Authors: Rachel Vail
“Yes,” I answered. “I’m her … her, well, I’m her, uh, stepsister.”
“Is there an adult in the house?”
“No, we’re babysitting.”
“Who’s there with you?”
I looked over at Kevin, his face tight and pale with worry, crouched beside us, rocking, bunched up tight.
“It’s my, just, he’s, we’re babysitting—can you just please send an ambulance?”
“It’s on the way. Send your boyfriend down to open the front door, honey.”
“He’s not my …” I just hung up. “The ambulance is coming. Kevin? You need to go down and open the front door. Okay? Kevin? Kevin!”
“Charlie, if anything—”
“Now. Go. The front door, Kevin; not the back door. You have to unbolt it. Go. I’ll call the parents. She’ll be okay. I swear. Trust me.”
Kevin nodded and sprang up. I heard him cursing the whole way down the stairs and then flinging the door open. From the distance, sirens approached.
I pushed Samantha’s hair back from her forehead and whispered at her, “I just promised Kevin that you would be all right. And I’m done lying. So you better not die.”
Without opening, her eyes twitched three times, and then she whispered, “Okay.”
“Samantha?”
She didn’t respond at all. While I called Mom’s phone and silently begged,
Pick up pick up
, I wondered if maybe I had imagined that
Okay.
“Hello?”
“Mom.”
The sirens were right outside already.
“Hey, Charlie,” Mom said, the wonderful lightness lilting in her voice. “Everything good there?”
I took a quick breath. “No. Something’s wrong with Samantha. You need to come home. Actually, you need to meet us at the hospital.”
“What? Joe, something happened to Sam. What happened? What’s going on?”
“She collapsed. I called nine-one-one. The ambulance is here. They’re on their way up the stairs. They’re here. Meet us at the hospital, okay?”
She was talking, and Joe was yelling questions in the background, but I said firmly to her, “I have to go now, Mom. See you at the hospital. Come quick.”
I put the phone down because the paramedics were pushing me away. The man was checking Samantha, poking and grabbing at her, slapping her cheeks, asking me questions like if I gave her any drugs.
Drugs? No. I argued with her brother, that is all.
The woman, who was the bigger of the two, started firing questions at me.
“Does she have any medical conditions?”
“Just the lack of consciousness,” I answered.
“Before this, wise guy.”
“I wasn’t trying to be—no. Not that I know of. She’s nine.”
“Did she fall?”
“Yes.”
“Did she hit her head when she fell?”
“No,” I said, picturing how she just kind of went boneless, liquefied, not solid flesh—what was that from? Oh yeah,
Hamlet: melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew
. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”
Both EMTs froze and stared at me. “Did you see her fall?”
“Yes.”
“Get the collar,” the woman barked at the man. He dashed down the stairs. They were obviously about to arrest me.
“I’m pretty sure she didn’t hit her head,” I said.
Collar
is cop-speak for arresting somebody. I definitely saw that on TV.
I swear I wasn’t trying to be fresh! It’s just a habit, when I’m nervous!
“Better to be sure,” the woman said, I guess to explain why they were about to slap handcuffs on me.
The guy clattered up the steps and snapped a collar not on me but around limp Samantha’s neck. Kevin winced as they lifted her onto a stretcher and began to navigate her through the hallway, which was clearly designed by somebody who never planned for a sweet little girl getting carried around its corners on a stretcher.
Kevin followed them down. I grabbed my sneakers, which had been placed emphatically beside my doorway by Joe after I’d left them in the kitchen again. What else? I pocketed my wallet and cell phone.
Think, Charlie. What else? Anything?
I wanted to be responsible. Nothing jumped out at me. As I passed Samantha’s room, I considered, for a split second, dashing in to get her shoes or a stuffed animal or a book, maybe look for her bubble gum, but I didn’t want to risk getting left behind, so I skipped it.
At the bottom of the stairway, I slid to a stop beside Kevin.
“Who’s family?” the EMT guy asked brusquely, his ballpoint pen clicking against the sheet of paper on his metal clipboard.
“I am,” Kevin and I both said. The guy paramedic looked down past our faces. So did we—and saw that we were holding hands, fingers interlocked. How did that happen? My sneakers hung from my other hand. Kevin squeezed me one pulse, and I pulsed him back. We didn’t let go, just looked at the EMT guy.
“Okay, then,” the EMT said, rushing out the front door. “If you say so. None of my business. Let’s hustle. You’ll need some shoes, son.”
I carried my sneakers. Kevin jammed his sock-covered feet into my mother’s Ugg slippers and slammed the door shut behind us.
We squeezed into the back of the ambulance, where the woman EMT was doing stuff to Samantha as we lurched away from the curb, sirens blaring. There was an oxygen mask over Samantha’s ashen, elfin face.
My phone buzzed. Thinking it was Mom, I checked. It was a text from Tess:
I need to talk to you. In person. Can you come over?
Sorry
, I quickly texted back.
In an ambulance. Something v. wrong with Sam.
I shut my phone and shoved it back into my pocket. Kevin gripped my empty hand tight as the EMT talked softly to Samantha, explaining that she was checking Sam’s blood pressure. Sam did not respond.
Silent tears ran down Kevin’s cheeks.
A pretty crier
, I thought;
figures. Not like you and me, Sam.
Still, I held his hand, and held it together, the whole way to the hospital.
A GIRL WHO
looked like an exhausted prom-queen/math-nerd hybrid told us in an absurdly British accent that she was the fellow who’d be taking care of Sam.
I considered pointing out that she was clearly not a fellow, so why would she say she was? But she was in her pajamas, poor thing, and also trying to help Samantha, so I didn’t say anything. Anyway, I was all smart-mouthed out.
The fellow was gone, then back. Kevin and I were standing like abandoned mannequins in the same place she’d left us. She explained that they were admitting Samantha. This made no grammatical or logical sense to me. I nodded. CT, MRI, MRA, EEG. I nodded more.
Get all the information
, I kept telling myself. Kevin sat down in a chair with his head clutched between his hands, so the fellow and other pajama people were talking to me, until the parents dashed in, frantic—and even after that, I stayed standing, listening, getting all the information. Joe went with Sam; Kevin stayed in the chair; Mom and I took turns pacing and sitting on hard, plastic seats until our butts itched.
Only at three in the morning, when it finally was absolutely confirmed that Samantha was officially not dead, not dying, could I take my first full breath.
I must have dozed off at some point, because the next thing I knew, it was ten a.m. and the fellow who was a woman had come in to escort us to someplace where Joe was already waiting. When we got there, Joe gripped Mom hard and held on as the fellow explained that the attending would be in to see us in a minute.
Please sit down
. So we did. Mom, Joe, Kevin, and I all buzzed in our chairs, yellow jackets whose hive has been kicked.
A doctor in a white coat came into the room and told us her name and her qualifications—attending, neurologist, professor. We didn’t care. She could have been the janitor, as long as she gave us some good news.
“She’s fine,” the doctor said.
“Fine?” Joe asked.
“She’s recovering. It seems she had a complicated migraine.”
“A migraine?” Kevin asked.
“You know what
migraine
means?” the doctor asked. She sounded exactly like our third-grade teacher asking,
You know what
migrate
means?
“A really bad headache?” Kevin said in exactly his third-grade voice. I looked at him and he looked at me, and we both started laughing, completely inappropriately.
“Kevin,” Joe said. “Please?”
Kevin and I were both convulsed with laughter. “Sorry,” Kevin said between gasping laughs. “Inside … long story.”
Just as abruptly as it had started, the spasm of laughter ended. I hugged my arms around my body; it was so cold in the room my teeth started chattering.
“Her mother gets migraines,” Joe said.
“Ah,” the doctor said, making a note. “Family history of—”
“She has to lie down in a dark room for two days,” Joe interrupted. “Samantha’s mother, I mean. I don’t think she ever passed out from it.”
“Samantha suffered a special kind of migraine, we think,” the doctor explained. “Very rare. Basilar-type migraine. Though there’s some disagreement over whether that’s a misnomer.”
“What’s the prognosis?” Joe asked. “For Samantha? For basil …”
“Basilar-type migraine,” the doctor said, clicking her ballpoint pen. “Fine. Excellent.”
There was a tremor in Joe’s voice as he asked, “So she’s okay? She’s, it’s a
headache
?”
The soft-voiced, sleek-haired doctor nodded, her calm face a universe of patience. Mom paused in taking notes and mumbled, “A migraine.” She underlined the word on her black Moleskine pad that had been, as always, in her pocketbook.
“Yes,” the neurologist said, and smiled. “Well, basically. Although the symptoms of a basilar-type migraine are very scary to witness, they’re not dangerous. No long-term damage or effects. She may have a pretty bad headache for a day or two, and we want to run more tests to be sure that—”
“She’s going to be fine, though,” Joe interrupted. “The baby is, she’s okay.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “We want to keep her …”
But none of us were listening because Joe was suddenly crying his eyes out, in my mother’s arms. And tears were running down Kevin’s cheeks, too. I put my hand on his back and rubbed, but then that felt so thoroughly inadequate I gathered him up in a hug.
The doctor waited until we all got ahold of ourselves and then said a bunch more stuff that Mom wrote down in her pad.
I wasn’t really paying attention. I was looking at Kevin’s feet, which were in my mother’s slippers, and his white socks, and loving the fact that he didn’t even care because Samantha wasn’t dead.
She was napping when we got to her hospital room. Mom said she’d sit with her while Joe and Kevin and I went down to get some food, that a walk-about would do us some good. She asked Joe to bring her a coffee.
In the food line, he picked out a dark chocolate bar with almonds. Mom’s favorite. He put it in the bag with her coffee, with a wad of napkins between them as insulation, before we found an open table.
We unwrapped our greasy food and started eating. I was so hungry I didn’t even taste anything for a while, but then, with my mouth full, had to admit, “This is the worst grilled cheese I ever ate.”
“I make excellent grilled cheeses,” Joe said, his mouth full of his turkey club.
“I know,” I said. “It’s the thing that you’re out-of-proportion proud of.”
“How did you—” he started to ask.
I cut him off: “Samantha told me. And, you know—family joke,” I said. “So, I know. Of course.”
And then suddenly I was crying, unprettily, into my disgusting, rubbery grilled cheese, and didn’t even care. Because Samantha was going to be fine, and, well, I guess the word
family
got stuck in my throat along with the gloppy grilled cheese. Joe started crying again, too, and then we all three started laughing at ourselves and choking on our gross food.
Joe wiped off his face with a napkin. “And what’s your thing, Charlie? That you are out-of-proportion proud of? I should know that.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “I’m kind of good at tiptoeing.”
Kevin hiccupped really loud at that. “No, you’re not.”
“I think,” Joe said, and paused as Kevin hiccupped again, louder. “Maybe your thing is that you stay calm in a crisis.”
“Nope. That’s pro-hiccup-portional,” Kevin objected, which made me and Joe laugh so hard we were crying again.
“What, then? What’s my
thing
?”
Then Kevin hiccupped unbelievably louder, and the three of us doubled over laughing, banging our hands on the table, stomping our feet, just so flat-out frigging happy to be alive.
Mom texted Joe that Samantha was waking up. We scrambled to throw out our trash so we could get back upstairs. Sam was going to have to stay over for observation for another night, Joe told us, reading off his phone as we rushed down the hallway toward the elevator, and asked if we were okay taking a cab home together, later, because he and my mom would stay over with Sam. We nodded quietly, remembering for the first time in a long time that there was stuff to sort out there, but pushing that aside for later. It was only noon.