12
Before
Sawyer didn’t say a word as he sped away from the ice cream shop and toward the hospital, went quiet as nighttime and just as still. A gorge had opened up inside my chest. The CD in the stereo was still spinning, old Louis Armstrong Sawyer must have gotten from my dad, and I reached forward and clicked it off. “It’s bad, right?” I asked.
Sawyer shrugged once, eyes on the asphalt in front of him. “I don’t know.”
“It must be bad, right? If she’s already in surgery and my dad wouldn’t—” I broke off, the words swallowed up by guilt and confusion and this huge, endless fear. I dug my fingernails into the passenger seat, willing the car to go faster. “It must be bad.”
“I said I don’t know, Reena,” he told me, and I was quiet after that.
We parked in the cavernous garage at the hospital and got lost on the way to the ER, the two of us wandering the corridors like some panicky, overgrown Hansel and Gretel. “This way,” Sawyer said finally, and I followed him dumbly down a freezing, fluorescent hallway, then through a set of doors and into chaos.
There was a crowd in the waiting room, small but restless: Allie’s parents and Sawyer’s, Lydia with her wild hair secured in a complicated knot. Lauren Werner was there, crying noisily. And there were my father and Soledad, watchful and waiting, somehow already gutted like carcasses or husks. Soledad looked heartbroken. My father looked old.
They got to their feet as I ran across the wide expanse of linoleum, and I saw my father’s eyes narrow in confusion: On the phone we had never actually established where I was or who I was with, and now here was Sawyer close behind me, throwing off fear and heat.
Allie’s boyfriend, I thought, for the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes. I was with Allie’s boyfriend.
He didn’t have time to ask, though, because Allie’s mom had spotted me and was rushing forward, grabbing me so tightly it was painful. I felt my ribs scrape together inside my chest. “She’s dead,” Mrs. Ballard wailed. It was a sound I’d never heard before and, if it pleases God, a sound I would like never to hear again. “Reena, baby. Our girl is gone.”
I thought, very clearly: This isn’t happening.
I thought, very clearly: This is our fault.
I stood there with Allie’s mom for a while, let her sob into the limp fabric of my shirt. I didn’t cry. I didn’t do much of anything, to be honest; I felt frozen, bizarrely quiet, like something had been hermetically sealed inside me. I heard the whine of an ambulance in the distance, the whoosh of a door whispering shut. Finally Mr. Ballard pried her gently out of my arms.
“We didn’t make up yet,” I told him.
“Reena.” That was Soledad, coming closer, but I stepped away, out of her reach.
“I’m serious,” I said, and my voice was louder this time. I was having a hard time getting what was going on. “We weren’t—we were …”
I trailed off as Soledad wrapped her arms around me, stood there loose-limbed and bewildered while she whispered Spanish prayers into my ear. “I’m not kidding,” I told her, voice cracking. I felt my ribs start to collapse. I looked up one last time before I stopped remembering anything, just in time to see the sharp, jagged pleat of Sawyer’s backbone as I watched him slip out the sliding doors.