I tore my eyes away from Claire’s and nodded, managing a smile. Claire did the same. Rachel relaxed, but I didn’t. For her sake, though, I tried to swallow my anger and unease as we settled in to watch the movie. Rachel popped in the DVD and blew out the candles.
Six months later, they were both dead.
AFTER
Rhode Island Hospital Providence, Rhode Island
I OPENED MY EYES. A PERSISTENT MACHINE BEEPED rhythmically to my left. I looked to my right. Another machine hissed beside the bedside table. My head ached and I was disoriented. My eyes struggled to interpret the positions of the hands on the clock hanging next to the bathroom door. I heard voices outside my room. I sat up in the hospital bed, the thin pillows crinkling underneath me as I shifted to try and hear. Something tickled the skin under my nose. A tube. I tried to move my hands to pull it away but when I looked at them, there were other tubes. Attached to needles. Protruding from my skin. I felt a tugging tightness as I moved my hands and my stomach slithered into my toes.
“Get them out,” I whispered to the air. I could see where the sharp steel entered my veins. My breath shortened and a scream rose in my throat.
“Get them out,” I said, louder this time.
“What?” asked a small voice, whose source I couldn’t see.
“Get them out!” I screamed.
Bodies crowded the room; I could make out my father’s face, frantic and paler than usual. “Calm down, Mara.”
And then I saw my little brother, Joseph, wide-eyed and scared. Dark spots blotted out the faces of everyone else, and then all I could see were the forest of needles and tubes, and felt that tight sensation against my dry skin. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t speak. But I could still move. I clawed at my arm with one hand and ripped out the first tube. The pain was violent. It gave me something to hold on to.
“Just breathe. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. They weren’t listening to me, and they needed to get them out. I tried to tell them, but the darkness grew, swallowing the room.
“Mara?”
I blinked, but saw nothing. The beeping and hissing had stopped.
“Don’t fight it, sweetie.”
My eyelids fluttered at the sound of my mother’s voice. She leaned over me, adjusting one of the pillows, and a sheet of black hair fell over her almond skin. I tried to move, to get out of her way, but I could barely hold my head up. I glimpsed two dour-faced nurses behind her. One of them had a red welt on her cheek.
“What’s wrong with me?” I whispered hoarsely. My lips felt like paper.
My mother brushed a sweaty strand of hair from my face. “They gave you something to help you relax.”
I breathed in. The tube under my nose was gone. And the ones from my hands, too. They were replaced by gauzy white bandages wrapped around my skin. Spots of red bled through. Something released itself from my chest and a deep sigh shuddered from my lips. The room shifted into focus, now that the needles were out.
I looked at my father, sitting at the far wall, looking helpless. “What happened?” I asked hazily.
“You were in an accident, honey,” my mother answered. My father met my eyes, but he didn’t say anything. Mom was running this show.
My thoughts swam. An accident. When?
“Is the other driver—” I started, but couldn’t finish.
“Not a car accident, Mara.” My mother’s voice was calm. Steady. It was her psychologist voice, I realized. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
More than waking up in a hospital room, or seeing tubes attached to my skin—more than anything else—that question unnerved me. I stared at her closely for the first time. Her eyes were shadowed, and her nails, usually perfectly manicured, were ragged.
“What day is it?” I asked quietly.
“What day do you think it is?” My mother loved answering questions with questions.
I rubbed my hands over my face. My skin seemed to whisper on contact. “Wednesday?”
My mother looked at me carefully. “Sunday.”
Sunday. I looked away from her, my eyes roaming the hospital room instead. I hadn’t noticed the flowers before, but they were everywhere. A vase of yellow roses were right beside my bed. Rachel’s favorite. A box of my things from the house sat in a chair next to the bed; an old cloth doll my grandmother had left to me when I was a baby lounged inside, resting its limp arm around the rim.
“What do you remember, Mara?”
“I had a history test Wednesday. I drove home from school and…”
I rifled through my thoughts, my memories. Me, walking into our house. Grabbing a cereal bar from the kitchen. Walking to my bedroom on the first floor, dropping my bag and taking out Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays. Writing. Then drawing in my sketchbook. Then…nothing.
A slow, creeping fear wound its way around my belly. “That’s it,” I told her, looking up at her face.
A muscle above my mother’s eyelid twitched. “You were at The Tamerlane—” she started.
Oh, God.
“The building collapsed. Someone reported it at about three a.m. Thursday. When the police arrived, they heard you.”