by Luanne Rice
“I told Roo!” I whispered. “And she understands and forgives me! It’s just going to upset Mom.”
Isabel jostled my arm. “I was texting Roo, too,” she said. “I know she didn’t crash answering me, but I can’t sleep, Tilly. I feel I played a role in what happened to her, and even if you don’t feel guilty today, it will build up and get worse. We have to tell your mother.”
“Tell me what?” my mother asked. She walked into the kitchen, wearing her ratty black house sweater over the clothes she’d worn to Boston, and her scuffed-up old Uggs slippers. She looked a little tired from the long day, but so much happier than she had since Roo’s accident.
“Could we sit down, Mrs. McCabe?” Isabel asked.
“Okay, what is this?” my mother asked. She stood rooted in place, feet stuck to the floor, as if she couldn’t take one more bit of bad news.
“Mom, I didn’t mean to do it,” I said, shaking so hard inside, feeling my face turn bright red.
“Tilly …”
Isabel reached into her jacket pocket, pulled out Roo’s phone.
“Where did you get that?” my mother asked, reaching for it.
“By the creek. It was wedged into the bank, all caked with mud, but I cleaned it up and charged it. I wanted to save it for Roo—I knew there would be pictures she’d want. But there was another reason. I’d been texting her.”
“When she crashed?” my mother asked. Her voice sounded hollow.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed the phone from her hand, clicked the little green message icon in the upper left screen, and showed my mother the last text Roo had sent. To me.
“I did it, Mom,” I said. “I was waiting for her at the museum, and she was late, and I just kept texting her. I didn’t mean for her to …”
My mother’s expression changed from sad to disappointed to furious in about three seconds.
“You didn’t mean for her to take her eyes off the road and roll the car into a ditch?” my mother asked, her voice sharp. “Is that what you didn’t mean?”
“Yes,” I said, shrinking, feeling my shoulders hunch so hard I thought they’d meet in front of my face.
“Mrs. McCabe,” Isabel said. “Tilly would never have hurt Roo, and neither would I. You’ll see texts from me in there, too.”
My mother stared at the phone, squeezing it in a tight fist as if it were her enemy. “You both should have known better.”
“I realize that,” Isabel said. She put her hand on my shoulder. “I take responsibility. And so does Tilly. We wanted to be honest and up-front. I can’t sleep, knowing what happened. Tilly feels as bad as I do.”
Worse, I felt like saying. Everyone texted, all the time. I didn’t have my license yet, and I thought I’d never text while driving, but hadn’t Roo thought that, too? All those good intentions, yet I’d caused my sister total disaster. And it was ten times more horrible, having my mother know.
“Okay, girls,” my mother said. “I’m going to go upstairs now.”
“But the pizza …” I said.
“I’m not hungry,” my mother said.
She left us standing there and went up to her room. Isabel started to hug me, but I backed away.
“You think I’m a traitor?” she asked.
I didn’t answer, but I was seething inside. The look on my mother’s face, the fury in her voice, were now seared in my brain along with the rest of the nightmare.
“Well, I’m glad I told her,” Isabel said. “You will be, too, eventually. You might not believe this, but I did it as much for you as for me.”
“It must be nice to be so sure of what’s right,” I said.
She looked at me sadly. “¿Crees? That’s what you think? That I’m so sure?”
“You seem it.”
“No. Not true. I question everything, Tilly.”
“Right and wrong, that’s you,” I said.
She gazed at me sadly, and her big brown eyes welled up. “You’re right; there’s a moral choice in everything. I know the choice exists, but I don’t always make it. I just try.” She wiped her eyes. “I’ll finally be able to sleep tonight. I hope you will, too. Good-bye, Tilly. See you at school.”
She left, and I turned off the oven and threw all the pizza ingredients into the garbage. My stomach growled—it was hungry, even if my mind was not. I wished Roo were there. She understood and forgave me.
I thought about Isabel’s words. I was surprised to know she had doubts about things, but I still wished she hadn’t told my mother. I felt like an owl pellet, slimy and gross and full of tiny bones and beaks. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night.
I glanced at my phone and considered texting Newton. But why? That would just be further proof of the fact I was a revolting person. I could have called Nona or Emily, but after what had just happened, it would only feel like small talk. So I stepped onto the back porch to smell the salt air and hear the spring peepers and wish the night would hurry up and pass so I could stop thinking of the way my mother had looked, seeing those texts from me.
I remembered standing in the marsh with Isabel, looking at Roo’s phone. I had a soft, sweet memory of dog smell, putting my arm around Lucan and hugging his neck, realizing he was really okay. But once again I felt the same shock as the minute when Isabel had first shown me the phone, when I’d realized what my text had done.
There was one person who might make it better, but I’d have to wait until the next day to see her.
I think I’m going to die.
The Boston hospital was unfamiliar and my room was freezing cold. Was this a panic attack or was I having another stroke?
A nurse was checking my vital signs, but she didn’t speak or smile—it was late at night; maybe she thought I was asleep.
I feel so far from home. I’m not in Connecticut anymore. My mother was here, but she left. What will happen to me?
Newton said he was going to look at colleges. Visit schools, book informational interviews with alums. His life was going to go on, and mine was going to be stuck right here, in a hospital bed.
Where will he go? Why can’t I go with him?
After all my grand plans, I would have given up Yale in a second, just to stay close to him.
I tried to breathe more deeply, because I was going over the edge.
Is it possible the ambulance ride was too much, and I’m going to die?
I was hooked up to a monitor, and I could it hear it beeping quickly.
Now the nurse paid attention. She shined a light in my eyes. She watched the digital screen, the jagged line that showed my heartbeat.
“Hi, Roo,” she said. “I’m Nina. You’re awake, aren’t you? You’re at Boston Medical now; we’re going to take good care of you.”
Am I dying? I asked, but she didn’t reply, of course. She couldn’t hear me. She didn’t know me. But she sat beside me now, holding my wrist and taking my pulse with her fingers in a way that felt more reassuring than the machine.
“You’re okay,” she said. “The doctor prescribed something for anxiety, and I’m going to give it to you now. You’ve had a big day.”
She left the half-dark room, then returned, and she injected a syringe into the IV line, and I felt an instant sense of relief—but it was upsetting, because beneath the medication, my emotions jumped and slithered. The drug didn’t stop them, just drove them deeper. They were like snakes under the floor of a tent, writhing around.
I slept, then woke up again. A new nurse was on. She said her name was Christina. I wanted to ask her to call Newton for me. She hit me with more medication, and it kicked in hard, and I drifted from my hospital room, through the early spring night, south down the highway I just traveled, reversing direction, back to Hubbard’s Point.
Newton and I were sitting at the kitchen table, working on college applications. Tilly’s pizza smelled great—it was her only specialty, but a good one. There was a fire in the fireplace, and the logs crackled. Newton’s legs were so long
, his knees touched mine under the table.
We’d both lived for this—the spring of junior year when we’d really get serious about college guidebooks. It didn’t matter that I already knew where I wanted to go and had visited a hundred times with my dad. While Newton tried to figure out his next move, I could spend hours reading descriptions of Yale’s residential colleges, different libraries, courses of study.
It was our shared geekitude. Other kids might look forward to actually attending college, but this part of the process was exciting to me. Thinking carefully about each answer, writing an essay that would express who I was, what I needed. With my father gone, I wanted Newton to be proud of me. I wanted to be proud of myself. I wanted to excel, and so did Newton.
When we were twelve and in sixth grade he got a B in science, and his father made him stay up all night memorizing the periodic table of elements, wouldn’t let him go to bed until he’d mastered it. I swung by his house the next morning, to pick him up so we could walk to the bus together, and he was still wearing the exact same clothes he had worn to school the day before.
“Um, did you sleep in those?” I asked.
“Didn’t sleep,” he said.
“How come?”
“My report card,” he said. I knew he’d been afraid to show his father the B. I stood there not knowing what to say. My dad would never have gotten angry about a grade—he’d have offered to help me improve. But Newton’s father was different, and without being told, I knew he’d given Newton a hard time that night. I’d hated his dad at that moment.
It was our first year of middle school, and kids would have teased him for showing up in yesterday’s clothes. Since Tilly wasn’t waiting for me—she was only in fourth grade, at our old school, and my parents drove her—I helped him change. I went right up to his room with him and picked out clean pants and a maroon sweater.
Then, waiting in the hall, I could hear him chanting under his breath, “Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron …”
His father walked out of the bathroom in his pajamas and jumped to see me standing outside Newton’s bedroom.
“You startled me, Roo. What are you doing?”
“Walking Newton to the bus.”
“Be precise, Roo. If you are walking Newton to the bus, you can’t also be standing in the upstairs hall, can you?” He walked away chuckling. I clenched my fists with anger. Not because he’d been mean to me, but because Newton had a father like that instead of one like mine. Yes, my dad liked me to get good grades, but he’d never punish me, or shame one of my friends.
I had known Newton for two years by then, since we were ten, and I felt this overwhelming emotion I’d never known before. My face felt hot, and I wanted to bundle him out of his house forever and keep him safe.
When he walked out of his room, I grabbed his hand.
“What is it?” Newton asked, looking startled.
“Just, I don’t know.”
He laughed nervously, his eyes flicking toward his father’s door. I could tell he was worried his father would come back, but the longer I held his hand, the bigger his smile got. Mine too. We stood there in the upstairs hall, beaming like crazy.
That was the moment we’d changed from just being friends to starting to love each other.
Lying in my new hospital room, my dreams wove back and forth between childhood and now, between Newton’s hallway and my kitchen.
That’s right, now I’m at the table in our house, working on my college essay, my knees touching Newton’s. Sitting there with him, hearing my mother and Tilly talk in the next room, I write about the ecology of our little spit of land jutting into Long Island Sound, the blue crabs in the tidal marsh and the piping plovers nesting at Little Beach. I lost my father when he died, but I write about finding him every day in the world of nature he taught me to love. I feel the warmth and certainty of being exactly where I am supposed to be at this moment in time.
Then the snakes wriggled under the tent, and my heart fluttered because I wasn’t home, not at all. I was paralyzed, and medicated, and locked in, and immobile in a bed in Boston while my family and Newton were a hundred miles away.
And I texted with Tilly, and that’s why I was here, that’s why everything changed. I screamed as loud as I could, but no one heard. A nurse came in eventually, not Nina and not Christina but someone else, someone I hadn’t seen before. She took my vital signs and shined her little flashlight in my face, gazing at my eyes as if wondering if there really was anyone inside.
Isabel had been wrong, and I had been right: The night took forever, and I couldn’t sleep at all.
I rode my bike to school instead of taking the bus. It was early April, and tree branches were turning pink. Hermit thrushes and warblers on their spring migration north sang from thickets along the road.
I made it through classes and avoided Emily and Nona at lunch, eating in the library. I managed not to see Isabel or Newton, either, and I was grateful for that.
On the way home, I sought out Slater. I found him walking north on Shore Road, and I slowed down to ride alongside him.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey. Are you going to work right now?” I asked.
“How’d you guess?”
“I was hoping. Can I head to Miss Muirhead’s with you?”
“Sure,” he said.
I got off my bike and pushed it so we could walk together. The day was warm, and he wore a navy blue T-shirt with the entwined letters NY, NEW YORK YANKEES.
“How’s your mom?” I asked.
“She’s having a good week,” he said.
“Week?” I asked.
“Yeah. We figured it’s better to keep our sights on the day, maybe the week,” he said. “Better not to get as far as the month.”
“Why not?”
“Things change,” he said.
My face drained, and he saw.
“Sometimes for the better. I think it’s good not to get too ahead of yourself. Keep it in the day.”
“Everything is different,” I said. “Before my sister got paralyzed, she was the smartest girl in school. And the prettiest, the nicest, the most popular.”
“She’s the same person.”
“You haven’t seen her.”
“Inside she’s the same,” he said. “She’s probably going through a ton of stuff, and that’s shaking her. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking just because she’s disabled, she’s lost who she is. You’ve got to help her.”
“Help her how?”
We walked along, and he seemed to think about it. “Like, to hold on to herself,” he said. “If you’re doubting who she is now, after the accident, think what it’s like for her.”
“I know. She was—is—the most special girl in the world. It’s weird to think of me helping her. She’s my big sister. She always looked out for me. I can’t imagine what I can do for her.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I think you can. She’s your family, so you sort of have to, right? Maybe it’s not even a choice.”
I glanced down and away so he wouldn’t see my face turning red. No, maybe it wasn’t a choice. Especially considering that I had put her in this position.
The road meandered along the tidal creek, where I saw tiny silver bait fish glinting under the surface. We were a hundred yards away from the spot Roo had crashed.
If Slater knew what I’d done, how I had texted her, he might not even be talking to me. If he had any idea that I was the cause of her condition, he wouldn’t be saying I could help her.
We cut through a field and headed down Ferry Road, following the narrow creek toward the wide and bright-blue Connecticut River. The lane twisted and turned, and rose and fell, following the contours of the glacier-scored land. Granite walls, their stones covered with silver-sage lichens, bisected meadows and defined yards. Roo loved to photograph our town’s stone walls; some of them dated back to the 1600s. It seemed so unfair that she was stuck in a hospital bed, unable to do wh
at she loved, while I walked along. As much as I’d wished I had a talent like hers, right now I knew I didn’t deserve one.
Slater led me down a driveway made of finely crushed clamshells, toward a rambling blue Victorian house. It had ornate white gingerbread decorating the porch and rooflines, a coral-pink door and shutters with starfish and scallop shell cutouts, a cozy herb garden and two grape arbors, a ramshackle gazebo overgrown with honeysuckle and bittersweet vines, and a carved sign over the front door: CASA MAGICA.
“‘Magic house’?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he said.
It was Spanish and made me think uncomfortably of Isabel.
Lucan came limping to the door, Miss Muirhead right behind him. Her white hair was piled on top of her head, held in place by two crisscrossed ebony sticks. She wore a simple black dress with a tiny amulet pinned to it, intricately carved from wood and mother-of-pearl. I remember Nona’s story about Miss Muirhead trying to heal her sister, and I wondered what the amulet contained.
“Hi, Miss Muirhead. I hope you don’t mind, but I brought—” Slater began.
“Tilly! What a nice surprise. Slater, I’m so glad you invited her.”
“Well, I invited myself,” I said. “I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s more than okay,” Miss Muirhead said.
“Good,” Slater said. “I’m going to get to work. You want me to start with the ones in the music room today, right?”
“That would be great,” Miss Muirhead said as I wondered what “the ones” were. “And we’ll all take a tea break soon,” she added.
“Sure thing,” Slater said, disappearing through the front hall, Lucan wagging his tail after him.
“You came,” Miss Muirhead said, beaming at me when we were alone. “I was hoping you would. How is your sister?”
“Well, she …” I began.
“She is improving, isn’t she?”
“It’s hard to say. But yes. In a way. They took her off the ventilator and moved her to Boston. A special hospital.”