“When can I see them?” As soon as I ask, a pounding starts up behind my eye sockets.
“Who? Mom and Dad?” The signature smart-aleck laugh creeps into Matt’s voice. “I’m sure they’ll be back in, like, five seconds. Chill. You’re still their favorite child.” You would think that Matt’s condition would have made him ultrasensitive in times of crisis, but it’s the exact opposite. It’s like he called dibs on all the world’s bad luck and no one else is entitled to feel sorry for a damn thing.
“No.” I jut my jaw out and speak through gritted teeth. “Will and Penny. Are they here too?” I push the heel of my left hand between my eyebrows and close my eyes, mimicking one of Penny’s deep, cleansing breaths. Maybe I got the worst of it and they didn’t have to come to the hospital at all. I’d heard of that happening. People walking away from car wrecks without much more than a scrape and a couple of bruises.
I feel a wave of nausea. My pulse rams into my temples and nasal cavity. I try to shake it away. Is there a call button? A nurse? Someone to bring pain medication?
Matt watches, observing me. I catch a hint of an expression that is unknowable to me and has been for years now. I have no way of perceiving what would make him happy or sad anymore since everything just makes him angry. Faster than I can memorize it, that brief, very human expression disappears.
“Seriously?” He scoffs and looks off to the side, like, Can you believe this girl? “You do realize you hit a car dead-on, right? I mean you were there. Doctor What’s-His-Face said you were probably conscious through most of it. I figured you already knew.”
“Knew what?” My tone comes out snappy and peeved. I regret it instantly. It’s an unwritten rule in my family: when it comes to Matt, we don’t retaliate, we tolerate.
A quick frown that I might have missed if I hadn’t known him for almost eighteen years crosses his face. Then the creases at the corners of his eyes flatten as I hear his familiar, sarcastic laugh. His brown eyes turn hard beneath the shadow of his cap. “They’re dead,” he says, and it’s as if a fist has punched through a brown paper bag, and with it my chest crumples.
“You’re lying,” I tell him. “You are so lying.”
He doesn’t argue. Instead he sips and puffs at the sippy straw, moving the wheels of his chair backward and forward in tiny measured increments.
The handle on the door turns. Mom comes in first, a muffin in one hand and a to-go cup of coffee in the other.
Her hands are full, but she uses the one with the muffin to cover her mouth anyway. Crumbs scatter to the floor. “You’re awake. Oh, honey.” Every familiar wrinkle on her face cuts deeper, becomes more pronounced. My mom wears her hair pulled into a ponytail with a large barrette made of shiny white shells. “We’re so sorry we weren’t here.”
All the while there’s a pressure building in my chest like a teakettle and I know she must misread my expression, because she looks so happy—weepy, maybe—but genuinely joyous and I sense that this is wrong. All wrong.
Before my dad can shut the door, I reach my boiling point. “Dead?” I shriek. “They’re dead?”
Their faces freeze in matching masks of horror. Mom’s hand begins to shake and coffee burbles out from under the lid of the cup. There’s a flash of disgust when she peers down her nose at my brother, but it’s gone too, before I can take a mental snapshot. “Why, Matthew,” she says, flatly.
My dad isn’t a tall man. In fact, he’s the same height as my mother, slight and sinewy from miles of flat-road biking on the weekends, but he draws himself up to his full stature. “Lake,” he says, his voice deeper than normal. But he doesn’t need to finish. It only takes that one syllable to know it’s true. They’re gone.
I fold my body in half. The needles buried in my skin tug at the veins in my arms when I sink my head into my hands.
“Lake, listen,” Dad says. There’s a weight on the mattress beside me, and the smell of sandalwood aftershave. “They did everything they could.”
And all of a sudden it’s there. A fully formed snapshot. Penny thrown from the car. Her leg splayed at an unnatural angle. Will pinned by the waist underneath the side of the Jeep, a sickly red creeping out from his back that I tried hard to mistake for the flashing red lights of the ambulance.
Mom rubs my back. “The paramedics brought Will back to the hospital, sweetie, but there was too much damage. There was nothing they could do.” Her tone is soft and soothing, like she’s singing me a lullaby, and I wonder if that’s the thing that will haunt me forever. That delicate singsong voice that crooned to me my worst nightmares.
My chin snaps up. “Will’s here?” This means that Penny had died on the scene, but Will still might be near.
My parents look through me to each other as if I’m a little kid. “Yes, but—” my dad begins.
“Where? Where is he?” Now I do sound like a child, a petulant, naughty child, and I slam my fists into the mattress so that both my parents bobble for balance. Pain shoots through my right elbow.
Dad clears his throat, trying to assume his position as head of the household. “He passed away, Lake. He’s gone.”
“I want to see him,” I say. “Get me out of these.” I pick at the tape holding the IVs in place. My dad flattens his hand over mine to stop me and I feel the familiar bits of sticky residue left over from the grip tape of his handlebars. I glare down, tears blurring my vision. Droplets fall from my nose, leaving splashes of salt water on my paper gown.
Mom’s hand is on my shoulder. I flinch. The need to see Will is overwhelming. The fact that he’s dead is somehow beside the point, but to explain this to my parents would require more words than I have in me.
What I need is to hold his hand, to press my cheek to his, to lean down and smell salt water and coconut. The moments of Will in his perfect Will-ness are slipping and I don’t know where he’ll go. He’s the only rope left to latch onto.
“Just let me go.” I hurl my body to either side. Both my parents grunt on impact before Dad grabs hold of me in a tight hug.
“Will’s family needs to…they need to be alone right now.” There’s a hitch in my dad’s voice that makes my entire body go limp. But I’m part of his family, I want to say. Me.
But my muscles are sandbag heavy and I slump into his arms instead. The fight drains out of me as I snot and sob into his shirt. The machine attached to me continues to beep incessantly, which is the only way I can convince myself this isn’t a horrible dream.
A hiccup racks my chest. I wipe the slug trail coming from my nose with the back of my hand. “I’m going to bring them back,” I say. “They’re going to come back and it’ll be okay,” I continue while rocking in place. “I’m almost eighteen.” I glance toward the window, through the angled blinds. Slivers of thin light X-ray the morning clouds, and I count the days until my birthday.