I looked at him, wide-eyed.
Decker smiled sheepishly. “I looked it up. After you . . . Before you . . . I looked it up. I just had to know if there was any chance. If there was something. Anything.” Then he pulled at a string on the sleeve of his sweatshirt and watched as the fabric unraveled.
“Then how come everyone’s acting like I shouldn’t be alive?”
“Because it’s rare. I mean, really, really rare. Like snow in August.”
“That’s never happened.”
“No, I guess not. But it’s not impossible, right?”
Decker’s parents came with him Sunday. But they spent most of the time comforting my parents, which was odd, considering I was the one in the hospital bed. I was stressed about missing another week of school, but the doctors were more concerned with the alleged brain damage. So I spent the day getting X-rayed and scanned and imaged again, and when everything turned up the same—that is, not any better, but not any worse—Dr. Logan shrugged. Really. He shrugged. And everyone continued like I was fine, which was, actually, perfectly fine with me.
But when no one was looking, I saw Dr. Logan watching me. Like he knew, deep down, that I was far from fine.
So on Monday morning, while the world went on being normal, I started rehab. It didn’t last long. Turns out, I didn’t have much need for any rehabilitation. Apparently I needed to go to rehab to find out I didn’t need rehab. It sounded like a Catch-22, but I wasn’t sure since my English class started that book while I was comatose. It was high on my to-do list.
At first, the rehab came to me. A thin woman with a nonexistent chin stood at the end of my bed one morning with flash cards. Without introduction, she said, “Identify the following objects.”
I complied. One after another, I recited, “Apple. House. Airplane. Table. Cat.” And then I paused. I squinted and strained my head forward.
“Can you see all right?”
“Yes.” I tilted my head to the right.
The chinless woman’s eyes glistened. “It’s okay if you can’t remember.”
“I can’t tell if it’s a pickle or a zucchini,” I explained.
She exhaled, signed some paperwork, and left the room. I never saw her again.
My physical therapy sessions began in my room, too. I was stretched and flexed and pulled and bent until my leg muscles remembered how to respond to my commands. Which was eerie because at first they didn’t listen, but they didn’t just lay there either. My toes would point instead of flex, and my knees would bend instead of straighten, and sometimes when I was drawing letters with my feet, they would spell something else entirely. Something I couldn’t quite read. Like something else was sending the commands. Something stronger.
Though I finally managed to walk the next morning, the nurses on duty still insisted on using a wheelchair to escort me to my therapy sessions. The physical therapy room unnerved me. Treadmills and exercise bikes lined the far wall. Weight machines loomed in the middle of the room. Thankfully, nobody asked me to actually exercise.
Again, I followed commands and completed coordination drills. I touched my right hand to my left hip bone, my left hand to my nose. I wiggled my toes. I did the Hokey Pokey. While my therapist filled out paperwork, I settled back into the wheelchair and looked around. A man struggled to hold himself upright on what looked like parallel bars. His lower body, encased in braces, followed stubbornly behind. I swung my legs in my wheelchair, which was more a prop than a necessity. I kept my eyes down until someone wheeled me back to my room.
As Melinda pushed me to my first and last occupational therapy appointment, another nurse was pushing a woman in a wheelchair out of the room. I waved. “So, was it therapeutic?” Hospital humor.
When we passed each other, I noticed her head was wrapped in gauze and drool hung from her chin. She turned her head in my general direction, but I looked away.
I wondered if she envied me. Then I wondered if she still had the capacity for envy. Maybe she didn’t even know how damaged she was. And in a moment of panic, I wondered if I was the same. I touched my hand to my chin, just to check.
No drool. No, I was the miracle. The fluke. The anomaly. Me, the uncoordinated, physically inept, potential valedictorian. Me, nearly drowned, hypothermic, broken-ribbed. Me, Delaney Maxwell, alive.
Chapter 3
I slept in a ball, curled on my side, knees to my chest, arms wrapped around my legs. Holding myself together. I was being tugged apart and there was an itch in the center of my brain, like the buzz from the wall unit. Only the wall unit was off. I scratched at my head, but it was buried too deep. And then the tugging grew to a pull. The itch in my brain tormented me. I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled my head around.
The tugging was still in multiple directions, but the pull—that was specific. In the hall. Dead left. I gave up trying to sleep. I slipped out of the sheets, planted my bare feet on the floor, and padded out of my room. The pull sharpened, and I followed it. And the itch in the center of my brain spread. It spread outward, down through my neck, radiating across my shoulders. It flowed down my arms, into the tips of my fingers.
And my fingers, unable to contain it or fight it, started twitching. They vibrated at an unnatural speed and jerked at odd angles as I walked down the hall. Which should have bothered me if I could’ve concentrated enough to think about it. But I couldn’t. All I could think of was the door at the end of the hall, how it called to me, how it held some answer to a question I hadn’t thought of yet.
But when I reached it, I had to go farther. I pushed open the door and saw a person lying flat on a hospital bed. A person; that’s as specific as it gets. Old or young, man or woman—I couldn’t tell. Its head was shaved and a tube snaked from the back of its skull. It was gray and wrinkled and swollen all at once. I stepped closer, letting the door swing shut behind me. My feet were cold on the hard floor, and I shifted from foot to foot. The person started to tremble. Gently at first, like a shiver; then jerky, like my fingers; then all-out convulsions—shaking the bed and the surrounding machines. And then the alarms sounded. Doctors and nurses barged into the room, pushed past me, and shouted orders at each other.
“Get the paddles!” someone cried.
“What’s wrong?” I yelled.
A nurse tried to force me out of the room without looking at me. “You can’t be in here.”
“What’s happening to me?”
Dr. Logan rushed into the doorway. “Delaney? What are you doing here?”
“Charging!” someone called. I turned to see a doctor shocking the patient’s heart, the body arching upward in response, the alarm still constant.
“What’s wrong with me?” I said.
From where Dr. Logan stood, not much was wrong with me. But something was seriously wrong with the person on the bed.
“Get her out of here!” someone screamed.
Dr. Logan gripped my shoulders and pulled me out of the room. “What? What’s wrong with you?”
I couldn’t figure out how to describe the itch and the pull and the confusion. I couldn’t. So I raised my arms and showed him my hands, the unrelenting twitching, as tears rolled down my face.