by Katie Henry
We need 911. We need 911, and we need an ambulance with medicine and doctors and wheels. Doctors on wheels. Doctors on ATVs. Jesus, Ellis, get it together. We need to call 911, but my phone is a mile away in my dad’s desk drawer, and Hannah’s is with Chris and Frank Zappa. Danny’s was smashed to pieces months ago.
Problem: We need a phone and we don’t have a phone.
Solution: Find a phone.
Problem: No one else is on this trail.
Solution: Get off this trail.
I look up, over the edge, at the dirt path leading back the way I came. I almost start running then, but stop myself, because I have to be logical. Even when the world is falling apart, you have to be logical. It took me forever to get up that path, it’s twisty and steep. It’s always harder to go down something steep. Didn’t I learn that at Lands End? Climbing back up was so much easier. More dangerous, maybe, but faster.
I close my eyes, trying to take myself back to the day I was here with Hannah. I shove myself into the memory. Sunshine. The bay, sparkling and blue. So quiet, except for the cars—
The cars. The road. The house at the top of the path. A house means people.
I want to run down. I want to run down, because that’s the way I came from, that’s something I know. But I know what I have to do. I have to run up.
I kneel down next to Hannah, who is sobbing so hard I wonder how she can breathe. “It’s going to be okay,” I say. “I’m going to get help.” I fumble around in my backpack. I grab her arm, uncurl her fingers, and jam a flashlight into her hand. “Figure out where he’s bleeding. Put pressure on the wound. Hard, do it hard.”
She sobs, but I feel her nod.
“I’m going to get help. Stay here. Don’t move, don’t move yourself, don’t move him.” She cries louder. “Do you hear me? Stay here.”
I feel her nod again.
I don’t want to leave her. I can’t believe I’m leaving her. But I drag myself over the edge and sprint into the darkness, up the hill, knowing I’m going faster than is safe and not caring at all. My chest is already on fire by the time the ground starts to climb under my feet, a sign that I’m starting the steep ascent. The flashlight’s no real help. A single pillar of light against pitch-darkness. It’s nothing. I shine it all the same. The toe of my shoe catches a rock and I crash to the earth, dust in my mouth and a searing sting in my knee.
The girl who used to live inside my skin would have curled into a ball. The girl who used to be me would have refused to go on. I get up. One foot on the ground, then the other. One step forward, then another.
It’s so slow. I’m so slow. The steps are steeper and harder, each one, and the snow is clouding my vision and my flashlight beam. What if I don’t make it? What if I freeze to death here, fall to my death here, what if Danny is dying, what if Hannah has gone into shock, what if what if what if. What-ifs don’t make the path flatter, maybes don’t make my legs stronger. What-ifs don’t solve a single thing. I’m done with them.
I fall, slipping on wet scrub grass. I get up. I climb faster, gasp for air harder, fall again, get up again. My hair is plastered to my forehead, every muscle I have is on fire, my skin is bruised and scraped raw, but my feet feel the ground rise up to meet them. Level ground is coming. I know the road is ahead even though I can’t see it. So I run on screaming tendons, I run faster than I’ve ever run in my life. I’m running so fast, so blind that I don’t see the trail gate until it’s in my gut, knocking the wind out of me.
A gate.
The gate.
I’m so close.
I clamber over it, though I’m sure there’s a way around. My foot slips on one of the bars. I catch myself from falling, but twist my wrist around too far. It burns. It’s fine.
My feet hit concrete. It’s solid, so solid, more stable than anything I’ve ever felt. In the flashlight glow, I can see the other gate, the one surrounding the house, the one I’m really looking for, up ahead. This one’s too tall to climb over. How am I going to get through? The snow’s falling heavier, and I can barely hear the party inside the house. If I can’t hear them, what chance do they have of hearing me?
On my bruised legs, I race up to the door and pound on it with the wrist that isn’t twisted. “Help!” I scream, and draw back my fist to pound again, but the door eases open, just an inch. I push, gently, testing, and it swings open. I’m through it before I can even question why it isn’t locked, stomping over cobblestone and grass, snow in my face, snow in my eyes, and then snow in my mouth as I pound on a smaller door, a front door, and demand to be let in.
Someone opens the smaller door. I don’t know who. I don’t look at their face before I stumble through the threshold and shoulder my way into the warmth and light ahead. I wonder if this is what death feels like. I wonder if I am dead.
When I brush snow and salt from my eyes, I’m standing in a beautifully decorated living room. There’s a Christmas tree by the floor-to-ceiling windows, which look out onto the white world outside. Two dozen people in dresses and sport coats are staring at me, drinks in their hands and shock on their faces.
“Call 911!” I shout into the room, and it’s so big the words ring back in my ears. “Someone, please, call 911!”
No one moves. Do they speak English? Do I speak English? Maybe I really am dead. I turn my wrist. It hurts. I’m still alive. I’m still alive, but Danny might not be, so why aren’t they calling?
“Call 911 now!” Still, no one moves. “I don’t have a phone and someone on the trail is hurt and if you don’t call, someone is going to die tonight.”
Everyone pulls out their phones at once. It takes me a second to realize that what I said sounded very close to a death threat.
“It’s ringing.” A young woman in a sparkly red dress presses her phone to her ear. “H-hello?” she says to the dispatcher. “There’s this girl, she burst into our party and said someone’s hurt, I don’t—”
She’s doing it all wrong, she’s too vague, too slow. I snatch the phone out of her hand and twist around so she can’t grab it back. “The emergency is an unconscious nineteen-year-old male bleeding from an unknown source on the Stonewall-Panoramic Trail in Claremont Canyon at the first lookout point. The first good one. With the view. With the bench.”
“The victim is unconscious?” the dispatcher asks.
Didn’t I just say so? “We couldn’t wake him up.”
“Is the victim breathing?”
“He was when I left.”
“Miss, where are you calling from?”
“A house, the house at the top of the hill, but the victim is at the first lookout point and needs medical attention.”
“What is your name?”
What does that matter? She’s wasting time. “His name is Daniel Marks and he’s with his sister who’s completely freaking out.”
“No, Miss, what is your name?”
“Ellis Kimball, it’s Ellis Kimball, but their names are Daniel and Hannah Marks and you need to call their parents. Their parents’ names are—”
My mouth is suddenly a desert. My throat is suddenly filled with cement. What are their names? I can’t remember their names and I can’t breathe and I can’t stay standing.
When I stumble, I grab on to the closest thing to me, something prickly and dry that jingles as I try to steady myself against it. It’s not strong enough. I’m not strong enough.
My knees buckle first, then the rest of my limbs follow. My vision pinpoints to a small spot on the green rug. It looks so comfortable, and yes, I will stay right here, this is fine, this is good, so I don’t understand why someone far away is gasping, and someone else is grabbing me hard underneath my armpit and trying to haul me up. The carpet is perfect, it cushions my head like my favorite pillow. It cushions my fall like a parachute landing pad. I let go of the something prickly and dry, and it rattles and shakes.
The last thing I hear is something shatter against the floor by my head. The last thing I see is a big, golde
n, broken star.
Then everything is nothing.
Twenty-Seven
IMAGINE THAT THE universe is a film that has already been completed, and you’ve been given the reel. Each frame is one moment in time. A character inside that movie could only see them in order, moving from one numbered frame to the next, but you hold the entire story in your hands.
Imagine that the universe is a colony of ants living in a vast, treeless desert. As far as they know, the world is one flat plane—they live in two dimensions. But imagine that one day, a single blade of grass begins to grow. One ant climbs up it and discovers the reality of height. A brand-new world.
Imagine that the universe is one big cement block, floating in space. Inside that block is all of the past, the present, and every moment of the future . . . and us. We are inside that block, too, experiencing time the only way we can. Second to second, always in the present, stuck in an unending forward motion. But imagine you could step outside the block. You would see the universe as it really exists, time as it doesn’t exist, every single moment occurring at once.
That’s how this feels. Like I’m outside time. Beyond it. Somewhere deep and dark, staring back at the universe with new eyes.
I blink into bright lights.
“Hey,” a shadow above me says. “Can you hear me? Are you awake?”
“Yeah,” I say, though I don’t know if it’s true for both questions. “Yeah.”
“Oh, thank God,” a different shadow says.
“You fainted,” says the first shadow, slowly taking form as a person with two arms and two eyes behind two glass lenses. My mouth is full of cotton. My legs are full of sand.
“911?” I ask through the cotton. Was that real? Did I make the call? Or was that just a dream?
“They’re on their way.”
Hannah. Danny. “My friend—my friend is on the hill, and her brother—”
“It’s okay,” says the girl in the red dress, holding her phone protectively to her chest, like I might snatch it again. “They’ll find them. It’s okay.”
“The world,” I say. “The world is still here.”
“Huh?”
“The world didn’t end. Did it end?”
“No,” says the guy with glasses.
“I think she’s delirious,” says the girl in the sparkly red dress.
My eyes feel heavy again. No, I’m staying awake. I have to stay awake.
“It’s a plowing metaphor,” I say. “Did you know that?”
“Okay, she’s definitely delirious.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Delirious. Delirium is the noun, delirium is Latin, delirium combines the prefix de, meaning ‘away,’ with the word lira, meaning ‘furrow.’ ‘Delirious’ means off the furrow, off the path.” I sweep my arms out. “It’s a metaphor. The whole world is a metaphor.”
“What the fuck,” says the blond guy.
“Mike!” says the girl. “Not helpful.”
“You’re the one who said her activation phrase, Lucy.”
“Her what?”
“Activation phrase. Like sleeper agents have. The secret ones, from Russia.”
“Are you drunk?”
“I am clearly not drunk enough.”
An EMT, young and slim, arrives, and the guy with glasses points her over to me.
“My name’s June,” the EMT says, sitting down next to me on the couch. “What’s your name?”
“Ellis.”
“I heard you fainted, Ellis.”
“I guess.”
“How are you feeling right now?”
“Okay. A little . . . fuzzy.”
“What have you eaten today?”
It takes me several long seconds to remember. “A piece of toast. And milk.”
“When was that?”
Breakfast time at Aunt Tonya’s, though it might as well have been a decade ago. “Nine a.m.,” I say, and don’t bother to account for the time difference.
“That’s the last thing?” she says, and I nod. “You probably have low blood sugar.” She pulls a little carton of orange juice from her bag, the kind my mom used to pack in my lunch for school field trips. June inserts the straw for me, and I slurp it down, only realizing when it’s gone how thirsty I was. She promises we’ll get me a snack in a moment.
“Is this yours?” she asks, retrieving my coat from the couch arm.
They must have taken it off me when I fainted. I nod.
“You should put it back on,” she says.
“I’m not cold.”
“You will be, when the shock goes away.”
I don’t think I’m in shock. That should feel like numbness, shouldn’t it? I feel like I’ve grabbed hold of an electric fence. But I shrug the coat back on and zip it up.
“Is Danny okay?” I ask. “Please tell me, I won’t freak out. I didn’t freak out before; Hannah did, but I didn’t.”
“They got him off the hill,” June says. “They’ll take good care of him.” She pauses. “Is that her name? The girl with the long hair. Hannah?”
Wait. How does she know Hannah’s hair? I swing both feet onto the floor. “Where is she? Is she here?”
Before June or anyone else can stop me, I’m out the front door, through the garden, and following red lights to a paved back road I didn’t know existed. Hannah is sitting in the back of an ambulance, her legs dangling over the edge, cocooned in a blanket. Another EMT is speaking to her. The snow has stopped, and the road is illuminated by the lights on top of the ambulance. They’re so bright and steady, it almost doesn’t look like a night sky anymore. The sky almost looks—red.
A red sky before midnight.
“Hannah!” She looks out from her caterpillar cocoon, and her face crumples. I rush over, but stop a step short, not sure if I can touch her. Not sure if I’ll hurt her. Not sure what to say. “Hannah.”
Her eyes are watery and puffy, and her cheeks have deep tear tracks down them, but she looks otherwise unharmed. “You’re okay,” she says, on a sigh of relief.
“Of course I’m okay.”
“You ran up a mountain in sneakers.”
“A hill,” I say. “I’m fine.”
“Did you see him go by?” she whispers, teary again. “Did you see them put him in an ambulance, or—”
I shake my head. “Why didn’t they take you with him?”
“They said I couldn’t ride along,” she hiccups. “I was hyperventilating. They couldn’t take care of him and me.”
“He’s going to be okay.” I don’t know that, but it’s what Hannah needs to hear. It’s what Hannah needs to believe.
“I’m sorry,” she sobs. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” I ask, bewildered.
“I’m so sorry I lied to you, I’m so sorry I told you the world would end.”
Doesn’t she see it? Doesn’t she realize how right she was?
“I need to get her heart rate down,” the EMT says, stepping in front of me.
“Wait, I—”
He boxes me out of the way. I’m about to object with harsher words when there’s a hand on my shoulder. I turn around to see a police officer beside me, June trailing behind him.
“Are you Ellis Kimball?” the police officer asks.
“Yes.” It comes out a whisper. I clear my throat. “I’m Ellis Kimball.”
“I’m Officer Harris. May I ask you a few questions?”
He’s phrasing it like a request, but I get the distinct impression it’s not. Still, I nod, and he guides me a few feet away, toward the house. Away from Hannah.
“Are you aware your parents reported you a runaway?”
So few people seem to appreciate the distinction between running away and running back.
“No,” I say.
“No, you aren’t a runaway?”
“No, I wasn’t aware they reported me as one.”
He sighs. “We’ve alerted them that you’ve been found. They’re very happy you’re safe, in case you care.
”
Wow. Expert guilt trip, Officer Friendly. “I do.”
“You’ve used up a lot of resources tonight, do you know that? You and your friend.”
Wow again. Find an injured person and they act like you’ve started a wildfire. “We didn’t mean to.”
“Really?” he says. “Because what I think is you and your friend were joining up with that street kid—I’m not going to say for what—when he . . . what, OD’d?”
My temper flares at how many hurtful, cruel assumptions a person can make in twenty seconds. Danny slipped and fell; that’s the only explanation I can think of. The ground was slick, we found him down the slope, there was blood, why would this jerk go straight to drugs? I know why.
“That’s not what happened,” I say, struggling to keep my voice even. “That’s not what happened at all.”
He spreads his hands. “Enlighten me.”
Here are some things I tell Officer Harris:
I went up the hill to see the snow falling.
Hannah and I discovered Danny, her brother, hurt and unconscious.
Hannah stayed behind to watch Danny while I ran up to the house to call 911.
Here are some things I don’t tell Officer Harris:
I went up the hill because I thought the world was ending.
Hannah’s brother, Danny, has been homeless and living with a mental illness.
Hannah stayed behind because she was hysterical, and I basically stole someone’s phone to make the call.
Details.
Officer Harris takes a few notes, but doesn’t seem overly concerned. “We’ll have you make a full report later,” he says. “Are you ready to go home?”
I don’t know. I’m ready to hug Em. I’m ready to have Dad call me Elk. I’m even ready to have Mom untuck the hair behind my ears. But I’ve hurt them, all of them, so deeply, and I know it. I hope they’ll accept why I made the choices I did, even if they can’t ever really understand them. Maybe, like the end of world, family is more complicated than we give it credit for.
“Do you know how he is?” I ask Officer Harris.