THE FIRST SOUND that filters in is the chirping of disturbed birds and a hissing sound that might be the radiator. My eyes blink heavily, but my chin feels connected to my chest, where a singular line of blood snakes its way from somewhere down my neck and onto my shirt. It’s hard to lift my head. All my weight is forward, my body strains against the seat belt, and I realize we’re facing downhill; mercifully, a large tree has stopped us from falling farther down the ravine.
Down to the eye.
Next to me, my mother groans. Her head rests on the steering wheel. Much more blood than I see on myself flows from her head, down her face like tears, and over her full lips. Her right forearm and wrist are bent at an odd angle. “Mom?” I’m afraid to touch her.
“Mom,” she repeats. Thank God, she can hear me.
Then I realize . . . she’s heard my voice, she’s found her own, so she’s naturally reaching up the chain, grasping to know if her own mother is okay. I strain to turn around, pulling myself over the top of the seat back. Gran is folded in half, slumped against the door; the window has a spider’s web of cracks in it. I call her name, struggle to reach and touch her, but she is still.
Calls bounce down to us from somewhere above through the trees. “Hang on! We’re getting help!”
“Hurry!” I croak too quietly and try again. I don’t see blood on my grandmother, but who knows the extent of her injuries.
I have an eternity to think about what happened.
We are the center of the universe, and the sun rotates around us as we wait for help. My mother is in and out of consciousness. I’ve cried out to Gran, tried to reach her, wherever she is, but the longer she’s quiet, the more scared I become. She’s withstood the pains and hardships of life longer than any of us, but her age makes her seem more fragile.
The girl who follows me may or may not be real. I was sure before that she was, but how can she be so big that the entire lake was one staring eye? That’s not possible. Unless . . . unless I really am schizophrenic, and the drugs haven’t yet stomped down the illusions of my monstrous mind. All I know is that as we hang precariously on this slope, I realize that nearly everyone in my life has been hurt by me, or by her?. . .
But it doesn’t matter where I assign the blame. It’s all hurt. And it’s all me.
Is being alive worth it if you’re nothing but a wrecking ball?
The sounds of sirens wind up the mountain, getting louder and louder until they are screeching right above us. A choir of voices discusses the best way to help us. Bless the man who reaches us first, looks in my eyes, and says, “We’ve got you now. It’s gonna be okay.”
I nod and cling to his words.
“They’re here to help us, Ayida.”
“You never used to call me by my name. I don’t like it,” she says?—?her voice is a crack of dry wood?—?and blacks out again.
Beginning with Gran, and then my mother, we are eventually all pulled from the mangled car and hauled up to the road, where ambulances whisk us off to the hospital. I have a gash in my neck where the seat belt cut into me, but I can sit up, and so I do, wrapped in a blanket, riding along with Gran. She’s alive, the medic assures me of that, but still unconscious. Halfway down the mountain, my stomach heaves, and I throw up all over the floor.
“Am I dead yet?”
It’s the most beautiful sound, Gran talking to me from her hospital bed. The nurse tells my mother that Gran’s blood pressure is dangerously low.
“No,” I answer, tears rising in my eyes. Guilt squeezes my throat closed. I did this. If I hadn’t freaked out, we’d be winding back down the mountain, pleasantly tired after a day in the sun with the wind blowing in her gray hair. Not sitting in the hospital, where the smell of sickness makes me queasy.
“I never got to stick my toes in the mud.”
I sniff. “I know. There’s still time.”
“No.”
That word slams like gnarled hands on piano keys.
The beep of the heart-rate monitor keeps slow time.
“Instead of me singing my song, my song is singing to me.” Gran’s voice is a low, scratchy purr. “That’s how I know it’s time to go,” she says. “It’s calling me home.”
From behind me, my mother sobs into one hand. The other hand is in a cast. Tears seep through her fingers like she’s dipped her onyx palm into holy water. Her reaction tells me this is not just melodramatics. Gran isn’t the type for that. If she says she’s going to die, she is, and there’s nothing any of us are going to do about it.