“One of us is,” I said. “The other one would like to but can’t.”
Ms. Rizzo got up and glanced at Sophie’s drawing. She threw her a thumbs-up.
“Why don’t you try landscapes again? Go to that pond you like to shoot when the light is best. A starry, starry night. A time when you aren’t usually there so that the world can be new.” Ms. Rizzo squeezed my shoulder. “Take heart. You still have plenty of time. Entries aren’t due until, what, end of July? You’re in good shape.” She wandered over to other tables.
“Easy for her to say,” I mumbled. Ms. Rizzo specialized in graphic design. Photographing nature at night was not easy. Lighting was one thing, but the reemergence of mosquitos was also soon to be another.
“I think you are putting too much pressure on yourself. You always have a hard time thinking of things in competition season.”
“Freaking Risa,” I said. “She asked me about it, you know?”
“Ohhh,” said Sophie. “What is she doing?”
“I don’t know. Something inspired, probably.”
Sophie shrugged. “You’ll figure out what to submit. Photograph what inspires you. What brings you joy?”
“You.” I grinned. “And Gran. And summer birds.”
“Yeah, your gran brings me joy, too. Birds? Not so much.”
I whacked her with her sketchbook. She’d spent a lot of time at Gran’s house when we were little. I don’t know how the birding hadn’t rubbed off on her, even a little.
At the end of lab, I had produced nothing except herons with mustaches.
“Remember me fondly,” I said to Sophie. “Remember the art of my youth, for that is all I will ever have to show.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve forgotten it already. See you later.”
Once I got outside, I fished around in my backpack to find my phone. I had turned it off for Art and Media, but I needed my internet fix before committing back to nature. There were six voice mails from Mom and more than fifteen texts.
I dialed Mom’s cell.
“Hello?” said a frantic voice. “Laurel, is that you?”
“Yeah, Mom, of course it’s me. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, honey. Where were you? I called and called.”
“I’m was at school, Mom.”
“Yes but your phone!” Her voice rose an octave. “I called the office, but no one there answered, either.”
“Maybe they were in a meeting. I’m not supposed to have my phone on at school.” I thought guiltily of all the times I’d kept it on for bird alerts.
“Honey. I have some bad news. There’s been an accident.”
“What? Who? I thought you took the car in for an oil change today,” I said, confused.
“Grandma, baby. Grandma has been in an accident. She’s downtown at Mercy Hospital. I had to take the bus here … but I’m with her. She’s in surgery. I think you need to come down here. Just … in case.”
“In case what, Mom?” Something wasn’t sinking in. What Grandma? That’s what I called Dad’s mom. Wait, she couldn’t mean Gran? I’d just seen Gran yesterday evening.
Actually. Gran usually called with a bird update by now. I’d been so distracted by lab and contest woes that it slipped my mind.
“Things don’t look so good. Just—just get down here, okay?”
“Wait, something happened to Gran? Are you sure?” None of this was making any sense. Gran was unstoppable. Gran was a force of nature. Gran was fine and looking for birds on the stupid mountain path yesterday.
“Of course I’m sure! Listen—Laurel. Mercy emergency room. Okay?” Mom’s voice just got more and more frantic. Emergencies weren’t exactly her wheelhouse.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me just text my co-op.”
It wasn’t until I sent Jerry a brief note about a family emergency that it started to sink in. Something had happened to Gran. Gran, my rock, had been unearthed and thrown who knows where. My hands shook as I gripped my handlebars, making my way the few miles to the hospital.
As the sliding doors let me into the emergency department, reality buzzed in my ears. A dad sat with a screaming little boy whose arm stuck out at a funny angle. A girl a little older than me rested her head against a pillar, her eyes half-moons under drooping lids. Nurses, doctors, light, and sound swirled like fog over this antiseptic place. I wobbled over to a desk where a harried-looking woman answered calls with a gruff voice.
“Excuse me?” I said. I hated to interrupt her.
“Just a second, honey,” she said. She barked into the phone, punched numbers, sighed at the ringing.
“Busy for a Thursday afternoon,” she said, finally looking up at me. “Are you here for yourself?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. I recognized her. I’d seen her at school plays and bake sales. She was the mom of a girl in my history class. “My gran was brought in…”
She shook her head, as if she, too, were stuck in the emergency room fog. “Fowler. Aurora Fowler. And you are Laurel, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Just a second, sweetheart.”
Mrs. Glenn. That was her name. Mrs. Glenn, mother of Tabitha, another Art and Media lab girl. Tabby, everyone called her. Mrs. Glenn, mom to Tabby, nice to people in front of her and hard as steel to the people demanding things on the phone. Good qualities to have in an emergency room receptionist, or nurse, or whatever she was. She wore scrubs, so it could go either way.
None of this mattered, these details. I should be thinking about Gran. Finding Gran. Not remembering a girl I didn’t really talk to or knowing her mom’s name or memorizing the patterns in the chipped paint in the wall behind her. But right now those normal things felt like a lifeline.
Maybe I should text Sophie. She was good in a crisis. I just slipped the phone out of my hoodie and unlocked it when Mom burst out of another set of double doors past the desk with Mrs. Glenn.
“Laurel,” she said. Her bloodshot eyes and puffy red face flashed a warning light that she’d been crying. Gran would always roll her eyes at Mom’s constant waterworks, but still alarm bells accompanied her appearance in my head.
“Mom?” I said.
She threw her arms around me. “It’s not good, baby. Not good. Come with me.” Mom released her grip around my shoulders and grabbed my hand. She waved at Mrs. Glenn, who pushed a button at her desk. The doors swung open for us. I followed Mom down a white corridor. White walls, white tile, white machines. The only color came in a yellow line of the floor, and angry red and green and blue bursts from monitors. People lay in little rooms, some with their doors open, some not. It was silent except when it wasn’t—cries or worried conversation or beeps broke the stillness. Mom rushed to a pod where Gran lay.
I gasped when I saw her—like an actual, audible gasp a cartoon character might make. She was Gran but she wasn’t. Her eyes closed, her skin pale, wires and bags and those terrible machines attached to her.
“What…,” I started, but I closed my mouth. What would Mom say? Could her words fill Gran up and make her whole and well, so we could leave this place? Would they wake Gran up from her dream so we could leave? We’d drop Mom off at home so that Gran and I could go back to trying to beat Louise and Risa, respectively
“What happened?” I whispered.
“I don’t know.” Mom shook her head. “She got hit by a car. It was raining all day and night and the oil on the roads … for some reason Grandma was out on the highway or something. Up on the mountainside, you know, that hiking trail. You can get onto the road in a break there. She was standing by the bend. A car took the turn too fast and hit her. She landed yards and yards away, down the hill. The driver stopped and was pretty torn up about it. But why was she even out there?” Mom looked at Gran. “Why, Mom? What could you possibly have been doing? How could you possibly think it was a good idea to be out there?”
Mom started howling. This wasn’t her usual, OMG-BradChad-broke-up-with-me cry. This was soul-deep wailing. I had
half a mind to shush Mom. There were other people, sick people, here after all. But then I looked at Gran. If anything was going to wake her up, surely this would.
Gran didn’t move. None of the monitor thingies hooked up to her changed at all.
Just then, a woman in a long white coat came in with a man wearing scrubs. They looked at Mom; then they looked at me. Since I was not currently impersonating a wounded animal, the woman addressed me.
“What is your name?” she asked, loudly businesslike over the sound of Mom.
“Laurel,” I said. “This is my gran. Um. And my mom.” I pointed to them both, as if there could be some confusion.
The lady nodded. “Is she okay?” She gestured to Mom.
“Oh. Well. My gran, you know?”
“Mommmmmm,” my own mother wailed.
She looked at me again. “Do you know what happened?”
I nodded. “I kinda heard.”
“We are going to keep her here in the intensive care unit. Your grandmother will need to have tests. We discussed this with…” She looked at Mom. “… your mother. But you might want to talk it out with her a little later. Is your dad around? Or another adult in the family?”
I shook my head, and Mom wailed.
Guy-in-scrubs gently shuffled Mom into a chair. He knelt and spoke softly to her. Eventually she calmed down.
“We can only give medicine if you are a patient here, too,” he explained. “Since you are in distress, though, maybe…”
I sighed. “She’ll be okay. Give her a few minutes. Right, Mom?”
Mom folded up into herself, like an origami swan creased with grief and pain. “Yes,” she whispered.
The guy kept talking to her and she listened. Dude was like the Mom whisperer or something. God, I hoped it was unethical for him to date her.
The doctor leaned toward me. “Laurel,” she said. “The first twenty-four or forty-eight hours are important. Hopefully we’ll see signs of improvement. For now, it’s a situation of wait and see. Given the circumstances”—she looked at Mom again—“maybe you want to go home. Get some rest. We have your contact info; we will call you if anything changes or if we move her. Okay?”
“Shouldn’t we stay here?” I said. “Gran shouldn’t be alone.”
The woman smiled. “I know this is difficult. But we will take good care of her. I bet she would want you and your mom to take care of yourselves, wouldn’t she?”
“Yeah,” I said. That was true. When Gran woke up, she’d have a duck fit if Mom was freaking out. That’s what she called it when anyone yelled—“a duck fit.”
All birds, all the time with Gran.
“I’ve been here for hours,” Mom sniffed. “We could come back in a little bit, Laurel.”
“But…,” I said.
“A little bit,” Mom said. I could hear her voice rise like it did before another duck fit.
“Okay,” I said, defeated. “Okay.”
We left through the double doors, past Mrs. Glenn, past the sleeping girl and the crying boy, still sitting there. Still sleeping. Still crying.
When we got home, Mom drank the tea that made her sleepy. She hadn’t asked me if I needed anything or if I was okay. Maybe she assumed that I didn’t. Or that I was. Or maybe she just didn’t have anything to give regardless of what I’d say.
It was probably that last one.
I sat down on my bed, cradling the phone to my chest. A sneaky thought from earlier floated back into my consciousness, growing heavier and heavier until it sunk to into the base of my skull—I had seen Gran up there yesterday. I knew then it was dangerous but didn’t make her come with me. I could have prevented this. I should have kept her from going up there in bad weather. That was my fault. If I had just stayed a little longer to talk her into coming with me, or turned around and dragged her, I would have pissed her off, but she would have been fine.
But she wasn’t fine. She was awful. She was alone in the white room with only wires and tubes for company.
And
it
was
my
fault.
The phone buzzed me out of my spiral. I nearly dropped it, thinking it was the hospital. But it wasn’t the ER or the ICU or wherever Gran was at the moment.
“Sophie,” I answered.
She started talking before I could get any coherent thought together. “Oh my god, Laurel. Brett’s dad heard on the CB that there was an accident and he called his buddy and is your gran okay? What happened?”
“I don’t know too much right now. She was hit by a car. Um. In an accident. She was outside, and it was raining, and she was by that fucking trail by the road and you know how slippy it stays all the time…”
And if Gran died, it was all my fault, Sophie. Completely, and utterly my fault. Because I saw her there and left.
But I couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell anyone that. Because if no one else knew, then it wasn’t really true. Well, okay, I knew. So it was fact.
But no one could hate me for it, at least.
“Laurel, are you still there?” Soph said. She’d been talking that whole time.
“I don’t know, Soph,” I said. “I don’t know where I am without Gran.”
“Yeah,” she said. She stayed on the other end of the phone, silent. “Do you want me to come over?”
“I don’t deserve that,” I said softly.
“What?” she said.
“I might have to go back to the hospital,” I said. “They are going to call. If she needs us. If they move her. Gran. To another room. Because they said they might do that.”
“Okay,” she said. “Laurel?”
“Yeah?”
“Um. I’m here if you need me. Okay?”
“I know,” I said.
“No, really. I am.”
“Thanks, Soph. This just sucks, you know?”
“Yes. Yes, it does.”
I didn’t know what else to say and neither did she, so we hung up. I watched her face fade from the phone screen. I held my thumb down and tapped into the picture icon. I opened shots of herons and watched them fade over and over.
Bills, feathers, darkness. Feathers, wings, darkness.
It made me feel better.
I rolled over and hugged my knees to my chest. I tried to lie still like a log and take deep, even breaths, like a family therapist once taught Mom and me.
There, completely alone, the night closed in around me. It was too dark and too quiet, even if the hall light glowed in on my lime-green rug and my daisy clock ticked cheerfully on my wall. Gran’s heartbeat should be booming from her house, out and over the mile-and-a-half stretch to our driveway, and into the downstairs and the upstairs and through our attic and the rest of Shunksville right now. She was so alive; all of Pennsylvania couldn’t contain her. The fact that right now she had shrunken into a damaged body in a tiny pod, left a silence so violent it attacked the ears. The clock ticked out of sync without her steady pulse to guide it.
I picked up my phone again. I willed it to ring. I willed the doctor or even the dude nurse who probably had a thing for Mom to call us. To tell us that Gran had woken up, that she’d be good as new in a few days.
Ring. Buzz. Something.
I made a resolution to myself, right then in the too-quiet, too-dark house. Gran was going to be okay. I would will her to be okay. If it took talking to her and learning physical therapy or whatever, I would do it. I would think of something that would be the miracle we needed.
FIELD JOURNAL ENTRY
MAY 4
The day dawned bright and beautiful, not that I got to see much of it. Jerry said that I could miss co-op, and had to make up hours only if I wanted to. I was there enough just for fun with Gran that I had amassed way more than I probably needed anyway.
Gran. Lying there in the hospital bed, still as a river stone, as the chaos of the hospital washed over her.
Gran. Her syllab
le stung. What always seemed a soft, kind, feathered word now squeezed into the brain with tiny, crushing claws.
I’d seen her. I’d seen her. I knew it was unsafe. Obviously it was unsafe. But I’d just kept going. If Mom ever found out, she was going to disown me. Kick me out. And I’d have nowhere to go because I’d killed the one thing keeping Mom and I going.
No. Not killed, Laurel. She was only asleep. A coma wasn’t forever. Her brain could be there.
Right?
Back at home after another day next to Gran, Mom went straight to her room, only stopping long enough to tell me to wake her if the hospital called with any news.
I went to my own room and collapsed onto my bed. I looked over at my Fauna issues from the last decade, neatly arranged on a tall shelf with my Warbley collection. Warbley’s Beginning Birding, the first of my collection, given to me by Gran on my fourth birthday. Warbley’s Definitive Guide to North American Birds, Warbley’s memoirs, One for the Life List, and Another One for the Life List. A dozen more.
None of the magazines or books I’d always used as life guides really covered what to do when you accidentally caused one of the world’s best birders to nearly die.
Nearly, Laurel. Gran wasn’t dead.
Still the tiny claws dug deeper. I could feel this sting in my head. In my chest.
“This can be okay,” I said to the Faunas and Warbleys. “Nature persists. Life triumphs. Always.”
Their prim rows stood sympathetically. If nature taught anything, it was that death came for us all.
“Not helpful,” I said. “I choose to believe that Gran is the exception that goes against the rule.” I nodded at them. Sometimes you just had to fake confidence until it became real. Guilt tried to worm its way back, but I’d just have to keep shoving it down.
“Like Warbley says…,” I said to myself, but couldn’t come up with anything in the moment.
Maybe tomorrow. That was one thing. The birds would fly and sing again tomorrow.
I could depend on that. Even if the feelings I’d shoved to the back recesses of my brain pushed forward, making my temples hurt. Knowing I could hear a bird sing tomorrow, I would make that enough for now.
The Confusion of Laurel Graham Page 3
