He jogged toward me, and I could tell from his face that he wanted to help. He wanted to be that person. He wanted to save him. “How can I help you?”
“Not me. Help him!” I pointed at Carson, at his limbs jerking at an unnatural speed. He kept thrashing, digging himself deeper into the snow, until small mounds crested over and buried his bare hands, his bare neck. He was cold. He needed gloves. And a hat. His clothes would be wet. He was wearing jeans. Nothing worse than wet jeans. And he’d be so mad at me that I had moved him from the warmth of the car.
Troy yanked me up to standing and tightened his arms around me. “There’s nothing we can do for him. You know that.” It was true. That’s what the woman on the phone said. Just let him be and he’d be fine. Unless he had more than one. This was more than one. Was there something else I should be doing now? But even Carson told me seizures don’t kill. That’s what he’d said.
Seizures don’t kill.
This second seizure definitely lasted longer than a minute. Troy’s zipper dug into my shoulder. It’d leave a mark. Two minutes. Troy held on tighter and tried to shift my body away so I wouldn’t see. I still watched. Three minutes. And then stillness. Carson covered in snow and filth and God knows what else. Troy whispered, “It’s over.”
I tore away from Troy and fell to Carson’s side. He was still. Too still. Lifelessly still. I moaned and flipped him onto his back. Oh God, where was I supposed to put my hands? I moved my fingers across his chest, feeling the ribs, trying to remember the right placement from that CPR lesson last year. The hell with it. I placed my hands somewhere near the center of his chest and pressed down. I did it again. I silently mouthed the count.
“Delaney. You need to stop. He’s dead.”
I shook my head and closed my eyes and counted out loud. Troy was wrong. Seizures don’t kill. “Delaney, concentrate. Feel. You know.” I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.
Because seizures don’t kill.
I tilted his head back forty-five degrees and brought my lips down to his own. I blew my breath into his mouth and watched his chest rise and sink again. And I thought of the oxygen in his lungs and my hands pumping the blood to the organs, keeping him alive.
“Delaney, come with me.”
I didn’t think at all about his lips, and how the last time they touched my mouth they were moving and warm. Now they were still and cold.
“Delaney, it’s over.”
But seizures don’t kill.
I breathed air into his lungs. I pumped his heart. I squeezed my eyes shut and lifted my face upward and prayed for a miracle. I begged for a miracle. “Please,” I cried. But nothing happened.
Sirens blared in the distance, growing closer.
“Let’s go. We have to go. I’m going.”
I kept pumping. I kept breathing. Troy’s car rumbled away. The real help arrived after I exhaled my breath into his lungs fifty-three times. They pulled me away. They pushed me back. They shouted questions as they lifted Carson’s empty body onto a stretcher and replaced my mouth with an inflatable yellow bag.
“What happened?” and “Who is he?” and “How long?” and “Next of kin?” but all I could say was, “Carson Levine.”
And all I could think was how cruel and impersonal that bag on his mouth was. How cold, sterile air was forced down into his lungs. How it had no connection to the living.
Someone asked me if I was okay to get myself home. I must’ve made some sound indicating I was, even though I wasn’t, because they drove off, leaving me alone on the side of the road with Mom’s car still running, two doors thrown wide open, front seat stained. I fell to my knees and stared at the hollow spot in the earth where Carson had been. Where his body had dug a hole for itself. I listened to the sirens fading into the distance. I pictured them saving him.
Because seizures don’t kill.
Only that’s not what he said.
He’d said seizures usually don’t kill. Like people usually don’t survive for eleven minutes underwater. Like I usually get all As. I doubled over in pain, but I couldn’t tell where I hurt. Just a widespread, all-encompassing, debilitating pain. I wondered what Carson felt. The last bit of life in his body had been from me. The last living thing his mouth touched had been my own.
I clutched at the snow in the empty space where he had been, packed from his weight. Then I flopped down beside it, on my back, like I was making a snow angel. Except I didn’t wave my arms back and forth to make wings. I just lay there, tears trickling out hot, turning to ice as they traveled down the sides of my face. Snow melted into my clothes and my hair and the crevices of my ears. Pain where an itch had once grown. Pain to cloud the memory. Pain and wet and cold.
Pain until I couldn’t feel my fingertips and the old car rumbled back beside me. My eyes stayed closed so I wouldn’t have to face him. But I felt my face grow colder as his shadow blocked the sun. I opened my eyes and saw Troy’s outline, the darkness where the light used to be.
He reached down for my hand and I took it. I took it. He pulled me to his body and I let him. He whispered in my ear and I listened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry about your friend.” He wiped the tears off my cheeks with his rough thumb and I leaned my face into his hand. He brushed the snow off my back, my arms, my hair—and held me until the shaking subsided. And when he whispered, “Let’s go,” I followed.
I followed until he stepped in the imprint where Carson had been. Where Carson had lived. Where Carson had died. Where Troy had watched him die.
I froze at the border of his body. “I’m not going with you.”
He turned around and let out an aggravated sigh. “You can’t take that.” He pointed at Mom’s ruined car. But he was looking at me, trembling, incapable of driving. He pulled my bag from the driver’s side, turned off the ignition, and locked the doors. I walked to his car in a wide berth around the two body prints in the snow. Wingless and immobile.
A tribute to death.
I slid into the passenger side, my bag between us on the bench seat. I leaned against the door, far from Troy. The car was old. The door was old. Leaning against it was downright dangerous. I didn’t care. Maybe if I fell out I’d hit my head on the pavement and an ambulance would take me away and I’d sleep for days in the hospital, not quite existing, and when I’d wake nobody would care that I didn’t save Carson. And they’d run an MRI and see my brain was damaged beyond repair and they’d pump me full of painkillers, keeping me in a haze where the neurons in my brain couldn’t form connections to make memories. And Decker would sit by my bed and hold my hand and sometimes he’d kiss my forehead when he thought I wasn’t awake. And it wouldn’t matter whether I was valedictorian or a miracle or a complete waste of a life.
I stared out the window at the trees passing by out of focus. Everything looked different. Like we had shifted dimensions. Like I’d been living in a flat, two-dimensional world, length and width alone, and now there was a sudden depth. Things looked too close and then too far, too large and too small. Everything the same, and yet completely disorienting.
It was the same place I’d been my entire life, same trees, same people, same white coating over everything. I’d never noticed that everything was dead underneath the snow. We hit a pothole and everything lurched to the right. Trees spun. Carson’s face. His mouth. His mouth that was cold and tasted like—“Oh God, pull over.”
I stumbled out the passenger door and fell to my knees in the untouched snow. I sucked in deep breath after deep breath but the churning wouldn’t stop. I tried to stand and had to steady myself with the car. Troy came around but I held my arm out to stop him.
“I’m going to be sick,” I said. And then I was. I hurled the abysmal contents of my stomach into a ditch off the highway in the middle of nowhere, Maine.