“Not Alex’s fault,” I managed to sob out. “Ella.”
That last, heavy word took an enormous amount of energy, and I felt myself slipping, my mind closing in on itself.
“Maddy?” Alex said, the fear I felt pouring off him rivaling my own. I didn’t want to see the hope in their eyes die as I forced them to realize that I was Ella.
I studied my dad, my own father, the man who I’d had breakfast with every day for the past seventeen years. The man who coached my middle school soccer team. The man who tried to teach me how to ride a bike one afternoon when I was seven and sat with me in the ER later that same day as they splinted my sprained wrist. Years of time together … of experiences, and my own father didn’t even recognize me.
Or maybe he didn’t want to. Maybe he wanted it to be Maddy who had lived, so that was who he saw.
Horror flashed through his eyes as he took the wheelchair from Alex and pushed me into my room. Distantly, somewhere in the remote crevices of my mind, I remembered that he still thought I was Maddy and that the soothing words he whispered weren’t meant for me.
“What were you thinking?” Mom had Alex by the collar of his shirt and was yelling at him. “Why would you let her go down there? Why didn’t you wake us?”
“Please. He didn’t do this. I did,” I protested.
Realization of who I was and what I needed to tell them set in. I started to shake, every inch of my body freezing. Cold. I tried so hard to say the words, to tell my parents I was Ella, but I couldn’t get a sound past my lips.
Dad helped me out of the wheelchair and back into bed, then sat down next to me. “We’re gonna get you through this, Maddy. I promise.”
Get through this? The phrase sounded so foreign to me, an unattainable solace that I had absolutely no right to hope for. I had been tired and angry and jealous that things came so easy for her. I’d screamed at her. The last words I said to her, the last words she would ever hear came from me, and they were bitter and mean.
“What have I done? Oh my God, what have I done?” I wanted nothing more than to trade places with Maddy, to give her back the life I’d taken. I didn’t want to be here. Not without her.
“We are not angry with you, baby girl. We could never be angry with you.”
Dad never called me that. He called me Bellsy when I was a kid or Isabella when I was in trouble, but mostly he called me Ella. Baby girl was Maddy’s nickname, one she both hated and used to her advantage when she wanted a curfew extension or extra money for shoes or a new pair of jeans.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean for her to die.” I shrank backward, the weight of those words settling deep in my core. Pressing my aching shoulders deeper into my pillow, I wished, for a moment, that I could dissolve into the bed and never come back.
“We know that,” Mom said. “It was a terrible accident, but you are here with us, Maddy. You’re alive and you have your whole life ahead of you. Your whole life. I want you to think about that, concentrate on getting stronger. That’s what your sister would want.”
I looked at Dad, wondering if he felt the same way, if he believed that, too. He smiled and nodded, but I could see the anguish behind his eyes, the battle he was waging to keep his emotions in check. “Ella wouldn’t want you to waste a single minute of your life feeling guilty. She’d want you to live, to do everything you ever dreamed of and more. Do it for her, Maddy. Live for her.”