“Is she . . .” Corinne trailed off shakily.
Aster groped around more, then found the hard, flat glass of the windows. She pounded on them, but they didn’t give. She felt water pooling around her feet. The car was filling up, water seeping through a break in the floor.
“Shit!” Corinne screamed.
Aster tried the door handles, but they didn’t budge. She spun around—or at least what she thought was around—climbed over the backseat, and scrambled for the cargo area, her fingers searching blindly along the carpet. Finally she touched something hard, metal, and heavy. A tire iron.
“Everyone get back here!” she called out. “We need to break this window.”
There were thuds from the front as her sister and cousin climbed over the seats. Rowan grunted loudly, dragging Natasha with her. Even in the dim light, Aster could see that Natasha’s head hung back on her neck, limp.
Once everyone was in the back, Aster wordlessly handed the tire iron to Rowan, who was the strongest. Rowan heaved the thing over her head and thrust it at the back cargo door. It cracked against the glass. She took a deep breath, and struck the glass again. This time it broke.
Ice-cold water flooded into the car, forcing them heavily back. Aster gritted her teeth and strained against the flood, struggling to get through that window and out into the sound.
“Come on!” she screamed at her cousins, reaching to pull them with her toward the hole.
Together, they grabbed Natasha’s limp form under their arms and clumsily hefted her into the dark water. Aster held tight to her cousin’s calf with one hand and paddled furiously with the other. Her lungs instantly begged for air. She tried to open her eyes underwater, but all she saw was darkness. She felt Natasha slip from her grasp and grabbed her as tightly as she could around her waist. Rowan and Corinne were kicking below her, each of them holding one of Natasha’s arms.
Finally, her lungs burning, Aster burst to the surface with a sputtering gasp.
The air was warm on her face. Waves lapped around them. Coughing, Aster looked up through the moonlit night at the bridge above. There was a large gash where the car had broken through the side rails. The bridge was empty.
Rowan popped up a moment later, Natasha deadweight in her arms. The three of them struggled to drag their cousin to shore and lay her down in the sand. She flopped on her back, her arms outstretched. There was an eerie gray pallor to her skin, and her lips were blue. “Is she alive?” Corinne asked hysterically.
Rowan straddled Natasha’s body and listened to her chest. “I think so.” Her eyes were full of fear. “But we need an ambulance.”
Corinne patted her pockets. “My phone’s still in . . . there.” She pointed at the bubbles rising on the surface of the water. The SUV was probably at the bottom of the sound by then.
“Mine is too,” Aster whispered.
“Same here.” Rowan looked like she was going to burst into tears. “Natasha!” she shouted at her. “Natasha, please wake up!”
“Natasha.” Tears were streaming down Aster’s cheeks. “Natasha, please.” The last moments with Natasha swarmed back to her. How she’d started to tell them something about Poppy.
“Please wake up,” Aster whispered.
But no matter how loudly they yelled, their cousin’s eyes remained tightly shut.
15
When Rowan opened her eyes, she was sitting on an orange vinyl chair. A rerun of Friends played on a television hanging on the wall across the room. Next to it a clock read 11:30—p.m., presumably, as it was dark outside. Her cousins leaned against each other on a couch, wearing scrubs that read “Property of Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.”
Then she noticed a woman in a hospital bed a few feet away, with tubes up her nose and a breathing apparatus over her mouth. Her eyes were shut, her hands lay peacefully at her sides, and a monitor recorded her steady heartbeat.
Natasha.
Rowan swallowed hard. After they’d climbed ashore, another car had finally passed on the bridge, and they’d flagged it down and called for an ambulance. All of their clothes were soaked, so the EMTs had lent them scrubs.
Corinne rubbed her eyes and reached for a water bottle. “Did anything happen?” she said groggily, glancing at Natasha. “Is she . . .”
“No. She’s still unconscious,” Rowan told her robotically, peering at her unmoving cousin. She looked peaceful, almost as though she was just asleep. Still, Rowan couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong here. What were the odds that the moment Natasha said she had something to confess, a car hit them? Had there even been a car? It had all happened so fast, Rowan wasn’t quite sure. She thought she’d seen headlights. She was pretty sure she’d heard a horn. Only, was it their horn?