96 Miles

by J. L. Esplin

  She’s wearing a faded blue T-shirt and a pair of light gray jeans that she cut off above the knee with my hunting knife a few minutes ago. Will’s changed too—a light blue T-shirt with a cartoon taco on the front.

  The only one of us who didn’t is Stew. He’s still wearing the clothes he slept in, the clothes he puked in.…

  “You think it was the toilet water?” Will asks me, squinting up from Stew’s other side.

  I ignore the tight feeling in my chest.

  “No.” I shade my eyes against the midmorning sun. “It’s getting late. We need to head out.”

  “If it was the toilet water, we’d all be sick,” Cleverly explains to Will.

  “Was it something he ate?”

  “Maybe you guys didn’t hear me,” I interrupt. “It’s time to get going.”

  Cleverly squints up at me—or maybe she’s glaring. “We heard you,” she assures me. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but Stew is in no condition to walk yet.”

  I let out a hard sigh but stop short of rolling my eyes at her.

  I already feel sweat accumulating where the pack rests against my back. The heat is going to be bad today. Unlike yesterday, the air is completely still. Which is normal around here. One day, a windstorm that can steal your breath, and the next day, not even a breeze …

  “Think it’s heatstroke, John?” Will asks, shading his eyes with both hands.

  I wish he’d just stop talking about it.

  “No.” I crouch in front of my brother, put my hand on his sun-warmed shoulder. The gesture is automatic, and it makes me think of my dad, makes me feel this weird catch in the back of my throat, so I pull my hand away. “Stew, we’ve got to walk. I know you can do it.”

  I slip my pack off one shoulder so I can unclip one of the full canteens for him.

  “Here,” I say, holding it out to him, the canvas strap dangling on the asphalt between his feet. “You’re going to wear this across your chest while we walk. Take small sips, tiny sips, every few minutes.”

  He doesn’t take the canteen. He slides his feet up, folds his arms across his knees, drops his forehead there.

  “Stew?” I say firmly, and he lifts his head enough to look me in the eyes, his expression flat.

  The shadows around his eyes are a deep pink color, and I feel a pang of guilt, pushing him like this. I know he’s dehydrated. I know he needs water badly. But I’m not going to let him give up. I’m not going to give up. I’m getting my brother to Brighton Ranch.

  “Try standing up,” I say, hardening my resolve.

  His forehead falls back to his arms, bridging his knees. “I can’t,” he mumbles.

  “On your feet, Stewart. Now.”

  “John—” Cleverly starts to say, but I cut her off with a shake of my head, my eyes never leaving Stew.

  “The longer you sit here,” I say to him, “the harder it’s going to be for you to work up the momentum to walk. You just have to stand up. That’s all you gotta do. Once you’re in motion, you’ll be fine.”

  “No, I won’t,” he says, his voice muffled.

  Before I can tell him that he doesn’t have a freaking say in the matter and he needs to get on his freaking feet now, Cleverly interrupts again. “He just needs a break, John.”

  I turn to her and snap, “He’s my brother. Let me handle this.”

  Her eyebrows shoot up. I know she’s only trying to reassure me that everything is fine, because she can probably tell that I’m about to lose it, but she’s actually making it worse.

  “He just puked his guts out,” Will says, eyes wide, aiming his thumb back toward the truck in case I forgot where Stew’s vomit is.

  “I know that, Will. I was there. I saw it.” I motion between the two of them. “Both of you need to let me handle this.”

  Cleverly stops fanning and gives me a look. She doesn’t think I’m handling it well is the thing.

  “I know what’s best for my brother.”

  “Really?” she says. “Because from what Will and I can tell, it’s pretty obvious that Stew needs to rest—”

  “Sitting on the side of the road isn’t going to do him any good!”

  “Neither is forcing him to walk before he’s ready!”

  I drop the canteen and push to my feet, let the pack fall to the ground with a clunk.

  “You gonna say anything, Stew?” I say, staring hard at the top of my brother’s head.

  Nothing. He doesn’t even look up. Cleverly and Will do, though. They look at me like I’m some kind of crazy drill sergeant, and Stew is just sitting there with his head down, because, let’s face it, he really doesn’t care anymore.

  And then I realize that the person who really needs a break around here is me. So I leave. I start walking south down the highway rumble strip. Because it’s either that or I yank Stew up by the collar of his shirt and let him have it.

  “John, wait!”

  I ignore Cleverly’s call, but it doesn’t take long for her to catch up to me. And when she does, I turn on her, pointing my finger. “You don’t trust me.”

  She looks surprised by my anger. “I do,” she insists.

  “You just don’t trust me to decide what’s best for my brother.”

  A small crease appears between her eyes. “No, that’s not it.”

  “I’m the one responsible for Stewart.” I jab at my chest. “I know what’s best for him, not you.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “And I need you to back me up,” I say, my voice cracking in frustration, the words barely coming out, squeezing through the tight muscles in my throat, “not take his side against me!”

  She takes a breath, stares at me for what seems like minutes, and I’m struggling to keep it together.…

  “Okay,” she says slowly. “I’ll back you up, John. But Stew is sick—”

  “I know! I know he’s sick, all right—”

  I can’t fight it anymore. The words break through the wall in my mind, bringing up all the thoughts I’ve been keeping away. Overwhelming thoughts made worse by flooding my mind all at once. My chest goes tight, and I can’t catch my breath.

  Cleverly is saying something, but the only thing I understand right now is that I can’t breathe.

  I’m trying to take in air, but nothing happens. My lungs have stopped working. They’ve seized up, like an elephant is sitting on my chest.

  I lean forward, hands on my knees, head dropped, and manage to suck in a small wheeze of air. Followed by another wheeze. And another.

  I stare at the ground between my feet. Blink my eyes, confused that my vision isn’t clearing, until I see drops of water hit the asphalt. Tears or sweat or both. I squeeze my eyes shut tight, trying to pull everything back inside, because I swear I’m having a nervous breakdown or something.

  I try the tricks that have worked for me before. I try wiping every thought from my mind, but it’s far too late for that. So I try channeling my dad, try thinking about what he would do in this situation, but that doesn’t work either. Instead I have this thought of seeing my dad again and having to tell him that Stewart is dead, that I couldn’t save him. That I failed at the most important job he’s ever given me, and now Stew is gone.

  Why did you leave that weekend? Why do you always have to leave?

  My breathing gets harder, thin wheezes of air, like I’m trying to suck air into my lungs through a coffee straw.

  My mind screams. Come on! Think of something else. No thinking about dying.

  I try. I try to replace thoughts of death with something positive. A good memory. But instead, it’s the morning my dad left. It’s that Battle Born flag hanging on my window. My room a shade of blue.

  What is that doing up there?

  No. That’s not the last thing he said.

  It’d look pretty good on your bedroom wall.

  I repeat these words in my mind, again and again.

  And then I think of lying beside my brother in my room in the dark, flashlight in my hand, shi
ning it on the emblem, lighting the words on the flag. BATTLE BORN.

  We’re going to be on our own for a while.

  Yeah, I know. But we’re not completely alone, John. We have each other.

  A breath comes through. Less like a wheeze, more like a gasp. I push myself up straight, grab the bottom of my shirt, pulling it up to cover my face, my eyes. It takes more concentration, it takes replacing the same negative revolving thoughts with good thoughts, but warm, stale air eventually filters through my shirt, fills my lungs.

  I push it back out. In and out again. And again.

  We’re not completely alone, John.

  My chest still aches with tightness, but my heart rate has calmed, my lungs have opened up. When I wipe my shirt down my face and open my eyes, Cleverly is still standing in front of me. I can’t read her expression, can’t tell what she is thinking.

  I sniff, wipe the back of my hand across my nose and mouth.

  “Your brother is sick,” she finally says. And it doesn’t sound like she’s trying to inform me of something this time. She says it like something has clicked into place in her mind.

  “Yes,” I say, forcing the words out. Stewart is sick, and I wish it were the toilet water, or the desert heat, or exhaustion.

  “Rest isn’t going to make him better,” she says.

  “No,” I say. Neither will protein bars or an endless supply of water.

  “What does he need?” she asks, studying me carefully.

  I look back down the road to where we left Stew and Will, see my brother still sitting on the ground.

  Don’t talk about it, don’t think about it, you make the decisions.

  I turn to Cleverly, and I know I can’t go back to holding it all in. It’s too late, and it’s not helping me anymore. I need her help. I need her to understand my brother.

  “Insulin,” I tell her, and I’m surprised by the weight that leaves my chest when I say it aloud. “He’s been out of insulin for almost two days.”

  Cleverly’s only reaction is the reappearance of that tiny crease between her eyes. At first I think she still doesn’t understand what I’m telling her. She doesn’t understand that my brother has type 1 diabetes, that he actually can’t survive without daily injections of insulin. And his insulin is gone. It’s all gone.

  Clayton Presley might not have pulled the trigger that night, but he may as well have.

  But it’s not that she doesn’t get what I’m saying, I realize. It’s just that she’d already guessed it was something bad. It had to be something bad, right? The way I’ve been acting. The way Stew’s been acting. Like this journey through the desert is pointless, like he’s going to die anyway … it’s starting to make sense to her now.

  “I have a friend from school who’s diabetic,” she says, not really to me, but to herself. Because she’s still putting it all together in her mind.

  It doesn’t take her long. She looks at me with sudden understanding. “I assume there’s insulin at Brighton Ranch.”

  19

  WE’D GOTTEN USED to the rumble of the generator, like a lawn mower engine humming in the distance, running at regular intervals. Keeping the refrigerator cold, keeping Stew’s insulin from spoiling in the constant heat of a house with no air-conditioning.

  But the rumble had stopped a long time ago. That complete silence. Except for our short breaths. The side of my forehead sweating into the rough fibers of our family room rug, face turned toward my brother. Knees tucked beneath us. He’d gone still beside me in the dark.

  I listened for the sound of tires rolling over gravel, even though it had long ago faded into the distance. They were gone. There was no reason for them to come back. They’d already taken everything. We’d heard the conversation, the argument over the generator, over Stew’s insulin.

  “Stewart,” I whispered into the rug, breathing in my own stale oxygen. I started to tell him again that it was going to be okay. But the words got stuck in my throat. Everything I’d been feeling for the last few hours—scared, angry, still—stopped. And without even meaning to, I suddenly felt myself in my brother’s position, felt the things he might be feeling. My chest constricted with the pain of it, with the overwhelming sense that they’d taken something more than his insulin. His humanity? His worth?

  I squeezed my eyes tight to stop the tears. To force the thoughts from my mind. I wasn’t as strong as Stewart. I couldn’t take kneeling there and putting myself in his position for longer than a few minutes.

  I got up, wiped my face with my shirt. I tried to remember when Stew had last changed his insulin cartridge. One night ago? He’d be completely out in a few days. There wasn’t really much of a debate in my mind about what we should do next, where we should go.

  We always spent summers with the Brightons, when Jess and her older brother, Nate, were with their dad. Camping trips, weekend sleepovers that my dad said we were getting too old for, back-and-forth drives down State Route 318. This summer had been weird, not seeing Jess, losing all communication during the blackout.

  It was last summer, a year ago, when Stew and I sat on the edge of Jess’s bed and watched her go through the steps of changing both her infusion set and the cartridge in her insulin pump. I was just curious, but Stewart was learning how to do it. Jess was older than him, my age, and had been doing this for two years. But Stew had switched to using an insulin pump only a few weeks before, and he wanted to start doing all this stuff on his own, without any help from Dad.

  “You can do it, Stew. It’s easy,” Jess said, her smile encouraging. She was excited that Stewart had gotten a pump—the same one as hers. Her light brown hair was smoothed back in a ponytail. She sat across from us in the white chair that matched her desk, her back straight, swiveling back and forth while she talked, all her supplies laid out in perfect order. Insulin, syringe, new cartridge, new infusion set, alcohol swabs.

  She talked with her hands a lot, just like always. Every other word emphasized with an opened motion, palms out. But this time, for some reason, her hands were kind of mesmerizing to watch. She held up her insulin pump in one hand—smaller than a cell phone, about the size of a deck of cards—motioned to the display, carefully selected options on the screen with her index finger. Her fingernail polish chipped, light blue.

  She showed how to open the infusion set, how to get it ready. Then she turned and lifted her shirt a little to show us a spot just below her hip, where she was about to start her new site—the place where the thin cannula would insert through her flesh, allowing the pump to deliver insulin to her body when she needed it. We both leaned close to watch her clean the area with an alcohol wipe, and place the infusion set against her skin.

  “It doesn’t hurt, John,” Stewart assured me, noticing my expression.

  “Well, sometimes it hurts a little,” Jess added, her chin tucked against her shoulder so she could see what she was doing. “But Stew’s right. It’s not that bad.”

  But I wasn’t thinking about it hurting. Stewart had already told me that this part wasn’t so bad, that, if he distracted himself, he sometimes didn’t even feel the needle inserting the cannula into his skin. I was thinking that there were so many steps to remember. So many little things that they had to get right. It was overwhelming. They had to do this, change the cartridge and infusion set, every three days.

  And they acted like it was no big deal.

  Watching Jess explain all this … I felt this weird swelling inside my chest, and I couldn’t even talk. All I could do was watch her hands.

  I guess I was just impressed. And a little envious of how brave they were, how they didn’t complain about any of it.

  I’m mean, sometimes Stewart complained. But it wasn’t about this stuff. He didn’t complain about the needles or having to prick his fingertips and test his blood sugar all the time. Or even the fact that he had to think about everything he ate, which I think would be the hardest thing for me. Keeping track of carbohydrates, keeping track of sugar. No, the
thing that bothered Stew was the questions he sometimes got from people. Did you get diabetes from eating too much sugar? Or, Maybe if you stopped eating junk food, your diabetes would go away.

  Jess was really patient with this kind of stuff, though. In fact, she loved explaining type 1 diabetes to people who didn’t understand it, kids and adults. And she was a lot of fun to be around too.

  Sometimes, I thought about how, if Stewart hadn’t been diagnosed with diabetes, we might not ever have met Jess.

  Our dad and her dad had actually known each other years ago. Our moms had grown up together, gone to school together. But when we were just babies, after our mom passed away, and Mr. Brighton got divorced, our dads lost touch. Then five years ago, Stewart was diagnosed with diabetes, and my dad signed him up to go to a summer camp for kids with diabetes. The same camp that Jess went to. The same camp where she’s now a junior counselor.

  “John,” Jess said, her insulin pump back in her pocket, her eyes wide like she had just thought of something, “I forgot to tell you what happened with Nate right before school got out! He asked out that girl I was telling you about.”

  Stew made a face. I grinned. “The one who’s deathly afraid of tortoises?”

  “I’ll show you her picture,” Jess said, turning to grab her phone off her desk. “She’s really nice, actually. Except for the whole tortoise thing. How could anyone be afraid of Herman? His cute little face!”

  Stew and I shared a look. Herman was Jess’s favorite rescue tortoise, a sulcata that weighed about eighty-five pounds. He was harmless, and definitely not cute.

  Eventually, Jess’s brother, Nate, came in to get us. He stood in the doorway and yelled at the top of his lungs, because he hadn’t bothered to take out his earbuds, and his music was blaring. “Dad wants me to tell you we’re having tinfoil meals out back.” He looked at us—sitting on the floor by Jess’s desk, almost crying from laughing so hard—looked at Jess’s old infusion set on the desk, the used alcohol wipes, and walked out.

  We busted up laughing again.

  * * *

  There’s a question Cleverly wants to ask. I can see it on her face. It’s the same question a lot of people want to ask when they find out Stewart is insulin dependent. Every once in a while, somebody actually does ask it: “How long can you survive without your insulin?”