My Sister's Keeper (35 page)

“
What is it, Mama? Has something happened to Dad?”

Like a wounded animal, she thrashed about sliding down the side of the car to the ground.

“
For Heaven’s sake, can’t someone tell me what’s going on?”

The woman living next door stepped forward. “Your sister’s been in an accident.”

“
An accident?”

Mom rolled to the ground, threw her head back, and let out a shriek that all of nature would recognize and I knew it was bad. “What? What happened?”

The woman pointed up the road. “We were standing here talking about your dad when somebody ran up and told her that Martha had been hit by a bus.”

I saw a faint flashing in the distance. A vice clamped down on my chest. I couldn’t breathe. My blood pressure soared. I could feel my heart pounding in my fingers. Muscles I never knew I had twisted into a knot. As I spun to turn, my right leg gave way. I caught myself on the car door, bumbled into it, dropped the shift into “reverse,” and stomped the accelerator. The car wheeled backward squealing as it spun around and raced off to find the scene of the accident.

It wasn’t hard to find.

When I got there, they had Martha on a gurney and were lifting her into an ambulance. I ran to her but was held back by Sam Jones as they closed the doors.

“
They’re taking her to the hospital,” he said.

“
What happened?” I gasped.

“
I got here right after it happened. They say she just came out of nowhere. She just shot out into the street without even trying to stop. Like she meant to do it.”

I felt the blood leave my head and my limbs began to tingle. “That’s ridiculous! She wouldn’t do that.”

“
Maybe not.”

I bent forward and grasped my knees, my pulse suddenly weak. “Maybe,
hell!
She would never do that, Sam!”

The ambulance let go a yelp from its siren and pulled away exposing one of the metal arms broken off the wheelchair lying in the street. I turned away and grabbed hold of a sign post. My chest rattled and my legs shook. “Jesus! How could this have happened?”

“
You don’t look so good,” Sam said. “Maybe you should sit down.” He took my arm and walked me toward my car. “There’s something else, too, Richard.”

I panted. “What?”

“
She called me about ten minutes before the accident and told me she’d seen a light in a window at that damned warehouse. She told me she’d wait for me. I was coming to meet her.”

“
So how’d she end up here? Three blocks away?”

“
I was on the way when I came upon the accident and when I realized who she was, sent another car around to have a look at the warehouse. There was nothing there.”

“
Well, there must have been
something
there or
she’d
still be there waiting for you right now.” I felt lightheaded. I leaned against the side of my car, bent low, and vomited in the gutter. “Damn it, Sam.” I cleared my throat and spit. “Some goddamned body did this to her.”

“
We’ll see.” He patted my shoulder, then headed back toward the scene of the accident.

“
You’ll
see!” I got in the car, laid my head against the steering wheel, and let the tears come.

MOTHER AND I ARRIVED at the emergency room about the same time and were told they were doing x-rays and prepping Martha for surgery. They sent us to the surgical waiting room and told us they’d let us know something as soon as she was out.

Just before 2 a.m., a doctor in a blue gown and paisley head-cover came and told us that she’d suffered multiple fractures and broken bones, internal injuries, and a concussion. He said she was a very lucky girl, but that it was too early to tell if there would be any permanent damage. He said they would be moving her into an intensive care unit shortly and that we could see her for a few minutes then, but that she would not regain consciousness for days.

When I first saw her, I gasped. Practically her entire body was wrapped in bandages. There were two holes for her eyes and a hole for her mouth and a tube running into her nose. Her left leg had a cast to the hip and the right had one to mid-calf. It was three years ago all over again. I leaned close and whispered that I loved her.

An hour later I took Mom home and sat in the dark in Martha’s bedroom trying to figure out what could have happened. Nothing made any sense. I picked up her writing tablet and there was Sydney’s number she’d written down when I was at the beach house.

Sydney! I’d forgotten about Sydney.

I picked up the phone and dialed the number. It rang several times before a sleepy voice answered, “Hello?”

“
It’s me.”

“
Richard? What time is it?”

“
I know it’s late, but I had to talk to you.”

“
What’s wrong?”

I dragged a hand over my face. “Martha was in an accident.”

“
Oh, Richard, I’m sorry. Is she…all right?”

My voice dropped to a whisper. “She’s in the hospital.”

“
Is it bad?”

“
Yeah, it’s pretty bad. She might have brain damage. They said they may not know for sure for weeks, or even months.”

“
Oh, Richard. I’m sorry. What happened?”

“
She was…” My eyes burned again. “…hit by a bus.”

“
Oh, no! How?”

“
Nobody knows what happened, Sydney.” I tried to hide the quiver in my voice. “She had gone back to that warehouse after I asked her not to go there anymore without me.”

“
Where are you now?”

I sucked in a deep breath and wiped my eyes. “I’m at Mom and Dad’s.”

“
Come get me.”

“
What? Now?”

“
I’d drive myself, but I wrecked my van. I just need fifteen minutes.”

I took down the directions and fifteen minutes later pulled into Sydney’s drive. As I stepped out of the car, she pulled the front door shut behind her and ran to me throwing her arms around me, drawing me into her as tightly as I drew her into me. For a while we just stood there in the dark and held each other. Finally, the fragrance of her hair and the touch of her cheek came through and all the years of pent-up angers, fears, and frustrations came spewing out of me. I withered into a mass of sobbing spasms. I tried to pull away, but her arms tightened around me and a tender hand cupped the back of my head.

“
I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

I pulled her to me and buried my face into her neck, and there—in the wee hours of the night—we wept together and our hearts fused. Together, we said good-bye to our pasts.

It was humiliating and disgraceful, but when it was over I felt cleansed.

I drove Sydney back to Mom’s house where the two of us stretched out side by side on Martha’s bed and laid in the darkness talking. We talked about Martha’s accident, Sydney’s accident, and the stitches in her head. And how she happened to be with Scott when I’d seen them at the hospital. Then we lay in silence wrapped in each other’s arms until she turned her face upward and kissed me. It was a tender kiss, but one that swept through me like a great wave knocking me down and pulling me under. Out of control, breathless, tumbling in a sea of passion, we made love.

Afterward, we lay in the darkness holding on to each other as if afraid that if we let go, the other one would vanish and we’d end up back in our old lives. I never felt more attached to anyone in my life. Even our hearts read one another’s rhythm and merged together. Lying next to Sydney staring at a faint green glow on the ceiling, my mind felt more alert than it had in years. I could see clearly how hard things must have been for my father and mother and understood for the first time the difficulties they must have faced in those early days. I doubted that I could have done it.

I lay in Sydney’s arms staring at that green glow on the ceiling until I began to wonder about the glow itself and realized it was coming from a tiny light on Martha’s laptop computer. I pressed the switch on the arm of her bed and raised the head high enough for me to read without awakening Sydney. Lifting the lid on the laptop, I found that it was on and that Martha had been working last on her novel. There were now one hundred seventy three pages. I pulled the computer stand closer to me, shifted back to the beginning of the story, and began reading.

It was titled
Down in Flames
by Martha Baimbridge. It opened with a shy teenage girl named Chelsea who, when invited by a popular boy in school to go on a trail ride with him and his friends, had been thrown from the horse and left paralyzed from the waist down. I read on.

From there, it was a heart-wrenching resemblance of many of the problems Martha had faced and the girl’s struggle to accept her fate and put her life back together. It was at times difficult to read as I saw it more as Martha’s story than Chelsea’s, but I read on, feeling that at that moment my sister was speaking to me and that I was as close to her as I could get.

With Sydney sleeping quietly beside me, I accompanied Chelsea as she buckled down hard, did exactly what her therapists said, and struggled through the pain and frustration of striving to become whole again. But after much pain and little progress, she became angry and bitter. She was difficult to deal with and cruel to her doctors and therapists—even Andrew, who had fallen insanely in love with her. Turning inward, Chelsea became obsessed with the challenge of finding a better medicine, a better doctor, a better therapist, and fired them all.

Her friends stopped coming and her family gave up on her, yet she was determined to find a way. But one failure led to the next and frustration led to devastation, and finally to the crushing reality that she would never walk again. As Chelsea sat in her wheelchair perched high on a ridge overlooking the sea below and pondered suicide, my heart ached for her and I cried for her, and as dawn broke and Chelsea searched for some thread of hope to hold on to, the pages stopped abruptly and Martha left me hanging.

Oh, God! Maybe her suffering had been worse than I’d thought. Maybe she did throw herself out into that traffic. Maybe she’d lost all hope like Chelsea and needed relief—one way or another. Oh, Martha! Why didn’t you tell me?

48

A
MISTY RAIN WAS FALLING as Ashleigh crossed from the parking garage to the lobby of Duke Medical Center in Durham. A clock high on a wall read 7:39 a.m. Collapsing her umbrella, she stepped to the main information desk where an elderly woman stared at a computer monitor.

“
Could you tell me which room David Matthews is in, please?” Ashleigh asked.

Leaning forward, the woman clicked a few keys on her keyboard and squinted at the monitor. “Let’s see... Hmm. Is he a patient here?”

“
He was in surgery all day yesterday.”

“
Matthews...Matthews…Okay, here he is. Are you family?”

“
Sister.”

“
Well, he spent the night in Intensive Care, but he’s being moved to another room right now and I don’t have that number yet. Give me your name and I’ll page you when I have it.”

“
How long is that going to take?”

“
I don’t know, honey. Usually not more than half an hour. I’ll keep checking and will call for you when I get it.”

Ashleigh gave the woman her name and stepped into the almost-empty waiting room. Picking up a recent issue of
People Magazine,
she settled into a padded chair. A TV on the wall above her softly chattered with
Good Morning America.
During the next fifteen minutes, visitors began lining up for passes and the waiting room filled with spouses, parents, and noisy children. As two women across from Ashleigh exchanged graphic details of their recent hysterectomies, a well-mannered, well-groomed eight-year-old boy sitting next to the women, placed his feet together on the floor, folded his hands in his lap, and stared at Ashleigh. Ashleigh checked the time and turned her attention back to the magazine.

“
Look, Mama,” the well-manner boy whispered loudly. “It’s the woman on TV.” Ashleigh felt a change in the mood around her. Looking up, she realized that the entire section was staring at her. On another TV screen across the room she saw her own driver’s license photograph.

“
Miss Matthews,” the receptionist called.

Ashleigh dropped the magazine in the seat next to hers, rose, and marched quickly out the front door slapping her sunglasses on as she left the building. Outside, she raised the umbrella and ran through the light rain toward the parking garage.

AS THE SOFT GRAY LIGHT of a rainy morning filtered into Martha’s bedroom, Sydney opened her eyes and gazed into mine. I brushed a lock of hair off her forehead. “Good morning.”

She smiled and tucked her face a bit lower into the covers. “Good morning.”

“
You look beautiful.”

“
Did we just spend our first night together?”

“
Looks that way.”

Sydney rose on an elbow. “I don’t think I should be here when your mother comes down. Could you run me home?”