‘Oh, I’ve seen it.’ I said, gliding away from her with my poor excuse for grace. The gravel crunched under my feet. ‘How does it go, like, “doo de doo do”?’ I opened up the umbrella and started twirling it above my head like she’d done earlier.
‘Yeah, see, you don’t even need me.’ She was grinning now, watching me from the side.
I grinned back, covering more of the rough surface with each twirl. I tried to pinpoint what I was feeling, the strange giddiness of dancing on a roof in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a simple happiness, because the anxiety I’d been carrying all night was still weighing in my stomach, but in a way that wasn’t exactly bad. It was an odd kind of freedom, something I wanted to be able to remember. A new version of myself.
‘This is all thanks to you, you know,’ I called to her, as my foot found a section of roof that felt different.
‘What do you mean?’ She was still smiling.
‘Me, being here, doing this.’ I moved my feet around on the new surface, wondering where the gravel had gone. ‘I’d never done anything interesting before I met you. And now –’
There was a cracking noise, so loud we both jumped.
‘What was that?’ Suzanne asked, looking worried.
I had frozen in place, too scared even to look down at my feet. ‘Um.’ My voice was shaking so much I almost couldn’t speak. ‘I think I might be standing on a skylight.’
The instant look of horror on her face scared me even more. I could hear a faint crackling noise, emanating from below my shoes. My heartrate was ratcheting up, roaring in my ears.
‘Don’t move,’ she said, and despite the panic on her face her voice was calm. ‘I’m coming to get you, OK?’ She started towards me.
I knew I was going to fall an instant before it happened. There was a split second when the glass beneath my feet gave way before gravity caught up, and it was in that moment my brain selected an image for me. As I fell in a shower of glass and mud, I couldn’t hear the screaming coming from my own mouth or Suzanne’s. I couldn’t see the rush of the floor below as it rose to meet me.
I saw Rosie, aged five, breathless and triumphant, holding out a ribbon to me. Her voice, lilting with excitement, before sarcasm dried it out, ‘And now we’re best friends.’
And then the ground.
When
Here’s one good thing about the aftermath of a twenty-foot fall through a glass sheet: memory loss.
Not total memory loss, of course. But just enough to minimize the trauma. My brain is kind to me that way.
Even some time after I had the full use of all my limbs back and no longer felt a sickening dizziness when I stood up too quickly, I still couldn’t remember most of what happened in the first twelve hours after the fall. All I had were scraps of memory, flashbacks that could be triggered by a chance phrase or sound or touch.
The rough scrape of the neck brace wrapped around my throat.
The sound of someone, a girl, sobbing.
A light shone into my eye.
A patient, calm voice. ‘Caddy?’ And me thinking, Who?
A strip of lights along a ceiling, whizzing by.
And pain, oh there was pain. Mercifully brief, as I moved in and out of consciousness, and then helped by drugs. But the memory of the pain struck me at odd moments, even months later. Like every nerve in my body had sounded an alarm: SOMETHING IS WRONG.
Which it was, of course. Aside from the severe concussion – which the doctors thought could be brain damage for what my mother says were the worst five hours of her life – I had a leg that was broken in two places, a wrist all but shattered and three broken ribs.
But I lived, conquering the odds of twenty-foot falls with an innate determination I didn’t know I possessed.
My parents were by my side in the hospital for most of the morning and afternoon, but I retain no memory of any conversations we had during that time.
‘That’s probably for the best,’ Mum said later. ‘You weren’t exactly making much sense. You kept telling me that you’d ruined your shoes.’ She laughed a little tearfully. ‘Like I cared about your silly shoes. But you kept saying it!’
The first lucid conversation I had was later that same day, when I woke up to find Rosie sitting in a chair pushed right up to my bed. She had Cosmo magazine open on her lap.
‘Hey,’ I said.
Rosie’s head jerked up. As soon as our eyes met her face broke out into a grin, and the sight of it almost brought me to tears. It was the smile of a friend who has known you for over ten years, the kind of friend who forgives you for your idiocy, the kind of friend where the word ‘best’ is unnecessary.
‘Hey,’ she said, reaching out to squeeze my shoulder. ‘Oh my God.’ She pressed her lips together, then took a deep breath and smiled again, a little shakily this time. ‘Caddy, oh my God.’
‘I know,’ I said, because I did.
She attempted another smile. ‘I’ve never had such a good opportunity to say I told you so.’
‘You’re not mad?’