiss Ben because you never know how many kisses you get and then I hurry out of the room, toward my sister. My sister, who is alive.

  When I Died

  some deaths give

  life

  Bed Railing

  Emergency Room

  Mass General Hospital


  46

  Hannah

  I guess some people need to get as close to death as possible before they realize they don’t want to die after all.

  Under the wave, I found out what I was made of. Realized no one is going to save me but me, that there is sometimes a choice—to stay or go—and that you might not know what you’ll choose until the breath has left your lungs and somewhere, past the blood pounding in your ears and the goodbye, world of a poppy high, you suddenly come face-to-face with the voice in your head, the hidden you, that spark of light that has been singing you out of the darkness for as long as you can remember. And she is wise and beautiful—maiden and mother and crone—and she says, she says, You are enough. And now you have a choice: to float or drown, and if you are enough, then drowning isn’t an option.

  And just when you’re not sure how to keep your head above water, you see your mother doing boat pose on top of the ocean. Making herself a lifeboat. Looking at you like you can be your own lifeboat, too.

  And then, far away on the shore, you hear a voice you love say, “Come back.”

  So I did. I pulled my face out of that dark water, arched my back, reached behind me for my feet, and rode that wave that was trying to drown me, rode it all the way to the shore. One boat against the ocean. With the ocean.

  But I didn’t come back for Drew. Or Mae. Or even for Mom and Dad. I came back for me.

  Because this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb. That’s what the poem Jaipriya gave me was about. Rebirth. That poet was right: This darkness is the womb. One more chance to do right by the miracle.

  I press my palms against the rough hospital sheets and think, We did it. I birthed myself, and it was a long and hard and painful labor, but I am alive and I am here. For good. Somewhere deep down inside me I knew—I know—that I won’t get another chance. Use it or lose it.

  “Well, Blue, you look like shit.”

  I open my eyes, and there’s Jo standing in the doorway of my hospital room, arms crossed, a phoenix tat hissing at me from its perch near her elbow. She looks like she’s just come from a goth biker meeting, all leather and ass-kicking boots and dark purple lipstick.