He laughed again.
“Don’t laugh,” she told him with a grimace. “I’ve seen it happen at least once every semester.”
When history was over, school was done for the day. Emma went to her locker, deposited her textbooks, and then stood leaning against the narrow orange door.
“Emma?”
She looked up. Eric, pack hanging loosely from his left shoulder, was watching her.
“Are you feeling all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She pulled herself off the locker door and grimaced. “I have a bit of a headache.”
“Should you be walking?”
Emma shrugged. She slung her backpack over her right shoulder and started to head down the hall. “I’ll be fine,” she told him, when it became clear he was following her. “Allison will walk me home.”
“Did your mother take you to a doctor?”
“I did not, and do not, have a concussion. I have a headache.”
“Migraine?”
“Eric, look, you are not my mother, for which I’m grateful because I can barely handle the one I have now.” She gritted her teeth and lifted a hand, palm out. “No, look, I’m sorry, I know that was unfair. I have a headache. I will walk home. I will sleep it off.”
Eric lifted both his hands in surrender. If her waspish comment had bothered him at all, it didn’t show, and if her head had not, in fact, been pounding at the temples, and if the light in the halls had not begun to actually hurt, she would have smiled.
“Tell you what. You can follow me at a discreet distance, and if I collapse, you can call my mother again. She might take a little longer to show up, though, because she’s at work.”
Allison was waiting for her on the wide, shallow steps from which less adventurous skateboarders leaped. The one thing Emma missed about winter was the lack of skateboards.
Allison bypassed the usual quiet and concerned questions she liked to open with and went straight to the single syllable. “Em?” She held out a hand, and Emma took it. Clearly, from the way Allison’s expression changed, she had gripped it a little too hard.
“Sorry,” Emma managed to say. “The light is killing my eyes, Ally. And the noise—it’s making me dizzy. I feel like someone is stabbing the top of my spine with—with hot stabbing things. I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Let me call your mom.”
“Are you kidding? I’ll throw up in the car, and you know who’s going to have to clean it up later.” Not that her mother wouldn’t try. “Just help me get home.” She paused and then managed to say, “Where’s Michael?”
“He’s talking to Oliver.”
Going home from school had never been as stressful for Michael as getting there. Which made sense—going to a very strange place from a safe one was always worse. “Ask him if he needs us to wait for him?”
Allison nodded and then said, very softly, “You need to let go of my hand. Sit down on the steps so you don’t fall over.” She helped Emma lower herself to the steps and then hovered there for a minute.
Emma heard steps behind her. Actually, she heard steps in all directions, but the ones behind her were louder. Allison hadn’t really moved, so they couldn’t be hers.
“Emma,” Eric said, speaking very, very quietly. “Let me take you home.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you are not. I have a car,” he added.
“You drive?”
“Depends on who you ask. I have a license, if that helps.”
“No, look, I—”
“And if you throw up in the car, I can clean it up. Go ask Mike if she needs to wait,” he added. Emma couldn’t see Eric; at this point her eyes were closed, and her hands were covering them. But she could guess who he was talking to, and she did hear Allison’s retreat.
“Don’t call him that,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t call him Mike. It’s not his name, and he doesn’t recognize it as his name.” She wanted to weep with pain. She stopped talking.
“I’m driving you home,” he said, in the same quiet voice.
She didn’t have the energy to say no again. She did, apparently, have the energy to throw up.
The car was agony. Curled up in a fetal ball, Emma almost cried. Almost. She did throw up again, but Allison was in the backseat beside her, and she was holding something in front of Emma’s face. Eric was either the world’s worst driver, or any motion caused waves of nausea.
She tried to say Michael’s name, but it really did not come out well. Mostly, it was whimpering, and Emma decided not to talk.
“Michael’s here,” Allison said quietly. “He’s in the front seat with Eric.” Allison’s hand was cool when it touched Emma’s forehead. She wanted to lean into it.
“Make it stop,” she whispered, to no one. Or to everyone. “Please, make it stop.”
And she heard Eric’s voice, cool and quiet, drop into the noise that was so loud it should have been making her ears bleed. “It will, Emma. I’m sorry.”
Eric had lied. He didn’t drive her home.
Emma survived the painful and endless stops and starts that were Eric’s driving, and she must have arrived in one piece, because she felt the agonizing crack of a car door opening, felt the change of light as she left the car, her eyes clamped shut. Eric lifted her; it must have been Eric. Allison and Michael wouldn’t have been able to carry her that far between the two of them.
But he didn’t take her up the familiar walk to her home; he didn’t take her to where Petal would be barking or whining. Instead, he carried her up a different stretch of road into a familiar building: the hospital and its emergency waiting room.
She could hear the short, harsh stabs of conversation that passed between Allison and the person at admitting. She couldn’t see the person, but the voice registered as female, crashing in, as it did, on all the other unfamiliar voices that were screaming—literally—for attention.
She wanted to pass out because, if she did, she would be beyond them. But she didn’t, because that would have been a mercy. Instead, she heard Michael’s clear voice answering questions. She couldn’t hear the questions nearly as clearly, but it didn’t matter; Michael had come for a reason, and he would make himself heard. Even if, in fact, the questioner had no desire to hear any more. You had to love that about Michael, because if you didn’t, you’d strangle him.
She shifted, attempted to sit up, and ended up curled forward in a chair, trying desperately not to throw up for a third time. At some point, she felt familiar arms around her shoulders and back, and she knew that her mother had been called and had somehow arrived.
She tried to apologize to her mother, failed, and also gave up on not throwing up. Because her mother was there. There was something about being sick that made it so easy to turn your whole life over to your mother. Even when her father had been there, it was her mother who had spent hours by the sickbed, and her mother who had cleaned her up, made sure she drank, and monitored her temperature.
It was her mother who was here now, losing work hours and work time. Emma tried to sit up again, tried to open her eyes, tried to tell her mother she was, as always, fine. Even if it was a lie. Some lies, you could make true, if you said them enough.
But she couldn’t say them, now.
She tried. She tried to make them loud enough to drown out all the other sounds, all the other words. She felt a hand in hers and couldn’t tell whose it was. She wanted to grip it tightly, but even that movement made her wrist ache, made the skin of her arm shriek in protest.
She wanted it to stop. She didn’t care if she died; it would be better than this. Better. Than. This.
It wasn’t the first time in her life that she’d wanted something to stop this badly. But that time? The pain had been different. She wanted to weep. But it was as if old pain and new pain combined by some strange alchemy to allow her to remember, to allow the images a lucidity and clarity that the pain denied everything else.
/> Nathan’s funeral. Nathan’s death.
She could remember standing and watching by the side of an open grave. She had thought to help, to dig at the earth with a shovel, to roll up her sleeves—or not—to stand in the dirt as it yielded, inch by inch, becoming at last a resting place, a final stop. But there were no shovels. When she’d arrived there, no shovels. Umbrellas, yes, because the sky was cloudy and overcast, but the umbrellas had yet to be wielded; they were bound tightly, unopened, waiting for rain. Instead, there was a hole, beside which a tall mound of dirt had been heaped over a large tarpaulin. And beside that, in a bag—a bag—a small container, a nondescript wooden one.
Her mother had said she didn’t have to go to see the ashes interred. As if. Nathan’s mother, eyes red and swollen with weeping, voice raw, had turned to her, hugged her, hanging on for a second to the only other female in the cemetery who had loved Nathan so much. That was why she’d come. That. To stand, to be hugged, to acknowledge a loss that was different from, and almost as great, as her own.
Emma did not weep. Emma did not wail or speak; she had been invited to say something at the funeral service, and she had stared, mute, at the phone while Nathan’s father waited for a reply that would never come. Emma had never been a drama queen. Why? Because she had cared what other people thought. Of her. That caring, it was like a fragile, little shield against the world; things broke through it all the time. Things hurt.
But not like this. The shield was gone; shattered or discarded, it didn’t matter.
Watching. Distant. Seeing the truth of headstones. No name of hers engraved in rock. Dates, yes. Birth. Death. Nothing at all of the in-between. Nothing about love. Nothing about quiet spaces. Nothing about who he was, who he’d been. Because it didn’t matter. None of it mattered anymore to anyone but Emma. Emma and Nathan’s mother.
She had wanted to die. She had wanted to die. Because then it would be over. All the loss, all the grief, all the pain, the emptiness—over. And she had said nothing, then. Nothing. Nor had she crawled into her room and swallowed her mother’s pills, or crawled into her bath and opened up her own wrists. As if death were somehow personal, as if death were somehow an enemy that could be faced and stared down, she would not give it the satisfaction of seeing how badly it had hurt her. Again.
She wanted to scream. She opened her mouth.
She felt the movement, felt the stabbing pain of it, felt the press of sound against her skull, as if her fontanels had never closed, and her head could be crushed by carelessness, not malice.
And then, suddenly, all the sound and all the pain seemed to condense into one point, one bright point, just outside of her body. She felt, for a moment, that she was falling, that the only thing holding her up had been sensation. A cool—a cold—breeze touched her forehead, like soft, steady fingers gently pushing hair out of her eyes.
Sprout, Sprout, you shouldn’t be here.
She felt the pain condense, all sound becoming a single point that fled the whole of her, and she was suddenly sitting up, her body light with the lack of pain.
“Dad?”
Em, he said.
She opened her eyes. The room wasn’t dark; it was fluorescent with light and half full of people in various states of health. She could see Michael sitting beside Allison, could see Allison beside her mother. She could see other people, strangers, sometimes sitting beside people and sometimes entirely alone. And, in the light of the emergency admitting room, she could also see her father.
She stood, freeing her hands.
“Dad.”
He turned to face her. Em, he said again, and then his gaze drifted away from her face and fell, slowly, to her mother’s. Her mother’s worried face, her mother’s pained expression. Emma started to say something and then stopped. Her mother was trying not to cry.
“She can’t see you, can she?”
No.
“Dad…”
Her father’s eyes were faintly luminescent; they were his eyes, but they were subtly wrong. He watched his wife. Emma turned again to look at her mother. To see that her mother’s hands were holding her daughter’s, even though Emma was now standing five feet away from the chair into which she’d curled. She tried to look at herself, at the her that her mother was still holding onto so tightly. She couldn’t. She could see a vague, blurry outline that might, or not might not, be Emma-shaped.
It was very, very unsettling.
“She can’t see me right now either, can she?”
No, Em. He looked back to his daughter, his expression grave. You shouldn’t be here, Sprout.
“No. I shouldn’t. Does this mean I’m…dead?”
His smile was quiet, weary; he had some of Mercy Hall’s worry embedded in his expression. No.
“Does this mean I’m going to be dead soon?”
No.
“Dad—what’s happening to me?”
Her father turned to look at Eric, who was standing very quietly in the center of the room.
Eric, arms folded across his chest, looked at Brendan Hall. At him, not through him. Emma glanced at her other friends. They were still sitting beside her mother, or each other; none of them had noticed the standing-Emma.
But Eric, clearly, did. He was, Emma realized with a bit of surprise, taller than her father, and he had lost the friendly, easygoing smile she associated with his face. His hair looked darker, the brown of his eyes almost the same color as his pupils.
Tell her.
“Tell me what? Eric?”
Eric met her gaze, held it a moment, and then looked away.
“Eric, I don’t mean to be a bitch, but you know, if I wind up being one, I think I’m entitled. What the hell is going on?”
He said nothing, and she walked toward him, trying not to ball her hands into fists. When she was three feet away from him, she stopped. “Eric,” she said, her voice lower. “Please. Tell me what’s happening to me because I cannot spend every day from now until I die doing this.”
He closed his eyes, but when he spoke, it wasn’t to Emma. It was to her father.
“You’re the one who shouldn’t be here,” he said quietly.
Her father said nothing.
“It’s not too late,” Eric continued, his voice lower than Emma’s had been, the words quietly intense. “She’s standing on the edge. She doesn’t have to fall over it.”
She can’t continue like this, her father said at last. Do me the favor of allowing me to know my own daughter.
“I do. I am.”
Emma thought her father would say nothing; he had that expression. She’d seen it often enough to know it, because he used to wear it when he argued with her. And when he argued with her mother. But he surprised her. I couldn’t stand back and do nothing. She can’t survive hearing all of the—
“She can,” Eric said. “She only has to do it for three days. Maybe you don’t understand what her life will be like,” he added. “Maybe you’re as shortsighted as she is and you can only see the now. But you’re doing her no kindness. You shouldn’t be here.”
Her father nodded, slowly. He took a step back, and Emma shouted, wordless, and ran past Eric.
Eric called her name, and she felt it like a blow; it slowed her, and it hurt her, but neither of these was enough. Her father was there, and somehow, somehow he understood what she was going through and had tried to spare her some of the pain.
And she wanted that.
She wasn’t willing to let him go. And he was going to leave; she saw that too. No. No. She’d done that. She’d done that once. She saw her father’s eyes widen as she ran toward him, and she saw him lift his hands, palms out, telling her, wordlessly, to stop. She slowed, but again, not enough.
“Dad—”
Emma, don’t—
She reached out and grabbed the hands he had put up to fend her off. His hands were cold. His eyes widened, rounding; the light that burned so strangely in them dimmed.
And she heard, from right beside her,
and at the exact same second, from behind her, her mother’s single shocked word.
“Brendan!”
EVERYTHING HAPPENED SLOWLY, and everything happened at once; it was as if Emma were two people, or two halves of one person. The one, sitting beside her mother, holding her mother’s hands, heard her mother’s sudden shift in breath: the sharpness of it, the strange fear and hope.
The other half, holding her father’s cold hands, turned to look at her mother and realized that her mother could suddenly see her father. Could see Brendan Hall. She could see the color ebb from her mother’s face, because fear had always done that to her.
She could see Allison stand, could see her mouth the words, “Mr. Hall?” although no sound came out. And she could see Michael. Michael’s gaze, on her father’s face, was unreadable. It always was when he was processing information that he hadn’t expected and wasn’t certain how to deal with.
He lived in a rational universe. He had to. All the irrational, unpredictable things made no sense to him, and, worse, they were threatening because they made no sense. Things that could be explained, in however much exhaustive detail he demanded—and he could demand quite a lot—were not things he had to fear.
But things like…Emma’s dead father…How could she explain something like that to Michael? When she didn’t understand it herself?
She said, felt herself say, “Michael, he’s still my father. He’s the same person he was. He’s not dangerous.”
But Michael didn’t appear to hear her. He probably had; it had taken him years to learn to look at people when they talked. She remembered—and what a stupid thing to remember now, of all times—telling him that he had to look at people when they spoke so they knew he was listening. And she remembered the way he had looked at her, his expression serious, and what he’d said.
“Emma, I don’t hear with my eyes.”
“Well, no. No one does.”
“Then why do I have to look at people so they’ll know I’m listening?”
She wasn’t always very patient, and it had taken her three days to come up with a better phrasing. “So that they’ll know you’re paying attention.” She’d been so proud of herself for that one, because it had worked.