“I love the cranes.”
The origami cranes had taken over the house. People were dropping cranes on our porch with notes, with chocolates, with magazines, with flowers. Shay was the ringleader, the crane queen. It didn’t matter that I was pretty sure I was supposed to make the cranes myself for the healing to happen, or that I wasn’t on the brink of dying, or that it was all so melodramatic. Shay wanted to deliver a grand gesture, and I loved her for it. But I was uncomfortable with all the attention. I didn’t want people worrying about me.
The local newspaper published the horrible picture of me with my bandaged head holding a barf bucket on the front page with the headline GOOD SAMARITAN TEEN SAVES BABY FROM FUGITIVE FATHER. I sat on the living room couch, propped up on pillows, reading about the Alabama man who had fled his estranged ex-wife’s house with their baby girl to get back at the mom for leaving him. He had a history of domestic violence and drunk driving. There was a nearly full bottle of Southern Comfort in the passenger seat. I assumed that was the bottle he had used to beat me in the spleen. There was a shotgun in the trunk next to a stuffed owl wrapped in a pink box.
I watched the whole thing, which had been recorded on a tourist kid’s iPod. It was all a blur of sounds, mostly—head-cracking sounds and baby cries and sirens. Watching it over and over again was strangely comforting. I didn’t have to work so hard to remember.
It turned out there were many things I hadn’t noticed the day of the incident. I hadn’t noticed Daniela calling the cops or Sissy and old Mr. Upton banging on the back window of the car with a rock, trying to get to the baby. I only noticed those things the fifth time I viewed the video on YouTube. The first four times I was focused on the bizarre kicking motion my legs made while he drove the base of the bottle into my back. And then there was my ass crack hanging out when the cops pulled me from the car by my shorts.
I clicked on the TV news story that aired the night of the incident. The newspeople speculated the guy might have been planning to drive his baby off a cliff. They speculated he might have been gearing up to go on a shooting spree. People online said I was a hero. They said I was stupid. They talked about me, Sadie Sullivan, the girl named after her paternal great-grandmother, an Irish seamstress who saved seven children from a fire and burned the bottoms of her feet so badly they had to be amputated.
“Where the hell did they find out about that?” Dad said, leaning in to watch the video.
“I’m surprised the news didn’t say something about your thumb,” I said, referring to Dad’s missing thumb, a casualty of an accident he refused to discuss that happened when he was a New York City cop.
I wanted to stop watching, especially when they zoomed in on the blurred ass crack. I wanted to stop looking at the pictures online, especially the one of me in the wheelchair looking like a deformed larva. But I couldn’t stop. For two days straight, I watched and read and searched for more stories.
There was one story out of Alabama. A dark-haired newsman with a deep chin dimple told the story of the seventeen-month-old baby who was saved by the New York farm stand worker. They cut to a blurry photograph of the baby, with wisps of sandy hair and apple cheeks and a wide, drooling smile. “Thanks to that Good Samaritan, baby Ella is home safe with her mother and doing well.”
Her name was Ella. And according to my laptop, baby Ella was home safe and doing well.
I spent a week on the couch, sleeping, texting, reading online comments about baby Ella and me, fielding visits from family, from the remaining seniors (even Shawn Flynn and D-Bag stopped by with flowers), from my food-pushing grandmothers, who didn’t understand I was drinking all my meals through a straw.
Seth sent a few more How’s it going? texts before returning to his vacation. I was surprised by how little I thought about Seth, how I didn’t need him during such a stressful time. Shay called whenever she could, until I promised her I was really, really, truly fine and she should use her breaks to find some California friends. By the end of the week, the flood of origami cranes dwindled to two or three a day.
I was relieved.
Mom went back to work designing window treatments and Dad resumed his twelve-hour shifts, leaving me with my laptop and the online East End troll mill.
Nobody knew who had started the school slam pages or how they had blown up all over Long Island to the delight of the gadflies. But they were full of horrible comments about people’s appearances, and mental health, and family crises. The slam pages were pure evil. Everyone walked on eggshells, afraid one wrong move would make them slam-page targets.
The incident made me an instant target. And every comment, even the nice ones, caused my heart to race and my stomach to sink, but I couldn’t stop myself from reading.
If that were my daughter, I’d kick her ass a second time for pulling that stunt.
The world needs more heroic people.
She’s hot. I’d hit that.
Yeah, if you like Al Qaeda looking bitches.
“Very original,” I said to Shay, who was going through the slam page with me on her lunch break.
“At least they didn’t say your ass was fat.” Somebody once called Shay a fat-ass on the slam pages, which was ridiculous because Shay’s entire body was tiny. That one comment made Shay eternally ass-obsessed.
“I just remembered the guy called me an A-rab right before the incident,” I said.
“You get that a lot,” Shay said. “Somebody should write a ‘Geography for Dumb Racists’ book.”
“We could send it to him in prison. A Sadie care package.” I was half serious.
“Is he going to prison?”
Until that moment, I had assumed he was going to prison for a long, long time. A wave of anxiety swelled inside me. “I hope so.”
Lucky for me, the Hamptons Hero story was soon overshadowed by the Hamptons Hoodlum story about a local teen Meals on Wheels volunteer who had been caught stealing from elderly people to feed her shoe-shopping habit. I preferred to be me—ass crack, larva face, and all—than the shamed Hamptons Hoodlum.
Mom woke me up early for my appointment. I couldn’t wait to get rid of the itchy bandage. I had never been so excited to shower and hopefully smell like a human being again. I shuffled out to the back porch and stood there for a long time with my face up to the sky, grateful to be breathing better. I wandered through the neatly groomed rows of flowering vegetables, then climbed up the back porch steps and sat on the cushioned wicker chair in the shaded corner next to Mom, who was having her tea.
My swollen face changed color every day. One day it was purple, like the inner petals of a crocus flower, then it faded to hyacinth blue until it settled on the brownish-gold hue of a smashed sunflower. Each time it changed, Mom took a picture.