44
Dr. Layne and I stop by the school on our way to the hospital. She helps me comb through the grass for the gold phoenix.
“I was such a jerk,” I mumble, pushing aside a clump of newly mowed remnants. “I should have been there for her.”
“Well, you can be there now. Is this it?” She holds up the phoenix, whose right wing has been clipped, probably by the steel blade of a lawn mower.
I run my finger along the jagged, broken wing. “What if she hates me?”
Dr. Layne stands up and reaches down to help me to my feet. “Be there anyway.”
Piper’s parents huddle with a white coat when I walk into the third-floor hospital hallway. Her mom cuts off the doctor and rushes to hug me. She tells me they’ve moved Piper out of intensive care but still have her on fluids and surveillance. She winces when she says these last words, like the thought of her daughter needing to be watched round the clock physically pains her.
“Can I see her?”
Her mom nods. “But, Ava, she’s heavily sedated right now and very tired, so I’m not sure she’ll even know you’re there.”
I pull back the curtain to the room, which is dead quiet except for the beeping of the machine in time with Piper’s heart. Behind the curtain, Piper is small and young and impossibly fragile. The massive bed swallows her up, and I feel like I’m seeing her for the first time.
I pull up a chair and lay my hand on hers. It’s bruised beneath the surface of the skin, where some nurse with no skills tried to insert her IV.
I’m not sure what to say. I’m used to being the one in the bed. When Cora and Glenn visited me in the burn unit, I watched from my immobile perch as they suited up in booties and scrubs and hairnets so they wouldn’t bring the infectious dangers of the outside world into my little reality. I’d lie there like a caged zoo animal.
Now I’m the one tapping on the glass.
“Piper?”
A small sound escapes her lips, but her eyes only flicker slightly.
“You don’t have to talk. I just want to say I’m sorry. I wasn’t there when you needed me.” I choke down the lump in my throat.
Beeping fills the otherwise silent space.
Then I feed her all the same battle language people used to give me. I hated it then, and I hate myself for saying it now, but it’s all I have—the hope that my words will reach her.
“I need you to fight. I need you to wake up so I can tell you something amazing. I found my new normal.” I flip her hand over and lay the gold phoenix in her limp palm. “It’s you. You and Cora and Glenn, and I almost missed it, searching for someone I used to be. I couldn’t see the beauty all around me.”
I close her fingers over the bird.
“But I see it now, Pipe. I see you. You’re not In. Valid. Not to me. So you have to get better so I can tell you that I’m sorry. I should have been there. But I’m here now, and I’m not going anywhere. You’re part of my story, and I’m part of yours.”
The antiseptic smell and beeping transports me back to the unit. I used to think Cora had a martyrdom complex, the way she’d stay through the night curled up on the chair, surviving off cafeteria Jell-O.
Did Cora feel the way I do holding Piper’s hand? Like there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be.
Then I do the one thing I know how to do: I sing softly, words about dreams and bluebirds and troubles melting like lemon drops.
Before I leave, I scribble a note on a cafeteria napkin.
You've got lots of flying left to do on this side of the rainbow.
PS If you try to die on me again, I'll kill you myself.
Piper’s dad stops me on my way out to offer a supremely awkward apology for when I saw him in all his drunken splendor at his house.
“I haven’t always been like that,” he says, as if I’ve asked for an explanation. “Sometimes it feels like the accident happened to all of us. You know?”
I nod like I get it, but I don’t: The accident didn’t happen to him. It happened to Piper, and then she happened to everyone else. It’s a feeling I know well, and as I walk away from Piper’s bed, I wonder if that’s the burden she felt so acutely last night when a bottle of pills looked a lot like relief.
Her dad takes my spot by the bed. A nurse closes the curtains again, and Piper’s mom walks with me down the hall, talking in circles the whole way.
“Did Piper tell you anything? About what was wrong? Or that she was thinking about doing something…like this?”
Her eyes dart across my face, searching for an answer I don’t have.
“I thought she was doing okay. She was walking with that walker thing a little. And helping with the volleyball team,” I say.
Her mom’s face twists in confusion. “What volleyball team?”
“You know, being an assistant on the team again.”
She shakes her head. “No, she wasn’t.”
I start to argue, but realize I have no evidence. I never actually saw her working with the team. She was always “skipping” practice to come hang out at drama, or didn’t have to go because the team was on the road. Did she ever even talk to the coach?
I look back toward Piper’s room.
Maybe Asad was right; I’ve been so busy looking down that I didn’t see the pain in the person right beside me. Just like Asad in his lighting booth and me behind my curtains, Piper’s been hiding this whole time.
At home, Cora and Glenn walk on eggshells, watching me out of the corners of their eyes until it’s time for bed. I don’t blame them—in the last thirty-six hours, I had an epic meltdown, took a harrowing trip down memory lane, and visited my suicidal friend in the hospital. No wonder they look at me like I’m a bomb about to detonate.
Cora lotions me up in silence, and when I’m rezipped in my second skin, she sits on the edge of the bed. Glenn comes in, too, but stops and leans against the wall to take off his boots. Cora smiles.
“Can’t take the cowboy out of that man,” she says, half laughing. Then, softer, “Not that I’d ever want to.”
Debooted, Glenn bends down to kiss Cora on the part in her hair. She leans into him.
“How is she?” he says.
My voice comes out gravelly with emotion.
“She wasn’t really awake when I saw her.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.” My voice vibrates, tightening right at the spot above my star scar. “It was so weird to see her lying there, so small. And all I could think was how I can’t lose someone again. My heart can’t take it.”
Glenn picks up the charred handbell off my dresser and transfers it between his hands.
“It’s hard watching someone you love in pain. You’d take their hurt in a heartbeat, but you can’t. It’s their pain.”
“How did you guys do it? I mean with me. Sara was gone. I was…me. How did you stand it?”
Cora takes the bell from Glenn and rubs her fingers across the blackened surface.
“We had to,” she says quietly.
“Because I needed you?”
“Because we needed you.”
“You needed me?”
Cora swallows hard, reaching up to hold Glenn’s hand. “I was a mother without a child. You were the one thing that kept the weight of that from crushing me. I needed you, Ava.”
Cora pauses like she’s waiting for more breath.
“I still need you,” she says. “If anything ever happened to you—”
I put my hand on her arm.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Cora smiles and slides her thumb along the scarred ridges of my fingers.
“Do you remember each time you would get a new graft? How we knew it was going to take?”
I think back to the white patches of skin sewn into my body. How the nurses would change the dressings, day after day, always checking to see if my body was going to accept or reject this new piece of me.
And then, one day, little pink pinhead dots would appear.
“When the buds appeared, we knew.”
Cora nods. “Once it connected to the heart, it had a chance.” Her small, manicured fingers envelop my hand, toe and flipper and all. “You’re grafted into our hearts now. Permanently stitched together.”
Cora hugs me and Glenn kisses me on the top of my head. He stops at my door to flick off the lights like he always does, his profile silhouetted against the light.
In the dark, my mind whirs with thoughts of Piper. How am I going to help her? How can I make up for the terrible things I said? And how can I face the hallways—let alone the stage—without her?
I put on my headphones, hit the Fire Mix and play Piper’s self-proclaimed anthem.
She’s a phoenix in a flame—
a hellfire raging from within,
her story written on her skin.
Once broken, now she flies—
soaring above everything.
She conquered her demons,
and wore her scars like wings.
An hour later, I still can’t sleep. I listen to Mom’s deodorant voice mail, but when it’s over, I think about Piper, and the darkness creeps in again. I write in my therapy journal, but the dark won’t go. Rather than fight it alone, I grab the Wizard of Oz DVD and knock on the door across the hall.
When Cora tells me to come in, I find Glenn lying propped up on a pile of pillows with Cora leaning against him, watching some TV documentary.
“You okay, honey?” she says.
Glenn mutes the TV. They both wait for me to say something—anything. But the words get stuck.
I want to tell them I’m scared. I want to tell them about the darkness and that I don’t want to stop fighting.
I want to tell them thank you for being there when I woke up.
That I’m a child without a mother.
That I need them, too.
“You guys up for a musical?” I hold up the DVD.
Cora scoots over quickly in the bed, nudging Glenn to make room.
“Of course!” she says. She throws up the covers on her side and pats the bed while Glenn puts in the disc. She fluffs a pillow next to her. “Jump in!”
I slide into the sheets, still toasty from her body heat. Under the covers, Cora’s hand finds mine, and when it does, the darkness lifts slightly.
I barely make it to Oz before I drift off.
All I know is it feels good to be there, sharing the same space.