by Luanne Rice
Sitting in the caf with TEN, I shook my head hard, dispelling this terrifying thought—Was it possible Roo and I would never run down the beach together again?
“Are you going to go see her after school today?” Em asked gently, looking at me over the rims of her pale-blue glasses.
“Of course,” I said.
Emily nodded; she could see right under my skin and knew just how I felt, that there was nowhere else I wanted to be.
Nona, though, was looking down at her right shoulder, holding the remaining blond thatch in her fist, probably contemplating a bleach job.
My emotions started getting the better of me. As much as I fought them, and I did, they tended to do that. I thought of Roo, how unfair it was for her to be in the hospital while people at school, even my best friends, talked about her at the same time they were worrying about dumb real-life things like hair color.
Roo was so smart, so good; I didn’t even care that I had always been in her shadow. Well, maybe I cared. A little. Before the accident, that is. Nobody would ever mistake me for either a beauty or a genius. My sister was—is—both.
“My mother can drive us,” Nona said.
“Us?” I asked.
“We want to go with you,” Emily said. “To visit Roo.”
“But you can’t,” I said, swallowing down the lie. “No visitors except family.”
“But it would be good for her,” Nona said, still frowning at her hair. Then she looked up, and I loved her again. “We could talk to her about Hubbard’s Point, the beach and stars, stuff she loved. Loves, I mean. It will bring her back.”
There was no rule about Roo having visitors. And Nona and Em loved Roo, too; they’d grown up with her. They wouldn’t judge her. But somehow, in a coma, Roo had become my responsibility. She needed protection, and I didn’t want anyone outside the little circle of my mother, Newton, Isabel, and me visiting her.
Across the cafeteria, I heard Marlene Nossiter laughing with a bunch of the popular kids, her snobby friends. She was in Roo’s grade, the kind of girl who was in the bathroom curling her eyelashes whenever possible. I looked over, and she smirked at me before turning toward her boyfriend, Andy Newell, and her pals Deb Bonner and Allison Meyrier. I heard Roo’s name whispered. I stood up, started over.
“Don’t do it. Don’t give her the satisfaction,” Nona said, grabbing my wrist. I saw genuine concern in her eyes, but I pulled away and kept going.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, stopping at Marlene’s table.
“Oh, nothing,” Marlene said. “We were just talking about the good news, saw it on TV. That dog your sister hit will be totally fine. Broken leg—no biggie.”
“Yeah, I saw him and his owner at the Big Y,” Andy said. “He has a blue cast. Limping through the dairy aisle.”
“Ha-ha, you’re hilarious,” I said, and felt like jabbing Andy in the throat. But I did feel relieved to know the dog was well enough to go to the grocery store.
“His owner is so weird,” Marlene said. “She’s, like, a witch. She’s probably putting spells on your family after what your sister did. I would be careful.”
“Maybe YOU should be careful,” I said. I could barely speak or breathe.
“The dog’s owner is Miss Muirhead. My mom took care of her sister,” Nona said as she and Em came up behind me. Nona’s mother, a nurse’s aide, worked for half the elderly people in town. Then, glancing at Em and me, Nona added, “She is a little bizarre.”
“What kind of name is Lucan for a dog?” Andy asked. “It’s not Luke and it’s not Lucas.”
“It sounds Wiccan, actually,” Deb said.
“Told you she was a witch!” Marlene said, giggling and dancing a little in her seat.
“You think it’s funny?” I asked, moving closer.
“Um, no,” she said, jerking back as if I’d invaded her super-precious personal space, which I totally had. I had this horrible desire to grab her hair in both my fists and pull it as hard as I could.
People began to gather. Isabel walked over with her cousin Melanie Torres, a sophomore. Two freshman boys—Teddy Messina, who’d been in our class since first grade, and Slater Jones, the quiet new African American kid from New York City—stood there looking vaguely uncomfortable.
“Mathilda,” Marlene said to me. “I am not saying this to be cruel. But it is possible Roo is a vegetable because that crazy old lady did some evil magic on her.”
I felt a surge of anger. “Shut up, Marlene. I mean it. Shut your ugly face,” I hissed.
“Nice, Tilly. Classy as ever. I’m just basically saying what they said in the paper. Vegetative state. It is what it is.” She shrugged, got up, and started to walk away. That wasn’t happening. Rage overflowed, and I lunged at her.
And then I felt the thud of someone bumping into me from behind, a pair of arms clamping around my waist. It was Slater Jones.
“Don’t get into a fight,” he said into my ear. “Don’t give her the satisfaction—just forget it, walk away.”
“Are you serious?” I asked, wrenching free to look straight into his dark-brown eyes. “Forget it? Did you hear what she said? About my sister?”
“Yeah. But walk away from her.”
“You don’t even know us!” I said, boiling over with frustration at everyone and everything. Slater just happened to be in my way. Marlene sat back down, a smug look on her face as she watched the drama.
“No, but I know fights,” Slater replied. “I’m a New Yorker. Fights get you nowhere. Rise up, don’t sink down.”
“Wow, you’re so tough,” I said loudly, sarcastically. I saw him flinch just slightly.
“Well, maybe I have to be. I know how it is to have a disabled family member,” he said.
That gave me a moment’s pause, and I studied Slater’s face. “I’m sorry for you,” I said. “But my sister’s going to get better.”
“Woo-woo,” Allison said. “Not if she’s got a spell on her.”
Marlene, Allison, Deb, and the others started laughing. I knew my cheeks were bright red; Slater just stood there with this weird, quiet dignity on his face. I felt humiliated, and worse, I knew I had hurt him.
“Miss Muirhead wouldn’t do anything to Roo,” Slater said, standing between me and Marlene and her friends.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I work for her. I do odd jobs after school, and she’s really nice. She feels bad about what happened.”
Mr. Gordon, the principal, came into the cafeteria, and I used that opportunity to leave as fast as I could. Emily called my name, but I kept going. I was too wrapped up in what a jerk I’d been to Slater and the truth of what Marlene had said.
Roo was a vegetable.
My sister had two separate brain injuries—the traumatic one caused by the car crash, and the acquired one caused by the stroke. And she would never be the same again.
I went to the library, to lay out the pages of my report on the Turtle, the one I’d started the day of Roo’s accident. I was still seething about Marlene. She had always been mean. I remembered seeing her make Roo cry, when they were eight and I was six. Roo had found a robin’s nest in the hedge behind school, and she would sit a short distance away, watching the parents fly in and out.
Roo loved all birds the way I loved owls. She’d let me sit with her, and she’d show me her notebook where she’d sketched pictures and written poems about the birds of Black Hall. Robins were Connecticut’s state bird, their eggs a perfect deep turquoise blue. Seeing us there, Marlene cackled, “Nature lovers, nature lovers!” as if it were the worst insult.
The next day, the nest was on the ground. The eggs were broken, the woven twigs and leaves pulled apart, strewn under the hedge. I had a lump in my throat watching Roo crouch down, gathering the bits of blue shell together while the heartbroken adult robins twittered overhead.
“Maybe they’ll build another one,” Roo said, tears running down her cheeks. She never mentioned Marlene’s name, but I knew t
hat she had done it, and looking back, I even knew why: She had envy for Roo’s curiosity and goodness, for the way her interests would lead her to drawing pictures and writing poems and taking photographs that got her recognized. I knew because I sometimes felt that way, too.
* * *
Right before the end of the day, I got a text from my mother:
They took the breathing tube out. She’s breathing on her own! No more ventilator. Dr. D says this is very good news. Meet me outside school. We’ll head straight to see her.
I couldn’t believe it—but what did it mean? It didn’t matter—I could hardly wait.
Although my mother taught at the middle school right next to Black Hall High, she’d been taking time off to be with Roo and deal with insurance problems. So she drove from home and picked me up; I was so anxious to get going, I met her halfway down the school’s long driveway.
We headed toward the bridge along Shore Road, past all the scenic spots Roo photographed just before her crash. My mother and I passed the accident site; it looked innocent in the afternoon light: the marsh, a winding coastal stream, a great blue heron fishing in the shallows.
“If she’s breathing on her own, does that mean she’s waking up?” I asked.
“Honey, I don’t know yet. Dr. Danforth said we have to manage expectations,” my mother said.
“But she said ‘very good news,’ right?”
“Yes.”
My pulse galloped, making me feel I could run alongside the car and beat my mother to the hospital.
“And being off the ventilator is huge,” I said.
“It is.”
“It means she’s going to get better, right?” I asked.
“We have to believe that.”
“She’s strong! She’s amazing. Now that she’s breathing on her own, she can really start to improve. It means her body is starting to work again. She’s going to know us, Mom. She is!”
“Let’s wait and see.”
“‘Very good news,’” I repeated. “Those were the doctor’s exact words?”
“Yes, exact words.”
I pictured Roo awake. I would probably have to break some of the terrible news to her. She would want to know why she couldn’t move. She would be so devastated to learn the extent of her injuries. But I was planning the words I would say to her: I’m here for you, I will take care of you, you can count on me for everything.
I pictured us at school, Roo and me. She’d be in a wheelchair, and I’d push her to all her classes. Yale might be out, because I would never get in; she would have to go to a college I could eventually be admitted to. But I would stay by her side.
Mom and I found a parking spot on the street, a small victory because the parking garage was costing a fortune. Although I might not have been a genius like Roo, I was no dummy, and I knew those papers spread across the dining room table meant Mom was cashing in our savings bonds and taking out a loan to cover medical expenses not covered by insurance.
Just as we were getting into the elevator, my mother gave me a small smile and hug. And I beamed back. That elevator ride was the happiest I had been since before the crash.
We ran down the hall, past the nurses’ station, into Roo’s room.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. Oh my God, oh, Roo.
The breathing tube had been taken out: That much was true, but it was the only difference I could see. Dr. Danforth was making notes on her chart. I threw myself at the bed, eye to eye with my sister. But she still wasn’t there. She stared straight ahead exactly as before: no smile, no recognition. Her lips were drawn back in a horrible expression—previously hidden by the tape holding the ventilator tube in place. Her head was still partially shaved, only they’d changed the bandages, so more of the baldness showed. Her incisions were more visible, dark and jagged on her scalp, stitched up, the tied-off black thread looking like tiny angry insects. I felt sick.
“Roo, can you hear me?” I asked, and then, just in case I was missing something, “Are you awake now?”
She didn’t answer; she still didn’t know I was there. I felt a sob in my throat and turned to the doctor.
“That look on her face, what is she feeling?” I asked.
“She still doesn’t feel emotion, Tilly,” Dr. Danforth said in a very quiet voice, just as she’d explained before. “That’s part of her condition. The expression on her face is purely physical.”
I grabbed Roo’s hands, held them to my lips while I cried, kissed them, and burbled spit all over: “Roo, it’s me, please talk to me, please, Roo!”
My mother tried to pull me away. “Stop it, Tilly!” she said.
“Why did you say it was very good news?” I wailed, turning back to the doctor.
“Because it really is. The fact she can breathe without the respirator is a tremendous step,” Dr. Danforth said. She was wearing her white lab coat with the little teddy bear pinned to the lapel; I am not proud of the fact that I felt like ripping that bear right off her collar and throwing it out the window.
“But I thought she’d know us!”
“Tilly, we can’t jump ahead of ourselves. Roo’s brain injuries are severe. We just don’t know when, or even if, the next development will occur. We have to be grateful for every step, even when it seems small.”
“Oh, Roo,” I said, turning back to my sister, sitting beside her on the bed, crushing her hand in mine.
“And this one wasn’t small. It might not seem like much to you,” Dr. Danforth said, “but breathing on her own is clinically significant.”
Clinically? The word was so cold, so unconnected to the love I felt for my sister. Rage boiled through me. My mother murmured something, and she and the doctor left the room. And here I was with Roo.
She lay in bed, on her left side because she’d started getting sores on her right hip. Her open eyes disturbed me exactly as they had ever since the seizure, staring with what seemed to be anguish, straight into nothing. Her lips, pulled back from her teeth in a horror-movie rictus, were forming the expression she might have had at the time of the crash: terror and dread.
A nurse came in, checked the plastic bag attached to Roo’s bed: It was full of dark-brown urine. I had gotten used to the idea of Roo having a catheter, having the smell of pee around all the time, but I hated being in the room when the nurse emptied the bag.
“You want to step out for a minute?” the nurse asked, picking up on my discomfort.
“That’s okay,” I said, steeling myself. If Roo had to go through it, the least I could do was stick by her side during the procedures that made me feel the worst.
I was the least science-oriented member of my family. Roo would probably have scientific curiosity even about what was happening to her now. The closest I came to that was checking out owl pellets—gross, slimy things gagged up by owls after eating, filled with the indigestible remains of whatever they’d just devoured: fur, blood, bones, claws, little mice skulls, sparrow beaks. I had a collection of them, picked up by me and my dad on our owling walks. Thinking of Dad right now, wishing he were here to help us through this, brought tears to my eyes.
The nurse reached up under Roo’s hospital gown, adjusted the thick tube; I tried not to think about how that felt to my sister. This was one of the few moments it helped to tell myself Roo was gone, that she couldn’t feel pain, but I felt it for her, cramps and twinges like the worst possible UTI.
When the nurse walked out, I noticed she’d left Roo’s legs uncovered. I knew Roo couldn’t feel the cool air, but didn’t the nurse realize she was at risk for pneumonia? Dr. Danforth had said Roo’s whole system was compromised. My mother had taken that and run with it, told me in a grim way that if Roo CAUGHT EVEN A COLD, it could turn into an infection, and she could develop pneumonia that she might not survive. I had become paranoid and felt like chasing the nurse down and yelling at her to keep my sister covered up, to safeguard against colds. I was furious at everyone.
Instead of be
rating the hospital staff, I took a deep breath. I stepped closer to my sister. I pulled the blanket over her legs, then took off the hoodie I’d worn to school; it happened to be one of Roo’s, from a vacation we’d all taken to Nantucket. I tucked the sweatshirt around her, to keep her warm.
It hurt to swallow. This was the closest I’d been to Roo since her seizure—the smells, the sight of her empty eyes, had been too much. But now I buried my face in her neck and held her in my arms till my heart slowed a little.
Then I eased my arms from around her, crouching down so my face was about an inch away from hers. Stroking her cheek, I brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, being careful not to jostle her stitches. In spite of what the doctor said about Roo not feeling, I didn’t want to hurt my sister.
Everyone had been telling me to talk to her, that it would be good for me, therapeutic. And my mom said maybe somewhere, deep inside, Roo could hear. I had resisted all this time; that had been my way of holding out for Roo to really wake up, to talk to us, to not be a coma girl but to be my old Roo.
“Hello,” I said. My voice croaked as if I had never spoken before.
Of course Roo didn’t answer.
“I’m supposed to talk to you,” I said. “I feel stupid.”
If only Roo would laugh, or stick her tongue out, do something to prove she was there. Talking to her now felt oddly right, and so did being this close and looking into her eyes. They were surprisingly unclouded.
“Are you in there?” I asked.
No answer.
“Blink if you can hear me,” I said, and even though there wasn’t a hope in the world, I realized I was holding my breath. What if Roo DID blink? But she didn’t. She just kept breathing. I moved closer, so I felt her breath. It was warm and steady. It was normal, so everyday, because what could be more everyday than breathing? It nearly tore me in half.