The Dragon's Playlist

by Laura Bickle

  But he needed to hear me.

  I clambered to the crest of the mountain as the sun brushed the horizon. Like the rest of the hillside, it was deeply forested, smelling like green and earth. I stood at the edge of a sandstone outcropping, where a pine tree grew improbably out of a fissure in the soft stone.

  This would all be gone. The silence would be broken with the roar of explosives, and all this rock and tree would be shoveled into the valley beside it.

  “Afakos,” I whispered. “This is all going away.”

  He hadn’t responded to my shouts, but he responded to my whisper. I heard a hissing in the trees, the sound of scales rustling against bark and poison ivy. I felt his shadow over me, and I turned.

  “What do you mean?” His head cocked to the side, and the dragon regarded me with pale eyes. The shimmer of the sunset played on his scales and shone through the translucent webbing of his wings. I could see veins outlined, delicate as lines on a map.

  “They’re going to blow up the mountain. Scrape the top off to get at the coal.” My eyes burned.

  He didn’t say anything. He just sat beside me and stared into the sunset as it reddened.

  “Afakos?” I asked after some time. I wanted to make sure he understood. “I thought you should know.”

  “Then this is war,” he said, eyes reflecting the red of the sunset.

  CHAPTER 19

  I couldn’t sleep.

  I sat up in bed, reading through the papers I’d stolen from work. I wondered if there was some way I could report this information anonymously. I wondered if it would even help. I wondered if it would save Afakos.

  I tried to focus on this one thing, a thing I could touch and have the illusion of control over. I hugged my knees to my chest and tangled my fingers in my hair. Everything was falling apart. I missed Grandpa. I missed Julie. I even missed the easy rapport I’d had with Jason and my mother. Will would be clearing out of town soon. Afakos would...I assumed he would be discovered. Get himself killed trying to fight the explosives, in the version of war that existed in his reptilian mind.

  And I missed my father. Since the accident, it felt as if he was becoming invisible. Maybe because I was ignoring him. Or maybe he was fading away.

  I heard mewing downstairs. Rhiannon.

  I slipped out of bed and padded out of my room and down the stairs. It was late, too late to hear crickets and some of the frogs. My mother had left the light on above the stove, a warm, soothing glow.

  I stepped across the kitchen linoleum to the living room. My father’s chair was turned toward the television. The rest of the lights were out.

  I wanted to talk to him. To tell him I loved him and I was sorry for everything. To feel his arms around me and have him tell me that everything would be all right, as he had when I was a child and kids picked on me in school. I wanted that soothing, that sense of rightness with the world.

  “Dad?” I whispered.

  A small gurgle emanated from the floor.

  “Rhiannon?”

  I reached down and turned on the lamp.

  My father had fallen out of his chair. He lay on the floor, with Rhiannon pacing on his chest. I fell on my knees beside him. The oxygen lines were tangled around his face, and I jerked them away. He was foaming at the mouth, twitching. Loose pills were embedded in the carpet like white violets in grass.

  “Dad!” I shook him, but his eyes had rolled back in his head.

  I screamed for my mother.

  *

  The hospital smelled like Grandpa’s nursing home, like disinfectant over something bland and rotting.

  I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my sweatshirt. I was shaking from exhaustion and despair, sitting on a plastic chair in the emergency room. A television droned above me on a metal arm. A nurse organized paperwork behind a Plexiglass-shrouded desk while a janitor mopped the tiled floor next to the vending machines. A young mother cuddled a little girl with a teddy bear. I didn’t know what was wrong with her, but she looked very pale. And when she coughed, she honked like a goose.

  I rubbed my eyes. This was all too much. I wrapped my arms around myself to keep from shaking. The air conditioning was turned up high enough to summon goose bumps on my skin, but my chill went deeper than that.

  Please don’t let my dad die, I thought at the popcorn ceiling. I wasn’t much into the idea of God. My family only went to church on Christmas and Easter, and that god never seemed to listen much to us. I didn’t know that Julie’s gods listened, either. I just hoped someone up there would hear and do something.

  The entrance doors slid open and I looked up. Jason rushed into the room. He sat down beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. I leaned into his side.

  “What happened? Your mom said on the phone that the squad came and got your dad.”

  I nodded against his chest. “They’re working on him now. I don’t know what happened... He was just on the floor. I don’t know how long he’d been there...” I felt a stab of guilt at not checking on him sooner, for being wound up in my own problems.

  Jason stroked my hair. “It’s gonna be okay. He’s tough.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “There were a bunch of pills around him,” I whispered. “I didn’t count... I hope he didn’t...” I couldn’t articulate the thought. I didn’t want to say: I’m afraid my dad tried to kill himself. I’m afraid that he felt so isolated in his weakness, that he didn’t want to be a burden. I’m afraid that he did this for Mom and me. Because saying it would make it real.

  “He didn’t.” Jason said it with such level certainty, like he was telling me that the sky was blue. I clung to that idea and to the soft flannel of his shirt.

  A shadow drifted out of the hallway beside the nurse’s station. My mother. In the green fluorescent light, her blond hair was gray and her skin sallow. She looked old.

  “Mom!” I leaped to my feet. “How is he?”

  She gazed at me, dazed. “There was a blood clot in his lung that got stuck... They found it, pumped him full of blood thinners. He’s not awake now, but you can go see him.”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  My mother ran a shaking hand through her hair. “The doctor thinks so, but...I don’t know...”

  I grabbed her hand. It was cold. “Let me get you some coffee.”

  I plugged some change into the coffee machine and wrapped her cold hands around the paper cup. She stared into it, seeming very old and fragile.

  Jason shifted from foot to foot, not sure what to do.

  “Stay with her,” I said. “She shouldn’t be alone.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  He squeezed my hand and sat down beside my mom.

  I took a deep breath and went back to see my father. My footsteps echoed on the green tile. My fists were clenched tight in my sweatshirt sleeves as I rounded the corner to his room.

  He was propped up in an adjustable bed, surrounded by hoses, and tubes snaked out of his mouth and arms. He was dressed in a hospital gown, a small, shriveled figure in the bed. Monitors beside him beeped and tracked his pulse and respiration.

  A middle-aged man in a lab coat stood at the foot of the bed with a clipboard. He extended a hand. “I’m Doctor Morgan. Are you his daughter?”

  I nodded and shook his hand. It was warm and fleshy. “Yeah. Is he...is he gonna need surgery?”

  “Right now, no. But if it had gone on longer, the clot could’ve killed him. You saved his life by finding him when you did.”

  My vision blurred. “What’s gonna happen to him? When can he come home?”

  “He needs to stay here for the next few days while we stabilize him and make sure the blood thinners are working properly. After that...he honestly needs to be seen by a specialist. Someone in a larger hospital who can put together a plan of physical therapy to get him on his feet again. And his lungs…yeah. There’s damage there that’s not just from the accident. He needs to be evaluated by a specialist.”<
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  I pressed my fingertips to my lips. “Mom won’t like that.”

  “He needs more care than we can give him here. If he’s to make any kind of a recovery, he’s got to get more help.”

  “Will his insurance cover it?”

  The doctor frowned. “I know this is a lot to take in. But I’m just telling you what I would do if he was my relative. Better bankruptcy than death.”

  “Of course.”

  He dug in his lab coat pocket and gave me his card. “We’ll need to get him set up to be transported and start the referrals. Call my office Monday morning, and we’ll get things in motion.”

  “Where do you want to send him?”

  “If he was my dad, I’d take him to Pittsburgh. They’ve had a good track record with cases like his in the past. I can investigate to see if there are any studies he might qualify for to reduce the cost.”

  I gripped the sharp edges of the card. “That’s far away.”

  “Yeah. But he’ll have a chance. Otherwise...” He glanced at my dad’s bed. “He’s just going to fade away here.”

  I nodded. “I understand. Thanks.”

  “I wish it was better news.”

  The doctor left me in the room with my dad. I pulled up a stool with wheels and sat next to him. I watched his chest rise and fall and listened to the whir and chirp of the machines.

  I knew what my mother wanted. She wanted to keep him at home. And that I’d have to fight her. Having him treated out of state would force them into bankruptcy. They’d lose the house. To her, that was only one step up from a death sentence.

  But a calm certainty settled over me. It was time for me to act. I could no longer be passively pushed around by the circumstances of my life. Everything was going to go to hell anyway, so I might as well stand up and fight for what mattered, and what was right. All the rest of this was ephemeral. I had saved my father’s life, and I was now responsible to see it through. I had more power than I knew. I could go quietly into the darkness, or I could go kicking and screaming.

  It was time to fight.

  I walked back into the waiting area and sat down next to Jason and my mom. She hadn’t sipped any of her coffee.

  “How’s he doing?” Jason asked.

  “He’s stable. For the moment.” I looked at my mother. She wouldn’t meet my gaze. “He has to go to Pittsburgh to get more care.”

  Her lower lip protruded, like a child’s. “This is his home.”

  “He can die at home, or he can go somewhere else for a chance to live.”

  Her fingers tightened on the coffee cup, denting it. “I won’t send him away to live with strangers.”

  “And you’d let him die alone on the living room floor?” I put my face very close to hers. “Mom, you have to do this.”

  “There’s no money.” A rivulet of coffee trickled over the rim.

  “And there won’t be any money with him dead. It’s the right thing to do. We can’t let him die.”

  Coffee sloshed over the brim, and my mother began to cry. Jason took the cup away from her, and I held her like a child.

  “It’s the right thing to do,” I repeated.

  “Di’s right,” Jason said. “He’s got to get help. The rest of it...it will all work out.”

  She nodded against my shoulder. She had broken.

  I looked over her head at Jason. He was surreptitiously rubbing at his eyes. We all were.

  But it was a beginning.

  *

  Time does not pass in hospitals. It sticks and starts and stops again.

  I waited with Jason and my mother until dawn. She went back to see my father and sign some paperwork. Jason was waiting for the hospital cafeteria to open.

  I was waiting for sun to shine through the glass of the doors.

  I stood up, stretched. I slung my purse over my shoulder.

  “There’s something I’ve got to do,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Just something I have to take care of.” I bent down and kissed his forehead. “I love you.”

  He blinked in surprise, and a smile twitched across his lips. “I love you, too.”

  I put my hands in my pockets and walked out into the sunshine. The outdoors smelled like mulch and dew, much more alive than the hospital. I started my car, scraped condensation off the windshield with the wipers, and pulled out onto the road.

  Nothing was open at this hour, as I tooled through town. It seemed empty, like a ghost town. I wondered if this is what it would look like after the mine went away. Someday, the coal would all be gone, and quiet streets and empty parking lots would be all that was left.

  I drove to the outskirts of town, toward the river. A battered sign for the canoe livery pointed to a dirt road on my right, and I turned. The road was rutted and strewn with beer cans. The livery building itself was closed, canoes and kayaks chained to a rack outside. The brown river sparkled with reflected sunshine.

  I followed the dirt track to the campground. I feared it would be empty, that Will and his friends would’ve packed up and left. My heart lifted when I saw a small cluster of tents behind a half-dozen picnic tables. I got out of the car and walked toward them, clutching my purse and feeling my heart thumping in my chest.

  A familiar motorcycle leaned on its kickstand beside a blue tent. The chrome and paint on the bike was scuffed up and the headlight broken.

  I paused before the blue tent. How does one knock at a tent?

  I crouched down before the flap, then rapped sharply on the lid of a hibachi set beside it.

  “Hello,” I called.

  I heard rustling within the tent, then silence.

  I knocked on the hibachi again. “Will. Wake up. Mother Earth needs you to get your ass outta bed.”

  I heard groaning and muttering. The tent flap unzipped, and Will’s sleep-mussed head poked out.

  “Huh?” He squinted at me.

  “Get out of bed and come talk to me.”

  “Hang on. Let me find some pants.” He sounded hungover.

  I rolled my eyes. Of course Nature Boy slept in the nude. I turned my back and tapped my toe in the dirt.

  He squirmed out of the tent, shirtless and barefoot, buttoning a pair of jeans. I looked away. He had really nice abs, but that wasn’t why I was here.

  I took a deep breath. “I have some information for you about Sawtooth Mountain.”

  He spread his hands in front of him. “I’m done with that.”

  My eyes narrowed. “You can’t be. What was all this rhetoric about saving the planet?”

  “We lost, okay?” He ran his hand through his hair. His gaze was dead and flat. No spark of the revolutionary. “People got killed. That wasn’t part of the bargain.”

  “It’s not over.” I unzipped my purse and thrust the sheaf of water sample papers at him.

  He stared at them, but made no effort to take them. “What’s this?”

  “Proof that the mine gave EPA false data. It might be enough to get them to reconsider.”

  He snatched the papers from me. He sat down at one of the picnic tables and flipped through them.

  “I don’t know what it all means,” I said. “But the mine submitted a duplicate of old water sample data, rather than fresh data.”

  He squinted at the numbers. “If this is the accurate data, there’s far too much selenium and iron in the streams. They’re already over the allowed limits.”

  “So that’s why they submitted numbers from five years ago?”

  He paged back. Some of the fire came back into his eyes. “I think so. This is a big deal. It suggests that the water is already poisoned. The blast mining would be icing on the cake.” He shook the papers. “This could shut them down entirely—if the EPA could be made to listen.”

  “Will they listen to you?” I felt a pang of trepidation. Could the ramifications really be that far-reaching? Could they be enough to not only stop the blast mining, b
ut shut down the rest of the operation? I knitted my fingers together. I was already committed.

  “I’ll have to make them listen.” His mouth was pressed into a grim line. I knew he could do it. He had the passion to make it happen. He looked up at me. “What made you do it?”

  I shrugged. Suppressed tears and exhaustion pressed behind my eyes. “It seemed like the right thing to do.” I turned to walk away.

  Will caught my wrist. “This is huge. Thank you.” He gave me a spontaneous hug. He smelled like stale beer and sweat, and I wrinkled my nose.

  Over his shoulder, I saw a figure approaching. A familiar one—Jason. The expression on his face was one of wrath, and his fists were clenched.

  I stepped back from the embrace, but it was too late.

  Jason stared at me with such a wounded look that it made my heart fall into my stomach.

  I ran to him. “This isn’t what you think,” I said, putting my hand on Jason’s chest.

  Jason wasn’t looking at me. He was looking past me, at the shirtless guy I was hugging and what he imagined lay beyond it. “I didn’t want to believe it, but it makes sense now. Being gone all night. Your car found at the park…”

  “You’re following me?” Anger bled into my voice.

  “No. I…I actually came here to see…to see if I could help the protest somehow…” His voice dropped in volume, unsteady. He’d been unsure before, and I could see him closing up now. “I thought…never mind what I thought.” His right hand wadded up a brochure the Friends of Sawtooth Mountain had printed with bright green lettering.

  Will held his hands up. “Look, man. Nothing happened.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that,” I insisted. “We’re not even friends!”

  “You have a funny way of treating friends. And people you say you love.” His eyes were clouded with hurt.

  I reached up to touch his face. “I can explain.”

  He jerked his head away. “Don’t.”

  Jason turned and walked back to his truck. I scurried to catch up with him, but he shrugged off my hands on his sleeve. He slammed into his truck and peeled out of the parking area.