Chapter One

 

Trixie Dalca should not have been the first to receive the terrible news. The original attempts to reach the family went to the restaurant her parents owned. Unfortunately, the desperate endeavors to contact them were unsuccessful because the accident occurred during the lunch rush with no one available to answer. Messages were taken electronically, but to no avail. Magda and Tavian, her parents, wouldn’t be available to speak with anyone for another two hours.

The people coaching her sister knew where Trixie was. Everyone in the country knew where the most popular and successful Romanian gymnast since Nadia Comăneci trained. So they called her gym in Constanţa, a bustling Black Sea port city on the southeastern tip of Romania, and spoke with her coach.

Trixie was doing pull-ups on the high bar but stopped short of the required fifty as soon as she caught sight of her coach and two other trainers walking toward her with grave expressions. She dropped lightly to the mat and put her hands on her hips.

Before speaking, her coach placed a hand gently on her shoulder, leaning close to her face. “There was an accident in Deva.”

Deva was the small town in central Romania where her younger sister was currently training for the junior international circuit at a gym called the Deva Fortress, one of the two premier gymnastics clubs in the country. Trixie felt sick at the news, nearly physically ill. Her knees went to water, and the only thing keeping her from falling to the ground was the hope that this was a huge misunderstanding. “Ileana?”

“Apparently something went wrong on her beam dismount. Somehow she slammed her head. Hard.”

“Her neck?” Trixie asked heart in her throat. It was every gymnast’s nightmare.

Surprisingly, the coach shook her head. “No, darling. It’s worse.”

“What could be worse?”

“They took her to the hospital, but she is not waking up.”

“Why isn’t she waking up?”

“That’s what they’re trying to figure out.”

Trixie clasped her chest and squatted down, dropping her head between her knees. “I need to get to Deva,” she said without looking up. “I need to find my parents and get to Deva.”

The gym where she trained was two miles away from the family restaurant. The midday traffic in the port of Constanţa was heavy and plodding. Ships were arriving, unloading, refueling, and because of this activity, the streets were jammed with sailors, dockworkers, machinery operators, tourists, warehouse stockers, and locals running lunch break errands. It would take at least fifteen minutes, maybe even twenty, to drive all the way to the restaurant. So Trixie grabbed her tennis shoes without bothering to cover up her leotard and biker shorts on the way out and hit the streets at a dead run. Paying little attention to traffic and mowing down pedestrians, the world class athlete, though just over five feet tall, made it to the restaurant in less than ten minutes.

Arriving at the building by way of an alley, she burst through the back door into the kitchen. Suddenly assaulted by cooking scents and an intense wave of odors and noise, she felt like her lungs might explode. The momentary lightheadedness caused her to crumple against a large cooler, and her vision swam the ceiling and floor whirling together. The world seemed to be crushing against her chest, and she could no longer fight it. The muscles in her thighs gave way, and she began tumbling toward the enveloping darkness.

Trixie never hit the floor. One arm went around her waist, the other looping beneath her right armpit, holding her up. After four deep breaths, her legs and brain began working in tandem once again. She looked up and saw her father’s face staring back at her. Looking into his eyes was usually akin to looking into a mirror, but today his expression held confusion and concern.

Hers, she knew, was pure panic.

“What are you doing here, Beatrix? What’s wrong?”

“There was an accident in Deva.”

The sturdy arms holding her up, the ones that had always been so strong began to shake. Tavian turned his older daughter around to face him, large palms on thin shoulders. “Is she okay?”

“She hit her head on the balance beam. She didn’t break her neck, they don’t think, but the injury is severe.”

“What does that mean?”

“They can’t wake her up.”

Behind Trixie, a plate crashed to the floor, and the sound of glass shattering temporarily halted all activity in the bustling kitchen. Trixie turned her head to see her mother standing there, her hands over her gaping mouth. Magda was shaking her head in disbelief, muttering “no” as tears began to stream down her cheeks.

Tavian retreated to the manager’s office at the back of the kitchen, followed by his wife and daughter, and phoned the training center in Deva. Ileana wanted Olympic gold, she’d told everyone as much close to her entire life. That dream was alive this morning. Now she might be dying, and her family was nearly six hundred kilometers away.

The phone conversation with a trainer at the club in Deva was short. Clearly, she did not have any further information. From two feet away, Trixie could hear the woman repeat through the receiver, over and over again, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” As if that was supposed to mean something.

As soon as Tavian hung up the phone, he said, “They took her to the hospital in Timişoara.” From Constanţa, it was well over seven hundred kilometers, near the Yugoslavian border.

An eleven-year-old girl on the other side of the country was lying unconscious in a hospital bed. She wouldn’t wake up. No one could give the family any more information.

“I’ll tell Belu to watch the restaurant,” Tavian said. “We need to go home, pack our bags, and get to the airport.”

Trixie knew she was moving because the world moved around her, but she felt unconscious. The creeping numbness stopped her from feeling the cold air outside. Even in just her workout clothes, there were no goosebumps. Adrenaline continued to surge through her system, making her ears buzz. Everything was very bright, and though she knew she was moving fast, too fast, without thinking, it felt insufferably slow.

CarpatAir had a plane leaving for Timişoara in a half-hour. The flight was full, but the desk clerk explained the situation to a group of seven passengers, all businesspeople on their way home from a day trip, and three volunteered to take the next plane.

The trip was brutal. They were out of contact with the coaches in Deva and the hospital in Timişoara. Trixie spent the entire flight hooked into her iPod, her legs continuously bouncing up and down, a nervous tic. It was how she passed the time at every gymnastics competition, and she couldn’t stop it now.

An hour and a half later, the plane touched down, and the Dalcas were the first ones off. CarpatAir volunteered to drive them to the hospital so they did not have to search for a taxi or catch the bus.

As unbearable as the plane trip had been, the last leg of the journey was excruciating. Trixie felt like she was going to jump out of her skin. She needed to see her sister, needed to hold her, needed to whisper in her ear that she was loved. Trixie wanted to turn back the clock five years, to when they were two little girls giggling in her bedroom, under a tent of covers. Whenever Ileana would cry, it wasn’t Mommy or Daddy she turned to for comfort. It was always big sister. She would hold Ileana close, running her hand through silky thin hair, and say, “I know why you’re crying. It must be hard being so beautiful.”

Trixie did not bother to stop and ask about her precious sister at the front desk of the hospital. She followed the signs to the Intensive Care Unit, sprinting down hallways, darting around corners, knocking into doctors and nurses without taking a spare breath to apologize. She guessed from the commotion it was time for midday rounds, but she ignored the warning not to enter the unit. There were seven rooms in the ICU, but only one held a person whose legs reached barely halfway down the bed.

A sob choked her but did not escape her throat. She dropped the duffel bag and leaned over her sister. The hissing sound of the ventilator breathing for Ileana combined with the incessant beeping of an alarm signaling one of the bags of medicine was empty consumed the vacuous space. Half of Ileana’s head was shaved and covered with a cloth bandage. On the other side, her brown hair was tangled and matted by blood, with crusted blood on her hairline, jaw, and shoulder. Though it was clear she was comatose, Ileana’s eyes were not completely closed. Her irises were milky and distant, and the drops administered by the nurses caused vacant tears to cut rivers across her pale cheeks. The face Trixie knew so well was puffy and swollen, and her sister was unrecognizable.

Trixie let out a devastated whimper but did not give in to the urge to wail. She believed her sister could hear her, and Ileana would be worried if her stoic big sister was crying. She leaned over the bed and kissed her softly on the forehead. “Hey, gorgeous. I’m so sorry I wasn’t at the gym with you. Once this mess is done with, I’ll teach you how to jump off a balance beam without banging your head.”

“Trixie.”

She turned around to see Evgeny Popescu standing in the doorway. He’d been Ileana’s coach for the past eight months, since injury caused him to retire from his own gymnastics career.

She stood up and turned away from the bed. “What happened?”

“She was practicing her double salto pike position—”

“She’s never been able to land that dismount cleanly,” Trixie interrupted. “Why wasn’t she training over a pit?”

“Trixie, she was ready. She landed it only a little short. Instead of falling to her knees, she went forward and slammed her head into the metal support of the beam. It was an accident.”

Mistakes like this happened all the time in gymnastics. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the athlete walked away with a bruise and a lesson for the next time the stunt was attempted. Sometimes a muscle was pulled, a bone broken, but though they all knew the stories of gymnasts who were seriously injured or even killed in training, no one believed it would happen to them.

Only then did Tavian and Magda arrive in the room. The sight of Ileana stunned her father mid-step, and her mother collapsed against the wall. Weeping, she crawled across the floor and took her youngest daughter’s right hand in both of hers. She kissed it excessively and began to pray.

Ten minutes later, the doctor entered the room and told the family that trauma to the head had caused Ileana’s brain to swell immediately and

dramatically. There was no neurosurgeon in Deva, so the surgery occurred in Timişoara, nearly two hours after what would have been ideal. Because of the postponement, choked blood vessels formed a clot. This was removed primarily, along with excess blood and fluid. The necessary delay in treatment resulted in post-operative swelling, which the doctor said “—diminished Ileana’s respiratory drive—” and Trixie shot him a threatening glare as he said this, fraught with confusion and dread, and the simpler explanation was Ileana was no longer breathing on her own. They had done what they could surgically, and now it was up to medications to reduce the brain swelling. Unfortunately, significant damage had already been done. There was no way to gauge what

kind of higher level functioning she would have when she woke up.

If she woke up.

When the doctor finished speaking, Trixie took a deep breath to keep herself from vomiting. She whispered, “So her brain is swelling uncontrollably, the blood flow was cut off for so long there’s no way to tell how much damage was done, now blood and fluid are putting pressure on her brain, and . . .”

“Yes?” the doctor said.

“She might never wake up.”

“Don’t give up hope,” the doctor said firmly. “We’re doing everything we can, and Ileana is strong.”

They called it a ‘traumatic brain injury’. Magda had fainted when she heard the diagnosis, but later she insisted defiantly, “She’ll wake up.” She remained by her daughter’s bed, stroking her hand.

“They won’t know for sure for a couple more hours, but she’s in a coma,” Trixie said softly. “I overheard the nurses talking about it at their station. No eye opening, no response to pain. No motor response, no verbal response.”

“What are you saying to me?”

“I’m only repeating what I heard. The measures they’re going to have to take to save her life...they might not work.”

Magda’s hand went backwards, and before Trixie could react, her mother’s open palm connected with her face. The smack was louder than the equipment in the room. She smacked her again, and the second one echoed through the entire wing. “Ileana will be fine. The medication will take care of the swelling, the bleeding will stop, and she’ll be fine. Don’t you believe that?”

“I do. I’m only telling you what’s happening now.”

Magda said she did not want to leave Ileana for a moment. She spent the night bedside, but in the morning, the doctors and nurses forced her out of the room when they realized the eleven-year-old was experiencing kidney failure. Through the window, the family watched as they attempted to stabilize the girl, adding more tubes and machines, more medicine, all the while tears ran senselessly down Ileana’s cheeks, though this was nothing more than a result of eye drops and involuntary response. The tears of Tavian, Magda, and Trixie were much more purposeful.

There was a beautiful synagogue in Timişoara, but none of them could bear to leave the hospital. When Ileana was unable to regulate her blood sugar, and an hour later, her heart stopped beating, Trixie ran out of the Intensive Care Unit. She had simply wanted to flee into the fresh air, to escape, to find a moment alone, but she saw a sign for the chapel and made a detour. Beneath Jesus crucified, though she was Jewish, Trixie prayed for her little sister. Most people thought Trixie lived for gymnastics, that her greatest love was the sport, her greatest goal Olympic gold. The truth was her greatest love was her sister, her goal to be a role model. Without Ileana, she was lost, and she couldn’t imagine a world without her. Just the thought of it made her ache, and for the first time since hearing of the accident, she allowed herself to succumb to the sorrow in her heart. The hope she’d been harboring like a light in complete darkness was fading. Her sister’s organs were failing, the swelling of her brain was not decreasing, and she’d yet to show any sign she had even minimal awareness of her surroundings.

Fifteen minutes later, Trixie’s father joined her in the otherwise empty chapel. Together they begged, “El na refa na lah.” Please God, bring healing.

Parents should not outlive their children, but death was not picky.

The Dalcas prayed for twenty-four hours straight. They implored death to leave one little girl behind. They refused to believe it could all end this way. They did not allow themselves to think the unthinkable, and they put all their hopes in the conviction that even death could not be this cruel.

None of it mattered.

She died anyway.