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Sirens call from the volunteer firehouse, and a few minutes later, the truck is here. Six men are connecting the hose to the hydrant and proceeding to squirt water on the ruin of our home. Several minutes later, the ambulance and paramedics arrive. “Help her,” I plead, and they ease me out from under her while they begin assessing her. “I saw the smoke. I got her out, but I can’t wake her up. She’s on pain pills.” I start to say that she drinks but hesitate. She would be so mad at me, but they need to know that she isn’t just asleep. “She drinks,” I scream out and one of the paramedics glances at me while the policeman begins to lead me away.
I watch them putting a mask over her face, checking pulses, checking her leg, looking in her eyes. I turn my back, glancing out into the woods. I have the strongest urge to run to Chessa. Run to the farm, but I stand still and then turn my back on the path leading to them. This is my life. Dylan can never be part of it. I can never be part of his. He has a future. People like me don’t have futures. We are broken. I drop my head onto my arm and let myself cry. What have I done?
“Let them work on her,” the officer says. He offers me a hand, and I let him pull me up. He leads me around to side of the trailer, out of the way of the spray of water and out of sight of the paramedics. I stand there, numb and throbbing, and the street slowly fills with the people. “Do you live here?”
I nod, glancing at his name tag. Officer M. Daniels. He is tall and lean with just the beginnings of a paunch showing under his uniform. I try to pull myself to rights, but I can’t keep my eyes off the smoldering edge of the trailer that blocks my view of the paramedics working on my mother.
“Your mother?” I nod again. He asks me my name and I tell him. “Do you know what happened here today?” I’ve stepped away from him, tottering, and can see them again—they are lifting her onto a stretcher, raising it, wheeling her to the waiting ambulance. I see her arm lift, and I am relieved. She wouldn’t do that if she were still out, would she? She must be awake. I need to go with her. I start to move in that direction, but Officer M. Daniels stops me with a touch to my shoulder. “I’ll give you a ride to the hospital. I’d like to talk to you.”
He doesn’t put me in the back of the car but lets me sit in the front, next to him. I glance in the backseat and see my backpack there. I groan and hope he hasn’t heard. Stupid. Where did I leave it? I don’t remember bringing it from the bushes, but surely they didn’t find it all the way down the road. If I weren’t already so fried from the day, I might have felt something more than defeat.
“Is that yours?” he asks.
“What?” Time. I need time.
“The backpack. I found it by the road. Thought it was probably yours.”
I nod but don’t speak. It’s been a horrible, shitty day.
“Can you tell me what happened here today?”
“No. I don’t know what happened.” It really feels true inside my bruised brain. There are whole portions of the day that I have lost. I don’t remember most of the walk home, I only remember pieces of pulling her out of the trailer. Did I really crumple papers and pour vodka through the house?
“What grade are you in?”
“I’m a sophomore.”
“So why aren’t you at school today?” His tone is friendly, just keeping up the conversation.
“I was. I mean, I went this morning, but I got hit by a truck, so I came home.” I lean my head on the window and close my eyes.
“You got hit by a truck, you say?” I can feel his eyes on me, hot, assessing.
“I did.”
“Where did that happen?”
“At school. In the parking lot. I was riding my bike into the lot, and I . . . I don’t know. I don’t really remember how it happened.”
“Are you injured? Did you fill out a police report?”
I shrug, suddenly so tired I can’t bother to answer. I lift my good hand to my collarbone and shoulder and then point to my head. My body is throbbing and pain shoots all down my arm, radiating from my shoulder, but my head is the worst. I feel myself weaving in and out of pain.
“Hit by a truck.” He goes through a red light, his lights flashing behind the ambulance, with their sirens blaring in a high/low way. “Then your home catches fire, all before noon. What a day.”
“Yeah,” I say, opening my eyes, watching the flashing light in front of me. Trying to stay focused or to get focused.
“Can you tell me about your backpack?”
“What do you mean?” I don’t move to look at him.
“Well. It looks like maybe you were going somewhere.” He pauses. “Were you planning to go somewhere?”
“Yeah.” Tears spill over my eyelashes and down my soot-darkened face. I don’t bother wiping them away, just let them drop, one after another onto my dirty jeans.
“You want to tell me where?”
I turn and look at him. “Anywhere but here.” My chin puckers, and I draw my lips together before turning again to lean on the window.
“You were going to run away?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Well. Running away from my problems has never solved them for me.” I don’t give him the look that I want to give him, and he goes on. “Lucky for your mother, trailers don’t burn well, being made mostly of flame-resistant materials. Has your mother ever shown suicidal tendencies before?”
“No.” I pause, “I don’t know, really.” The words on my feet sing out, the scars of the words that define me, and I wonder if they would think I have suicidal tendencies.
“She’s had a rough week?”
Week, month, year, life. “Yeah, it’s been a bad week.” I wish we could stop talking.
“She was involved in the accident on 130 on Thursday?” I nod.
“Was she upset about it?” I nod: of course she was. “That was a bad situation.”
“Of course she was upset,” I snap. Somebody died, you idiot. Lydia Dollman and her son Terry, age five. “The roads were slick,” I say, defensive.
“It was a bad storm, for sure,” he agrees. The ambulance pulls into the emergency entrance ahead of us, and I draw my head away from the glass. “I reckon you aren’t planning to run away any time soon?”
“No. I’m not going anywhere.” Ever. Stuck. Trapped.
“That’s good. I think it’s best if you don’t leave town right away.” He steps out of the car, opens the back door to retrieve my backpack. He hands it to me as I get out of the car. What does that mean? Isn’t the backpack evidence? Is he telling me not to leave town because they know what I did, or is he just telling me that running isn’t the answer? Do they really say that to people, to perps? I always thought that was just for the TV dramas. I don’t have time, though, to consider it longer than that. They are wheeling my mother inside, and I am relieved to hear her coughing as they go.
***
My mother is admitted, and when I am given the once-over, they give me ice for my shoulder and arm, which are not broken, only badly bruised, and six stitches followed by an ice pack for my head. They give me some medicine to numb the pain, and when they leave me, I spit the undissolved bits into the toilet, vaguely remembering that I took something from her pill bottle earlier. I don’t want to have my stomach pumped on top of everything else. I am not admitted, just outpatient, but I am permitted to stay with her. They provide me with a pair of scrubs and some mesh underpants and tell me that if I would like to shower in the bathroom I can. I look at myself for a very long time in the mirror before I strip free of my grimy clothes. There are black smudges on my cheeks and chin, and the red rim of my eyelids cut jagged edges toward my iris. I had reached through flames to get her off the couch, but there is not a single scorch mark on my flesh. The devil doesn’t burn. I draw my clothes off in the sterile, antiseptic bathroom and close my eyes to the girl standing in the mirror.
I let the water run down my body, scrubbing suds through my hair, avoiding the stitches as best I can. They told me not to get them wet for twenty-four hours, but I smell like a torch. I’m not sure really that I care a whole lot if they get infected and take me out. Death by infection can’t be counted as a suicidal tendency, right? I am careful with my bruised skull, but rub fiercely at the smudges on my flesh. I am sobbing again, the tears wracking my body until my legs crumple abruptly, leaving me in a pile on the tile floor. How do I go from here to any kind of life? How do I turn this horrible life into something worth living? How do I go from trying to kill my mother to doing good in the world? What I know is that I cannot rely on her. She will never change. She is trapped in her own hell, and she cannot escape it. I have two more years before I can move out, work full time, build a life. One more year I might be able to manage, but two seems like too much. But I have to. I have to do that.
When I come back into her room, the skin of my face scrubbed fresh and pink, I find my mother asleep, connected to monitors and an IV. They’ve cleaned her face as well, and there is only one small bandage where the fire must have licked too long at her arm. I sit down solidly in the chair beside her bed, done in, exhausted, cried out. Beep, beep, beep, beep. I let my mind slip to empty. I stare at the half moon of her fingernail, where it peeks out beyond the edge of the bedrail. I am chilled to the bone, even though I showered in the hottest water I could stand. I draw my legs forward and wrap my arms around them, feeling hollow. The throb and pain in my shoulder and across my collarbone, the soft spot on my head . . . the reminders that it was only this morning I was run over in the parking lot by the younger brother of Lydia Dollman, the woman my mother killed. I close my eyes and count down, one hundred to zero. Somewhere before reaching rock bottom, I drift off to sleep.