TWENTY-FOUR

 

Two days later, the flap of my tent was opened in the dead of night.  Avian stepped inside, his face grave and sharply illuminated by the lantern in his hand. 

“Can you come with me?” he asked.  I had never heard his voice sound so rough.  There were red rims around his eyes.  I nodded once and followed him through the dark without a word.

Somehow I knew before we even left my tent that we were going to his.  The darkness felt heavy and cold, despite the summer heat.  My hands were clammy and my insides hollow.

We stepped inside and I felt myself freeze up in despair.

Sarah lay on her cot, her eyes closed, lined with a frightening shade of red.  Her face was covered with a sheen of sweat and her entire frame trembled slightly.  Her breathing came in terrifying gasps.

“She’s been unconscious for more than twenty-four hours,” Avian said, his voice sounding as if it were being dragged over rocks.  “I can’t wake her up.”

I knelt at her side, pushing the hair back from her face.  Her torso twitched violently as her body fought for air. 

“Sarah?” I said quietly, taking one of her bony hands in mine.  “Sarah?” I said again, my lips pressed into her clammy skin.

Avian sank to his cot, resting his face in his hands.  In a few moments his shoulders started to shake as the tears consumed him.

I knew then why Avian had asked me to come.  He had wanted me to be able to say good-bye.

I closed my eyes as I pressed my lips to her hand again.  Every time Sarah had gathered me up in her arms, every encouraging word she had spoken to me as a young teenager reverberated in my mind.  Flashes of her smiling face swam through my head.  I recalled all the squabbles she and Avian had gotten into, remembered all the days they wouldn’t talk to each other afterwards, and then the awkward apologies that followed.

West, Bill, or even Gabriel might say that I had never had a mother, never known a sister.  But they were wrong.  I’d had Sarah.

“I will always miss you,” I whispered, surprised at how rough my own voice sounded.  Avian’s sobs became all the louder.  “I will always remember you.  I don’t know that I would have turned out as human if it wasn’t for you.  You gave me a family when I didn’t have one. 

“Thank you for everything, Sarah.”

Avian gave a heart-wrenching cry, his shoulders shaking violently.

The sound of Sarah’s labored breathing became all the more terrifying over the next hour.  Her skin started turning a grey-purple and her hands grew cold.  I squeezed her hand all the tighter.

Just before dawn, Sarah’s body was finally still.

 

We buried her by the lake.  Bill and Graye had found a perfectly smooth salmon colored rock and had somehow managed to carve her name into its surface.  Gabriel snapped out of his stupor just enough to speak, to give honor and remembrance to her name.  Avian hadn’t said a word since he had come to get me the night Sarah died.  I held his trembling frame the rest of that day and all through the night.