Dancing in the Rain

by Shelley Hrdlitschka

“Good,” she says, staring at the screen.

  “Do you have any loot to share with me?”

  She gives him a quick glance, then also glances at Brenna. “I didn’t go trick-or-treating, but there are leftovers in a bowl in the kitchen,” she tells him.

  “There are?” he says, jumping up and heading toward the kitchen.

  “Save some for me,” she calls after him.

  Halfway through the movie Ryan reaches for Brenna’s hand. Until then they’d been sharing a large soft drink and popcorn, but the empty containers have been placed on the floor. Ryan doesn’t hold her hand but rubs his palm across hers, ever so softly. Brenna has never felt her nerve endings spring to life so intensely. She leans her shoulder into his as the character on the screen prepares his sailboat for the approaching storm. The music builds, and a wave of energy flows between them. She leans closer and their fingers clasp. The adventures on the big screen seem small compared to the swell of sensations rushing through her body. All the awkwardness of the past week evaporates as the current between them grows. Words were the stumbling block, she realizes. The pull between them is beyond words.

  Brenna resists returning to the present when the final credits roll and the movie character has conquered all his battles, external as well as internal. She knows that her demons are all still waiting for her outside the theater. For the duration of the movie, she was safe to revel in the flow of feelings between her and Ryan.

  They step outside as the afternoon is turning into evening. The rain has not let up. Ryan pauses on the sidewalk, looking down at her. He looks like he is about to say something, but then he simply takes her hand again and leads her to his car. She doesn’t ask where they are going, just holds his right hand while he steers with his left. She draws patterns on his palm with her fingers. She feels if she says anything she’ll break the spell that still lingers from the movie.

  He pulls his car into his uncle’s driveway, and they go into the house together. As soon as the front door is closed behind them, Ryan pulls her into him. She breaks away just long enough to ask about his uncle.

  “Out for the evening,” he says and leads her down to his bedroom. She doesn’t resist. Every fiber in her body knows that she’s ready.

  Hours later they climb back into Ryan’s car. “You’re sure you’re okay?” he asks.

  “Way more than okay.” She smiles, and they gaze at each other for another moment.

  “I wish you could stay all night.”

  “I wish I could too.”

  He leans over and gives her a soft kiss before putting the key in the ignition. She leans back, melting into the seat. “Is that what you meant when you said we would create memories?” she asks.

  “Well, maybe in some hopeful place in my mind. But I really didn’t know if we would go there—or whether we should.”

  They drive in comfortable silence. As they turn the corner onto her street, Brenna’s about to ask what he’d like to do on Sunday, but then her mouth and brain freeze. A police car and ambulance are sitting at the curb in front of her house.

  fifteen

  Tears are the silent language of grief.

  (VOLTAIRE, PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY)

  Ryan has barely come to a full stop when Brenna jumps out and races over to her father’s car, which is parked in the driveway. The paramedics are attending to someone in the backseat.

  “Brenna!” her father says. He’s standing close to the open car door. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you! Naysa’s in a bad way.”

  Brenna barely hears him. “Is she going to be okay?” she asks the paramedics as they pull Naysa out of the car and place her on a stretcher. Her eyes are closed, and Brenna can see how pale her face is.

  “We’re going to take good care of her,” one of them says.

  She knows that’s a polite way of saying they don’t know. “What happened?” she asks her dad. His face is also ashen.

  “I’ll tell you on the way to the hospital.”

  As Brenna turns to follow the paramedics who are carrying Naysa to the ambulance, she sees Ryan hunched over beside his car, hands shoved in his pockets. Brenna simply shrugs when he meets her eyes, looking for answers. “We’re going to the hospital.”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  The paramedics load the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. Then, with lights flashing and the siren screaming, the ambulance pulls away from the curb. Brenna jumps into her dad’s car, and he backs out of the driveway and follows. His hands grip the wheel tightly. Brenna feels like she might throw up. She checks the side mirror and sees that Ryan is behind them.

  “One of her friends called the home phone about forty-five minutes ago,” her dad explains, glancing at the clock on the dashboard. “They said Naysa seemed to be having some kind of seizure and that I should come and get her.” He swallows, and Brenna waits, her heart pounding so hard she feels deafened by it.

  “I got there and found her lying on the floor. Her eyes were open and she was trying to talk, but she was incoherent. I managed to get her to the car, though I was practically carrying her.” He pauses. “I should have called the paramedics there, at that house, but all I knew was that I wanted to get her out of there and away from those kids as fast as I could. I was hoping she was just drunk and could sleep it off.

  “By the time we got home she was no longer even responsive. I couldn’t get her out of the car, so I called the ambulance. It only took them a few minutes to get to our place, thank God. We need to find out what she took tonight. The police are at that house now; they’ll call me if they learn anything.”

  Brenna forces herself to take a deep breath. She had known her sister was headed for trouble and yet she’d done nothing to stop it. If Naysa doesn’t pull through, it will be all her fault.

  “Do me a favor, Brenna, and call Laura and Tamara. Tell them to meet us in the ER.”

  Brenna pulls out her phone and searches through her contacts for her mom’s sisters.

  “Where were you tonight anyway?” he asks. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  Brenna thinks back to what she was doing while Naysa was getting wasted. Her face burns as she remembers. She was thinking of no one but herself and Ryan, and how blissful it was to forget everything else. That already seems like hours ago.

  “We went to a movie, so my phone was on mute. I forgot to turn it back on. I’m sorry.”

  “That was a matinee, Brenna. It’s eleven thirty now. Why didn’t you check in? It’s so not like you.”

  Brenna doesn’t answer. Shame courses through her the same way pleasure had a few hours earlier. She listens to Aunt Laura’s phone ring.

  “How ironic that it was you I was worried about, but it was Naysa who was getting into trouble,” her dad says.

  He pulls into a parking stall at the hospital, jumps out of the car and begins to run toward the ER. Brenna leaves a message on her aunt’s answering machine and with shaky fingers begins scrolling through the list, looking for Aunt Tamara’s number.

  Ryan pulls into a stall close to where her father has parked and waits while Brenna finishes leaving another message. They begin to walk across the parking lot toward the ER. Brenna quickly fills him in. “And the stupid part was, Dad was worried about me—not Naysa—because I forgot to check in.”

  Ryan puts his arm around Brenna’s shoulders and pulls her to face him. “This has nothing to do with what you and I were doing,” he tells her.

  She doesn’t meet his eyes but hears him sigh.

  “Brenna.” Now she does look up, wondering at the change in his tone. “I can’t go in there,” he says, glancing at the hospital. “It brings back too much…too many memories of…of that day…”

  He doesn’t finish, but Brenna realizes he’s talking about the day his brother died.

  “I’m sorry, but I just…I just can’t,” he says. “But I’ll be waiting in the car. Keep me posted, okay? I won’t go anywhere.”

  Sh
e nods. “It’s okay. I left messages for my aunts. They’ll probably come right away.”

  The screaming siren of another ambulance can be heard in the distance. They see the lights, and moments later it pulls up to the automatic doors. They watch as the paramedics begin to unload the stretcher.

  Brenna glances at Ryan and sees that his face is stricken. “Go back to your car,” she tells him. “I’ll keep in touch. I promise.”

  Inside the ER waiting room Brenna finds her father standing in a corner, talking on his cell phone. The hand holding the phone is shaking.

  “You’re sure?” he’s saying. “There’s no doubt about that?”

  He listens to the response before tucking the phone back in his pocket. “The police finally found a girl who would talk about the party. Naysa took Ecstasy and then drank shots of tequila,” he tells Brenna. “I need to tell the doctors.”

  She watches as he speaks to the triage nurse. The nurse gets up and indicates that her father should take a seat in the waiting room. He turns, and together they find two empty plastic chairs, but as soon as he sits, her dad jumps up again and begins pacing the room. Brenna looks down at her hands and sees that they are trembling too. Bile begins to creep up her throat. She looks around for the nearest washroom, just in case.

  Forty-five minutes feel like twenty-four hours. The outside doors open. Brenna’s aunts have arrived. They spot her dad and rush over to him. “What’s happening?” Aunt Laura asks.

  Brenna can see that both women must have been asleep when she called them. Their makeup has been washed off, and Tamara is wearing an old pair of glasses instead of her contact lenses.

  “Possible alcohol poisoning,” he tells them. “Combined with Ecstasy. She had some kind of seizure and then passed out. They’re pumping her stomach right now. They’ll let us know when they’re done.”

  Brenna joins the small group, and both aunts give her a hug. Her father rubs his face, wiping away tears.

  “Let’s sit down.” Tamara guides them to the bank of plastic chairs.

  Brenna sits and looks around the stark room. The fluorescent light is harsh, and there are clusters of distraught people talking and pacing. An old woman sits across from her, a scarf over her head, her fingers rubbing the rosary beads that lie in her lap. Brenna pulls out her cell phone and fills Ryan in.

  Another hour slowly passes. More patients arrive via screaming ambulances. There’s nothing to do but watch the other people who are coming and going, all of them as distressed as they are. Her father paces and her aunts sit on either side of her, each with an arm around her. She wishes she could join Ryan in his car and get away from the waiting-room drama.

  “Mr. Yokoyama?” calls the triage nurse, looking around. She has stepped through the doors that lead from the patient area to the waiting room.

  Her dad identifies himself.

  “Come with me, please.”

  He glances at Brenna and her aunts but follows the nurse through the swinging doors.

  Twenty minutes pass. Brenna pulls out her phone again and texts Ryan.

  I am so scared.

  She waits for a response, but there isn’t one. She puts her phone back in her pocket.

  The outside doors open again, and Brenna meets Ryan’s gaze. She stands up and hurries over to him.

  “You don’t need to come in,” she says. “My aunts are here.”

  He shakes his head. “I want to be with you. I can do this.” He swallows hard.

  Brenna leads him over to where her aunts are waiting and introduces them. Then she and Ryan sit in chairs across from them. He takes her hand in both of his. The last time he did that, Brenna remembers, was in the movie theater, before this nightmare began, when the nerve endings in her palm nearly exploded. If only she had gone home after the movie and forbidden Naysa to go to another party…

  The swinging doors open again and her dad strides over to where they are sitting. “They’ve pumped her stomach and they’re giving her fluids through an IV,” he says in a quiet voice. “There’s some concern about the seizure she had, whether it could leave any brain damage. I’m going to wait beside her bed. I want to be there… when she wakes up.”

  Brenna notes he said when, not if, although he hesitated.

  “Are they keeping her in the ER?” Laura asks.

  He nods. “So why don’t all of you go home and get some sleep. I will call the minute there’s any more news.” He looks at Brenna’s aunts. “Maybe one of you could go back to my place with Brenna?”

  “We’ll sort it out,” Tamara says. “You get back in there with Naysa.”

  “Okay, thanks.” He leans down, clasps Brenna’s shoulders and looks directly into her eyes. She wants him to say that it’s going to be okay, but he doesn’t. He never said that when her mom was sick either. After a moment he turns and heads back through the swinging doors.

  Outside the hospital, Brenna turns to Ryan. “I’ll call you when we hear from Dad.”

  He nods. “You know I can be there—with you—in a flash, right?”

  She nods.

  He hugs her, then leaves her to get home with her aunts, who have both decided to go back to Brenna’s house.

  “I take it that Naysa was at some kind of party tonight?” Laura asks. She’s sitting at the kitchen table. Tamara is stretched out on the family-room couch and has closed her eyes.

  Brenna realizes she hasn’t eaten anything since the popcorn she shared with Ryan hours ago at the movie. She puts some bread into the toaster.

  “I guess so. I wasn’t home tonight.” She takes a knife out of a drawer.

  “Do you think this is the first time she’s done drugs and had alcohol?”

  Brenna shakes her head. Her toast springs up, and she spreads peanut butter over it. “I don’t know about the drugs, but there have been a few parties this fall,” she says. “I tried to talk to Dad, but I didn’t want to worry him too much.”

  “Why didn’t you come to Tamara or me?” Laura asks.

  Brenna takes the chair across the table from her. “Same reason.”

  “Oh, honey.”

  Brenna stares at her toast through tear-filled eyes. “I was hoping it was just a little phase she was going through. I figured that any day she’d get over it and start hanging out with her old friends again.”

  The kettle whistles, and Laura gets up and drops a tea bag into a mug. She pours the hot water over it and returns to where Brenna sits with her elbows on the table, her face in her hands. She places her mug on the table but steps behind Brenna in order to rub her back.

  Brenna’s hand shakes as she picks up her toast.

  “Ryan seems like a nice young man,” Laura says, massaging Brenna’s shoulders.

  Brenna nods.

  “How long have you two been seeing each other?”

  “He’s the guy I’ve been hiking with.”

  “Oh, right! You did tell me about your hikes.”

  “But he’s moving back to Australia at the beginning of December.”

  “Oh. That’s not good.”

  Not good, Brenna thinks. An interesting way to put it.

  Aunt Laura lies down on her parents’ bed, and Brenna goes to her own room but doesn’t shut the door. If her dad calls the house phone, she wants to hear it.

  She lies on top of her bed. There’s no point putting on pajamas and getting under the blankets, as she won’t be sleeping anyway.

  She scrolls through the email messages on her phone. There’s one from Angie. They have yet to find a night for dinner that works for all of them. She has suggested the following Thursday night. Brenna shuts off her phone and gets out her journal. It’s too late for Angie to help now.

  Nov. 10

  I am SO pathetic.

  I saw this coming.

  I did nothing.

  Did I really think Angie could help Naysa?

  No, I just wanted an excuse to have her in my life.

  Fuck.

  The night drags on. Brenna
dozes off but wakes with a start when a motorcycle buzzes past on the street outside. She gets up and paces around the house. Aunt Tamara, on the couch, has rolled onto her side and is snoring softly. Brenna unfolds a soft blanket and carefully lays it over her. The snoring stops for a moment, but her aunt doesn’t stir.

  She looks in on Aunt Laura, who has also rolled onto her side. She has pulled a blanket over herself. Brenna watches her sleep, noticing how much she looks like her mom when her eyes are closed. If her mom were still alive…Naysa wouldn’t be in the hospital, and her aunts wouldn’t be here.

  Brenna goes back to her room, pulls a light blanket off her bed and returns to her father’s room. Trying not to disturb her aunt, she lies down beside her. She breathes in the comforting scent of her father on the pillow before noticing the less-familiar scent of her sleeping aunt. Climbing off the bed, she quietly steps over to the closet and pulls a sweater off a hanger. She holds it to her nose and breathes in the faint smell of her mother. Taking it with her, she lies down beside her aunt again and holds the sweater close to her face.

  Brenna’s eyes spring open when the house phone rings. She leaps off the bed and races to the kitchen, beating both of her aunts to the phone. She’s surprised to see that it’s already beginning to get light outside.

  “Hello?”

  “Brenna, it’s me.” Her dad’s voice croaks, and Brenna’s heart sinks.

  “Naysa’s awake,” he says.

  “Oh my god! That’s great!” She collapses into a kitchen chair. Her aunts are both staring at her from the doorway, and Laura’s hand flies to her chest when she hears the word great.

  “Yeah, it is. She feels like hell, of course, but it doesn’t appear that there’s any brain damage—not obvious brain damage anyway.”

  “That’s great,” Brenna repeats.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s the matter, Dad? You don’t sound relieved.”

  “I’m just…just…” His voice cracks. “I just didn’t take good enough care of her. She needed help and I wasn’t there.”

  Brenna can hear his sobs. “Oh, Dad.” Her own eyes fill with tears. “That’s not true.”