Fracture

by Megan Miranda

  Janna wasn’t sure what happened while she and her brother were gone, but when they got back, Justin had a split lip and Kevin had Decker in a headlock. Kevin released him when Carson arrived with the rope.

  There are certain things kids must know depending on where they grow up. When my parents took me to Manhattan last summer, I saw kids half my age navigating the subway while Dad squinted at the map on the wall, tracing the colored lines with his finger. Maybe kids in the desert can drain the water from a cactus. I don’t know. But here in northern Maine, we know how to treat hypothermia, we know how to prevent frostbite, and we know how to rescue someone who has fallen through the ice.

  This is how it’s done: someone ties a rope around his waist and lies flat on his stomach, scooting out on the ice until he can reach the victim. In the absence of a rope, people make a human chain. That’s much more dangerous and takes a lot more people than are usually immediately available.

  So Decker tied the rope around his waist and Carson, Justin, and Kevin held on to the other end, feet planted firmly on the shore. Only, Decker didn’t lie on his stomach. He didn’t inch slowly. He ran, like he was on solid ground. The ice didn’t hold him. When he got closer to the hole, it gave out. Decker fell.

  My bright red parka saved my life. That’s the only explanation. Because the guys on shore didn’t wait. When Decker fell, they started pulling. They hauled him back to shore, tearing a path in the ice along the way. But he already had me in his arms. He found me in the few seconds he had before they pulled him back. That alone was a miracle.

  Janna called 911 again. “They found her,” she said to the dispatcher. And then she cried. She cried in the hospital, telling me how she cried when she saw me.

  I was blue. Not the pale blue of a crisp autumn sky or the deep indigo of a cloudless night. No, I was the muted, mottled blue of the corpses in the morgue. I was dead and everyone knew it.

  But Decker, whether delusional or unreasonably optimistic, gripped me by the shoulders and shook. He ripped open my parka and started CPR, hands in the center of my chest, just like we learned in health. He didn’t stop, even though he was shaking from the cold. He didn’t stop when water seeped out the corner of my mouth. He didn’t stop when he broke two of my ribs. He didn’t stop when the ambulance came three minutes later. He finally stopped when the paramedics pulled him off and resumed compressions. And then he jumped into the back of the ambulance, daring anyone to kick him out. According to Janna, they probably let him in because he needed medical attention of his own.

  I was dead. That’s what she said. My heart stopped beating. Blood sat stagnant. My body turned blue. But I came back.

  Janna let go of my hand and fished her cell phone out of her bag. She scrolled through her call history. “Look.” She pointed at the two outgoing calls to 911.

  Time between calls, time underwater, time without air: eleven minutes.

  A lot can happen in eleven minutes. Decker can run two miles easily in eleven minutes. I once wrote an English essay in ten. No lie. And God knows Carson Levine can talk a girl out of her clothes in half that time.

  Eleven minutes might as well be eternity underwater. According to the lessons from health class, it only takes three minutes without air for loss of consciousness. Permanent brain damage begins at four minutes. And then, when the oxygen runs out, full cardiac arrest occurs. Death is possible at five minutes. Probable at seven. Definite at ten.

  Decker pulled me out at eleven.

  “I shouldn’t be alive,” I told Decker when he came back later that evening.

  “You were in ice-cold water,” Decker said. “It slows the body’s metabolism. So you don’t use that much oxygen. Or something.” Decker wasn’t in the running for valedictorian. He was a different kind of smart. Decker once joked that he would become a famous entrepreneur and I would be his best employee. I had smacked him over the head with my notebook at the time, but deep down I feared he was right.

  I looked at him, wide-eyed.

  Decker smiled sheepishly. “I looked it up. After you . . . Before you . . . I looked it up. I just had to know if there was any chance. If there was something. Anything.” Then he pulled at a string on the sleeve of his sweatshirt and watched as the fabric unraveled.

  “Then how come everyone’s acting like I shouldn’t be alive?”

  “Because it’s rare. I mean, really, really rare. Like snow in August.”

  “That’s never happened.”

  “No, I guess not. But it’s not impossible, right?”

  Decker’s parents came with him Sunday. But they spent most of the time comforting my parents, which was odd, considering I was the one in the hospital bed. I was stressed about missing another week of school, but the doctors were more concerned with the alleged brain damage. So I spent the day getting X-rayed and scanned and imaged again, and when everything turned up the same—that is, not any better, but not any worse—Dr. Logan shrugged. Really. He shrugged. And everyone continued like I was fine, which was, actually, perfectly fine with me.

  But when no one was looking, I saw Dr. Logan watching me. Like he knew, deep down, that I was far from fine.

  So on Monday morning, while the world went on being normal, I started rehab. It didn’t last long. Turns out, I didn’t have much need for any rehabilitation. Apparently I needed to go to rehab to find out I didn’t need rehab. It sounded like a Catch-22, but I wasn’t sure since my English class started that book while I was comatose. It was high on my to-do list.

  At first, the rehab came to me. A thin woman with a nonexistent chin stood at the end of my bed one morning with flash cards. Without introduction, she said, “Identify the following objects.”

  I complied. One after another, I recited, “Apple. House. Airplane. Table. Cat.” And then I paused. I squinted and strained my head forward.

  “Can you see all right?”

  “Yes.” I tilted my head to the right.

  The chinless woman’s eyes glistened. “It’s okay if you can’t remember.”

  “I can’t tell if it’s a pickle or a zucchini,” I explained.

  She exhaled, signed some paperwork, and left the room. I never saw her again.

  My physical therapy sessions began in my room, too. I was stretched and flexed and pulled and bent until my leg muscles remembered how to respond to my commands. Which was eerie because at first they didn’t listen, but they didn’t just lay there either. My toes would point instead of flex, and my knees would bend instead of straighten, and sometimes when I was drawing letters with my feet, they would spell something else entirely. Something I couldn’t quite read. Like something else was sending the commands. Something stronger.

  Though I finally managed to walk the next morning, the nurses on duty still insisted on using a wheelchair to escort me to my therapy sessions. The physical therapy room unnerved me. Treadmills and exercise bikes lined the far wall. Weight machines loomed in the middle of the room. Thankfully, nobody asked me to actually exercise.

  Again, I followed commands and completed coordination drills. I touched my right hand to my left hip bone, my left hand to my nose. I wiggled my toes. I did the Hokey Pokey. While my therapist filled out paperwork, I settled back into the wheelchair and looked around. A man struggled to hold himself upright on what looked like parallel bars. His lower body, encased in braces, followed stubbornly behind. I swung my legs in my wheelchair, which was more a prop than a necessity. I kept my eyes down until someone wheeled me back to my room.

  As Melinda pushed me to my first and last occupational therapy appointment, another nurse was pushing a woman in a wheelchair out of the room. I waved. “So, was it therapeutic?” Hospital humor.

  When we passed each other, I noticed her head was wrapped in gauze and drool hung from her chin. She turned her head in my general direction, but I looked away.

  I wondered if she envied me. Then I wondered if she still had the capacity for envy. Maybe she didn’t even know how damaged she was. And in
a moment of panic, I wondered if I was the same. I touched my hand to my chin, just to check.

  No drool. No, I was the miracle. The fluke. The anomaly. Me, the uncoordinated, physically inept, potential valedictorian. Me, nearly drowned, hypothermic, broken-ribbed. Me, Delaney Maxwell, alive.

  Chapter 3

  I slept in a ball, curled on my side, knees to my chest, arms wrapped around my legs. Holding myself together. I was being tugged apart and there was an itch in the center of my brain, like the buzz from the wall unit. Only the wall unit was off. I scratched at my head, but it was buried too deep. And then the tugging grew to a pull. The itch in my brain tormented me. I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled my head around.

  The tugging was still in multiple directions, but the pull—that was specific. In the hall. Dead left. I gave up trying to sleep. I slipped out of the sheets, planted my bare feet on the floor, and padded out of my room. The pull sharpened, and I followed it. And the itch in the center of my brain spread. It spread outward, down through my neck, radiating across my shoulders. It flowed down my arms, into the tips of my fingers.

  And my fingers, unable to contain it or fight it, started twitching. They vibrated at an unnatural speed and jerked at odd angles as I walked down the hall. Which should have bothered me if I could’ve concentrated enough to think about it. But I couldn’t. All I could think of was the door at the end of the hall, how it called to me, how it held some answer to a question I hadn’t thought of yet.

  But when I reached it, I had to go farther. I pushed open the door and saw a person lying flat on a hospital bed. A person; that’s as specific as it gets. Old or young, man or woman—I couldn’t tell. Its head was shaved and a tube snaked from the back of its skull. It was gray and wrinkled and swollen all at once. I stepped closer, letting the door swing shut behind me. My feet were cold on the hard floor, and I shifted from foot to foot. The person started to tremble. Gently at first, like a shiver; then jerky, like my fingers; then all-out convulsions—shaking the bed and the surrounding machines. And then the alarms sounded. Doctors and nurses barged into the room, pushed past me, and shouted orders at each other.

  “Get the paddles!” someone cried.

  “What’s wrong?” I yelled.

  A nurse tried to force me out of the room without looking at me. “You can’t be in here.”

  “What’s happening to me?”

  Dr. Logan rushed into the doorway. “Delaney? What are you doing here?”

  “Charging!” someone called. I turned to see a doctor shocking the patient’s heart, the body arching upward in response, the alarm still constant.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I said.

  From where Dr. Logan stood, not much was wrong with me. But something was seriously wrong with the person on the bed.

  “Get her out of here!” someone screamed.

  Dr. Logan gripped my shoulders and pulled me out of the room. “What? What’s wrong with you?”

  I couldn’t figure out how to describe the itch and the pull and the confusion. I couldn’t. So I raised my arms and showed him my hands, the unrelenting twitching, as tears rolled down my face.

  Dr. Logan put a hand on my back, persuading me down the hall, but I didn’t move. So he picked me up, like Dad might’ve done, and carried me back to my room. And as he set me on my bed, the itch retreated up my arms and through my neck. My hands stilled. The itch in my brain faded to a buzz, then to nothing. The pull was gone. All that remained was the gentle tugging from all sides that I’d almost grown to expect. I sat in bed, staring alternately from my still hands to the open door. Dr. Logan flipped through my chart and scribbled on an empty page. He ordered me a sleeping pill and sat with me until I slept.

  He was still there in the morning. Maybe he left sometime in the night and came back again. But he was here now. And so were my parents.

  “Seizure.” Dr. Logan’s voice was heavy, weighed down by years of disease diagnoses.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  He sat up straighter. “I believe you’re having seizures.” This time, it sounded like a cure.

  “It’s just my fingers.” I held up my hands, palm out, as evidence.

  Epilepsy wasn’t pretty. Carson had epilepsy. When I was in second grade and he was in third, he had a grand mal seizure on the blacktop during recess.

  “Boys only,” he’d said, barring me from his new club. Second grade was the year I was mad at Decker. He’d decided he should play with the boys and I should play with the girls when we were at school. I used to barter for him to play with me at recess. My brownie at lunch. His choice of cartoon at home. The window seat on the bus. That day, I had snuck an extra chocolate chip Pop-Tart into my backpack for him. I had several friends who were girls, but no one was quite as much fun, or knew me as well, as Decker.

  He’d ducked his head and wouldn’t meet my eyes. Even back then, Carson was the natural leader. Tall, with blond curls and green eyes, nobody said no to him. Not guys, not girls, and definitely not me. Well, usually not me. But right then I was mad at Decker, and Decker was sitting cross-legged on the blacktop, cowering behind him.

  “You promised, Decker,” I’d said.

  He’d shifted uncomfortably and started to stand.

  “Decker stays,” Carson had said. He took a step closer.

  “You’re a big jerk,” I’d said. And then I pushed him. Just a little shove, really. He took one step backward and smiled. He opened his mouth to say something, but he never got around to it. His eyes rolled backward and he dropped like a stone onto the pavement. His body, usually so self-assured and charismatic, disintegrated into a fit of bucks and spasms. Nobody moved. And then I was the one pushed aside. Janna barreled past me, knelt by her brother, and turned him sideways.

  Her eyes bore into me. “Go get help!” she screamed. But I didn’t. I just stood there, staring. Decker was the one who ran for help.

  Ten years later, it still ranked as one of my top five scariest memories.

  Dr. Logan said, “Most seizures are not like what you see on TV. Some people just stare off into space, yet their brain is seizing. Sometimes just part of the body convulses, like your hands.”

  “Can you fix it?” They must’ve fixed Carson’s, because I never saw or heard about another seizure. But then I realized that maybe the reason Carson had to repeat that year of school was because of the seizures, and I started to panic.

  “I can. Medicine can. Or it might. But I won’t prescribe anything unless I know for certain that you’re having seizures.” By the set of his mouth, I knew Dr. Logan believed he’d found the answer.

  “Like if my hands twitch again? Then you can give me something?”

  The corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. I’d like to run a test called an EEG. Basically, I’ll stick some sensors to your head and monitor your brain activity tomorrow morning, but you need to stay up to night. We need to put stress on your brain. Hopefully we can nudge it into having another seizure.”

  My hands clutched at my long blond hair. “You can’t shave it off.”

  Dr. Logan smiled. “Wouldn’t dream of it. But it will get fairly messy. Nothing a good shampoo won’t take care of.”

  Vain. I disgusted myself, clinging to my hair when I was fortunate my body wasn’t rotting underground. The man in physical therapy had no use of his legs. The woman in occupational therapy had drool hanging from her face. Hypothermia could have resulted in amputations. Lack of oxygen to the brain could have left me comatose, muscles atrophied, boils on my backside. I wasn’t vain by nature. I didn’t dress in tight designer clothes and I didn’t wear a lot of makeup, but I loved my hair. In the grand scheme of life and death, it was ridiculous. I knew it, but still it didn’t matter.

  When Dr. Logan was halfway out the door, I said, “Hey, that person from last night. They’re okay, right?”

  But he kept right on moving, pretending he hadn’t heard me, and the door slammed shut wit
h a resounding thud.

  My parents took shifts that night. We watched movies. We played Scrabble. I tried reading Catch-22, but after several pages, an ache started deep in my head and the words swam. I wasn’t allowed to have any medicine because it might interfere with the test results. My ribs ached. My head hurt. The tugging at my skin was beyond annoying.

  And then, just as I was losing the ability to keep my eyes open, Decker came. Even though it was a school night.

  “My turn,” he said.

  Mom kissed me on the forehead and then kissed Decker’s forehead, too. “We’ll be back for the test. Call if you need anything.”

  Decker sat in Mom’s vacated chair and propped his feet on the bed. “So,” he said, “it’s two a.m. There’s nothing on TV, and the cafeteria is closed. What do you want to do?”

  I rubbed at my face and moaned. “I want to sleep.”

  “Like you’ve never pulled an all-nighter before.”

  “Only for studying.”

  “You want to do schoolwork?” He scrunched his face in disgust.

  “Actually, I already did.” I picked up Catch-22 and clutched it to my chest. “I need to read this. But I can’t. Headaches.” I held it out for him and smiled.

  Decker shook his head and leaned backward. “I don’t read assigned books. Goes against everything I believe in.”

  I smiled wider. “I’ll be your best friend.”

  “I can’t believe I begged my parents to let me come here for this,” he said. But he took the book all the same. He sat facing my bed, feet propped up on the edge, knees bent. And he began to read.

  He looked at me over the first page. “I feel ridiculous.”

  “Shh, shhh, you’re perfect.”

  I listened. Correction: I watched. I watched his eyes scan the page and his mouth form the words, and I grew entranced by the way he rested his tongue on the corner of his lips every time he turned a page and the way he smiled at all the right spots, same as me, and the way his voice dropped an octave whenever someone was talking in the story.