The queasiness lasts for hours, making sleep impossible. Meaningless tasks like cleaning the bathroom and organizing my closet just make it worse. I doze off sometime after dawn. It’s late afternoon when I wake up again.
“Avery!”
Mom again. She sounds peeved.
“What?” My voice barely carries, but that’s intentional.
“It’s Christmas Eve and I need eggnog for the dinner!”
Christmas Eve. For the first time in my nineteen years, I have completely forgotten a major holiday. I pull on a sweatshirt and hobble downstairs.
“Seriously?”
“Yes, I’m serious.” She looks me over with obvious disapproval. “You’re not wearing that to dinner, are you?”
“Maybe . . .”
“I hope that’s a joke. Anyway, I need eggnog, stat.”
It never ceases to amaze me that my lawyer mother says things like stat and critical and tachycardic, while my doctor father avoids medical jargon at all costs. It helps, though. I know she’s in crisis mode when she calls one of her codes.
“Mom, you know I’m not dying to go outside—”
“I need this, Avery. It’s critical.”
“How critical? Because reporters work three hundred sixty-five days a year. There could be one in the driveway right now.”
“The only person in the driveway right now is your uncle Ted, who arrives two hours early to everything. Go tell him to take a walk and then get me my eggnog.” She smoothes her apron and forces a smile. “Please, sweetie?”
I look her dead in the eyes. “Is this a Code Blue?”
“Yes,” she says, with much gravitas.
“All right.”
“Take my car. It’s faster.”
“I can just walk—”
“No. I need it stat. No time for dawdling.”
“Whatever,” I mumble. She doesn’t understand how much I despise city driving. My high school friends used to call it a disorder.
But stat is stat, so I grab the keys and fire up her months-old Audi. It still has that new-car smell, the leather so stiff it hurts my butt. Even though the skies are overcast, I put on the sunglasses she left on the dashboard.
The closest grocery store is about a mile away. Turns out my mother isn’t the only one who forgot something critical. The parking lot is jammed with anxious shoppers. Horns blaring. Carts scattered haphazardly across the concrete like the spoils of war. I want to go somewhere else, somewhere deserted, but there is no time for that. Our extended family knows to be at the house promptly at six. The clock on the dash reads 4:35.
I park two blocks away and walk with my head down, hood up. This is my first real venture into the public realm, and it feels monumental. Terrifying. Essentially the opposite of what I had hoped it would be.
I remind myself it’s Christmas Eve. Family time. No one thinks about plane crashes or survivors or the news on such a happy holiday. Even reporters have boundaries.
The sunglasses are a little much, but my hood stays on as I enter the store. No one glances my way. People are too preoccupied by their tasks at hand. They just want to get their bonbons and cinnamon sticks and go.
There are a dozen other people swarming the milk aisle. This could be trouble. Eggnog is a hot commodity on Christmas Eve, unlike every other day of the year. I wade through the crowd and reach, painfully, for the last carton.
“Oh, that’s mine,” someone barks.
I glance over my shoulder. Is she talking to me?
The woman points to the quart of eggnog in my hand. “That’s mine,” she says again.
“Uh, it was on the shelf—”
She’s starting to say something when her eyes go wide, her hands go to her mouth, and she squeals, “Oh dear God. You’re that poor girl from the plane.”
Her voice carries, echoing down the aisles as I weave through the crowd toward the exit. My mother will not be pleased if I come home empty-handed, but I can’t stop at the checkout line. I just want to escape. Leave. Run.
For how long, though? Forever? Colin would tell me to make a stand.
Colin, who may never have another Christmas with his own family.
With this thought, I hurtle to a stop in the express checkout line. Hood up, head down. Eggnog on the conveyor belt, wallet in my hand. This will be easy. Fast.
Five minutes. Ten. Like airport security, now that I think about it. Someone’s credit card gets declined. Someone else has to run back to the frozen foods section because he doesn’t want asparagus; he wants artichokes. The mother in front of me tries to soothe her screaming baby, and I think about the baby whose mother died before she could hold him.
When it’s my turn, I hand the cashier a five-dollar bill and hurry out. A raw wind hits me as the doors slide open, makes my eyes water. I put the sunglasses back on, no longer caring how ridiculous they look. If someone else recognizes me . . .
“Avery Delacorte?”
I stop walking. “Yes?”
A woman in a pinstripe suit thrusts a recorder in my face. My first thought is, How did she get here so quickly? A text? A phone call? Some anonymous tip line? I suppose it doesn’t matter. She found me, and now she wants her story.
“I really need to get home.” I start walking—fast, jagged, almost drunken strides. She gives chase in her four-inch heels.
“Avery, I had some questions for you regarding your account of what happened during your five days on that mountain. As you may be aware, Tim, the eldest boy, said you rescued him—”
“He’s wrong.”
“Wrong? He tells the story in great detail.”
“He’s six.”
“Yes, but it just seems that he had a connection with you—”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“You don’t want to talk about this, or you can’t talk about this?”
She waits for me to answer, or at least turn around. Neither happens. I fumble with my keys as my mother’s Audi finally comes into view. The eggnog slips from my grasp and splatters on the curb. Its thick, pungent liquid dribbles onto the street.
I pick up the remains of the carton. Any other year, I would have gone to some other store, if for no other reason than to refuse failure. Not this year. Maybe never again.
“Well?” she prods.
I shove the recorder aside, a meager act of rebellion that feels weak, and sad, and futile. She must hear the visceral ache in my voice. She must see the spilled eggnog and know, as everyone does, that I’m not the hero they want me to be.
“Two hundred and four people died that night,” I say, seeing their faces, hearing their screams. “Shouldn’t you be telling their stories?”