The Art of Losing

by Lizzy Mason

  But she was handy in a crisis, especially when my mom—and I—needed her.

  It was Mom’s sobs that finally cracked my shell of anger. I choked on the words I wanted to scream. Tilly reached out for me and smoothed my hair, brushing my overgrown bangs out of my eyes with one hand while rubbing Mom’s back with the other.

  “Let it out, chicken,” she said.

  I was gulping air like it was water and I’d just run through the desert as Aunt Tilly pulled me into the hug. Mom wrapped her arm around me. Inside the huddle, the therapist replaced the grieving aunt.

  “Try to breathe,” Aunt Tilly said. Her temple pressed against mine, and her hand was a reassuring pressure on the middle of my back. “In through your nose, okay?”

  I took a shuddering breath in and Mom followed. Aunt Tilly counted to four.

  “Good, now out through your mouth.”

  We followed orders, breathing in and out for eight seconds several more times. My tears wouldn’t stop, but my heartbeat slowed a little, and I didn’t feel like I was running anymore. Aunt Tilly finally released us from her grip, and we sat down in a soggy, red-faced row, passing a box of tissues.

  Dad had slipped out the door, but by the time he came back from wherever he had gone, we’d dried our tears. I wondered briefly if he had been waiting outside the door to avoid us—or me.

  “Is the other driver okay?” I asked him.

  Dad nodded. “He’s fine. He was wearing his seat belt and his airbags deployed. He’s lucky.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, relieved that at least one person’s life hadn’t been destroyed by this. But as Dad pulled me into a hug, I felt sick. I knew I didn’t deserve to be comforted by my father, who may have lost his baby daughter tonight and instead had his long arms wrapped around me.

  I should have brought Audrey home with me. She’s my sister. No matter what she did, I should have watched out for her.

  When I opened my eyes, Aunt Tilly was looking at me.

  “Harley, why don’t we go get some coffee downstairs?” she said.

  I nodded, even though I knew what was coming. She wanted to know what had happened.

  Aunt Tilly followed me to the elevator, but once inside, she hit the button for the ground floor instead.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I need a cigarette,” she said, meeting my gaze with a guilty look.

  I shrugged, thinking, Me, too. Aunt Tilly had supposedly quit smoking a year ago, but I wasn’t disappointed in her failure to follow through this time. I had an only-when-drinking policy about smoking, and I hardly ever drank, but little-sister-in-peril seemed like a perfectly reasonable time to break my own smoking rule.

  I followed her out of the elevator, through the chaos of the Emergency Room entrance, and across the parking lot to the farthest possible corner from the hospital so no one would glare at us. The stagnant humid air made me feel like I was breathing through a wet washcloth, but that didn’t stop me from pointing at her pack until she reluctantly handed me a cigarette.

  “So what really happened tonight?” she asked. “Why was Mike driving your sister home?” She let me light it before staring me down. Aunt Tilly was never one to hold back, but she wasn’t afraid of a little silence, either.

  After the first satisfying lungful of smoke, I opened my mouth to answer, but no words came. I couldn’t tell her the truth about why I’d left Audrey behind at the party. I didn’t want her feeling even one ounce of pity for me when her focus should be on Audrey.

  I shrugged again instead, willing my traitorous tear ducts to stay dry. “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought her friend Neema was going to drive her.”

  She narrowed her eyes. I felt my pulse speed up. She knew I was lying. But she didn’t ask me any more questions.

  Instead, she changed the subject to Spencer, my cousin.

  “He’s supposed to go to camp this summer,” Aunt Tilly said, “but I’m not sure how he’ll handle it. You know how he can be with kids his age. Or anyone really.”

  I nodded. Spencer lacked some social skills, but he was better with statistics than most graduate-level math students. He’d picked the winner of the World Series every year for as long as I could remember.

  “If he hates it, I’ll just figure something else out,” she said. “Next year, he’ll be old enough for that math camp at George Mason.”

  “Aunt Tilly, do you think my parents hate me?” I interrupted. I couldn’t think about Spencer’s math camp when I was spiraling through a tornado of guilt. Maybe she’d known that I’d cave out of boredom and start talking to her.

  “Oh, chicken.” She reached out to tuck my shoulder under her arm. “They don’t blame you for this.”

  “Maybe not yet,” I said darkly. But they would.

  Once we were back in the chilly air of the hospital, I steered Aunt Tilly toward the cafeteria. I really did want coffee, but I knew Dad needed a cup, too. He was used to late nights, but there’s a big difference between doing surgery at 2 a.m. and waiting for your child to come out of it.

  When we walked back into the waiting room, Mom gave Aunt Tilly a withering look. She sighed a soft “Mathilda” and shook her head. No doubt she could smell the smoke on us. But for once, I didn’t care. I hadn’t even bothered with gum.

  “Has anyone come in to tell you what’s going on?” I asked Dad as I handed him the cup of coffee. The chair sighed as I sat, as if unhappy about my return.

  “No,” he said. I tried not to read too much from the bags under his eyes. I didn’t ask if he’d gone to check on Mike again. I preferred to pretend he no longer existed.

  After what felt like days, a doctor I recognized—I think he’d been to our house for dinner—opened the door and motioned for my parents to step out into the hallway. I couldn’t read his expression, but he wasn’t beaming with joy.

  I could just see the side of Dad’s face through the glass as the doctor spoke, but Dad betrayed nothing. I clamped a hand over my mouth and gripped my necklace with the other. The pendant was a silver H that Audrey had given me for Christmas the year before. The sharp edges cut into my fingers.

  When Dad opened the door, Aunt Tilly and I were already standing.

  “She’s resting comfortably,” he said. “They set her arm—the humerus needed a few pins—and they repaired her fractured sternum. Her ribs will just take time. And they were able to relieve some of the intracranial pressure by inserting a shunt to drain some of the fluid from the swelling around her brain.” He took a deep breath. “That’s good news.”

  “Is there bad news?” Aunt Tilly asked cautiously.

  Dad shook his head. “Even though she has a traumatic brain injury, there was no bleeding.”

  He sounded positive, but I could hear the strain and uncertainty. I’d watched enough TV to know that brain injuries are bad news. And he didn’t make a “humerus” pun. He was too stressed even for that.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  He avoided looking at any of us. Even Mom, who’d followed him through the door and taken Tilly’s hand. She was squeezing so tightly, her knuckles were white with the effort.

  “Now they keep an eye on her and wait for her to wake up.”

  Aunt Tilly put her hand over her heart and whispered, “When will that be?”

  “They’ve given her steroids to try to reduce the swelling in her brain, but Dr. Martinez said she needs to be put into a medically induced coma so that she can heal—” Dad’s composure fractured, and he let out a choked cry. Tears filled his eyes. Mine filled in response. “So I don’t know,” he said softly. “It could be days . . . or weeks . . .”

  Or not at all, I finished in my head.

  Twelve Years Ago

  “Hurry up, Audy!” I yelled, dragging our red plastic wagon down the hallway. Inside, two of our stuffed anima
ls were wrapped in gauze like mummies. “This is an ambulance, and it has to go fast!”

  Audrey caught up to me as I reached the stairs.

  “Ready?” I asked her.

  She nodded, sucking on her bottom lip as she climbed into the wagon. We’d padded the bottom of the staircase with blankets and a few couch cushions to catch the wagon when it landed.

  “Okay,” I said from behind. “I’ll make the siren noise while you drive the patients.”

  Audrey’s chin started to tremble. “I want to make the siren noise,” she said.

  I almost said no, almost insisted that I had to be the one to do the siren, but I didn’t want her to cry and get me in trouble before I’d even done anything wrong. So I told her to hold on to the sides of the wagon.

  “Now!” I yelled and gave the wagon a push. Her siren noise quickly morphed into a scream.

  Audrey plunged down the stairs without flipping out of the wagon—which was amazing enough—but it was nothing short of a miracle that she didn’t crack her head open on the hardwood floor when she landed. She had a goose egg on her forehead and had scraped one elbow and both knees. The padding we’d arranged had done almost nothing to break her fall.

  Her cries were so much worse than they would have been if I hadn’t let her make the siren noise. I should have told her to keep her mouth shut.

  Mom came running, her face a wild mask of terror. She scooped Audrey into her arms and started firing off questions: “What hurts and where?”

  When Audrey pointed to her head, Mom whisked her into the car, leaving me behind with Dad. He sat me down on the stairs, the scene of the crime.

  “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?” he yelled, looming above me.

  I nodded, my lower lip trembling. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “You can apologize to your sister,” he said. “You could have killed her.”

  Audrey was okay, no concussion or broken bones, but those words—I “could have killed her”—stuck with me. Stuck inside me.

  I got grounded for a week with no TV, but I punished myself much more harshly. I slept with Audrey every night until her scabs peeled off to reveal pink skin underneath, and I let her have whatever she wanted—the bigger slice of pizza, the red popsicle, the choice of what to watch on TV.

  I gave myself the task of being Audrey’s protector from then on.

  Chapter Two

  As the sun began to rise, I turned my phone back on and watched as the texts, emails, and even voicemails poured in. Mostly friends wanting to know what was happening, but Mike had also texted me about a dozen times, asking me to call him. And even though I answered none of them, they all made me want to throw my phone out the window. So did the silence when it wasn’t buzzing.

  Aunt Tilly was stationed outside Audrey’s room to usher away anyone who came by, probably less politely than Mom would have liked, but none of us had gotten any sleep the night before and I doubted Mom had the energy to argue. Plus, it did the job.

  The only person Tilly let in was my best friend, Cassidy, who had spent more time with my family than her own over the last ten years. With three younger siblings, I think she liked the quiet of our house as much as she liked that Mom stocked her favorite snacks and cereal alongside mine and Audrey’s.

  Cassidy’s parents weren’t neglectful or anything; they were just distracted. Her grandmother had broken a hip two days ago, so her mom took her two younger brothers, Loren and Kelly, to Richmond to stay with her. Cassidy’s father had a business trip that couldn’t be rescheduled, so the Finches left her in charge of her fourteen-year-old sister, Morgan.

  It wasn’t like Cassidy to throw a party while her parents were away, but it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Still, she’d been nervous about it. Nervous they’d find out, nervous that no one would come, nervous that too many people would come. Nervous that Morgan would rat her out. I promised I’d be there to make her feel better if no one showed up. And I was.

  So when I texted Cassidy, she answered right away, saying she’d come as soon as she could. She added a dozen x’s and o’s.

  She opened the hospital room door an hour later. Mom gave her a long look, hugged her, then took Dad’s hand and left the room.

  I knew what Cassidy was thinking when her eyes settled on Audrey’s inert body because I’d thought it, too. My sister was unrecognizable.

  Tubes were shoved down her throat. Swollen bruises under her eyes squeezed the lids shut. She hardly looked human. Not to mention that her head was wrapped in gauze, her arm set in a contraption and propped up at her side, and her body was hooked up to so many machines that there were wires snaking out from under every available opening in her hospital gown. Her right cheek and her chin were burned from the airbag, and her chest was bruised from the seat belt. Purple, red, blue, and black cut angry swaths across her skin.

  She wasn’t sleeping, but she clearly wasn’t dead either. She was in some horrible purgatory where no one could reach her.

  Cassidy didn’t comment; she just hugged me.

  I closed my eyes and leaned into the warmth of her embrace and the lavender scent of her shampoo. But even though her hair was still wet from her shower, she exuded the slight tang of alcohol, and I couldn’t help but wonder how hungover she was.

  “I’m so sorry,” she finally whispered. “I wish I could’ve been here sooner, but I was up all night trying to find someone to cover for me at work and you’d turned your phone off, so I couldn’t call you.” She was trembling.

  “It’s okay,” I said, squeezing her harder. “Did you find someone to work for you?”

  She released me and sat in the chair Mom had vacated. “Yeah, reluctantly. The Flakey Pastry customers will have their coffee and croissants.”

  I tried to smile, but both of our expressions were pained.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, her eyes flicking toward Audrey.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  But Cassidy shook her head. “No, I’m really sorry. It was my party. At my house. I’m responsible for what happened.”

  “This is not your fault,” I grumbled. “Mike didn’t have to drink last night just because you had a party.” But when my eyes met hers, I saw what she didn’t need to say aloud. Mike wouldn’t have been able to keep himself from drinking, even if he had bothered to try. “Okay, fine, but he didn’t need you to have a party to get drunk.”

  She sighed and leaned back in her seat. “No, I guess not.”

  “Trust me.”

  “Have you talked to Mike since . . . it happened?” she asked.

  “No,” I said brusquely. “I haven’t talked to him and I don’t plan to, ever again.”

  Cassidy raised her eyebrows. She had never been Mike’s biggest fan, and she knew that I had wanted to break up with him for weeks. But she didn’t know what happened. She didn’t know what he’d done or what shape he was in now.

  “How can I, Cass? He could have killed Audrey. And yet he’s fine. He’s going to walk out of this hospital with barely a scratch.”

  “Okay, but . . .” Her voice trailed off when she saw the tears welling in my eyes. “Harley, is there something you aren’t telling me?”

  I didn’t want to tell her. For Audrey’s sake, and for my own. It was humiliating.

  But Cassidy was the one who knew all my secrets. And she had never broken my trust.

  She knew about the time I kissed Harrison Sanders on a dare at a party in middle school, even though he was the scrawniest kid in our class, and I made a big deal about wiping my mouth off afterward. I felt bad about it every time I saw him after that. She knew about the time I threw up in a Ziploc bag in the back of the bus on a field trip in third grade and left it there, telling no one that I was feverish and nauseated, because I wanted to see the new baby panda at the zoo. She knew about the time Rafael Juarez, my next
-door neighbor, asked me to sneak out to meet him one night the summer before eighth grade. How I waited for him for an hour and how he never showed.

  She’d never told anyone any of it.

  I steeled myself. “Mike cheated on me,” I confessed. “With Audrey.”

  Cassidy’s eyes went wide with disbelief. “What? When?”

  “Last night, at the party. And then I walked out and left them behind to . . .” I let my voice trail off and gestured at Audrey’s inert body in front of us. “My sister, Cass,” I said. “She said they didn’t have sex, but still. How could they do that?”

  She shook her head slowly, genuinely shocked.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” I warned her. “Even my parents don’t know.”

  Cassidy pressed her hand over her heart. “I would never,” she said. “And I’m so sorry that he did that. That they did that. But she glanced away guiltily as she chewed her lip. “Okay, don’t hate me, but . . .”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Exactly where did they hook up?” she asked. At least she had the decency to look sheepish.

  I had forgotten about that part.

  “No, wait, I changed my mind. I don’t want to know,” she said, covering her ears.

  But it was too late. I’d gone this far; I needed to unburden myself of this one last piece of awfulness. “Sorry, Cass,” I said. “You may want to wash your sheets.”

  Disgust flickered across her face, but she took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “It’s fine.”

  “Are you in trouble?” I asked her. “Do your parents know?”

  “Oh yeah, they know. Mom’s on her way home now. I may not be allowed out of the house for a while.”

  As I studied her face, I realized the circles under her eyes were as dark as mine. “How did they find out?” Her frown told me she’d been hoping I wouldn’t ask.

  “Your mom called my mom,” she said.

  Of course she had.

  Rage boiled inside me. I could hear Mom justifying it in my head already. She’d tell me it was “her job as a parent.”