Sadie counted up and down to eleven. She was eleven years old, and counting it gave her a kind of peace. She thought about her life for each of those numbers: how at zero she had known nothing, but at eleven she knew too much. At eleven she knew how to be afraid. Eleven was two straight lines standing tall: constant and unshakable and parallel and good. Just like her parents used to feel. Then she counted back down from eleven and felt all the knowledge and all the trouble fading away. Up and down, up and down in her head.
Her parents were “stable,” which was funny because she had only ever heard them being accused of being “unstable.” It was unstable to take road trips, to go on adventures, to do a radio show, to have fun. Sadie had liked unstable. Now she wanted nothing more than stability. Sadie sat in the emergency room watching them, fading in and out of the present. The heartbeat monitor kept the moments moving forward, but they were all outside of time. Her parents looked like one of the barely moving photographs in Harry Potter. She imagined them stranded in this moment for all eternity.
Sadie felt a hand on her shoulder, ruining the illusion of stillness. These moments were happening. Who knew what the next moment would bring? She looked up. When she looked back on this day years later, she could remember everything about the scenes that made up the story except the faces. Later, her mind injected George into all her memories, the most comforting face she could think of.
“Your grandparents are coming,” the man wearing George’s face said. “Would you like to stay here?”
Sadie nodded.
“Everything is going to be all right,” he said, and he walked away.
But nothing would be all right. Everything had changed.
Her grandparents came and picked her up, and she was, according to them, miraculously unscathed.
“That must have been so scary,” they said.
“I don’t know,” Sadie replied. “I don’t remember a thing.”
“But that wasn’t true?” asked Dr. Roberts, and Sadie was sixteen and it was the present again and she wasn’t in the story, she was telling the story. She was back in the horrible confrontation of now, two crashes becoming one.
She’d said she was ready to talk about this.
She wasn’t. But she never would be. So she kept moving forward anyway.
“No,” she said quietly. “It wasn’t.”
She remembered the first crash, the long hours in the car upside down, which she’d been told had only been minutes. It didn’t matter. Time had come undone. She remembered how her parents had been in the front seat, bloody and unseeing, bent at unnatural angles into airbags. She remembered the sound of sirens, the smell of gasoline, the Beatles singing, strangely, to the beat of the seat belt warning sound.
A car and their truck had landed upside down side by side, smashed up next to each other. She remembered the other driver crying: “Please help me. I don’t want to die.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Sadie whispered.
In her memories, the other driver too was played by George: George, who could never die, who would stand up and take a bow at the end of every episode.
But when she tried—when she really tried—she could remember the boy’s real face: his brown eyes, his hair so matted with blood she couldn’t tell what color it was. She could picture his mouth hanging open, screaming and dribbling blood outside her window. The dignified, dressed wounds of film heroes were nothing like this. The boy was soaked in a burnt black gore she could smell. This was no stage makeup. He was unraveling in the car beside her, right through the frame of the broken window, and whoever he had been, he was not going to be that person for long.
Who had he been? She would never know. But she was the only one who knew those moments. They only existed because she remembered.
She couldn’t stop remembering.
Sadie, at sixteen, was back in the truck again. She could never get away from this day. The crash drew her back to Day Zero, the bomb blast that shattered her entire life.
The moments passed, every one a framed photo to look at safely from where she sat. She knew it wasn’t happening, she was just replaying it again.
And again, she was eleven. She lived through it again: her milk shake splashed against the roof of the car, pooling in her hair, and how it was still hot and summery. How she still thought about the weather even while people were dying. The humidity was terrible. The ceiling was covered in blue broken glass diamonds, glittering like stars in the sky.
She replayed it again, and again, and again. Her parents, shouting. The other car. The crash. The waiting. Again. And again. And again.
She remembered knowing that she was alone, utterly and completely alone, without control. And she whispered to herself:
I’m not here
I’m not here
I’m not here
I’m not here….
She stared up at the stars, which were made of broken blue safety glass on the roof of the car. Her hair was floating, like she was underwater. She was sixteen and eleven, outside of time. She looked into the sky of stars that she had imagined and saw George—her George, in his royal white jacket and pure white gloves—beckoning. She reached up and took his hand.
And off to the Star Palace she went.
“Sadie?” called Dr. Roberts, snatching her back to reality. The verdant garden smell became bleach and latex. Sadie shook her head, and she was in the hospital again.
“Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone what you remembered?”
Sadie shrugged, and George paced nervously behind her.
“She’s asking too many questions,” George said. “You know this is getting too dangerous.”
“I just didn’t,” Sadie said. But it wasn’t that simple. She hadn’t wanted to remember herself.
“Does this have to do with George?”
Sadie looked away.
“You mean the other driver,” Sadie said quietly.
“Is there another George?”
“There’s…my George,” Sadie said. But then she was thinking about the first George: no more than a teenager. He had said, “Please help me. I don’t want to die,” until he didn’t say anything else. She knew he wasn’t talking to her, but to no one, because he was alone too. All alone, with no one to help him.
They were all like that. Her parents, herself. Trapped together, completely alone.
And the whole time she heard The Tape going on and on and on…Blackbird fly…Blackbird fly…
“Sadie!” Dr. Roberts called, but Sadie didn’t answer. “What happened that day wasn’t your fault. Maybe it’s time to let George go.”
“I can’t….I love him,” Sadie said. George put his head in his hands.
“Sadie, who in the world are you talking about?” Roberts asked.
“George.”
“Sadie, I’m confused. You didn’t know George. Are you talking about the other driver, or someone else?”
Sadie closed her eyes so the world wouldn’t vanish.
“I want my parents,” Sadie said softly. “Where are they?”
“Sadie, please. Please don’t,” said George.
“I need help,” Sadie told him. “I’m trapped and all alone.”
Sadie wheeled herself down to the cafeteria and found her parents sitting at a table, their accounting all spread out around them. They’d been working for hours.
“Can I talk to you?” Sadie asked, surprising them. They had an extended eyeball conversation that Sadie could not interpret, but she said: “It’s important.”
“Of course,” said her dad. “Even if it’s not important, you can tell us anything.”
As she gathered all her strength, the cafeteria became the ER from the first crash, and her parents were back in their beds, bloodied to within an inch of their lives but somehow listening to her. She couldn’t keep it straight. She was sixteen and eleven, falling in and out of time.
“Do you remember the crash?” Sadie asked. Her parents fidgeted with their IVs and bandages, like actors in a hospital scene. They weren’t really hurt, in this memory. It was all pretend.
“I don’t really,” her mom said. “It never came back to me after the accident.”
“Me neither,” her dad said.
“So you don’t know what caused it.” Sadie sighed. She could feel the truth raging to be let go. She tried to say it. Instead, she relived it.
They were all exhausted at the end of a long drive.
She saw her parents in the front seat, and she felt herself saying their names over and over because they weren’t listening. She wanted to hear The Tape. She felt a rage she couldn’t explain, being strapped into the backseat for hours and hours, ignored. She was trying to behave.
The Tape was in the stereo already. All they had to do was press play. It had seemed so simple. She just wanted to listen to it.
Her mom was saying, “No, just wait,” and “Sadie, stop, we’re driving,” and looking into the backseat, and her dad was saying, “Okay, just quiet down,” as he pressed play and then he was yelling and Old Charlotte slammed headfirst into a green Honda Civic.
“You were distracted because I wanted to listen to my Beatles tape,” Sadie admitted.
“No, Sadie, that’s not what happened. We’ve talked about this. The other driver wasn’t paying attention. He was in our lane.” Her mom was so certain that Sadie almost believed her.
“No, I remember what happened.”
“You always said you didn’t remember anything.”
“I remember every day,” Sadie confessed. “Trying not to remember is remembering.”
“The accident didn’t happen because of your tape. You didn’t know how to drive. How would you have known who was in the right?” her dad asked.
“But it doesn’t matter. If you’d been paying attention you might have gotten out of the way! It was my fault all this happened. I killed that other driver. You know he was only eighteen?”
“Of course we know that. You probably don’t remember all the legal stuff, all issues with the insurance. We know a lot about him,” her mom said. She hesitated. “His name was—”
“George,” Sadie said. “I know.”
“That’s right. How did you know that?”
“Because it was on the news. You can look it up in the paper. Everyone knows. I heard him, when we were in the car. Before the ambulances came. He was crying and crying and crying. No one heard. No one remembers but me. No one else knows what really happened. I have to carry it forever.”
“Stop, Sadie. Before it’s too late,” George begged. But she couldn’t stop. She saw his face on every nurse, every doctor, every patient, every relative who had been in the ER that terrible day. The ceiling disappeared and became a starry night, just like the ceiling of the Star Palace rising above. The ER ground to a halt around them, and all these Georges watched as she betrayed him.
“Sometimes I wonder if maybe we all died,” she said, choking on tears. “I worry until I make myself sick. Or maybe just I died and that’s why I don’t feel anything. And I play that day in my head over and over and over and over and over and I wish I hadn’t been asking for my tape and I wish you hadn’t been arguing and I wish and I wish and I wish and nothing changes. Nothing changes. I’ve told myself this story a million times and nothing changes.”
“Sadie, nothing can change the past,” her dad said. “And it’s not a story. It’s a terrifying thing that happened to us. And to that boy.”
“That must have been frightening for you, being awake in the car after the crash. It must have been horrifying.” Her mom wiped away a few tears, choking on her words before she could continue. “I can hardly bear to think about it. But you know, it was an accident. It was an accident and we’re all okay now.”
“But the other driver died.”
“He did,” her mom admitted, but there wasn’t anything she could say to make that better. They sat in silence.
“But we’re okay now,” her dad said finally.
“Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand? Everything can fall down in an instant. You can’t control anything. And then you have to wonder, is it fate or could we have changed it? I ask over and over, could it have been different? Life only goes one direction, and this moment, and the next moment, once they’re in the past you can’t change them and there’s no reason for anything that happens. You can’t stop time and it paralyzes me. I mean, what if we hadn’t been okay? What if?”
“But that didn’t happen,” her mom said. “What happened, happened. And here we are.”
“And it was scary. Tragic,” her dad added. “But everything is okay now.”
“Nothing is okay,” Sadie said, putting her head in her hands. “And I don’t know why.”
“What do you mean?” her mom asked.
“Nothing feels real,” Sadie mumbled. “I feel empty and worthless and cold. All the time. And no one sees. I feel like a ghost. Like I’m just pretending to be alive. I don’t even know if it was the accident or if I just am this way. There’s no reason for it. But I think there should be a reason for everything and there isn’t. I don’t get why I have to be this sad. I don’t know.”
Sadie’s parents looked at each other, but their telepathic conversation seemed to fail them.
Sadie stared up at the ceiling she knew so well: the Star Palace’s beautiful glass false sky. Here in the real world, to real people, she couldn’t explain what it felt like. Words could never carry the shattered feeling she lived with out of her body and into another mind.
Only George knew how she really felt. His many hospital guises stood like a jury around her.
“They’ll never understand,” all the Georges said at once.
“I don’t understand!” I shouted back.
I shouted. Me.
I looked up, but I had to cover my eyes. It was blinding.
The shattering roof made horrible music. All around me, broken glass stars were falling. The palace roof was falling down, abandoning me to reality in a shower of stars. They burned bright as they died, a thousand wishes going out.
The soft bustle of the hospital cafeteria began again, and my parents were looking at me, shocked.
Because I was there, suddenly. In a way that I’m usually not. I was there despite the darkness that had taken over, through the dreaming, in the real world. My words were like the staff that strikes the water, parting the sea. Magic, powerful words.
“I need help. I really, really need someone to help me,” I sobbed, and they put their arms around me, sheltering me from the black water that was already coming back, that too-familiar cold.
“It’s okay,” my parents said over and over as I sank back into the ocean of sadness, and I knew they just didn’t know what else to say. “Sadie. We’re here.”