The Accident Season

by Fowley-Doyle, Moïra

  “Of course!” Sam smacks the desk with the palm of his hand. “It’s a good thing one of us has a few brain cells left,” he says, before quickly turning back to his math book when the teacher looks our way.

  Sam and I spend our lunch break in the library, looking up articles about the secrets booth and printing them out to read after class. We also photocopy every school newsletter from the past five years and spend a frustrating fifteen minutes quizzing the extremely unhelpful librarian about Elsie.

  “She’s here every day,” I exclaim, waving my arms at Kim, who is sitting at the secrets booth by the window. “Right there! Every day!”

  “I don’t know the girl,” says the librarian for the seventh time. “I can’t help you. Now, that’ll be five-fifty for the photocopies.”

  ***

  When we get home after school, Bea calls me because she is having a fight with her mother. This happens fairly often: Bea and her mother have similarly dramatic personalities that can’t seem to help but clash. While I talk to her in a soothing voice, Sam sits up on the newly bubble-wrapped kitchen table (Alice crashed into it earlier, slipping on a bump in one of the mock-Afghan rugs) and eats slices of plastic-looking cheese straight from the packet.

  My mother, who is in a surprisingly good mood, is playing a bunch of 1950s rock ’n’ roll songs. She turns the volume up so that the whole house is jitterbugging under its felt and plastic wrapping. She has spent the day hiking in the mountains with Gracie. She tells us how good it feels to just let go for the first time in weeks, to not worry where you put your feet, to know someone’s there to hold you if you fall. Gracie has written a haiku about the walk on the cast on her arm. It is silly and sweet.

  Suddenly, over all the 1950s rock, I can hear Alice’s raised voice from the stairs. It sounds like she’s shouting over the phone. When I go into the hall to ask her what’s wrong, she is putting on her coat.

  “Be back later, Mom,” she calls into the kitchen.

  “Where are you going?” I ask her.

  “Just over to Bea’s.” Alice shrugs on her coat and frees her hair from underneath her scarf.

  “Bea’s?”

  Alice slings her bag over one shoulder. “Yeah, Bea. Tall girl, red hair, hippy skirts. You know the one.”

  “She had a fight with her mom,” I blurt out.

  Alice opens the door. “Yeah, I know.” She stops just long enough to stamp her heel properly into her boot and she is gone. “I’ll tell her you were asking after her,” she calls back over her shoulder. I stand in the hallway, stunned.

  When I go back into the kitchen, my mother is singing along to something that sounds like it belongs in Grease and Sam is laughing at something she’s said and is trying to persuade her that he didn’t eat all the sliced cheese. I stand in the doorway and look at them like they’re on television or in a picture. I half expect to see Elsie’s foot hiding in the corner of the frame.

  “Everything okay?” my mother asks, pouring milk into her tea. “Where’s your sister off to in such a hurry?”

  “To Bea’s,” I say, and my mouth is kind of twisted.

  “Bea’s?” Sam looks as surprised as I feel, only probably a lot less upset.

  “Very good,” my mother says distractedly. When she bends to put the milk back in the fridge—one-handed, her other arm useless in its sling—her hair falls like a tangled purple curtain in front of her face.

  Sam just sort of shrugs. Straightening up from the fridge, my mother bumps her head on the edge of the padded counter. She makes a face and rubs it.

  “But,” I say, because I can’t let this go just yet, “I just talked to her. Bea, I mean. She’d had a fight with her mother. She didn’t want to come over.”

  My mother takes a bottle of arnica pills from the cupboard and pops a couple under her tongue. “Maybe she wanted someone to come to her,” she says, lisping because of the little pills.

  I start to feel guilty. “But she would’ve asked.”

  Sam helps my mother peel a banana and carefully pours his own tea. (We stopped my mother from hiding the electric kettle two weeks ago. We are content to live without sharp knives and the gas burner, but living without tea is just impossible.) “I think it’s a good thing for Alice to be spending more time with Bea,” she says. “She spends so much time with Nick and his posse, and female friendships are so important.”

  “But she’s my best friend,” I say, and then I feel silly and childish. My mother is right: Nick takes up so much of Alice’s time outside school.

  “I know you feel left out,” says my mother, echoing my thoughts exactly. She comes over and puts her good arm around my shoulders. “But you’ve got your brother to keep you company. And me.”

  “He’s not my brother,” I mutter, and my mother laughs.

  “If you say so, petite soeur,” Sam says, and my mother laughs louder.

  When she goes up to the attic to work, Sam and I sit in the living room and look through the newsletters and articles, searching for any mention of Elsie. She is almost as elusive in text as she is in person; we find mention of “a fourth-year girl” here, “a student” there, like glimpses of an ugly cardigan or a hint of mousy hair. I wonder if Alice is right about all this; I wonder again if there is such a thing as coincidence.

  “I can’t believe Bea asked her over and not us,” I say to Sam after a while, as if I were talking to him in my head about Alice all along.

  “I don’t think it was like that.” Sam flicks through the music library on his laptop while trying to find more articles online. “Alice probably asked Bea. Maybe she needed someone to talk to. And Bea’s good at that sort of thing.”

  “Aren’t we?”

  Sam looks at me. “Not always,” he says with aching honesty.

  I look around the living room, wrapped up like a fragile package, and I think about all the secrets hiding in the sharp edges of things. “I guess,” I say. “I guess Bea doesn’t really do secrets.” I think Bea could set up her own secrets booth, sell all the unsaid things for ten cents a pound. How many secrets would fit into a pound? I wonder.

  “She kissed me,” I find myself saying. From the laptop a woman’s voice sings softly. The guitar notes accompanying her song are like plucked heartstrings.

  Sam is very still. “Bea?” he asks.

  I nod. “In the ghost house.”

  Sam sort of shrugs it off. “You guys have kissed before,” he says. “At parties, in spin the bottle.”

  “I guess.” I want to tell him about the way she kissed me—like she wanted to prove something, like it wasn’t really me she was kissing, and how she hasn’t talked about it since that one time in PE class (not that I have either), but instead I ask, “Did you ever kiss her?”

  “In spin the—?”

  “Outside of that.”

  Sam’s fingernails drum on the keyboard. “Once.”

  “Oh.” I realize the second he says it that I don’t want to know, but he tells me anyway. I try not to listen without actually blocking my ears.

  “It was at that party in Joe and Martin’s house this summer. You and Alice’d gone to the liquor store and the others were in the kitchen getting ice cream.”

  I remember the night. Alice had taken us to the party Joe was having because his parents were out of town. It was one of the first times we’d properly hung out with her friends, and it was mostly because Martin had invited some people in our year too. We’d been sitting out on the veranda and Bea’d read the cards for us in the light-hearted way she does sometimes, when all the questions are about love and sex, and none are about anything serious. (But is there anything more serious, I wonder now, than love and sex? Not hardly.)

  “Anyway,” Sam says. “Everyone else left and she still hadn’t read my cards, so she did, and then I kissed her.”

  I make a choked sound in my throa
t. “You kissed her?”

  Sam doesn’t look at me. “Yeah. I just wanted to . . .” He sighs. “Her cards’d said something that I didn’t want to believe, so I kissed her to prove them wrong.”

  Now I really want to cover my ears. I reach up and brush my hair away from my face instead. “How does that even—?”

  Sam speaks louder over me. “I didn’t feel anything.” He is staring resolutely at the newsletter pamphlets in front of him.

  My hands drop into my lap. I want to say a hundred things, but I end up with a sarcastic “Yeah, right.”

  “Yeah,” Sam says simply.

  “But . . .” I look up at the ceiling as if it’ll give me answers. It’s unresponsive, however, blank and white. It’s the only part of the house that doesn’t look bandaged. “But you like her.”

  “So do you.”

  “No, I mean you like her like her.” I feel like I’m twelve again. “You kissed her.”

  “Yeah, but it was just a kiss. It was just to see . . .” Sam sort of laughs. “I’m not in love with Bea, Cara.”

  I look down at my hands. “I thought you were.”

  “Well, I’m not.” A new song comes on. “Never have been.”

  All of a sudden my heart feels funny. Sam isn’t in love with Bea. Not that it matters if he was, I tell myself. He’s my ex-stepbrother. He’s like my brother. He’s my brother. Sam is still talking, but I almost can’t listen to him. Never have been, he said. There’s only one wench I want.

  “Cara,” Sam says, and I quickly realize that it’s not the first time he’s tried to get my attention in the last few minutes. He is holding up one of the school newsletters from several years ago. The original pamphlet we photocopied was slightly torn. All that’s missing is part of a paragraph about the bridge the council has been saying it’ll build across the river for the last twenty years.

  I scan the page quickly, looking for a mention of the secrets booth. I shake my head. “What?” I hand the pamphlet back to Sam, who turns it toward me again and points at the torn-off piece about the bridge.

  “I bet they won’t even build the actual bridge now,” I say, thinking of the way the wooden one crashed into the water. “They’ll probably just repair the old one.”

  “Cara,” Sam says again. “Look.”

  “At what?” I read the torn article quickly, muttering the key points out loud to let Sam know I’m paying attention. “Construction of bridge halted yet again . . . years since original bridge collapsed . . . town mayor putting pressure on county council . . . says it’s a travesty it hasn’t been rebuilt yet . . . local girl Elsie— Wait, what?”

  The article stops there. It’s the line immediately below the quote from the mayor, but the rest of the article has been torn away.

  I look up at Sam. “Do you think it’s our Elsie?”

  “It’s worth a shot. It’s not a very common name.”

  I twist my mouth, trying not to look doubtful. “It doesn’t tell us much.”

  “Right now it’s all we have to go on,” Sam says. “If we can find the rest of the article, we can see if it is our Elsie.”

  I look back down at the pamphlet doubtfully. It looks like a newspaper article pasted into the school newsletter. “It could be from the Telegraph,” I say with uncertainty. “Or Western People. But their offices are in Castlebar and Ballina. We won’t be able to get out there before they close. It’s almost half past four.”

  Sam shakes his head. “There’s this magical place,” he says with mock solemnity, “called a library—I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but they have books, and also newspapers, and back issues of newspapers . . .”

  I give his arm a playful thump, but I can feel the beginnings of excitement fluttering in my chest. “Okay,” I say, taking out my phone to tell Bea and Alice to meet us in town. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  Our small town is more crowded than usual today: The buses from Dublin and Galway seem to be full of college students who have taken Friday off and are home early on the Thursday afternoon bus for the midterm break, and parents and local schoolchildren are hurrying around before the shops close, buying Halloween decorations and trick-or-treat sweets for tomorrow. Some of them are dressed up already, and in a couple of the pubs, loud work parties of costumed people spill onto the street.

  Bea and Alice are waiting for us across the road from the library as we walk up. I weave around the costumed people outside the pub, ducking under elbows to dodge their drinks. That’s how I bump into the man. His chest makes a hollow clang where my hands hit him.

  I say, “Oh, I’m sorry!” as another man steadies me, but the man I bumped into has slipped into the pub. When I peer through the window beside the open door I see that it’s the metal man statue I walked into on the day Sam and I found the magic shop in Galway. Sam stops behind me. I stare through the window into the man’s eyes. They are as gray as the rest of him. Something about the shine of his skin is unnatural, which is to say more unnatural than silver body paint. Or perhaps a lot more natural; it looks like metal-made skin. The man smiles mechanically and I shudder. He moves across the window as I walk and his strange eyes find Sam, and then Alice ahead of us. His smile gets wider. Even the corners of his mouth are little hinges.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I say slowly, and I take Sam’s hand and hurry onward to Alice and Bea. I take Bea’s hand as well and lead them quickly across the road toward the library. The metal man stares through the window. Alice crosses after us more slowly. When she’s just stepped off the curb, she turns around and looks at the statue man one last time. She frowns and starts to say something as if she wants to call across to him. Sam’s face falls.

  A car speeds around the corner ahead of us. The driver only sees Alice at the last minute. I can see what’s about to happen, but I don’t even have time to move before the screech of brakes rips across the road. The driver tries to stop the car, but it’s too close to Alice. The front of it crashes into her and she is flung over the hood and onto the road. The car skids to a stop.

  I think Bea screams, or it could be me. We all run to Alice. The only thing I can register is that she is moving, and just as we reach her I have a moment of swooping relief because it looks like she is trying to get up. But then her face turns ghostly white, her eyes roll back into her head, and she collapses. With incredible speed (and a presence of mind that I don’t have) Bea catches Alice before her head can hit the ground.

  I vaguely feel my knees sting as I drop onto the road beside Alice. Her eyelids are flickering and Bea’s arms around her are shaking. Sam and a woman who must be the driver of the car are there beside me, and a small group of people has gathered at the side of the road, calling out questions and suggestions.

  I reach over and tap Alice’s cheek. “Alice.” My voice is hoarse. “Alice!” I give her a little smack and she opens her eyes. The driver breathes a sigh of relief. Alice looks confused for a second, but then she gasps and lets out the tiniest whimper that quickly turns into a sob. When I look down at her, I can see why. She is covered in blood. Her tights are ripped and the skin of her knees has split open. Her hands and elbows are bleeding badly too, and there is a long, jagged gash in her right arm that shows through the tear in her sweater. Bits of dirt and gravel are embedded in her skin.

  But it’s Alice’s left arm that makes me stop trying to pull her up. Her shoulder is out of its socket. It’s a small difference, but it looks so wrong—a bump where there should be sharp lines. I swallow down a wave of nausea.

  Alice’s breathing is shallow and quick.

  “It’s okay,” Sam says from beside me. “It’s okay—here, give me your arm.”

  A woman emerges from the crowd at the side of the road. “I’m a certified EMT,” she says. “Can I help?”

  “So are we,” Sam says without looking at the woman. My mother has had us all ta
ke first-aid courses every year from the age of eight. We can dress wounds, improvise slings, and set bones in minutes. Alice blanches, but she hands Sam her arm.

  He grips her hand and I brace her arm just under the shoulder. Gently, with Alice wincing beneath us, Sam straightens her elbow and pulls her arm slowly toward him until the joint slips back into place with a pop.

  Alice bites back a scream, then shudders.

  “Better?” I whisper. She nods, but her eyes look haunted. I glance across the road at the people still milling about outside the pub and wonder if the metal man is still watching from the window. Suddenly my face stings as if it’s been slapped. I frown and shake my head, put my cold hand against it to cool it down.

  Sam, Bea, and the EMT lady carefully help Alice to the side of the road, while the driver of the car wrings her hands and apologizes over and over. Alice keeps saying, “It’s fine, it’s fine,” but when she stands up, she swoons again, and leans heavily against Bea.

  “We need to get you to the hospital,” says Bea, and Alice nods again. The owner of the corner store across the road, Mary Daly, ushers us inside and we sit Alice down on the chair behind the counter. Then she hands Alice some chocolate and a soda. “For the shock,” she says.

  “Will I call an ambulance?” the EMT woman asks.

  Alice answers, her voice suddenly strong. “No, it’s fine, my boyfriend lives just down the road. He can—” She stops then, breathless with pain. “He can drive me there.”

  I unwind my scarf from around my neck and make a sling for Alice’s arm.

  “Don’t you think we should ask Gracie?” Sam says.

  “No,” Alice replies quickly. “I don’t want to worry Mom. I’ll get Nick to pick me up.”

  “Alice, I think we should call an ambulance,” says Bea. Mary Daly and the EMT lady nod their heads.

  “No,” Alice says again. She sits up straighter and tosses her long hair behind her back, as if to prove she can. “I’m fine.”