Arcadia's Gift (Arcadia Trilogy)

by Jesi Lea Ryan

  “What’s happened?” I asked. “Am I dying?”

  “No, you’re going to be fine.” The doctor fiddled with my chart, staring at it, but not really reading it. Stalling.

  “Tell me. What happened?” I pleaded.

  “Let’s wait for your parents. Your father is just down in the cafeteria.”

  “No,” I insisted. “Tell me now!” I attempted to sit up, but my head spun and I slumped back down.

  “Okay, Cady,” he said as he pulled a chair alongside the bed and leaned with his forearms balanced on the metal guardrail. “I have some rather disturbing news.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “It’s your sister, Avalon. She was in an accident. She was struck by a train and killed Saturday night. I’m so sorry.”

  The doctor paused to gauge my reaction. My face remained frozen, but my mind wheeled about in a dozen different directions.

  “What you remember was not a dream. In fact, you’ve been in a coma, which means you were so deeply unconscious that your brain did not go through the normal sleep cycles. You couldn’t have had any dreams.”

  Spontaneous tears welled in my eyes, but I blinked them away. He must be wrong. Lony can’t be gone. I wanted to argue with him, to tell him he must be wrong. “W-w-w…?” I sputtered.

  “Your father is downstairs in the cafeteria. Nurse Jenny just went to get him, and she’ll phone your mother. Your parents have been taking turns staying at the hospital with you.”

  “But…what about me?” I asked, still confused. “What happened to me? Why am I…you know…here?”

  The doctor pursed his lips as if in deep thought. “Honestly, we’re not quite sure what happened to you. We were hoping you could fill us in. When you were first brought to the ER, we assumed you had been hit also, but there were no injuries. Then, we figured you passed out from the emotional shock of it all, but then your blood pressure dropped dangerously low and your breathing became irregular. It was clear that this was no ordinary swoon.”

  It was all too much to process. To say that my heart was breaking over the loss of my twin was an understatement. My hands trembled with emotion that needed to escape but had nowhere to go. Ordinary tears were not enough of an outlet. Suddenly, I felt naked and adrift in the clouds. I never realized how tightly my life was bound to my sister’s until the comfortable weight of her was gone.

  The doctor took a few minutes to examine me and make notes in my chart, but everything he did and said turned into a blur. Flashes of the dream —or were they memories? —roamed about in my head. The more I tried to hold them down, the more real they became. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “Oh, thank God!” my dad cried as he ran through the doorway and fell on me with a tight embrace. Once my face was safely buried in the crook of his shoulder, I breathed in the comforting familiar scent and let the tears loose.

  Dad rocked me in his arms and pressed his lips to the part of my hair. When he finally drew back to look at my face, he appeared ten years older. Huge gray bags hung below his eyes and his skin looked chalky. “The nurse called your mother. She’ll be here in a few minutes. Doc, do you know what happened to her yet? Will she be all right?”

  Dr. Gibler nodded and gestured for my father to take a seat in the chair beside my bed. My father covered his hand in mine, holding on a little too tightly. One, or maybe both of us, was shaking.

  The doctor’s kind eyes were surrounded by deep wrinkles. “I’m so sorry, Cady…about all of this. I can’t explain why you were overcome the way you were. Shock is still an area of the human mind that doctors are unclear on.” He went on to explain that there are two kinds of shock, emotional and physical, and they are the mind’s way of protecting a person from trauma. What I had experienced was an emotional shock, but for some reason, my body had responded to it as if I had been the one physically traumatized. “I’ve consulted with a shock expert at the University of Iowa and he has never seen a case of emotional trauma setting off physical symptoms to this extent. The erratic breathing and heart-rate, the drop in blood pressure, the coma. The only thing we can assume is that it was the extreme circumstances of witnessing the accident which caused it.”

  My father’s face crumpled, and I knew he was thinking about Lony. So was I. She couldn’t be gone. Lony was so beautiful and fun and young—she loved life! And what about me? What is a twin without the other?

  I didn’t have time to ponder it further. My mother burst in the door all tears and loudness. She seemed both overjoyed at my consciousness and deeply scarred from the death of her other daughter. She nudged my father out of the way so she could hug me and sob onto my hospital gown. There was a thick wall of tension between my parents. It was nothing that I could see really, more of an intuition. Something more was going on with them.

  “Doctor,” my father asked, “How soon can we take her home?” Mom raised her head for the answer. For the first time in years, she had left the house without her face made up.

  Dr. Gibler replied, “Well, Cady’s vitals are strong. Her heart rate and blood pressure are back to normal. I suspect the worst is behind her now, but I’d like to keep her overnight for monitoring. We still don’t know what caused her to lose consciousness for so long.”

  My father nodded, but my mother’s lips formed a hard line. “Don’t you think she’ll be more comfortable in her own bed? It’s really inconvenient having her away from home, and she looks fine.”

  Something else was off about my mom, other than her lack of cosmetics. Her gestures were a little too broad, her words slightly slurred. Dad must have noticed it too, because his eyes narrowed in on her face.

  “Besides,” she continued waving her hands around, “We have a funeral to prepare for.”

  Both my father and I flinched at the word funeral. All of a sudden, I felt the anguish my parents were going through with one daughter in the hospital and one in the morgue. My stomach rolled again. I started to gag and the doctor shoved a plastic pan in front of me. Nothing came out, but the heaves strained the muscles of my abdomen.

  “Julia!” my father snapped, darting his eyes toward me. “Not here.”

  My mother set her shoulders back and she stomped out of the room, shoving the door hard. My father gave me an apologetic look before following her out into the hall.

  “It’s going to be fine, Cady,” the doctor assured me. “As you must know, they’re under a lot of stress. This isn’t easy on anyone. Can I get you anything?”

  I shook my head. I just wanted to be alone.

  Chapter 7

  The time between waking from my coma and the funeral was a complete daze. I’d been released from the hospital on Thursday morning only to stay in my bed until I had to get up for my sister’s wake Saturday morning. Bronwyn came over, at my grandmother’s request, to help get me ready. After a couple of lame attempts at conversation, she gave up and went about the motions of getting me ready in silence. I sat on the toilet lid in my robe while she brushed and dried my hair with a feather-light touch. We both knew if she tugged too hard I might shatter.

  I put on the dress that someone set out for me without really looking at it, thankful that I didn’t have to make any decisions for myself. Mom left for the funeral home early with Grandma Nora, so Bronwyn drove my brother and me over in her mother’s minivan. Aaron was dressed in one of our dad’s suits and kept fingering the knot of his tie, trying to loosen it enough for comfort, but not so much that our mother would freak out on him.

  I’d been in Grandview Funeral Home a few years earlier, when my Grandpa Bill passed away, so I thought I knew what to expect. I learned really quickly that an elderly man’s funeral, even one who was respected and loved like my Grandpa, couldn’t compare with that of a popular sixteen-year-old cheerleader. Parked cars lined the avenue on both sides of the street for three blocks. It seemed as if everyone in Dubuque was here.

  “I better drop you guys off at the door,” Bronwyn said. “It’s gonna take me forever to find a parking place, and I d
on’t want you to be late.” She turned into the lot and pulled up in the fire lane to let us out.

  “Thanks,” Aaron muttered before hopping out of the back.

  My posterior felt glued to the passenger seat.

  Aaron didn’t notice I wasn’t behind him until he turned to hold the funeral home door open for me. His already grim face fell a little further, and he returned to retrieve me from the vehicle.

  “Come on, Cady,” he said, opening the passenger door and unhooking my seatbelt for me. “It sucks, but we have to do this. If it’s too awful, I’ll find a way to take you home early, okay?”

  “Okay,” I replied, my voice dry and crackled. With a hand on his shoulder to steady myself, I slid out of the seat. Leaning on my brother seemed to magnify my sorrow, and I struggled with the heaviness in my chest. It was just the two of us now. The odd feeling vanished as Aaron, seeing that I was steady on my feet, started walking ahead of me toward the building. I flashed a weak wave to Bronwyn as she pulled away from the curb.

  Several people, mostly students from school, stared at us as we made our way inside the building. The pity in their eyes felt strong enough to touch, making me long for the safety of my bed.

  Aaron took a deep breath and let it out with a whoosh. “Alright, let’s get this over with.”

  Aunt Tina, our dad’s younger sister who drove in from Chicago, met us right inside the door.

  “There you are!” she exclaimed, drawing us both into a tight hug, her bleach blond extensions tickling my nose. “The family seating is in the reserved rows up front. They just started the receiving line.”

  Aunt Tina crushed my hand in hers and dragged me through the crowd. Aaron followed behind us. My emotions were all over the map, making me feel like a computer getting ready to short circuit. I’d taken half of a Valium before leaving the house. Not enough to make me sleepy, but just enough to separate my mind from my body with a thick layer of numbness. I could sense tension and sorrow vibrating through me, but at the same time, it was like it was happening to someone else. Even with the medication, the pressure of the crowd triggered claustrophobia, making my chest heave and my palms dampen. Between that and the mass of people making the air thick and stuffy, my stomach tumbled with nausea.

  I was halfway up the aisle before I spotted the white wooden casket, the door hinged open to show the lavender-tinted satin interior. I snapped my gaze away before I could see her. After our Grandpa’s funeral, Lony and I both agreed that viewing the dead was creepy, and we wanted to be cremated. I tried to tell my mother this when she was driving me home from the hospital, but she’d kept her eyes on the road like she was all alone in the car. I probably should’ve let Grandma Nora know, since she was the one making most of the arrangements. Once I’d woken up and Mom didn’t have to worry about me, she had to face Lony’s death, and she slipped into a strange kind of depression, pretty much making her useless for anything other than staying in bed all day.

  Our aunt presented us to our parents like china dolls to be inspected. Mom looked like someone had beaten her with a hammer and superglued her back together. Her navy blue suit, freshly blown out hair and make-up were perfect, but anyone could see all that was only a thin veneer barely holding the pieces of her together. She reached forward mechanically and straightened Aaron’s tie. Her eyes reflected a glassy shine.

  Dad stood shifting his weight from foot to foot as if his dress shoes were too tight. He drew me in next to him with a light squeeze on my shoulder. Once Aaron and I were between them like a buffer zone, the receiving line began moving again.

  Thick grief washed over me with every new person who stood before me, making it difficult to breathe. I let my body shift into autopilot. While my arms hugged and my head bobbed in mute acknowledgment to the whispered words of sympathy, I shrank into myself and tried to fight off the urge to blow chunks all over my shoes. The line was insanely long, winding its way out the door, and after an hour, Dad let Aaron and I retreat upstairs to the family lounge to relax until the service started.

  Away from the crowd, I finally felt like I could breathe again. I waited on a couch, letting a mug of coffee grow cold between my palms as various family members rotated in and out. My thirteen-year-old cousin, Geoffrey, sat in the corner playing Mario on his DS until Aunt Tina hustled him out with orders to talk to our great-aunts.

  Aaron and I didn’t speak. He sat across from me on another sofa with his eyes closed as if catching a cat-nap, although I could tell by the way he flinched whenever someone else entered the room, that he was wide awake.

  When it was time for the memorial to start, our grandma came to fetch us. While my family is not religious, Grandma hired Bronwyn’s father to hold the inter-faith service. As we entered the small chapel, I saw with horror that our front-row seats were situated directly in front of the casket. Panic hit me hard. I wasn’t ready to see Lony. Somehow, seeing her body lying in that coffin would make her death official, and I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t think I’d ever be ready for that. I swallowed hard and stared at my feet the whole way up the aisle. I discovered with immense relief once I sat down that my line of vision was low enough to prevent me from seeing inside the box.

  Just before Pastor Tom began to speak, someone sank into the seat on the other side of Aaron. I looked down the row to see Cane Matthews. I’d forgotten all about him. My parents must have invited him to sit with the family. His face appeared to be carved out of stone, as if betrayal of the slightest emotion would cause the whole thing to crumble off his head.

  The ceremony passed in a great rush, each second bringing me closer to having to say my final good-bye to my sister. While Pastor Tom talked, I fingered the vintage butterfly hair clip that I had stashed in my pocket. I’d found it a couple of years ago in a junk shop downtown. The wings were made of delicate sheets of abalone and tiny rhinestones formed the body. Lony was constantly stealing it from my jewelry box, leading to many arguments about how I should just give it to her since I rarely wore my hair up. The thing is I probably would’ve let her have it if she hadn’t been so demanding about it. Instead, I held onto it out of spite. The clip now was fastened around a badly composed poem to my sister that I’d written in third grade. A few of the words were misspelled and the overly melodramatic lines didn’t really rhyme, but Lony had kept it pinned to her bulletin board in her bedroom ever since. I planned to slip it and the hair clip into the casket before it was closed.

  Aunt Tina gave the eulogy for the family. Grandma had asked me to do it, but I begged off. I didn’t like public speaking on a good day, and there was no way I’d be able to hold it together on this one. My aunt’s words washed over me without sinking in. My mind whirled with all of the things I wanted to say to Lony before they closed the casket on her forever. The last time I’d seen her, she and Cane had been bickering. I snuck a glance down the row at him. The muscles of his jaw twitched beneath the surface of his freshly shaven skin, and his blood-shot eyes appeared tired and dry. It was sad that her final moments had been spent fighting. When the eulogy was over, our family remained seated while ushers dismissed everyone else with instructions that the burial would be a private, family ceremony.

  Once the bulk of the crowd cleared out of the chapel, our family members drifted up one at a time to kneel on the velvet cushion before the coffin to pay their last respects. I waited as long as possible. I didn’t want an audience.

  When my turn came, I settled on my knees beside her and folded my hands on the waxy wooden rail. Carefully, I allowed my gaze to drift over my sister from waist to head.

  I had expected to see Lony there, but I realized with some surprise that body lying there was not her. My sister was long gone. The mortician had made her up to appear younger and more conservative than she’d been in life. Her hair was brushed and positioned so that it framed her face. She wore the plum colored dress that we had taken our family pictures in the year before, a dress that I remembered her complaining made her neck itch. The
smoky eye make-up that I’d been so accustomed to seeing on her over the past year was gone, leaving a fresh face with only a hint of mascara and lip gloss. It looked more like my body in the coffin than hers. I shuddered.

  I’d been so absorbed with drinking in her appearance, I didn’t notice the long moments that passed. When Dad touched my shoulder and indicated that my turn was up, my heart jumped into my throat. No! I screamed inside. I’m not ready for her to be gone!

  Pastor Tom gathered the remaining family members and Cane in front of the coffin to say some last words. The tenor of his voice sounded far away, and I concentrated on saying my own silent good-byes, which I’d neglected to do before.

  One by one, people began heading for their cars to get ready for the procession to the cemetery.

  As I left the chapel, I turned back to see Cane, all alone now, watching the two somber men from the funeral home close the lid and set an arrangement of roses on top. He’d been the last person to see her in life. It seemed fitting that he be the last to see her in death.

  It wasn’t until we were in the car on the way home that I felt the butterfly hair clip still in my pocket.

  Chapter 8

  The next week and a half faded past me in blur. The pain in our house was almost unbearable. When Lony died, she left behind a hole that stifled us with its emptiness. My mother, Aaron and I spent most of our time in our bedrooms, Mom in a Valium-induced haze. She crumbled after the funeral and hadn’t gotten out of her pajamas since. Aaron drowned his thoughts in death metal in the basement until Dad stopped by and told him to keep it down so as not to disturb Mom. Me? I spent long afternoons sitting on the cushy window seat in my bedroom watching a flock of cardinals nest in our backyard pine tree.

  Just over two weeks after the accident, I awoke early to noise coming from the kitchen beneath me. I slid my arms into a Hawkeyes sweatshirt and wandered down to investigate. Aaron stood in front of the open refrigerator drinking milk from the carton. Mom would have yelled at him for it, but I never drank milk, so I didn’t care.