by M. Anjelais
“Honey, I need to call!” Leigh said. She tried so desperately to be calm, but her voice was high and terrified. “We need to get you to a doctor!”
“I can’t wait for an ambulance to get here!” Cadence gasped. “Just take me to the hospital!”
Leigh dithered on the spot, panic flashing in her eyes. “Okay, okay,” she said, her words running together. “Vivienne, can you please pull my car around front and get the back doors open?”
Vivienne darted away, her dark ponytail flying out behind her. And Cadence and I lay in the pool of broken glass on the floor, listening to each other’s breathing. His still sounded unnatural, too forced and rough.
“Why are you breathing like that? Are you okay?” I asked him, turning my head to the side to look at him. There was a thick fashion magazine under my head; it had been sitting on the coffee table. That was lucky, I realized. The magazine must have protected my face.
“I don’t know,” he snapped, still hoarse. “It hurts.” He grimaced and added, “There’s glass in the back of my head, I can feel it.”
Leigh let out a moan, but then she said, “You guys are going to be just fine,” in as a comforting a voice as she could muster. “I’m going to help you stand up one by one, and then Vivienne is going to help you out to the car.” She got me up first, grabbing the hand that didn’t have glass in it and heaving me to my feet, the only parts of me that weren’t hurt. I swayed at first, and she steadied me with an arm around my waist. I could feel the pain of the glass in my skin now, little stabbing pains all through my body, especially in my back … but none in my face or my head, as far as I could tell. That magazine had saved me.
When Vivienne got me out to the car, I tried to sit down on the backseat and yelped in pain. “There’s glass in my butt!” I said, and then laughed, a wild and frightened laugh that burst out of me without my consent.
“Are you okay with sitting here alone while I go and get Cadence?” Vivienne asked me, her brow furrowed with concern.
“Yeah, I’m fine, just go help him,” I said, brushing her off. And then I was by myself in the car for the small amount of time that it took for Vivienne to rush back inside the house, to help Leigh get Cadence to his feet. I perched stiffly on the edge of the backseat, my hand throbbing with pain from the big shard of glass that stuck out from my palm like a little mountain. I stared at it; I couldn’t stop looking, even though the sight of it was making me feel sick. Then I thought I should try to keep my hands over my lap, try so hard not to let blood drip onto poor Leigh’s car, but three crimson drops fell and soaked in even so. And then four more, and then six more, and then more than that. I spat on my uninjured hand and tried to rub the blood away, but it was useless.
By the time Leigh and Vivienne came outside, supporting Cadence between them, I was crying. I did not want to cry, and I was not actively crying; that is, I wasn’t sobbing or anything like that. I simply sat there shivering and dripping, while cold tears flowed silently down my face. Leigh was sitting in the front passenger seat while Vivienne drove, and she reached around, trying to hold my hand. I wouldn’t let her.
“I got blood on your car seat, I got blood on it,” I babbled. All I could think about clearly was the car.
“It’s okay, we’ll get it cleaned,” she told me. Her hand fluttered around, looking for something to do, and started rubbing my knee.
“My mom’s going to be really mad at me,” I said, sniffling. My voice sounded wet.
“No, she’s going to be mad at me,” Leigh said. “I’m the grown-up, I’m responsible.”
Yes, I thought distractedly, staring at her. I probably wouldn’t even be here at all if you’d told the truth.
Vivienne turned the car abruptly around a corner, and I pitched to the side, bumping into Cadence, who gritted his teeth in pain. He glared at the back of the driver’s seat, at Vivienne’s now-messy ponytail swinging around behind it.
“Drive smoother, will you?” he snarled.
“Cadence!” Leigh said, his name wrenching itself from her throat in a raw half-scream. Her head whipped around as she twisted in her seat to look at him. Her face was pinched with worry and a sudden overflowing of held-back frustration. “That’s enough, do you hear me? That’s enough!”
He glared at her. His hand was still clamped over that one side of his chest, his breathing still off. “Are we almost there?” he asked after a moment of glowering silence. Behind his head, the car seat was smeared with blood. I squeezed my eyes shut and gripped the seat with my good hand.
“We’re almost there, just hold on, you’re fine,” Leigh said. The terrible, pitchy voice that she had used to yell at Cadence moments ago had vanished just as quickly as it had come, dissolving back into a shaky mass of worry. Her head was practically on backward from twisting around to look at us. “Look, here we go, here it comes.” I opened my eyes and saw a hospital building coming up on our left. There were two places to turn in, but we went into the first one, and then almost immediately realized that we’d gone in toward the visiting entrance. The other way had been where to go for the emergency room. Vivienne backed up awkwardly and was almost rear-ended by a passing car as she did so.
“Stop it!” Cadence snapped, his face twisted in pain. “Somebody else needs to drive!”
“Cadence! It’s okay, we’re fine!” Leigh yelled. The car wheeled precariously around and made it into the right entrance; Vivienne stepped on the gas and we jerked forward, finally skidding to a stop in front of the emergency room doors.
And then we were flying, out of the car, through the automatic doors that slid open to let us in. We tracked red through the waiting area, over the hospital’s crisp white tiles. A nurse came out and put towels out on the chairs for us, and we sat on the edges, feeling stiff and sharp all over. We waited there for what seemed like forever, and I became so aware of the shard in my hand that I could feel the outlines of it under my skin. Leigh kept begging for them to let us in faster, to get us a room, a doctor. “They’re bleeding,” she kept saying, her voice high and frantic. “My kids are bleeding.” She couldn’t sit still; she paced around in front of us and kept going over to the place where you were supposed to sign in, pleading for the wait to be shorter.
When they finally took us back into the rooms, we were separated: Leigh went with Cadence, and Vivienne came with me. A young doctor with short brown hair came in and looked at me. He pulled the shard out of my hand with a pair of tweezers, and then looked through my hair, searching for any stray pieces. I had to take off my shirt and pants so that he could get the rest out of me, and it was freezing in that hospital room. I felt like I had stitches all over me, I couldn’t keep track of how many I needed. My clothes were in a little pile on the floor by Vivienne’s feet, smudged with red, turning brown in the dry air. Vivienne had a tank top under her shirt, and when the doctor was finished, she took it off and gave it to me so that I wouldn’t have to put my bloody shirt back on.
Vivienne and I sat in the emergency room by ourselves for more than half an hour. I couldn’t stop thinking about the strange way Cadence’s breathing had sounded in the car. It scared me that they were taking so long. Finally, Cadence and Leigh emerged. Cadence looked terrifying, angry and bitter and vicious. The back of his head was a mess of tangled hair and blood.
“He wouldn’t let them shave the back of his head,” Leigh told Vivienne. “They stitched it up with all the hair in the way. It’s a mess.”
“I’d rather have it like this than not have it at all,” Cadence spat.
“What’s up with the breathing?” I asked, still worried.
“He’s got a broken rib,” Leigh said.
“What do they do for that?” Vivienne wanted to know.
“Nothing, apparently. They used to put bandages around the chest to hold everything in place, but now they don’t do that anymore because it stops people breathing deeply enough.”
I was frozen, feeling sick. Even though I knew that it had been beyond m
y control, that he had grabbed me and made me fall, that I couldn’t have helped it, I had still fallen on him. I had broken his rib. It was me.
“I’m really sorry,” I said, and my voice sounded whiny and annoying.
He wouldn’t answer me. I hadn’t expected him to.
When we got into the car, most of the blood had dried already. It was then that I remembered the budgie. I hoped Wilbur hadn’t been grazed by a piece of flying glass, and that he was safe. No one had bothered to put him back in his cage, I realized as we neared Leigh’s house again.
I looked at the palm of my hand, at the thin lines that were suddenly all there was to hold my skin together, and I felt fragile. Breakable. And mortal. When you’re living day to day, just ducking and dodging what life throws at you as though you’re playing in some cosmic game of extreme dodgeball, you don’t realize that one day you could fall the wrong way and never get up again. I rested my hand on my knee, palm facing upward.
Cadence had his head turned away from me, looking out the window. The back of his head looked awful where they had stitched it up; his blond hair was matted and sticky, looking tight and unnatural plastered just above his neck. I wished I could have known what he was thinking. Was he somehow grateful, for being alive and fixed when just a short while ago he had been lying next to me in the glass, bleeding and bleeding? Or was he just angry, filled with spitfire that he wasn’t sure where to direct? I had a twinkling of a desire to reach out and try to touch him. If he had been anyone else, I would have, knowing that he, as another person, would gain comfort from touching someone who had just been through the same thing, and who had come out all right … but he wasn’t anyone else. He was Cadence, alone on his sacred ground even when he was hurt. I knew that. But my desire to try to reach him was only growing stronger.
How had he felt when he was frightened, when we had first fallen and he had begged Leigh to get him to the hospital? I had drawn comfort from seeing the faces of Vivienne and Leigh above us, from knowing that they were there and worried about me. But he, alone and with no one but himself — how had he felt? He was lying on the floor, breathing painfully with a cracked rib, and he had no one but himself there in his head. And that must have been terrifying. It must have.
“Hey,” I said quietly as we came up on Leigh’s driveway. “Hey, can you believe that happened to us?” I knew that it wouldn’t mean anything to him, but I wanted to try even so. “And we’re fine,” I continued. “We’re really fine.”
I was trying to project what I felt outward. I wanted to feel thankful enough for both of us, lucky enough for both us, and to cover us both in those feelings. He was always searching; I wanted to put it right out there in front of him. I was still thinking about reaching out to him, touching him. Just once.
“We’re so lucky,” I said, and slowly, oh so slowly, I reached out and put my hand over his. It was the first time I had ever dared to do something like that, and my heartbeat sped up at once. My fingers were trembling, and I bit my lip, trying to make them stop. For a moment, I forgot the stinging pain that was still present all over my body, in all of my cuts.
Then he turned his head slowly, and my hand stiffened involuntarily over his, in fear of what his reaction might be. I watched his eyes adjust. He was examining me closely again, like the day that I’d stood in the kitchen and declared that I was staying. And I realized that all of those years when we were little — when I’d stared at him and wondered how he could read so well, draw so well, speak so clearly, think up such clever games to play — he’d been staring at me and I hadn’t noticed that he was also wondering. How I felt so deeply. How I screamed so loudly. How even though he knew he could best me in all other areas of life, I still lived so much more intensely than he did.
He looked away from me, pulling his hand away from me and closing his eyes as he did so, as though he was turning away from a disconcerting sight. “It is not lucky,” he said, his voice thin, a little snip of sound in what was suddenly a gigantic car. “I’m going to have so many scars.”
And I felt sunken all of a sudden, as though I were watching the middle seat in between us slump into a great divide. The scars. That was the first place his mind had gone: the physical marks.
He was smarter than me, better than me, and more talented than me, but he was more lost than me, too, and we both knew it. And that was impressive, because I felt incredibly lost myself. I was sitting in the back of a car stained with my own blood, and I wanted my mother and didn’t want her, and it was her fault but it wasn’t, and I was trying so very hard to do something right, even though the plan was broken and ruined and stained with my blood just as much as the car was. I swallowed and it hurt, and I wondered if I’d gotten glass in my throat, in my chest, in my lungs.
The car trundled slowly along the road. I reached out to put my hand on Cadence’s shoulder, but then all of a sudden we were in the driveway and life was continuing on, and I had kind of forgotten how lucky I was to breathe and feel and live.
We found the budgie sitting on the floor next to the shattered remains of the coffee table, pecking curiously at a piece of glass that was sparkling in the light from the windows. Leigh grabbed him and stuffed him unceremoniously into his cage, and then stood over the mess, surveying the damage. I stood awkwardly in the kitchen and watched her, dread rising in my chest. She was going to call my mother any minute, there was no doubt about that, and then she would make me go home. But now Cadence was hurt on top of everything else. How could I leave him now? I’d already decided that nothing could prevent me from being there — not his diagnosis, not his behavior, and certainly not a stupid accident with a coffee table.
“Nobody take off their shoes,” Leigh said finally, turning away from the remnants of the table. “We don’t need glass in anyone’s feet.” She sighed, pushing her hair out of her eyes, and continued, “I’m not even going to try to clean this up, I’m going to call someone to come in and do it safely. And I have to call Sarah.”
I cringed, as did Leigh. She looked almost as pained by the idea of calling my mother as I felt, or maybe even more so. This was the second time I’d had to go to the hospital as a result of something that belonged to Leigh. Her kid, her coffee table. I couldn’t decide whether I felt worse for her or for myself.
She called my mother first, and cried when she explained what had happened. They talked for a few moments, and then Leigh handed the phone to me. I took the receiver gingerly in the hand that didn’t have stitches in the palm.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, my voice quivering with apprehension.
“Sphinxie! Oh my God, are you okay?” Her voice was loud in my ear, high and strained. I tried to reassure her, to tell her that I was really fine, the doctor at the hospital had fixed me up just as good as new. And there had been a magazine on the table, it had protected my face. I was so lucky, I was so thankful. And the stitches hadn’t really hurt, not really.
“Please don’t make me come home,” I added at the end of my speech. “I mean, I really wish you were here to hug me and stuff, but I can’t come home. Not now.”
“If I had my way, I’d have Leigh put you on a plane today,” she said. Her voice was almost angry, but I knew she wasn’t mad at me, just angry that she hadn’t been there to hold my hand in the hospital, to tell me that it was going to be all right. Angry that anything had happened at all. “But I can’t really do that, can I, not with you all cut up. You’ll have to stay until you’re somewhat healed.”
I imagined how she would feel about the situation if she knew what Leigh was hiding from her. But then suddenly my heart leaped. Maybe it was a twisted blessing to have gotten hurt. I hadn’t even stopped to think that if I was hurt, my mother would wait before making me take the long flight home.
“Okay,” I said breathlessly.
“I love you, Sphinx,” she told me. “You have no idea how much your father and I wish we were there to be with you.”
“I know, Mom. I love you too,” I said. �
��But I’m fine. Really. I got lucky.”
“I’m happy you’re feeling positive,” she said, and let herself laugh briefly. “Here, talk to your father. He wants to hear your voice.”
My father hardly let me speak when he got on the line. His voice was far louder and angrier than my mother’s had been, and although I knew his anger wasn’t really directed at me, I felt a sinking feeling in my chest. I held the phone to my ear with a shaking hand and listened in silence as his declarations that he’d known something like this would happen melded together with questions about how I was feeling.
“I love you, Dad,” I said, in a small voice, when he finally trailed off into silence of his own.
I could hear him breathing, sounding slightly winded.
“I want you home as soon as possible,” he said, his voice hardened. I felt tears stinging my eyes. I knew that meant he loved me too. He just couldn’t say the words right then. He was still too angry. It was like all those years ago, when he’d stormed out after I’d gotten cut.
A half hour later, a man came to clean the glass and the blood from Leigh’s living-room rug. Cadence and I sat in the kitchen and watched him do it, and took Tylenol with large glasses of water to stop the throbbing in our wounds. The cleaning man looked at us out of the corner of his eye as he worked. He was probably wondering what had happened, pondering what events could have led up to two sensible-looking teenagers catapulting through a glass coffee table. I almost wanted to ask him what scenario he had come up with in his head.
For a few days afterward, it felt like we were all walking on eggshells. Leigh was feeling guilty and traumatized, and the table itself was missing, a void in the living room. Cadence and I were still hurting, although I found an odd sense of comfort in knowing that we were hurting in the same ways, because we’d gone through the table together. Now Cadence had marks that connected him to me, just like I’d always had my scar to connect me to him.
Leigh ordered another table online, a wooden one this time. She was through with having glass tables in her house, and I couldn’t blame her. While we waited for the new table to arrive, we sat in the living room holding our mugs of tea instead of setting them down, and watched movie after movie. We were trying to do nonactive things, because Cadence was supposed to move around as little as possible, but he ditched us and went up to the attic in spite of the doctor’s orders, and painted more blue onto his canvas. Leigh and I watched television alone then, chick flick after chick flick. Thankfully, she remained silent while we did so. When I found myself getting embarrassingly teary-eyed over the soppy parts, she didn’t call attention to my quiet sniffles.