“Hey, sleepyhead.”
I pressed the light on my digital watch. 10:43.
He held his finger to his lips and whispered, “There’s a band playing at the Basement that I want to see. I have it all planned out. I just need your help. One favor.”
“OK,” I agreed fast, happy my big brother needed me for something, and our pinkies met in a pact.
“When will you be . . .”
But he held a finger to his lips.
“I’m not going to tell you when,” he whispered. “Because I know you, and you’ll start counting. No counting, Rain. No worrying.”
He explained how he would walk quietly down the stairs, and right as he was opening the door to sneak out, I would have my big job.
“You’ll flush the toilet so Mom and Dad won’t hear the door squeak open and close shut.” I nodded my head as we practiced counting out one, two, three silently on our fingers.
“Flush on three,” he said.
Then he rustled my already bed-headed hair. “Thanks.”
He carried his shoes in his hands so they wouldn’t make noise against the wood floors, and I wondered how he knew to do that. Probably the same way he knew how to get in to see a band at the Basement when you had to be twenty-one to enter.
I walked to the bathroom up on the balls of my feet and laid one finger on the toilet handle. Then I looked down the staircase to the front door and locked eyes with Guthrie.
We counted out together silently. One, two, three.
Flush.
And he was gone before the water swirled down the bowl.
And I helped him go.
I crawled back in bed, straining to make out his truck tires on the gravel driveway, but all I could hear was the toilet bowl filling back up and running loud before it faded away and the house was silent again.
I tried not to think of all the things that could happen when you break the rules, in the dark, past curfew. I tried not to worry. And I tried not to count. I tried not to press the light on my digital watch for four minutes. Then another four. I counted out perfect seconds in my head. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, and wondered how long a concert goes. The average length of a song is four minutes, and that’s a fact because I used to sneak into my brother’s room and study the labels of all the records in his collection so that I would know all the names of the songs too. But I didn’t know how many songs a band played at a concert, or how long it would take him to drive there and home since all the stoplights in town were blinking yellow at this hour.
I pressed the light on my watch again. Four minutes. Another song.
12:34 . . . 12:38 . . . 1:02 . . . 1:06 . . . 1:10 . . .
At 2:41, the phone rang four long rings. I could hear my dad clear his voice through my bedroom wall.
Then panic.
Mom’s voice. And drawers slamming and, “What about Rain?”
“Call the neighbors.”
But I had already pulled on my hand-me-down jeans and Guthrie’s worn hooded sweatshirt and I stood in their bedroom doorway. “I want to go with you.”
“Rain,” Mom started. “Honey—”
“I’m going.”
Dad tried too. “It’s really best if—”
“I’m going.”
I slid my bare feet into my Adidas Ultraboosts, and we all ran to the car. I laced my shoes in the back seat while Dad reversed down the driveway and sped off at fifty miles per hour down our dirt road. The speed limit is thirty-five, and Mom and Dad always complained that thirty-five was too high for a dirt road with so many dips and curves, but right then, it wasn’t fast enough. And when the dirt turned to pavement, the needle on the speedometer got close to sixty and we whizzed right through the first blinking light and the new stop sign in town that everyone missed anyway because they just weren’t used to it yet.
Then I saw the lights and an ambulance and three cop cars. And my brother’s truck. And I didn’t want to think about what could make a truck look like that. Crushed so hard from the side that it looked like half a truck, pushed into the median, with dirt and grass dug up in two streaks behind it. I squinted my eyes against the lights and looked for Guthrie in the driver’s seat, but there was no more driver’s seat, just squished metal, and broken glass glinting in the red lights.
I thought he must be sitting on the edge of the ambulance with a blanket over his shoulders. That’s what happens in books. The family looks and looks and just when it seems too terrible to be true, they find him, sitting on the back of an ambulance with a nasty cut above his eye and all the EMTs saying that he’s going to be OK, and everyone hugs.
I squinted my eyes again, but the lights were too bright and we were stopped and couldn’t go any farther because of barricades and Do Not Cross tape and a cop asking Dad to roll down his window, but I had to find Guthrie, so I flung open my door and took off running.
I counted each stride until that was all I could hear. The one, two, three of my sneakers against the pavement drowned out the policemen shouting after me. They waved their arms and tried to cut me off, but they weren’t as fast as I was. Not even close. I ducked under a barricade and stretched the yellow tape over my head, running toward the flashing lights of the ambulance. The lights were slowly rotating, no big whoop-whoops that you hear when they’re driving like crazy to save someone’s life because every second matters. And the lights were too slow. Everyone was too slow. No one was rushing like I was.
I was trying to keep count of my strides, but my legs were losing pace until I stopped because I didn’t know which direction to turn. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and another. Mom and Dad. And even though I’d only run twenty-eight strides, my muscles were shaking and I was feeling heavy and I collapsed on the pavement into a big heap with Mom and Dad’s arms wrapped around me and each other, and I thought maybe, maybe if we just stayed like this forever and didn’t look up, we wouldn’t see the ambulance door close and see it drive off slowly. We wouldn’t hear the officers asking us to come with them so they could tell us that an eighteen-wheeler lost its brakes on the interstate ramp and soared through a red light and right into Guthrie. And we could just squeeze our eyes closed and make it all untrue.
But no amount of pretending ever brought anyone back. And that’s a fact.