by Una LaMarche
“Like a giant teddy bear?” I say.
I tilt my face up toward his, and all of a sudden there are his lips, soft and warm and full and pressing into mine with an urgency that nearly topples me over. I freeze for a second. I wanted this in a vague, soft-focus, fan-fiction way, but here? Now? I don’t need anything else to worry about, much less my first set of boy problems. Physics problems, yes. Boy problems, no.
But then his hands cup my chin, his fingers tracing circles on my neck that send tingling waves down my entire body, and my brain stops talking. I open my mouth and let his tongue meet mine, and it’s nothing like that first time in the schoolyard, not awkward and rough and frightening but gentle and tentative and intimate, like we’re improvising a dance with no music. It’s hard to find the space to breathe, but it feels too good to stop. When I pull away, we’re both dazed. We should probably move back from the cliff.
“Sorry,” he says. “I had to do that.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I say, running my tongue against the back of my teeth.
“So . . . you’re not going to hit me?” He grins, and I shake my head, leaning in.
“No,” I breathe as our lips brush again.
But that’s when I hear it: the scream, high and loud, its two syllables breaking into the still mountain air like a firecracker.
“MICHELLE!”
Tim and I jump to our feet to see Leah racing up the path, her face at least four shades whiter than normal, her eyes full of fear. What really chills my bones is that the look she has makes me think it’s not the cops but something worse. She doesn’t just look scared, she looks haunted.
“Michelle!” she cries, groping for my arm, her hands shaking. “It’s Cass. You have to come. I don’t know what’s wrong, but she’s on the ground, twitching. She can’t talk, her eyes are weird—” The words tumble out so fast it’s hard to process what they mean at first, but my body reacts before my brain has time to catch up. I break into a run, pushing Tim and Leah aside, racing past tourists with their Nalgene bottles and raised cameras, the canyon fading into blackness along with everything else in my peripheral vision.
My feet pound the ground, but I can barely feel them. I taste coppery blood in my throat. I can’t even think, except for three words that keep breaking through the chaos in my head: Nothing else matters. The money doesn’t matter. This trip doesn’t matter. That kiss doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters but getting to Cass. Nothing will ever matter again if I lose my sister.
FOURTEEN
Saturday Afternoon, Part 2
Grand Canyon, AZ Flagstaff, AZ
Here’s what I remember before the tidal wave hits: Running across what seems like miles of concrete, not understanding how I possibly could have gotten so far away. A cluster of people, three or four bodies thick, standing in the sunlight, silent, like a prayer circle. Just watching. Pushing through them, tearing at their clothes, their purse straps, not caring if it hurts. Their angry glances turning to pity, features melting into the periphery. Nothing else matters. And then Cass, on the ground, flopping, her eyes rolled back in her head. Bathed in sweat, so bad that at first I look to the sky for the rain I can’t feel. A man in madras shorts crouched over her, his finger in her mouth. Her teeth are bared; she doesn’t look like herself. I think: Come on, beautiful, give me that smile.
I fall to my knees. Cass, are you there? I grab her hand, clenching so hard the knuckles crack.
Michelle. MICHELLE! Denny wrestling away from the elderly woman who’s been comforting him—not me, of course not me, I wasn’t there, I was with Tim—and throwing himself on me, his voice shrill and scared.
What’s happening? Why is she moving like that? Is she okay?
I’m a doctor, the man in madras says. She’s having a seizure. Does she have any preexisting . . . And then the siren drowns him out. I fumble for her backpack, splayed half-open at her feet, with hands that feel like lead pellets in rubber gloves. The front zipper won’t open. It’s stuck on something. I pull and pull until it rips apart. A truck parts the crowd. Two men in black jackets jump out as my fingers close on the bracelet.
The man in madras talking to the paramedics as they hold her down and check her vitals. Could tell something was wrong . . . hard fall . . . don’t think she’s breathing.
She’s diabetic, I say—scream, really—holding the bracelet out like it’s some kind of magic wand and not just a crappy scrap of titanium. Like it can do anything at this point.
I need an Accu-Chek and D50 NOW! The guys in black are all over her, and the only thing I can do is hold on to the toe of her sneaker, and not even that once they lift her onto the stretcher.
We need to intubate, one says. Within seconds, they’re fastening a plastic collar around Cass’s neck, and one of the paramedics holds her head steady while the other feeds a clear plastic tube into her throat. I cover Denny’s eyes.
A burst of static from a walkie-talkie. I’ve got an unresponsive teenage female who needs immediate transport to Flagstaff! We’re intubating in the field. Have an airlift meet us at the clinic.
Denny’s eyes, looking up at me, terrified. This can’t be happening.
Where is she going? I’m her sister. A voice behind me: Leah. I didn’t even see her.
Flagstaff Medical Center, the other paramedic shouts, lifting Cass onto a stretcher. She’s moving less, just twitching now. I need you to move back, ma’am.
Someone’s arms lift me up, dragging me back. Tim? A stranger? Does it even matter? Nothing else matters. Then doors slamming. The taillights of the ambulance. The earsplitting scream of the siren.
Denny, clinging to my waist. Is she gonna be okay?
Waiting for a sign. Waiting for the three squeezes I can’t give.
I don’t know.
(Take care of them, okay?)
I don’t know.
(I know you will. You always have.)
I DON’T KNOW.
(You’re all they got right now.)
And then I’m gone.
• • •
This time, though, it doesn’t pass after a few seconds. I feel dizzy and numb. Somehow I make it to the car and sit down in the passenger seat, still clutching my sister’s backpack.
“Can you buckle yourself in?” Tim asks gently, and I nod only so that he leaves me alone. But the truth is I don’t want the buckle. If we hit something, I want to fly through the windshield, and I want to feel it. I want to get what I deserve.
I know the symptoms of hypoglycemia like I know my times tables. Pale skin. Sweat. Hunger. Confusion. Agitation. Hadn’t she looked pale to me for days now? Hadn’t I seen her vibrate like a live wire in the backseat all afternoon? Saw her wipe sweat from her eyes even with the windows rolled down, doing sixty on the highway? Watched her wander over to the visitor’s center like she didn’t know where she was? The seizure might have been sudden, but the warning signs were all there, and I noticed them. I just didn’t see them.
“It’ll take us about an hour,” Tim says, pulling onto the highway entrance ramp. “I’ll go as fast as I can.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Denny asks, his voice uncharacteristically quiet.
“You saw it, Lee,” Tim says. “What happened?”
“I didn’t, actually.” Leah’s face is still paper white. “I was inside with Denny. Then I heard . . . screaming.”
I close my eyes. I should have been there, and not just today. I should have been there all week. Cass has barely spoken in days, and I chalked it up to moodiness. I saw her get bullied, and I let it go after one half-assed attempt at a talk. I thought running away would just fix her problems (well, my problems, anyway), like on one of those makeover shows when some formerly frumpy lady walks out from behind a curtain wearing fitted jeans and a blazer and her whole family cries. They don’t show you what happens after that, though, because it pro
bably just goes back to how it was. People don’t change from the outside in.
“She seemed okay earlier,” Tim says, glancing at me. “Right? I mean, she seemed normal.”
“Well.” I stare at the floor mat, a faded maroon the color of dried blood. “Normal for Cass isn’t really normal.”
“But, I mean, this must have been sudden. Some kind of accident.”
“She gets mad when she doesn’t eat enough,” Denny says.
That’s true. If Cass doesn’t time her shots to her meals right, she can dip below the blood sugar threshold. But that doesn’t happen often. She’s been diabetic since she’s been alive, so she knows how to handle it—I know she knows. So I never pay that much attention to what she eats.
But this week has been different. I’ve been with her twenty-four hours a day, so I know what she’s had: not much. Cass, who needs to eat well to live, survived on crumbs and scraps while I hoarded my money for gas, spent it on a totally unnecessary tent, and paid for parking at a tourist trap so I could explore second base in the open air.
“I should have made her eat,” I say to the floor.
“No,” Tim says and puts his hand on my arm, but I shrug him off. I don’t know what to say to him. I can barely even look at him. It’s not his fault I wasn’t with Cass, and if he hadn’t followed me I probably would have stayed just sitting there, doing nothing, trying to get inspired by nature. (God, was that really just hours ago that I had the fleeting luxury of not feeling like the world was collapsing around me for a second?) But he did follow me, and now I can’t think of the velvet feel of his lips without my stomach churning with guilt, because nothing will ever change the fact that while we were kissing, she was seizing on the concrete, afraid and alone. I’ll never forgive myself if something happens to her, but I’ll never be able to forgive him either. And I think he knows it.
“Is there anything else that could make her . . . do that?” Leah asks.
“Too much insulin,” I say, zipping and unzipping the front of Cass’s backpack, watching the teeth click into place and then fall apart, over and over.
The only time it happened was when she was five. That was before she could give herself shots, and it was up to Mom to do them. She had just two shots a day back then. The morning shot was much more potent than the nighttime one, and it must have been easy to mix them up. That’s what I’ve told myself ever since: It must have been easy to mix them up. Even sober. Because of course she was sober, right? She didn’t get high and then inject her own daughter with a potentially lethal dose of insulin, right after pajamas but before she’d brushed her teeth with her light-up Hello Kitty toothbrush. The reality is that I’ll never know, and I never want to know. We spent that night in the ER, all three of us wide awake, Cass nauseous and ghost-pale and tethered to an IV that made her cry, nurses coming in to adjust her dosage every hour until they were confident she could stabilize on her own. After that, I took over the shots, and Cass started doing them herself when she was nine. She has never slipped up in four years. Ever.
I look down at my sister’s backpack and notice something odd. Except for the MedicAlert bracelet and a few snack-food wrappers, the front pocket’s empty. The ever-present Ziploc baggie filled with needles and insulin is gone. I tear open the main zipper, hoping she just moved it, but all that’s in there are dirty clothes.
In a flash, I see it laid out before me like a horrible road map I didn’t bother to read: the silence, the tears, the delay in the Window Rock bathroom, her face when she came out. I’m sorry. For what? Everything. The insulin, gone. All of it. Gone.
Agony cuts through the fog with the precision of a scalpel, and I literally gasp as the truth dawns on me. There’s no way this was an accident. Cass is trying to die.
FIFTEEN
Saturday Night
Flagstaff Medical Center, Flagstaff, AZ
The ICU waiting area is a little three-walled enclave with one couch, twelve chairs, and two loveseats arranged back-to-back so that we don’t have to see anyone else’s grief up close. Not that I could think about anyone else right now. There’s a flat-screen TV playing sitcom reruns on TBS and a spread of magazines, and I wonder who could sit here and watch Seinfeld or read about Selena Gomez’s new eyebrow shape without wanting to break shit and start wailing. The nurse at the desk looks like she’s seen it all; she looks like that Munch painting, The Scream, only with bangs.
We’ve been here an hour. Cass has been here an hour and forty-five minutes. Her doctor, Dr. Chowdhury, who wears green scrubs and has a handsome, angular face with a prominent forehead vein, told me I can’t see her until she stabilizes. She seized for twenty minutes, they’re guessing, from the time she fell to the time she responded to the dextrose solution they gave her in the ambulance. They don’t know how long her brain was without oxygen—probably not long, they think, but combined with the overactivity from the seizure (“like an electrical storm”) and the mild concussion, it could cause lasting side effects. She’s still intubated and has been given barbiturates to keep her nervous system suppressed, so she’s still unconscious—not coma-unconscious, but heavily drugged. Her body will live, but her brain is anyone’s guess.
“We’ve been able to pick up activity in many of the major areas of concern,” Dr. Chowdhury said when we got there. “I’ll keep you updated.”
Many of them. Meaning not all of them. I think for the thousandth time of Cass on the verge of tears and me turning up the radio. Cass sitting down on that bench and putting on her sunglasses, turning her face away. How I’d thought she was just freezing me out like usual . . . how relieved I was that I could get away from her for a few minutes. Not knowing that they were the last few minutes she was planning on living.
A flood of tears sends me down the hall to a cavernous, antiseptic bathroom, which is lined floor to ceiling with gray tile, to double as a shower. I crouch on the toilet in the corner and weep into my knees, turning the sink water on full blast to drown out my primal, hiccupping sobs. In the car, I managed to hold it together for Denny, but now that I’m actually here at the hospital, the numbness is gone and my nerves are raw and bloody. How many mistakes have led up to this moment? How many were my fault? Mom’s? Buck’s? I know it’s useless now, but I desperately backtrack, looking for the point of no return that I missed. If I hadn’t pushed Cass aside so much lately—if I hadn’t invited Leah and Tim—if Aunt Sam hadn’t been such a cold bitch to us—if Mom hadn’t gotten arrested—if she hadn’t relapsed in the first place—if she had been happy—if any of us had been happy—if Buck hadn’t left—if, if, if.
I finally pull myself back together and scrub my face under the ice-cold water, knowing that my red-rimmed eyes and swollen features will give me away in a heartbeat anyway. But at least maybe it’ll get me some sympathy with the nurses. They treated Cass because it was a life-or-death emergency, but when I filled out her intake forms they told me parental consent is required for moving her to the pediatric psych ward, which is protocol for suicide attempts once she recovers. If she recovers.
I plop back down on a chair across from Leah and Denny, who are coloring with the pen he stole from Child Protective Services. Amazingly, the MVP of this disaster is turning out to be Leah, who has been calmly distracting Denny for hours now, discreetly showing him YouTube clips on her phone, walking him back and forth to the water fountain, and even making a DIY bowling alley with upside-down Dixie cups and a crumpled page of Prevention magazine. All this time I assumed Tim was the strong one, but now I’m not so sure. Because right now he’s freaked out and pacing, making things even more tense, while she’s quietly and unassumingly locking shit down. I’ve always assumed that’s what I do in my family—hold it together, balance out the crazy. But maybe I’m not the strong one. I certainly don’t feel strong right now. I feel like I’m unraveling.
“Hey,” Tim says, grabbing my hand and pulling me into the corner, next to a
potted palm. “Are you okay? You look . . .” He pauses to consider his options before making a save with “upset.”
“I am upset. My sister tried to kill herself.” I look past his face to a pastel painting of a sunset hanging on the opposite wall. Or maybe it’s a sunrise. That would be less of a metaphor for imminent death, at least.
“I’m sorry, that was a stupid thing to say.” He takes my other hand, but I still can’t look at him. We’re standing a foot apart now, making an inverted drawbridge. “Is there anything I can do?”
Leave, I think. I tried to get him and Leah to stay in the car—I don’t know how far the Harpers’ witch hunt has spread, and I don’t want to find out while Cass is being kept alive by machines—but they wouldn’t.
“I don’t think so,” I say. I catch Leah looking at us in my peripheral vision and snatch my hands back.
“Oh.” He clears his throat, takes a step back. “Well, I was thinking maybe I should call my dad.”
“Don’t do that,” I say. “It’ll just complicate things.”
“We have to tell someone,” he says. “And your mom is, uh, hard to reach, so . . .”
“Parents aren’t just interchangeable,” I snap. “Your dad doesn’t know us. He wouldn’t care. Plus, what could he even do?”
“He would care,” Tim says, sounding hurt. “And he could get us a hotel room, buy us some real food. He could make sure they take care of her here—people listen to him.”
“Of course they do, he’s a white man.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You don’t have to mean something for it to be true.”
“Fine, well, I just think . . . we can’t do this on our own anymore,” he says.
I look him straight in the eyes. “Maybe you can’t.”
“What?”
“I could do it,” I say, anger suddenly filling the emptiness in my chest. “We were doing fine before you.”