by Becky Wade
He answered with a grunt.
“Blueberry muffins are on the counter,” she told him. “But if your tastes tend more toward the savory on this fine morning, we also have enough chicken noodle soup to soothe a thousand head colds.”
“I’ll eat the muffins.”
“Okay. Fair warning—we’re out of orange juice.”
As she was crossing the living room, her peripheral vision registered movement through her front window. She glanced toward it just in time to see Sebastian come to a solemn stop on her walkway.
Their eyes met and a crescendo of need, love, caution, joy, and pain exploded inside. Why had he come? To make amends? To say good-bye?
She loved him. However, her elation warred with practicality. Don’t get your hopes up, she told herself. You are a woman of logic and reason. Stay logical. Stay reasonable.
She pulled on a pink athletic jacket, stepped outside, and gestured for Sebastian to follow her. They came to a stop on the patch of driveway in front of the closed mouth of the garage. This position would give them at least partial privacy from Dylan, should he rouse himself from his room.
Sebastian wore a severe black wool coat over an untucked white business shirt and dark jeans. The hue of the coat matched the hue of his hair. His bruise had turned purple.
Behind him, the sky widened, hazy and pewter. The ice-tipped breeze paled his unsmiling face. “Are you all right?” he asked.
Obviously, the observant doctor could tell that she was off her game. “Physically, I’m fine. My bruise was less severe than yours, because it’s almost gone. Emotionally, though, I’m as unhappy as I’ve ever been. I’ve hardly slept the last two nights.”
“Why?”
“The state of our relationship. But also because I discovered the identity of Bonnie O’Reilly.”
“And?”
“She’s my friend Tess. They’re . . . one and the same.”
“What?”
She described how she’d come to realize Bonnie was Tess. “A woman I’ve trusted for years switched me at birth. She took Jonathan Brookside’s baby—me—and gave me to Erica and Todd Montgomery. Which was a terrible thing to do. Yet, she did it for reasons I can somewhat understand. In summation, I don’t know what to think—”
“Leah.” Sebastian nodded toward the corner of the garage.
She swung in the direction he’d indicated and saw Dylan standing there.
Dylan. Had heard her.
Undiluted horror washed through her.
Dylan’s face leached white. His car keys dangled from his hand. “I was going to get orange juice.”
Because he threw his stuff down in the mudroom, he always exited through the back door and walked around the garage to his parking spot on the street. She’d been so fixated on Sebastian that she hadn’t heard him.
“You were switched at birth?” Dylan asked.
No. She didn’t want him to know! Until now, she’d been so careful to shield him.
“Dylan,” she began. Her voice sounded unnatural, rattled. “Let’s go inside and talk about this—”
“Were you switched at birth?” he asked, angry now.
She pursed her lips and sought for an escape route that would enable her to give anything other than a direct answer. “Let’s go inside.”
“I don’t want to go inside!” He gestured sharply. The keys made a jangling sound. “It’s a simple question.”
“Watch it,” Sebastian warned Dylan in a low tone.
“Were . . . you . . . switched . . . at . . . birth?” Dylan asked her, as if she were hard of hearing.
She looked at him pleadingly. “Yes.”
“I’m not your brother?”
“You most definitely are my broth—”
“But I’m not, by blood?”
“There are more important things than blood—”
With a guttural sound of frustration, he stormed down the driveway toward his truck.
“Come back!” she ordered.
He didn’t slow.
“Dylan,” Sebastian called.
He didn’t slow.
She jogged downhill, but her brother was pulling away when she reached the road. He peeled out and sped away.
Anguish slid down the back of her legs, weakening them. “Slow down!” He was upset and driving much too fast. “Slow down!” she yelled.
His truck disappeared around the bend.
“Dylan!” she couldn’t stop herself from screaming, even though she knew he couldn’t hear.
His engine growled. A horn blared. Brakes screeched. Then she heard the sickening noise of crunching metal.
Quiet.
She opened her mouth, but no voice or breath emerged. To the bottom of her soul there was nothing, nothing but immobilizing fear.
Sebastian was beside her, hurrying her to his car. She was in the passenger seat. He was driving them around the curve. Dylan’s blue truck had rammed into a tree. Another car, a sedan, had pulled onto the opposite side of the road.
Leah was out of Sebastian’s Mercedes before it had come to a stop and running the way she always did in her anxiety dreams many times before. Leaden legs. Too slow.
The grandfatherly driver of the sedan was also rushing toward Dylan, but Leah dashed past the older man and got there first. Dylan’s window was down.
He looked fine. No blood. Unharmed.
Relief hit her like a visceral thing.
But then Dylan, who was leaning back against his headrest, rolled his face toward her, and she saw panic in his dark eyes. He made a high-pitched rasping sound that told her he was fighting to get air. “Can’t . . . breathe.” The words were barely audible.
She tried to jerk open his door, but the impact had warped it. “Sebastian!”
“I’m here.”
“He can’t breathe.”
Sebastian leaned inside the truck. “Can you move your hands and feet?”
Dylan gave a desperate nod.
Sebastian reached in, hooked his arms around Dylan’s upper body, and pulled him through the opening. Leah caught his legs. They lay Dylan on a flat stretch of earth and dropped to their knees beside him.
“Leah,” Dylan wheezed, looking at her the way he had when he was little and scared.
“It’s okay,” she told him, though she was dying inside. She wrapped her hand around his. “You’re going to be fine.”
Sebastian rested his ear on Dylan’s chest. Then, gently, he probed Dylan’s throat. “Injury to the larynx. It’s preventing airflow down the trachea.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the driver of the sedan said. “He was in my lane. I honked and he swerved—”
“Call 9-1-1,” Sebastian told him.
The man blanched. He fumbled for his phone.
“I need a straw,” Sebastian said.
“There’s one, ah . . .” The man pushed a shaking hand to his temple. “In my car. I stopped at 7-Eleven earlier.”
Sebastian sprinted to the man’s car.
Dylan was trying to say her name, she could tell by reading his lips. But no sound was coming out now. She squeezed his hand. He was struggling for air, like a fish in the bottom of a boat, and the sight of it was the very worst thing she’d ever seen. She wrestled down the sob that wanted to rise.
“I love you,” she told him. “So much. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Dylan’s lips were beginning to turn blue.
Frantic, she looked up for Sebastian. He was reaching into the trunk of his Mercedes. The stranger was talking to 9-1-1 dispatch.
God! she begged silently. God, please. Please!
Sebastian ran to them, knelt on Dylan’s other side. With one hand, he flicked open a Swiss Army knife. With his other, he felt the area just below Dylan’s Adam’s apple. “Dylan, I’m going to open an airway into your lungs.” Then with full assurance and zero hesitation, he slid the knife through the skin of Dylan’s throat. Instantly, blood rose to meet the blade. He twisted the kni
fe just enough to open the incision he’d made, pulled a wide red straw from his jacket pocket, and inserted it into the hole.
She heard air pulling through the straw, urgent and deep.
Dylan relaxed slightly.
“That’s it.” Sebastian used his fingers to close the hole around the straw. “Take it easy and breathe.”
The whistling, beautiful sound of an exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
“Good job.” Sebastian looked straight into Dylan’s eyes. “Did your throat ram into the steering wheel when your truck hit the tree?”
Dylan gave a slight nod.
“Your lungs are getting the air they need,” Sebastian said. “You’re going to be okay. Do you hear me, Dylan?”
Another nod.
Leah was too terrified to believe what Sebastian had just said, that Dylan was going to be okay. And much too terrified to believe that he wasn’t.
Dylan’s focus flicked to her. Brown curls fell against the bright autumn leaves blanketing the ground.
“I’m here,” Leah said to the boy she’d loved since the day he was born. The one who was more important to her than her own wants, her own desires, her own life. “I’m here, sweetheart.”
Sebastian tightened his hold on the skin around the straw, doing his best to create a seal.
He loved Leah. And Leah loved Dylan. He’d once lost what he’d loved, so he would move mountains and oceans with his bare hands to ensure that she did not endure the same pain.
He’d perforated the cartilaginous rings of the trachea. The pressure he was exerting on the wound would mitigate the loss of blood. Even so, he could feel it running down the sides of Dylan’s neck.
“I performed a tracheotomy,” he explained to Dylan, “which means that the straw is functioning as your windpipe, allowing oxygen in and out. The straw will tide us over until we get you to the hospital. There’s a trip in an ambulance in your near future. And a hospital stay. I’m sorry to tell you that hospital food is just as bad as its reputation would lead you to believe.”
This situation had stripped years off Dylan. Though he was trying to appear brave, he looked young and defenseless.
Leah’s concentration remained trained on her brother. She probably wasn’t aware that tears were wetting her face and turning her lashes spiky.
It was too late, much too late, to protect himself from her. From now on, for the rest of his life, there would be no hiding from the things she made him feel.
A siren’s blare started small and grew in volume.
“You can look forward to a few days off of school for this,” Sebastian told Dylan. “This is a tough way to cut class. But congratulations. You managed it.”
Dylan tried to smile. The straw made a gurgle and Sebastian adjusted the angle of it so Dylan would continue to receive plenty of clean air.
The paramedics arrived. Sebastian gave swift instructions. They brought over tape and Sebastian used it to secure the straw so that there was no leakage around it and no possibility of dislodging it.
He helped the paramedics move Dylan onto the stretcher. Blood smeared bright against the boy’s sweatshirt.
Once they’d secured Dylan inside the ambulance, he helped Leah into the back of the vehicle.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I’ll follow behind.”
But she was already looking back at her brother.
Leah had spent the last ten years worrying about the dangers that might devour Dylan. Today, one of them had devoured him, in part, because of her and the things Dylan had overheard her saying to Sebastian.
The ambulance ride ended at their local hospital’s emergency room. Doctors, nurses, white walls. Dylan, at the center of it all, the only entity she could see in sharp focus.
They replaced the temporary straw with a much more sophisticated tracheostomy tube. Dylan’s vital signs stabilized. The staff informed Leah that they’d treat Dylan here until surgery could be arranged—which would likely take a day or two.
No doubt the surgery and recovery would be difficult, and Dylan might face a degree of lasting damage to his vocal cords. But all Leah could think, sitting beside his bed in the room they’d been assigned, was that the consequence of his injury could have been much, much worse.
Without a doubt, he would have suffocated, if not for Sebastian.
Sebastian hadn’t sought out her attention once. However, she’d been aware of his presence ever since the accident. Two different times, when she’d looked up to find him so that he could answer a medical question, he’d been there. Because of him, she knew not to allow Dylan to be passed off to the nearest surgeon but to insist instead that only the best larynx surgeon in Georgia would do. She’d heard him sharing his opinions with the people who worked here—also known as bossing people around. At one point, she’d discovered a bottled water in her hand. At another point, a cup of tea. She didn’t know how they’d gotten there, only that Sebastian had provided them.
Even now a container that smelled of bacon potato soup and warm bread waited for her on Dylan’s bedside table. Sebastian had left a while ago, saying he wanted to give them time alone. But before he’d gone, he’d brought her food.
She’d eat it. Soon. She just couldn’t bring herself to do so quite yet.
She’d just finished texting people to tell them what had happened. Their mom, who’d yet to respond because it was probably the wee hours of the morning in Guinea. Dylan’s friends. Ben. And, after a moment’s debate, Tess and Rudy. She’d supplied their room number and details about hospital visiting hours.
Dylan was staring listlessly at ESPN on the TV mounted on the wall. Since air was no longer passing over his vocal cords, Dylan’s doctor had said it would be best for him to communicate through texts or notes until speech therapists could begin work with him post-surgery. He’d said that for now, Dylan would have his hands full simply adapting to breathing through a tube.
Indeed, Dylan appeared to be concentrating on his breaths as if in a yoga class. His inhales and exhales sounded normal, just much more audible now that they were transitioning through the tube rather than his nose.
She’d never wanted her switched-at-birth calamity to rock Dylan’s world. She still didn’t. But at this point, her preferences on that had been rendered moot. His world had been rocked. And now was the time to say what needed to be said.
She reached over and silenced the television, then waited for him to look at her.
Now’s the time. “Seven months ago, I learned from a DNA test that I’m not biologically related to Mom and Dad. I began searching to find out who my biological parents were and what happened at the hospital the day I was born. I discovered the truth. So, when you’re ready, I’ll answer every question you have. I won’t keep any of it from you.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Text me your responses, please.” Like all teenagers, he could text at the speed of light.
His thumbs went to work on his phone. She received his effusive answer on her own phone.
Okay.
“I want you to know,” she said, “that the things I discovered didn’t change—not even slightly—how I view you in my mind or in my heart. You’re my brother. You will always be my brother. I very much hope that my DNA won’t change how you view me, either.”
It won’t.
She believed him because when he’d been stretched out beside his wrecked truck, it hadn’t mattered that they weren’t born of the same two parents. He’d looked to her for reassurance because only one thing had mattered—the fact that she was the sister he’d known all his life.
Are your mom and dad still alive?
She nodded.
Do they know their kid got switched?
“I don’t think so.”
Are you going to tell them?
“I’ve been debating that question for months.” Today’s events had clarified her decision. “The answer is no.”
Why?
“I don’t want to disrupt their lives. But also, I’m
content with the way things are.” She shrugged. “I have a family. I have you.”
What happened to my biological sister?
“As far as I can tell, she’s had a wonderful life. Her name is Sophie. She’s married and lives in Atlanta. I’ve chosen not to reach out to her and her parents. But if you want the opportunity to know Sophie, then I’ll support that. I’ll help you contact her.”
He took a moment to think.
I don’t want to contact her. Like you said, I have a family.
“All right.” She did her best to hide her relief. “I love you.”
I love you, too.
The connection that had always existed between them was still there—tenacious and strong.
I’m afraid that you’re never going to let me leave the house again.
It felt good to smile. “I’ll confess that I wish I’d had a wee bit more control over you today than I ended up having. If I had, I could have kept you safe.” She clasped her phone tightly in her lap. “Back in the emergency room, I was contemplating how hard it must be for God to give people their freedom and then watch them crash their metaphorical cars into metaphorical trees. Yet He gives us our freedom anyway. Because that’s how we grow and make mistakes and fail and learn. You made a mistake today, but there’s no doubt in my mind that you’ll grow and learn from it.”
Are you gonna ground me?
“I won’t have to. Your surgery’s going to ground you.”
But when I’m better? Can I go back to normal?
“Yes, with a few small additions. You’ll need to watch numerous instructive videos on the dangers of angry driving. And you’ll have to allow me to cover you in bubble wrap every time you leave my sight.”
He rolled his eyes.
“In all seriousness, once you’re better, we can go back to where we were in our efforts to negotiate a middle ground between my oversight and your autonomy.”
What’s autonomy?
“The ability to make your own choices.” Then she added, “Darling boy of my heart.” Surely the time had finally come when he’d respond with an equally flowery endearment. Right? She waited expectantly as he typed.
Can you turn the TV back up?