by Nancy Rue
“Let me take that,” Perky said.
She rescued the mug, and Chip folded me to his chest. My husband held me.
And I measured the hold, trying to tell if this was a beginning or an end.
“What does a person have to do to get one of those?”
I recognized my sister’s cream-filled voice . . . but when did she get a south-of-the-Mason-Dixon accent? She was born and raised in Pennsylvania just like me, but she sounded like a character from Gone with the Wind.
Chip released his arms and stepped aside. Sonia slipped by easily and wrapped her long, lithe arms around my neck. Smooth move. She knew they’d never circle my girth. I felt a soft kiss on my cheek before she stepped back so I could look at her.
I had forgotten nothing about Sonia. Her hair-the-color-of-maple-syrup was as sleek as always, defying the humidity that frizzed mine. She’d pulled it into a shiny bunch at the crown of her head, giving her exquisite cheekbones and full, sensitive mouth center stage. Those weren’t my words. I’d read them in Today’s Christian Woman, where an admiring journalist had compared her to Esther in the Bible.
She surveyed me with her gold-brown eyes, which I hadn’t forgotten either. The windows of her beautiful soul, that same journalist had said. Right now her soul looked sad. No, pitying. Disappointed—but not surprised.
Like little Perky, Sonia managed not to gasp and instead flashed me the smile that had won her every magazine cover from TCW to Focus on the Family.
“It is so good to see you, sorella,” she said. “And your face is just as beautiful as ever.”
I heard the unspoken If only you’d lose some of that ugly fat.
“It’s been two years, sorella.”
It took me a few seconds to recover from her use of our pet name for each other. The Italian word for sister didn’t quite translate into Scarlett O’Hara.
She shook her head. “It isn’t going to be that long this time. When I come back, we are going to have some sister time.”
My mind tangled. “I thought you were coming over to the house. Everything’s ready. I painted the bathroom.”
Good. I painted the bathroom. Add that to the list of pathetic things I have said to my sister.
“Darlin’, I’m sorry.” Sonia put her hands on my shoulders. “We’ve had a change of plans.”
My eyes followed as she looked past me at Perky. She and Chip were by the door to the cockpit, Chip with his hand on the wall above her head, scanning her face with his eyes. Like he was trying to memorize it.
He whispered something to her, except that Chip Coffey had never been able to pull off anything quieter than a stage whisper. His “You have to change your mind” might as well have been broadcast on the airwaves.
“Hello,” Sonia said.
They looked up. The girl and my husband both flicked on smiles.
“Marnie, didn’t you send Lucia that e-mail with my new itinerary?”
Marnie didn’t have a chance to answer before Sonia turned back to me.
“We have to go right on to Pittsburgh,” she said. “I am so sorry. I thought you knew. Marnie, get Lucia a coffee—do you want a coffee?”
I shook my head.
Sonia threw out a smile that lassoed Chip and me. “I know ya’ll need as much alone time as you can get this weekend. I’m not part of that.”
When did she start saying ya’ll ? When did she stop making herself a part of everything that happened to me? And what exactly was happening to me right now?
Sonia brushed her lips against my cheek again and let go of my shoulders.
“Remember,” she said to Chip, “I want you to pray hard before you give your final answer.” She pushed back the diaphanous sleeve of the tunic that outlined the curves of her slender shape and shook a gold Rolex down over her hand. “I wish we had time to pray now, all of us.” She smiled over my head. “I know, Otto, I know.”
I only looked back at the man she spoke to long enough to see that he wore a pilot’s uniform and that he had a brilliant shock of white hair, disconcerting on someone about to take a plane into flight. Beyond that, I didn’t care. I was aching with the idea of Sonia and Chip praying about some issue I wasn’t privy to, dying under the image of his whispered exchange with a waif half my age. And weight.
I might have him for the weekend, but he clearly wasn’t mine.
As I watched Chip squeeze Sonia and give Marnie a lingering hug, I knew why I’d been surprised that my husband still looked the same. I’d been so sure Sonia would have changed him, taken some damaged piece of him and reshaped it. Of all her many talents, she excelled at that one.
I clung to the cable handrail as I navigated the steps, but I still managed to stumble.
“Babe, you okay?” Chip said behind me.
No, I wasn’t. I wanted to roll into a ball and bounce across the tarmac, away from the inevitable.
Chip groped for my hand when we got to the bottom of the steps, but I shifted my purse to that side and risked more breathing-like-a-freight-train to hurry ahead of him. When the door to the terminal sighed shut behind us, I stopped, even turned his way, but I didn’t look right at him. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the steps folding back up into the plane and Pencil Whiskers retrieving his yellow chocks.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go with them?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
The sandpaper edges of Chip’s voice were raw. When he held me on the plane, I thought that meant he felt as frightened as I did about going back to our home and deciding whether we could live there together again—there or anywhere. I would have embraced his fear. Taken it home and fed it the five-course dinner I’d planned like the president was coming. Just like I always had.
Now those rough edges only sounded annoyed, the irritated last strings of a man anxious to tear away.
The engine roared to life, and Chip looked toward the window, eyes engrossed as the jet turned toward the taxiway. Slowly. As if it were dragging its wheels, giving him one more chance to change his mind. Or Marnie to change hers.
“Do you want to go with her?” I said. “Is that what you want?” He whipped his face toward me. “What are you talking about?” I shook my head, felt the limp panels of heavy hair threaten to stick to the sides of my face. I must make a stunning picture. How could I expect him to do anything but run after the plane that was leaving with the pretty women? The skinny twenty-something and the gifted sister. The God-connected sister.
I had never known Dr. Chip Coffey to be a party to prayer before, but he evidently bowed his head with Sonia these days, even while his whispers sought the ears of her assistant. I had made a list of possible scenarios for this meeting, many of them ending in a pained good-bye I would hide behind my pads of flesh. But this— this hadn’t been one of them.
I watched the jet turn onto the runway and stop.
“Are they coming back?” I said.
“They’re waiting for clearance for takeoff. Look, I just want to go home.”
Chip took hold of the back of my arm, and I felt his fingers slip until they were clutching a loose fold of fat. I pulled away.
Beyond us the jet engine whistled, louder and stronger until the jet suddenly raced down the runway. I kept my gaze glued to it, watched its light lift, listened to the billowing thrust. They were leaving, and Chip wasn’t running after them. Crazily, I had to make sure Sonia and Perky Marnie and half of what I feared had truly taken off and left us before I could move toward the door.
The nose of my sister’s jet lifted and pointed upward, starting to make a sharp ascent, and Chip took a step toward the window, murmuring a curse.
“What?” I said.
His answer was lost to me as the plane virtually fell from the sky. Like a toy being thrown to the ground by a child, it slammed against the barriers at the edge of the airfield and erupted. Ripped in half. One piece slid through the grass on the other side of the fence.
The other erupted in flames.
A moment seared into me, a paralyzed moment when nothing happened and I knew something should have. The back half of the plane writhed in flames, and yet no one moved, no one spoke, as if we had burned to the spots we stood on, gasping for air. Do something. Someone, do something.
I was out the door before I realized I was screaming it, with Chip snatching at me as I hurled myself across the tarmac toward the runway.
The air was too angry to breathe in, and I flung my arm across my nose and mouth as I charged forward until the heat rose up before me like a wall. I could only stand, helpless, a cacophony of jet fuel and burning rubber and melting plastic searing inside my nose. The flames lashed upward and left me only distorted glimpses of blackening metal through the heat waves—the tail, the wing, a gaping hole where a window had been. Then, as if a giant voice had scolded them, the flames cowered before a twisted mass of horror that pushed another scream from me.
I started forward again and felt Chip’s arm come around my chest from behind and clamp me against him.
“Sonia’s in there!” I cried.
“You can’t get her out—”
Sirens wailed from somewhere, and more people scattered like ants from a burning log, but no one went near the plane whose tail melted and twisted and wrestled with the flames.
A fluorescent yellow van cut through the smoke and halted just short of the fence. Movement caught my eye at the front half of the jet, which lay silent and still in the field. A waif appeared in the unnatural opening that should have been the rest of the plane and pleaded frantically with its arms.
Chip let go of me, screaming Marnie’s name, and tore toward the aircraft, straight into the path of a fire engine. Someone hurled himself from the truck, tackling Chip and rolling him away from the fuselage. He shoved off a fireman, struggled to get up, still screaming for the girl above the din of burning and sirens and shouts.
Two more firemen ran with Sonia’s assistant cradled between them, and Chip bolted for them with me at his back. When he stopped abruptly, I slammed into him.
“I can’t do anything,” his voice croaked through the smoke. “You go, Lucia.”
“But Sonia—”
“I’ll see about Sonia. You can help Marnie. Go!”
Some health-care professionals would tell you that their training completely takes charge of their emotions in a medical emergency— that in essence they have no personal feelings when their skills are needed. They have obviously never watched an airplane melt around their sister and known she couldn’t possibly survive it.
I was nothing but raw gut as I chased the men to one of the parked yellow vehicles and forced myself not to look back. Dear God, let Sonia be in that half of the plane—dear God, let her be alive.
My prayers were as chaotic as the scene around me. Demands for information were shouted over the roar of vehicles that catapulted onto the field and the end of the runway. Foam swallowed the ground around the still-smoldering rear of the plane. Bodies in helmets and leaden-looking coats shot back and forth in a dizzying zigzag that pumped my fear up into my throat.
“I’m a registered nurse,” I said.
“Can you stay with her till I get a paramedic?” one of the firemen muffled to me from behind the shield covering his face.
I pushed him away from Marnie and slid my arm around her waist. “I’ve got her—go get my sister out.”
“Paramedics are on their way.”
“Go!”
A fat lady’s voice can be vicious. He fled.
I tried to focus on the next thing to do, and the next, as I got the oxygen mask someone handed me over Marnie’s face and tore off the bottom of my tunic to staunch the bleeding above her eye. More sirens screamed in until a haphazard crowd of fire engines and ambulances blocked my view of the burning back of the jet. Smoke continued to heave, and the heat distorted the sky.
Marnie’s eyes were wild.
“It’ll be all right,” I lied.
A paramedic emerged from the smoke and went to his knees beside us. “What have you got?” he said.
As I looked up, I caught sight of a tight knot of people in uniforms between us and the smoldering skeleton of the jet’s tail. Their movements were quick and tense. Critical.
I heaved myself to my feet. “Sonia?” I said. “Is she alive?”
“Babe, come on,” Chip said out of nowhere. “You need to get back.”
“We have to help her.”
I strained to pull away, but Chip pressed me close to him.
“You know I can’t touch her,” he said. “Let the paramedics do their job.”
I stared up at the face smeared in soot and sweat. Their job? That was my sister—this was my job.
I hauled myself away from him and ran for the paramedic knot, clawing through the smoke until I nearly plowed into a figure tearing open a bag.
“How bad?” I managed to get out.
“You need to get back.”
“I’m a registered nurse.”
“Looks like full thickness burns,” one of them said into a cell phone. “Face and neck. Probably second-degree on her hands from recoil.”
I looked down at the gurney, still at ground level, where Sonia lay. I couldn’t tell what part of her face was her nose, which part her mouth. She was as twisted as the plane they had pulled her from. Panic rose in me as I realized her eyes were open. They had to be. Her lids were no longer there.
The paramedics spoke in staccato. “BP 90 over 50—respirations faint—32—pulse tachycardic—130.”
My own pulse pounded at me and brought me down to my knees. One paramedic squeezed a bag valve mask over her mouth. I watched another start an IV in her arm, tossing wrappers aside. And I saw Sonia’s charred fingers move.
“Sonia!” I said. “Sorella, can you hear me?”
“We’re going to have to intubate,” the third one said into the phone.
“Got the Albuterol going.”
“Sonia?” I said.
Her fingers tapped me, like the tentative touch of a baby’s hand. I wanted to stroke her hair, but I was afraid I would draw back her scalp in tattered sheets.
“It’s Lucia—I’m here—it’s okay.”
“You know her?” the female paramedic said.
I wasn’t sure. That mass of white ash and grayness and soot could not be my sister.
CHAPTER THREE
From the time we rolled into the emergency room at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland until Sonia was embedded in intensive care at Nathan Speare, their burn center, every face that turned to her showed a degree of horror before achieving professional cover. And these people saw over three hundred tragically burned patients a year.
I stayed with her until a nurse from ICU ushered me into a family waiting room and parked me in a chair.
“Is there anyone with you?” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said. And I sounded so. Cool, pulled together, as professional as she.
The moment she left and I had nothing to do to shove away the flames and the fear and the future, it all assaulted me, and I came apart in pieces. I groped at them, tried to find my own senses.
I plucked frantically at my tunic and found the strings of my tattered hem. I was tying them together when Chip found me.
“Babe,” was all he said. I let him pull me against his chest, but I couldn’t cry. I went numb, and I thanked God for that.
“It’s not good,” I said into his shirt. “Her whole face—”
“Don’t, Lucia. She’ll get the best treatment here. Just think about that.”
“They had to intubate her—I don’t know if there’s damage to her lungs.”
Chip pulled me in tighter. “You can stop being the nurse now,” he said.
“If that were your sister, could you stop being the doctor?”
It was out before I could catch it and stuff it back in.
“I already stopped being a doctor,” he said.
; I made a halfhearted attempt to pull him back to me as he stood up. We must have cut a pathetic vignette for the doctor who appeared in the doorway.
“Dan Abernathy,” he said, putting out his hand. “I’m a burn surgeon. I’ll be taking care of—your sister, is it?”
I nodded as I put a clammy palm in his. When he reached for Chip, I saw the flicker of recognition.
“Chip Coffey,” Chip said, even though there was no need. Dr. Abernathy’s eyes had already narrowed.
“I’m just here as the brother-in-law,” Chip said.
I plastered both hands to my forehead. “Okay, so—what’s the prognosis?”
Chip folded his arms, took a step back. Dr. Abernathy turned his attention to me and motioned us to chairs. Chip moved against the wall.
“I know it’s bad,” I said. “I’m a nurse. I want the full story.”
The “story” unfolded with increasing degrees of horror, from possible injury to Sonia’s lungs, which they would know more about in forty-eight hours, to second- and third-degree burns over 9 percent of her body, including the hands that she’d used to try to cover her face. That was only Chapter One.
Chapter Two still lay ahead, in waiting at least two weeks for the wounds to close and a few more months after that for scars to completely set up. The doctor tried to convince me he had some good news. The face regenerates well, he said, so once her body started healing itself, they could excise and graft. Because her injuries were limited to her upper extremities, they’d have plenty of donor sites elsewhere on her body.
If that was the good news, we were in trouble. Still, as long as we talked in clinical terms, I could stay numb and pretend to be the unflappable nurse.
But when Dr. Abernathy took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and put the specs back on, I caved. He was stalling.
“What else?” I said.
“Her eyelids have been compromised.”
“Meaning—”
“They’ve retracted.”
“Will she be blind?”
“No. But her eyes will always be open.”
He seemed to wait for that to sink in before he went on about keeping her corneas moist, and using a prosthesis to hold her mouth open so it wouldn’t draw down.
