The View From Who I Was (11 page)

“I need some air.” She lunged toward the door, glancing at Dr. Yazzie. He nodded once, like she'd won a race. I followed her, a balloon dragged by a string, and not a shiny new one. A deflating one, like from a dance long over.

Seventeen

From Oona's journal:

Water vapor in the form of clouds covers half the Earth's surface. Clouds form when microscopic droplets or ice particles suspended on the air
condense and gather.

—Mr. Bonstuber

Corpse skipped lunch. As she approached the office, Mr. Handler was waiting for her out front. “You okay?” he said.

She shrugged and pushed back her hair.

“That flute music always gets me,” Mr. Handler said. “I asked Dr. Benson to play today.”

Corpse glanced at him and snorted.

They listened to some jays and the clack of bare branches in the breeze.

“So you fell running?” he said.

Corpse held out her palms. “With Angel.”

Mr. Handler grinned.

Before I knew it, Corpse said, “I heard some teachers talking about a student scared by witches, maybe a ghost in somebody's room here. Do you believe it could be true?”

Mr. Handler regarded the sky. “I hoped this place would help you see things in a different light. I hadn't counted on it happening so fast.”

Corpse kicked a pebble. “I died once already. Remember? So maybe I'm part ghost.”

“It's not a thing I'll forget.”

“Well, do you? Believe? In witches? Ghosts?”

He sighed. “Here, I do. In our world, it's not so easy.”

“Why do you think that is?”

He scanned the common area. The panorama out the valley's funnel. “A quick, glib answer comes to mind, but I'd rather think on it and let you know.”

“Okay,” Corpse said.

“What do you believe?” Mr. Handler said.

She had my full attention. She shrugged. “I'm not sure. I'm realizing I was wondering about things like this before I got here. I just didn't understand I was wondering. You know? Like, I think water is alive somehow. Sort of the key to … ” Footsteps approached.

Mr. Handler winked at her. “Hello, Tina,” he said. Tina was another other girl who'd been at the conference. The one we'd never heard read. Corpse pressed her palms together like prayer and then followed them into the office.

Corpse scooped mashed potatoes next to the baked chicken on her plate. She spooned out green beans and put those in her plate's remaining third. She filled a glass with water, grabbed silverware and a napkin, and looked around for Mr. Handler and his faculty table. Instead, she saw Angel and William. Angel patted the space between them.

As Corpse passed Mr. Handler's table, she felt Louise and Dr. Yazzie watching too, all of them like proud parents.

Angel and William were in a conversation. They kept talking as she sat down. Next to Angel sat Pauline, who Corpse had helped with her applications the day before. Pauline came from Oklahoma, but she'd applied to Arizona State University and University of Arizona. She wanted to be an engineer.

Corpse dug into the mashed potatoes, self-conscious about her wobblier-than-usual fork. After one bite she switched to her left hand and wondered if she'd ever be normal.

“Harvard this summer again, huh, William?” Pauline said. “I thought you hated it.”

“The program was really good. There were just some lugheads there.” He shrugged. “Good chance they won't be back.”

“Brave.” Angel snorted.

William let out a war-whoop.

They all laughed.

“What are you doing this summer?” Angel said to Corpse.

She shrugged. I hadn't even considered summer. Would it be the usual shopping spree in New York followed by a month on a yacht? We actually liked that camp, the way they lived on and in that turquoise sea, ate mostly fish. She especially liked the dolphins that would dive with almost no splash around the boat. “Not sure,” she said. “I usually I go to New York and then to a camp.”

“Camp? Like with counselors? Where?” William said.

Corpse couldn't make herself say St. Lucia. She shrugged. “What happened at Harvard?”

William watched her for a minute, but went along with her change of subject. “Just some students who'd say things like ‘I didn't know Indians wore normal clothes,' or ‘I didn't know Indians cut their hair.'” He took a thoughtful bite of potatoes. “I don't think they were trying to be mean. I think they were just that dumb.”

“Right,” Angel said.

“Seriously?” Corpse said. “You believe they knew that little about Indians? That's impossible.” She remembered how many times she'd said “Oh” and bit her lip.

“Honestly?” William said. “We're the last ethnicity where it's still okay to be racist.”

Angel blew out her breath and let her hand drop. “Here we go.”

“What do you mean?” Corpse said.

“Well, for starters, our nation's capital has a football team called the Redskins,” William said.

“How about the Cleveland Indians logo?” Pauline said.

“Or Kansas City?” William said.

“Chiefs?” Corpse tried to remember if that was football or baseball.

“Can you imagine the riots if a team was named the Washington Negros?” William said. “The Cleveland Asians? Maybe the Kansas City Rabbis?”

Corpse laughed with everyone else. But it wasn't actually funny at all. How had she not noticed this before?

“That doesn't bother me,” Angel said, dismissing it with a wave. “The comments bothered me.”

“You were there too?” Corpse said.

“Well, they should,” William said.

“For a writing program.”

Corpse slouched back. “I've just been going to camp in summers.”

To Pauline, Angel said, “What did you decide to do?”

Pauline opened her mouth to speak, but Roberta arrived, thumping down her tray and slouching into her seat. She picked up her fork, rocked it in her fingers. The anger and confusion from when she'd stormed through me came right back.

“Louise just offered me five hundred bucks not to dance anymore.” Roberta poked her potatoes twice, pushed her tray forward, crossed her arms on the table, and rested her forehead on them.

Money, Corpse thought, created a lot of problems. As I studied how Roberta's hair fanned out on the table, Corpse felt her butt against that hard leather chair in Dad's office.

Eighteen

From Oona's journal:

Water covers most of the planet, and its high specific heat holds the Earth's temperature within a range that allows life. Organisms, made mostly of water, also benefit in the same way.

—Biology: Life's Course

“It's already Thursday,” Corpse said.

“All day,” Angel said.

“Time is different here,” Corpse said.

“Uh-huh.”

They strolled toward the dorms through moonless black. After living next to two rivers, one of water and one of cars, Corpse couldn't get used to the quiet, and she realized her ears had been straining to hear rushing since she'd arrived. Such darkness, no water. Her mouth felt dry, and she tried to count the number of times in her life she'd been in a place this still.

One. Now.

A coyote darted across the road. Another flashed after it. Moments later, eerie howling rose from the mountainside. Angel looked toward the howling, then ahead, seeming to think hard. I was thinking hard too. About Roberta. About money. About my future. They arrived at our door, and Corpse dug out her key.

“Well, good night,” she said.

“Want to come to my room?” Angel said.

“Sure.”

Corpse followed her to the building's far end. The coyotes sounded again, each yip and howl so unique, so mournful, it churned her guts. Angel unlocked the door of the room on the building's other end.

Inside, it was like our room, except crowded and lived-in. One bed had a bedspread with big poppy blooms. The other, a bedspread with zebra stripes. There were two desks squeezed along the wall with the dresser, one on each side, and on them were framed photos and books. Another dresser stood against the wall before the bathroom. Covering the walls were posters of movies and bands. Angel walked to an iPod in an alarm clock on her nightstand and turned it on. Hip hop music pulsed out. Above the nightstand, her feathers hung from a rawhide cord tied to a nail.

“My roommate's gone this week,” she said. “That's her bed.” She pointed to the one with the zebra spread. “She went home.”

“Is everything okay?” Corpse said.

“Yes,” Angel said. “Sometimes we just need to get back home. You know?”

Corpse sat on the zebra bed and flopped onto her back, felt a little out of control. “No, actually, I don't.” She could feel Angel studying her. She looked at the photos on Angel's roommate's desk. One showed six people in formal attire, corsages pinned to the girls' dresses, boutonni
è
res to the guys' lapels. They stood in a line, arms around one another, obviously having a great time.

“Do you have prom here?” Corpse said.

“Sure.” Angel followed her eyes to the photo. “They hold it at the Oasis House. It's really fun.”

“Where's the Oasis House?”

“Farther down the road along the valley's other side. It's lush there. Pretty.”

In the photo, Angel's head rested against William's shoulder. “Was William your date?”

“Yes,” she said. “But we're just friends.”

“I like your dress,” Corpse said. “Blue is my favorite color. My prom dress was blue.” My mind travelled to last April. To prom and Richie Leevers, our date. We'd hated Richie Leevers. Ash had insisted we go with him because he was best friends with Paul Thomas, who she was dating at the time. We'd met Gabe in the hall the week afterward, and it was strange to think of a time before him. I remembered our last dance with Gabe. How Corpse had kissed him for real because I'd left her. She moaned and sat up.

“We had a winter formal back in January,” she said to Angel's puzzled look. “I left it, took the bus to a trail by my house, hiked out, and let myself freeze to death in a pink satin dress and strappy heels dyed to match. I was wearing a freaking crown. My heart stopped. The doctors said I was dead for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes.”

Angel didn't say anything.

“I hate pink. My Mom made me get that dress. They must have sliced it open because they had to cut holes in my groin and pump warm fluid into me before my heart would start again.” Her fingers went to the tiny, precise scars. She'd forgotten those incisions. Funny, she thought, how these saved her body, while that slice in her chest saved her soul.

I had to think about that. Did she mean my leaving was good?

“I keep picturing the paramedics, the doctors, working to revive me and me wearing that crown.” She snorted. “Dad always called me princess. I made him stop.”

“So you're on your second life.”

Corpse cocked her head. “Yes, I guess I am.”
Second life.
She liked the sound of that
.

Would her second life include me?

“When do you go home?” Angel said.

“Saturday morning.”

“So you just have tomorrow left,” Angel said.

“I guess so.” She considered asking Angel about her dream but decided not to. “I never heard what you're going to do this summer.”

“I'm going to work in the movie theater at home. I need money for college.”

“Have you decided where you want to go next year?”

Angel looked at Corpse with a funny expression. “I think so.”

A knock at the door made them both jump. When Angel answered it, Dr. Yazzie stood there, hand in his pocket.

“There's a wildfire down across the highway.” He gestured with his chin, as if they could see through the building across the miles out there in the dark. “This one's spreading. We may have to evacuate. Pack a bag just in case. Stay in your rooms, so we know where to find you. It's a ways off, and it would have to jump the highway, but the wind's blowing this way.”

Angel closed the door, grinning.

“This is good?” Corpse said, but Angel didn't answer.

Into a backpack, Angel stuffed a pair of jeans, two shirts, two pairs of underwear and socks, and two framed photos from her desk. She grabbed her toothbrush and a hairbrush. She took the prom photo from her roommate's desk. She lifted the feathers reverently from their nail, slid them into a gauzy bag she pulled from her drawer, and zipped them into the front pocket. They went to Corpse's room. Corpse packed the few things she'd taken out of her suitcase while Angel paced on the patio. Corpse joined her.

“I can see the flames.” Angel pointed ahead and left. Sure enough, there were flickers of orangish-yellow.

“I've never seen a forest fire,” Corpse said. “Let's watch it.” She pulled the bedspreads off the beds and handed one to Angel. Smoke clogged the air.

Corpse wrapped herself like a burrito and settled into a plastic chair. Angel set her bedspread in the other chair and walked to the low wall bordering the patio, staring at the fire. The flames, an arm's-length wide and tall as Corpse's thumbnail, were hard to imagine as dangerous, yet it was mesmerizing, watching them waver in that space halfway to the invisible horizon.

“I wonder how it started,” Corpse said.

“A smoker, probably. Flicking his butt out the window. Butthead,” Angel said. “This happens a few times a year.”

A set of red and blue flashing lights appeared for a second and disappeared. Corpse imagined all the firefighters and emergency workers. How loud and chaotic it must be, while for her and Angel it was so still.

I thought how there must have been a circus of pulsing lights parked at the trailhead back home as rescue workers hauled us out. I imagined the pajama-and-bathrobe-clad occupants of the houses nearby, gawking out their windows. A scrap of our history we'd never see. Corpse rubbed her forehead, sighed, and surveyed a sky muted by the moon's light. She thought of Dad, imprisoned in his recliner.

Angel blew out her breath. “I'm going down there.”

“To the fire?”

“My cousins are firefighters. They might be down there.”

“Oh.”

Angel strode into the room.

Corpse shot to her feet. “You won't get caught?”

She shrugged. “I miss them.”

Corpse eyed the line of flame. “I'm going with you.”

“You didn't even want to run down the mountain.”

I forced myself quiet.

“There's a bunch of people who have a memory of the dead me,” Corpse said. “Of the flashing lights and the rescue workers. I don't have that memory, and I need to know what it was like. That fire there. Maybe it's as close as I'll ever come.”

Angel shrugged again. “It's a long hike. You won't get much sleep tonight.”

Corpse flexed her fingers, feeling all ten. “I'm starting to see things more clearly, the things that made me do what I did. But there's so much about my life I don't understand. I guess that's why I was following you up that mountain. I have to start figuring out some answers. Does that make sense?” She didn't mention that she also craved seeing Angel's people.

“I'll be right back.” Angel left Corpse's room and returned with a flashlight and two down coats.

This time I hung close. I needed to see that fire and Angel's people just as much as Corpse did.

Angel kept the flashlight off till we were away from the campus. Even then, it cast a wan light the size and shape of a soccer ball. The trail descended steadily, sometimes dropping into a draw and climbing steeply out. It was hard to gauge when the rocks or sticks or whatever Corpse saw in the flashlight's beam would arrive underfoot, so she tripped about every twentieth step.

After an hour the air turned strangely warm, conjuring Chateau Antunes's warm air as she'd wobbled, in that mask of bandages, down the hall toward Gabe. The night sky glowed, and a roaring sound filled it. Ahead of them reached a wall of white smoke. Shouts sounded, faint against the roar. The smoke made Corpse blink and take shallow breaths.

The highway appeared a hundred yards down a graded hill. On its far side, weirdly enticing flames took over the night. Sheriff cars, state patrol cars, fire trucks, and trucks with Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management emblems filled the inside lane, their strobe lights slicing the dark. The roaring came from the fire, but it reminded Corpse of a river's sound. And something else she couldn't place.

Angel and Corpse settled behind a clump of sagebrush. A thwapping consumed the air, and their hair swirled. A helicopter, its light a knife of daylight, dropped water from a huge, dangling sack onto the fire's length. It turned and passed again. In its path, Corpse saw firefighter after firefighter step back and look up.

The breeze toward us stiffened. A tall pine exploded, sending a spray of orange branches and bark. The tree swayed and fell, an arc of yellow against the night, and a scream pierced the fire's roar. Corpse scanned the scene frantically: one firefighter lay trapped beneath the trunk, another beneath its branches.

Firefighters rushed forward, hurling dirt onto the tree with their shovels, able to safely reach only the branches. They pried out that firefighter from a web of flame. Angel glanced at Corpse, but Corpse was fixated on the body trapped beneath the trunk.

In Bio, during our cellular respiration lab, Mr. Bonstuber had told us that when organic things combusted, they rose as carbon dioxide and steam, invisible but for suspended soot and ash. Before her eyes, that firefighter was evaporating.

Within minutes the fire was gnawing the highway's edge. Two paramedics and two firefighters shot onto the pavement through a gap in the flames, carrying a yellow stretcher. The injured firefighter was jostled along, but his eyes stayed closed. Angel rushed toward the stretcher, but Corpse froze and touched the top of her head, where Ash's crown had been.

I was right there with her, and in our mind's eye, that guy's brown jacket and pants transformed to a pink dress, his bearded face to ours. Something about how he lay wasn't right; we peered at death.

The back of an ambulance opened, a bright geometry, and Angel returned to Corpse's side as the stretcher slid into it. The doors slammed. The paramedics raced to the cab's doors, and the firefighters milled in the red glow from the ambulance's taillights as it pulled into a paved connecter between the east-bound and west-bound lanes. Its siren sounded, and Corpse covered her ears. At the road's edge, the vehicle's headlights swept across them.

“Hey!” one of the firefighters shouted.

“Sherman!” Angel called.

“You can't be here! It's not safe!” he shouted.

Corpse and Angel were in two headlamp beams that started toward them.

“It's me, Angel!” She walked toward the lights. Corpse followed.

One of the lights said, “Angel! You shouldn't have come. It's dangerous!” and then it became a tall guy hugging her.

“You stink!” Angel said.

Sherman chuckled. Corpse could make out a long, serious face below the beam.

“Where's Kenny?”

“I'll get him. But then you have to go. Promise?”

Angel nodded, and Sherman took off in a tired boot-jog. The other firefighter followed him, but walking. Angel wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. Corpse stepped beside her. A minute later, two headlamps bounced toward them again—one shorter, resembling an off-kilter car on a bumpy road.

“Straight A!” called the shorter beam. It picked Angel up and spun her. She squealed. Sherman watched them, grinning, and then his eyes landed on Corpse.

Kenny set Angel down, and Angel held up her hand against the light. Kenny turned off his headlamp. He was round-faced and jolly with eyebrows that matched Angel's, and their eyes had a conversation. Corpse felt she should look away, but she gobbled up the bond in their gaze.

Then Kenny saw Corpse, squinting in Sherman's headlamp.

“This is Oona,” Angel said as Sherman extinguished his light. The fire's incendiary glow cast their faces in ghoulish shadows. I thought how all light, even the sun, was released energy. Corpse attempted a smile, but the burning guy pressed around her. The guy on the stretcher seared her gaze, and the bond connecting Angel and her cousins was a thousand pounds on her chest. Angel's people. Corpse swayed and gulped the smoke-clogged air. Everything started to churn. A hacking cough bent her.