My aunt nodded. “True. But that was an extreme circumstance—”
“What part of this isn’t an extreme circumstance?” I asked.
“Sí,” agreed Riley. “Fuz, fuz, fuz, fuz, fuz.” She was having a great time.
“I give up!” Mom declared in defeat. “Curse all you want!”
“I’m just in time, then.” Elayne stood in the doorway. Despite her joke, it was obvious that she had been crying much of the night. “Can I come in?” Before anyone (my mother) could object, Riley waved her in. The last time she was here, her mother decided who came and went. My mother turned to leave; Riley gestured for her to stay.
“You look like crap,” I teased Aunt Elayne.
“Nora!” snapped my mother.
“I had that one coming.” Aunt Elayne grinned. I made room for her next to Riley. “Riley, I need to apologize for what happened yesterday. Paige was absolutely right and I never should have left. I was irresponsible and it was entirely my fault.”
“Mine too,” I added meekly. “I—I shouldn’t have taken you to the bathroom. It was a dumb idea.”
“Mine,” said Riley. “Mine.”
“True,” I agreed boldly. “It was actually Riley’s dumb idea.” She nice-smacked me on the arm.
“Ladies!” Audra was in the doorway, tapping her foot. “Have we forgotten the visiting rules already?” There were four of us in the room, one more than the PICU allowed. Aunt Mo didn’t count, so either my mom, me, or Aunt Elayne had to go. Riley jabbed a finger at my mother, her mother, and then Elayne. She gave me an open hand. Archie-speak for “stay.”
“She, uh, wants me to stay,” I told the others.
“Yessi,” Riley confirmed.
“We’ll be right outside this door,” said her mother, clearly unsure. “Do NOT get out of this bed.” The Sullivan sisters cleared the room together.
As soon as they were gone, Riley reached for a pen, but she couldn’t quite get her fingers around it and it dropped to the floor. I put it back in her hand and gently folded her fingers around it. When I let go, the pen fell again.
“Fuz,” she grunted.
Picking it up again, I realized what the problem was—the pen was too slender for her weak grip. But I had an idea. I took the pen to the bathroom and wrapped it in toilet paper until it was practically the size of a cucumber. When Riley saw it, she tilted her head the same way Archie sometimes did. I put the toilet-paper-cucumber pen in her hand and wrapped her fingers around it one more time—and then I let go. A huge smile spread across Riley’s face, her hand shaking just a bit as it hovered over the family page. I resisted the urge to help steady her hand. Finally the pen settled on the page.
“You good me,” she said.
“I’m good to you?”
“Sí. Sí.”
I didn’t deserve that. I thought about hiding from her during her toughest days in the ICU, about the books I threw and kicked, and complaining about my ruined summer, and—half the time I still couldn’t even bring myself to meet her gaze. But Riley hadn’t witnessed any of those things. And then of course there was the fact that I was the reason she was here in the first place—only it seemed that the stroke had erased all that from her memory. She didn’t remember that she shouldn’t even be talking to me. I shook my head.
Riley refocused on the pen. Her grip seemed strong, but when the pen hit the page, the paper moved with her pen. Too much pressure. I held the page still as she concentrated on—and then adjusted—the point pressure. On her second attempt, the pen went through the page and tore a small hole.
“FUZ!”
“Don’t give up, Ri.” I smoothed over the hole with my thumb. “Let’s try a new page, where there’s more room. Bigger might be easier.”
She drew one shaky line. Then another. She grunted, seeming satisfied with it, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. She tried again. And again.
“Wep,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said sheepishly. “I don’t understand. You’re spelling something?” That was a huge step, although I was suddenly nervous that despite all her hard work, I wouldn’t be able to understand what she was writing. She shook her head and put the pen down. She gave up.
“Skay.” But she was still looking at me.
“Want to play some more UNO?” I reached for the cards from the table, eager to put that conversation behind us.
“No. Walt.” She turned to a fresh page in the notebook.
“Wait?”
“No.” she said, “Walt.” She turned the pages back with her good hand and stopped on:
“Wolf?” I asked. “Walt is wolf!”
“Sí, sí.”
“You want to draw the wolf?”
“Sí.” She kept her eyes on the sketchbook.
I eased my hand away from hers so I wouldn’t be in the way. The toilet-paper-cucumber pen dropped and rolled to the end of the tray table.
“Fuh, fuz,” she said.
“It’s okay, we’ll try again.” I got the pen, and this time I wrapped my hand around Riley’s and placed it on a new spot on the page.
“Walt!” She smiled. The pen was barely touching the paper, but it was enough. After a few seconds, it started to tilt to one side as her grip loosened. I tried to hold it steady without changing what she was drawing.
“¡Bueno walt! ¡Bueno!” She was happy, but her face was beginning to droop again.
“Let’s take a break,” I said, easing the pen out of her hand, but putting it on the tray so she could grab it easily. She was out like a light. Beep. Beep. Beep. I stared up at her numbers, her P-SOCKS (98), her heart rate (65), and her blood pressure (110/60). She was solid, even if her memory was shaky.
DAY 11, 12, 13
Riley spent two more days in the PICU and had two more clear CT scans. Dr. Mejia was finally satisfied that the danger of the delayed hemorrhage had passed, and she had even managed to do some shuffling and put her back with Sophia in pediatrics.
Mom couldn’t make Riley take the obscenities out of the notebook, but she did ask that we not use them in front of her—which Riley agreed to, but sometimes that was hard. Aunt Elayne, of course, had figured out a way around that.
She grabbed an UNO card and threw it down on Riley’s tray.
“A wild card? What’s that for?” I asked.
“There’s your new secret F-bomb.” She grinned. “Consider it a gift. I’m just going to close my eyes for a few minutes.” Riley and I literally watched her fall asleep in the chair inside of one minute.
“You know they’re putting your bed in the living room, right? So you don’t have to use the stairs?” I babbled. “I mean, I’m sure someday you will use the stairs. . . .”
“Sí.” She nodded. “Know.” Aunt Maureen was close by, in the hallway somewhere, and we were both under the threat of severe consequences if we moved a muscle without permission. Emergency rules were no longer in effect.
“And you know that my dad is going to build some kind of ramp so it will be easier to manage the front steps? I think he’s coming this weekend so it will be ready for you.”
Riley laid her hand flat on her chest and slapped herself lightly. “Me.”
“Yep,” I rattled on, “and a new bathroom, with bars . . . just for now . . . to help . . .”
Riley interrupted with a hand on my arm. She pointed to the ORB. I had just changed the UNO pile from red to green, and I thought she was asking me if it was her turn. Riley was in rare form back in pediatrics. She had earrings in and was wearing lip gloss! I hated the goopy feel of lip gloss, but Riley never left the house without two different shades in her bag, and by the looks of it, she had shared one of them with Sophia.
“Sí, sí,” I said. “It’s your turn. Verde. Green.”
“No,” she said. She pointed to the picture I’d made of my dad on the communication board. She laid her hand flat on her chest and slapped herself lightly. “Me,” she said. “Me.” She pointed at:
And then a
t herself.
“You want to talk to my father?”
“No, no, no,” she said. “Me. Rye. Me.”
She opened and closed her hand a bunch of times then put her thumb and pointer together like she was writing with something.
“Give a note to my dad?” She reached awkwardly toward the phone and made the writing gesture.
“Fffun.” Fun?
“Me fun?” I said. “Yes, Riley. You are loads of fun. For real.”
Riley snorted. She grasped at a pen on the side table but only succeeded in knocking it off.
I picked it up and handed it to her. I was hoping she wasn’t trying to write me a note, because she hadn’t had much luck with handwriting yet. Instead she made some lines above my dad’s head and then over his face a little bit.
“Are you mad at my dad for leaving? He didn’t want to,” I assured her. “He had to get back to work. I just told you, he’s coming back to build you a ramp.”
She didn’t say anything. She just kept drawing. All over my dad. I listened to her scribble and Aunt Elayne snore.
Then she pointed at herself and then pointed at Scribble Dad, herself, Scribble Dad, herself, Scribble Dad. This was Scribble Dad:
You have no way of knowing who that is, but all of a sudden, I did. It was actually a pretty good version of Former Uncle Pete. “Your dad?”
“Sí, sí.”
“You want your father?”
She nodded and suddenly was crying, and trying to say something so garbled that I couldn’t tell which language she was trying to use. She tried to wipe her tears, but the one hand wouldn’t cooperate. It really seemed to be lagging behind the rest of her recovery—and it worried me. I grabbed a Kleenex and dabbed her cheeks as gently as I could. She pointed to her dad again and again.
“See me,” she rattled.
“You thought he would come here?” I kept my voice as low as I could.
“See me,” she said, looking over at Aunt Elayne and then lowering her own voice. “See me.” Thoughts were ping-ponging in my brain. Why would she think he would come see her? Did he even know? If there had been a conversation about that, I definitely had not been filled in. I thought about what Mom had said in the waiting room, that Maureen hadn’t spoken to Uncle Pete in two years. Whatever had happened between Riley’s parents, it must have been bad. And I still had no idea what his “problems” were. Did Riley?
“Do you know where he is?” I asked reluctantly. I had never asked her that before.
She nodded her head.
“You do?? Does . . . does your mom know?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“You miss him?” I asked. What a stupid question, I thought. Of course she missed him.
She nodded. “Sí, yes,” she agreed, smiling a little, even as her eyes spilled over with tears. She sank back into the pillows, her gaze starting to drift past me. I waited for her to say something else, but it felt like she was done. I shuffled the UNO cards and dealt another round. Riley didn’t pick up the cards. Instead she reached across the bed with her good arm and tapped on the phone. The phone that hadn’t been used a single time since we’d been here.
“You want me to call your father?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Me,” she said. “Me,” and then she tapped the phone.
“You want to call him?” I tried not to sound as panicky as I suddenly felt.
She smacked my arm. She pointed to her mouth and then me. “Meh,” she said. And then she tapped the phone.
“Yo sa,” she said.
“Yo sé,” I repeated. I know. “I know? I know the phone?” I had become remarkably fluent in broken Spanish/English/Pointing. So had she.
“No, yoo sé.”
“Yoo sa? Wait, what? You or yo? English or Spanish, Riley? I think you’re bouncing back and forth. Start over, because I’m lost.”
She pointed to father on the board, not padre.
“Okay, English,” I said. “Say it in English.”
“You say,” she said. Then “Meh” and pointed to the phone.
“You say meh phone,” I recited back to her.
“Sí, sí, sí.”
“Zombie Spanish Charades!” I laughed. She’d hated that joke the first time I used it, and she still hated it. She grunted a little. Grunt = mad. Snort = laugh. It was a subtle difference sometimes, but then she fished around the UNO cards until she found what she needed and threw a wild card at me. Unmistakable. She had just told me to go fuz myself.
“Well, same to you! This isn’t easy, you know!” I threw it back at her. Aunt Elayne’s head rolled in our direction. Shoot. I lowered my voice. “Okay, okay. I say what you are saying and showing. Me telephone. Mefone? Oh . . . my phone! My phone!”
“Yess!” Riley threw her hand up in the air.
“I have your phone,” I told her, my heart quickening. “You were worried about your phone?” Worried that Aunt Maureen had it, I bet.
“Yes. Sí.”
“It’s in your desk drawer at home. I put it there,” I said. “I turned it off, too,” I added quickly.
“Here,” she said. “Here.”
“Bring the phone here?”
“Sí, sí,” she said brightly. Of course she wanted her phone. She was getting better. More herself. She wanted her phone just like she wanted french fries now and her own clothes and earrings. Then it struck me. Her phone! Georgina? He had no idea where Riley was or why she seemed to have fallen off the face of the Earth! Was she worried he might be mad? Worried he might have forgotten about her?
If she was remembering Georgina, what else was she starting to remember?
“Do you remember that it’s cracked?” I swallowed hard.
“No.” She found the shaky lines she had drawn in the ORB. The ones I hadn’t understood.
“Wep?” It was a question, I could tell from the intonation.
I saw it now. The letter Y. “Why?” I said. “Is that it?”
“Sí, sí.”
“We had a fight,” I explained. “You and me.”
“Wep?”
I glanced over at Aunt Elayne, head now back and mouth wide open. Sound asleep. “We . . . um, had a fight. About the phone. In your room.” An awful fight, I did not add. You hit me, I did not add. An awful fight about a secret boyfriend with a code name: Georgina. The promise I made about it and the promise I broke about it. To force her on the roller coaster. The roller coaster that landed her here. I added none of this. I wasn’t going to say “Georgina” out loud, and I wasn’t going to draw that ridiculous big-haired decoy.
“Wep?” Riley asked again, patting the page.
“I don’t remember,” I lied. Yes, I flat-out lied. My throat had gone dry. “We had a stupid little fight about something. We were tired.”
She nodded, but the worst look crossed her face, as if, all of a sudden, she was remembering, as if she was watching our fight happen all over again. Riley drew a sharp breath and her eyes got wide. Her gaze zeroed in on me. She hissed.
I steeled myself.
she demanded with her finger. With her eyes. With her shoulders.
she demanded with her fist.
Then she angry-pointed at me. YOU.
.
YOU.
.
“I’m sorry, Riley,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“WEP?! WEP? WEP?” Why, why, why.
“I don’t know why!! ¡Yo no sé! ¡YO NO SÉ!” Why did I blackmail her? Why did I drag her on the roller coaster? Why did I make such a big deal out of a boy with a deep voice in the first place? Why?
I reached for her hand. She snatched it away.
Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
“I just did it. It was a stupid thing! I’m just a jerk, okay! A stupid, immature jerk. I had no idea this would happen! I didn’t know you would get hurt. I didn’t know!!”
Both of Riley’s hands were in tight fists, the left one quaking from the effort. Her chest and face had gone
crimson and blotchy.
“I’m sorry, Riley. I’m so, so sorry.”
She slammed both her fists against the table. The cards scattered and the table rolled. Aunt Elayne jumped up out of the chair. “What?! What?!”
I grabbed helplessly at the cards, trying to catch them. “OUT.” Now she was crying. “OUT.” I had managed to trigger Riley’s memory—of the phone, the fight, Georgina, the roller coaster, the broken promise—and it was pumping through her veins, and now she couldn’t stand the sight of me.
“What happened? Do you need the doctor?” Aunt Elayne was next to Riley now. “Nora, what’s going on?” She looked a little frantic, like she wasn’t entirely comfortable being the adult in the room.
Riley closed her eyes, then swept the ORB off the bed. It splayed open on the floor, rings popping. Plastic sheathed pages slid in every direction. She was done talking.
“¿Riley, está bien?” called Sophia. Not only was she wide awake, she was up out of bed and standing at the end of the curtain. Are you okay?
“No,” Riley whimpered. “No bien.”
Sophia went to Riley’s bedside, sat down in my chair, and spoke to Riley in quiet Spanish while my aunt looked on. Riley answered her, but I couldn’t understand them. Sophia glared at me so hard I shrank away until my back was up against the wall. She listened to Riley for another full minute before she turned her attention back to me.
“What did you do?” she seethed.
You have no idea.
Aunt Elayne excused me with a jerk of her head toward the door. I took off.
* * *
No sign of Jack in the PICU family room. Where the hell was he these days? I did two laps on the PICU floor before Monica stopped me in the hallway. I immediately felt better when I saw her.
“Do you need something for the binder, Nora?”
“I’m looking for Colin’s room.”
“Who?” Her smile disappeared.
“I know I’m not supposed to invade anyone’s privacy, and I’m really sorry, but I’m trying to find Colin’s room so I can find Jack. You know, his brother.” I really didn’t want to invade anybody’s privacy, but I really needed to talk to Jack. This wasn’t a silly triangle problem. Riley remembered all of it and she hated me now.
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