“Um, I have a problem,” Zoe said.
“Right now?” I turned to her.
“My cut is bleeding again.” She raised her arm to show me the splotch of red seeping through her bandage.
“Okay. Okay,” I repeated, as though if I kept saying that word, things would actually become okay. Like it was a magic spell. Maybe if I clicked my heels three times it would work. “Raise your arm again, above your head. I’ll get you a new bandage.” I’d also check if there were any stray pain relievers in the drawer the bandages had come from.
The kitchen was freezing. Not surprisingly, because the window was still wide open. I sniffed deeply, hoping the rotten-eggs scent was gone. I sniffed again. If I did smell it, it had become faint. That was a relief, at least.
I got a fresh bandage, but I didn’t see pills anywhere in the drawer or spilled on the counters or among the debris piles on the floor. Maybe Zoe would know where their mom kept children’s Tylenol.
I ran back into the living room, waving the bandage with one hand and rubbing at my chest with the other. It ached. Before I saw the doctor and got diagnosed with the asthma, I used to feel like this during soccer practices. My face would turn beet red and everything from my rib cage to my shoulders would feel so tight after I’d been running up and down the field. “Do you have a side stitch? Try raising up your arms while you run,” Neha had suggested. That never helped. I hated feeling so much weaker than everyone else on the team. Even after I got diagnosed, I didn’t want to go back to playing. Having asthma made me feel kind of ashamed. I didn’t want to have to stop in the middle of games for puffs of my inhaler with everyone watching. Maybe sometimes that’s why I forgot to bring it to school.
Although I really wished I had my inhaler as I hustled through the Matlocks’ house.
While changing Zoe’s bandage, I could see that the bleeding was only seeping a little—Oscar’s legs must have been pressing directly on the cut when we were carrying him, and that had opened the wound again. “If you rest that arm, it should be fine,” I said. “But keep it raised for now.”
We stood shivering next to Oscar, who lay motionless on the couch. I had absolutely no idea what to do next. I pressed my hand to my phone, willing the internet to come back to it. For text messages from my mom and dad, Andrea, and Neha to flood the screen. But without power, that wasn’t going to happen. How am I supposed to figure out what to do?
I blinked, remembering the boxes that had blocked us on the screened porch. “Encyclopedias…some other old books.”
“Wait here—I’ll be right back.” When Zoe opened her mouth to protest, I added, “I’m going to be moving around those book boxes, and you can’t help me—not with that.” I pointed at her injured arm. “Stay with Oscar.”
“Why are you going through the book boxes?” she asked. “How is that going to help us?”
“You’ll see!”
“Are you going to bring Jupiter back inside too?” she hollered after me.
“Good call,” I yelled back at her. Poor Jupiter. I’d forgotten his box was on the cold porch. Although it was equally cold inside. Four layers was back to feeling barely adequate.
When I returned to the living room minutes later, my arms were full of heavy, dusty, leather-bound books, with the emergency box holding Jupiter on top of the stack. And that was only the first batch, with the B, F, L, and S encyclopedias—for broken bone, first aid and fracture, leg, and sprain. Once I piled them on the coffee table, I went back to root through the other box. In it, I found a home medical guide—which looked really old based on the hairstyles of the people on the cover—and a Girl Scout handbook. Sweet. There must be some information inside that could guide us.
Zoe was already flipping through the B encyclopedia. “I looked up ‘broken bone’ but there isn’t an entry,” she said. “I don’t know if these books are going to help.”
“Try another one. How about F, for ‘first aid’ and ‘fracture’?”
Zoe started turning the pages. “Wait, how do you spell ‘fracture’?” I spelled it out for her, hoping I got it right. When you misspell something while Googling, it helpfully suggests the correct spelling for your results. Turning pages was painfully slow, in comparison to scrolling. It was strange to think that this used to be how people got all their information, before computers and smartphones and search engines. Research projects must have taken forever back then.
I opened the home medical guide, whose pages were thick and yellowed. The illustrations were black and white, and all the medical stuff pictured appeared outdated. The sample thermometer was glass—not digital. The bandages were in a tin box. I bet they weren’t even the waterproof kind. I turned back to the table of contents, then ahead to the section on first aid. “Sprains and Broken Bones” was the second header. I leaned closer, running my fingertip underneath the words as I read them.
It said that you really needed a doctor and an X-ray machine to determine if a bone was sprained or fractured, although I was pretty certain it was the latter—even if the cracking sound I’d heard when Oscar fell was from the monkey bars breaking and not his leg. Symptoms of a break were: a snapping noise during an injury (check?); bruising, puffiness and swelling, and tenderness (check); pain and difficulty moving the injured area or when the area is touched or bears weight. “Oscar,” I said, “I’m going to touch your leg. Very gently. Let me know if it hurts, all right?”
He nodded. He’d become much quieter now that he was on the couch. I didn’t know whether that was a good or worrisome sign. I reached out my hand, then gently pressed above his ankle. He howled like I’d punched him. I jerked my hand back. A check for that symptom too.
So, I was going to officially consider his leg broken. My stomach clenched. I turned back to the medical guide, hoping it would tell me what to do now. Its steps for treatment were:
• Get medical care immediately.
• Don’t let the injured person eat or drink until you do, in case surgery is required.
• Remove clothing from the injured area.
• Apply ice.
• Keep the limb in the position you found it.
• Make a simple splint, using a board or rolled-up newsprint and elastic tape or an ACE • bandage.
My heart sank while I read the list. The instructions were simple, but most I couldn’t follow. There was no way to immediately seek medical care, unless we left the house and started walking—but Oscar couldn’t do that with a broken leg. Anyway, it said to keep the limb the way I’d found it, but I’d found his foot gruesomely twisted, and I couldn’t believe that leaving it that way would have helped him at all.
Whatever ice was unmelted in the freezer-tomb was inaccessible to us, unless Zoe or I suddenly developed superhero strength and managed to lift the fridge back upright, which would only make it a danger again.
It was too cold to remove his clothing, and assuming it might be a while—a long while—until Oscar could see a doctor… Not eating or drinking seemed like a terrible idea. Hunger wouldn’t help him. In fact, we hadn’t eaten lunch, so I should already be foraging for dinner. Dinner. That meant it had been almost twenty-four hours. I still couldn’t believe no one had come to find us yet. I didn’t want to think about what that meant.
The only instruction I could follow was to make a simple splint—if I could find the right materials. I scanned the room. No boards shorter than the length of Oscar’s lower leg, and the few broken bits of wood strewn across the floor looked like they might be splintery. Then my eyes stopped on a flood of glossy magazines spilling out of an overturned wicker basket. A rolled-up magazine could work the same way as a newspaper, right?
I snatched one of the magazines and wiped off the dust, then rolled it up like a sturdy tube. Measured against Oscar’s lower leg, it was the perfect size. I felt a rush of satisfaction for being so resourceful—before I remembered tha
t if I really was good at babysitting, he wouldn’t have been climbing on an unsafe swing set in the first place, and nobody would need a homemade splint. Nor would Zoe have that deep cut.
I rubbed at my chest, coughing to clear it. “Do you guys have any ACE bandages?”
“Huh?” Zoe looked up from the encyclopedia. “What are those?”
I sighed, even though I probably didn’t know what one was when I was ten. “It’s a stretchy fabric you can wrap an injury in, to make a sling, or to cover a cast…” What other stretchy things we could use to fashion the splint?
When Zoe shook her head, I figured it out. She was wearing a soft, wide, stretchy elastic headband. I reached my fingers up to loosen the polka-dot hair tie that had been keeping my curls contained in a bun. I’d double-tied my hair yesterday morning, so there were actually two I could use.
“Give me your headband?” Dutifully, she pulled it off her hair, which still stayed pressed against her head, like a phantom headband was keeping it in place. That was probably the work of grease—we were all in need of showers. I arranged the headband around the upper part of Oscar’s leg and the magazine splint, tugging it tight. Then I secured the bottom with my linked hair ties.
“We just made a splint,” I said, a proud smile curling at my lips. “But I don’t know how well it’ll stay on—so don’t move, Oscar.”
He only made a sad little groan in response, and my smile vanished. Even the small successes I had were reminders of how overwhelming this all was, how utterly incapable I was of being in charge. Or to keep us safe.
10
We spent what was left of the afternoon in the living room. Oscar rested on the couch, cuddling Jupiter and intermittently moaning when he would forget to keep still and try to move his leg. I’d ventured into the downstairs bathroom and pried open the remains of the medicine cabinet—my bravery was rewarded with children’s Tylenol chewables. There were only five left rattling in the bottle. I checked the instructions, and for a kid Oscar’s age that was only two full doses. Hopefully, that would be enough—and, hopefully, by the time he chewed all five, someone would’ve made it home and whisked him to a doctor.
While he drifted in and out of sleep, Zoe and I made use of the dwindling daylight. I divvied up between us the encyclopedias and manuals to scour for survival information. We’d spent the first twenty-four hours woefully underprepared. Whatever happened next, I was going to be ready for it. I’d found my backpack in the jumble of debris in the front hall and my almost-blank notebook inside was unscathed. Using a marker from the kitchen floor, I scribbled In Case of Emergency on the front. Inside, every useful fact or tip we’d read would live. So far, I’d written two pages on identifying poisonous berries, which I’d read about in a slim, faded pamphlet on Washington flora and fauna that was tucked inside the F encyclopedia. Of course, the first instruction had been, “When in doubt, don’t eat wild berries.” Well, ideally, we wouldn’t have to. At least I was certain about what a blackberry bush looked like, and I knew where clusters grew along the road. Neha and I used to walk from my house to the inlet, filling baskets with ripe ones, when they were in season.
I paused while reading the home medical guide, pressing my finger to the crease between pages while I reached for a pen. “Found instructions for a tourniquet,” I said.
“What’s a ‘turn a kit’?” Zoe looked up at me from the Girl Scout manual. She sniffled and wiped at her nose. I hoped she wasn’t getting sick.
“It’s how you deal with a bad cut. You wrap a bandage super tight to stop the flow of blood.”
Zoe reached for her arm, glancing down to check the still-white bandage. “Should I have had one, when I sliced my arm?” Her tone was fretful.
I shook my head. “Your cut wasn’t bleeding badly enough to need one.” It turned my stomach to think about gushing blood that would require an actual tourniquet. Whenever TV shows or movies showed injuries like that, I’d have to cover my eyes, and ears, if they were using lots of gross sound effects. “Anyway, do you have anything for me to write down?”
“Yeah, I found a chapter on identifying animals by their tracks.” She held up the book for me to see. It was dim in the living room, and I had to squint. Soon we’d need to use the flashlight and my phone to see, and then books would have to wait until morning.
“That’s great information.” I quickly sketched the most worrisome tracks: cougars and bears. Then, instead of copying the rest, I took a photo of the illustration of prints and tracks. In the notebook, I simply added, See photo of tracks to identify which animals are around. I guess my phone did still have some use besides being a flashlight.
“I know how to identify poison ivy,” Oscar chimed in, his voice woozy. “It has three leaves. So does poison oak. Write that down—leaves of three, let them be. Especially don’t use them to wipe your butt.”
I had to laugh. “Um, okay. How do you know that?”
“One of my games,” he said. “In the fourth level you’re on your own in the woods, hunting bad guys. If you run into poison ivy, you get all itchy and lose points from scratching.”
“That’s not a real tip—that’s for a video game.” Zoe sniffed.
I wrote it down anyway. “Maybe so, but it can’t hurt to make note of it. Thanks, Oscar.” It was reassuring that he was stable enough to listen and chime in.
“There are bears in that game too. If you see them, you’re supposed to make noise and back away slowly.”
“Doesn’t your game have hunters? Can’t you just shoot the bears?” Zoe asked.
Oscar looked horrified. “It’s not that kind of game!” She shrugged. I added his advice to the notebook, even though it had been years since I’d seen a bear around my house. I’m not even sure how many were still living in the forest preserve. In terms of the threats we were facing, bears were thankfully low on the list.
When I turned back to the book, I had to lean close and squint to see the words clearly. I slipped out my phone to check the time: almost seven. Before I tucked it back in my vest pocket, I tested the Wi-Fi and bars. I pressed to resend texts to my mom, my dad, Andrea, and Neha. Hope springs eternal, like Mom always says. But all my phone did was flash me the warning bubble that my messages would not be sent, suggesting I check my settings. I sighed. The battery was at 17 percent. It was way beyond time to use the emergency radio to crank it back to fully charged. I’d been putting it off because I hadn’t wanted to remind Zoe and Oscar about the radio’s existence. I didn’t want them to ask to listen to the broadcasts. If I were being honest—I was afraid to listen. In a way it was easier to not hear the news, to keep pretending that on the other side of the inlet, things were back to normal.
I wonder if our moms, and my dad, are pretending that everything is okay here on Pelling. Even though I desperately wanted them to come home, if they couldn’t, I almost wished that the grown-ups had forgotten about us, stranded here by the preserve. It was worse to think that they were somewhere out there, unable to reach us, worried, possibly hurt, and scared. Just like we were. I wouldn’t wish these feelings on anyone.
“It’s time we ate something,” I said. When I rose from the couch cushion on the floor, my head spun. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, to make things stop swirling. I hated that light-headed feeling. Before I got the inhaler, that’s how I would feel after running in gym or at soccer practice.
“Are you okay?” I opened my eyes to see Zoe watching me, her brows knitted with concern.
“I’m fine. Just a head rush. Probably because I’m hungry.” I cleared my throat, then a second time. “Any requests for tonight’s meal?”
“Yeah, something hot. Like mac and cheese…or noodle soup,” Zoe said.
“I always have soup when I’m sick,” Oscar mumbled.
I rubbed at my temples. “There isn’t a way to heat up any food, unfortunately. I meant more like… Do you want granola b
ars or crackers and nuts?” I didn’t even know if we had those. I squatted next to the food bag. There wasn’t much left in it. We’d been hungry that morning.
“Whatever,” Zoe said, curling down onto the cushion and hugging her arms against her chest.
I debated trying to do something with the orange powder packet in the mac-and-cheese box—maybe mix it with the water to make a paste for the crackers? But a sad imitation of mac and cheese would probably only make our bellies more aware of all the delicious things they were missing. It’s funny because I always thought if I were home alone and could eat whatever I wanted, I’d never tire of stuff like chips and chocolate. But after a full day of grazing on whatever junk had survived the shaking in the pantry, what I craved was a big bowl of my mom’s brown rice veggie stir fry with peanut sauce. Something fresh and crisp, warm and filling. I didn’t even want the leftover chocolate eggs. Avoiding them was the least I could do to be kind to my teeth, now that I was living without a toothbrush. I ran my tongue over them again. So gross.
The house was quiet except for our chewing. And my wheezing. I swallowed the peanut butter cracker-wich I’d made and reached for the home medical guide and the A encyclopedia, which I’d also grabbed from the porch. I flipped to the guide’s index. Asthma, pp. 68–70. I turned to the page and, in the waning light, started to read.
It was mostly information I’d already read or been told by the doctor: how asthma is a chronic lung condition in which the airways thin and narrow because of inflammation. Often mucus blocks the airways, too, which is gross to think about. Sometimes asthma is minor, sometimes it interferes with certain activities—like my soccer playing, I guess—and sometimes it can cause life-threatening attacks.
A lump of the cracker-wich stuck in my throat. I swallowed harder, and it wouldn’t budge. Maybe I was just getting nervous. Asthma could be serious, but the doctor said that I had only moderate problems, which my inhaler could control. Without my inhaler, I wondered, could moderate become severe? And how fast? I began copying down the information in our notebook.
The Disaster Days Page 10