Sacred (30 page)

When I woke again, it was no longer raining. That was my first thought, before I opened my eyes. And then I heard a sound, a steady ping, ping, ping. It sounded medical.

My eyelids felt as if tiny weights were attached to the lashes, making opening them a struggle, so I left my eyes closed. I knew I was in a hospital bed. My head ached, though it was more of a dull throb now than the gripping pain I’d felt on the trail. Working my way mentally down my body, I felt tenderness in my left shoulder, and both elbows stung as if coated with antiseptic. My left hip felt deeply bruised, achy all the way through, but the rest of me seemed all right.

There was someone next to me. I heard quiet sobbing. It was a woman.

I had heard this woman cry before. I had heard her muffled cries through my bedroom wall; I had heard her keening sobs at her son’s funeral. I had heard her silent, pervasive sadness that was even worse to me than the sounds of her despair.

I opened my eyes. There she was, in a chair pulled next to my bed. Her head was in her hands, her hair wild and lank about her shoulders. My mother.

Opening my mouth to speak, I found it dry and bitter. How long had I been here, in this bed? How long had my mother been crying over my body?

My eyes scanned the room. Bouquets of flowers covered every surface; three large, brightly colored balloon arrangements shifted in the air, their ribbons leashing them to chairs.

Mom’s overnight bag squatted in the corner. It was open, a sweater spilling out of it.

A window. Outside, the sky was dark. Was this the night of the same day or was it another?

I shifted in the bed. Mom’s eyes, red-rimmed and puffy, shot up and found me awake. Her mouth opened into a little O; had this been any other situation, I might have laughed at her expression.

Instead, I felt tears filling my eyes. “Hi, Mom,” I tried to say, but my voice didn’t work quite right, and it ended up sounding like a cough or a quack.

“Scarlett,” she said, and she leaned across my chest, dropping her head onto me. “Thank God.”

Her words made me remember Martin’s book.
God … if God is all of us, everywhere, all the time
, I wondered,
then was my mother thanking herself? Thanking me?

I brought a shaking hand up to my mother’s head and rested it on her hair. I had comforted my father in front of our Christmas tree while he cried for Ronny; now I felt my mother’s sobs on my chest as I ran my fingers through her hair.

Who was the child? Who was the parent?

I didn’t know the answers. Maybe after a family has suffered a loss such as ours, everything needs to be renegotiated.

“I thought I’d lost you, too,” Mom murmured into the sheets before drawing a long, quivering breath and sitting up. She smiled into my eyes, and then it was her hand smoothing my hair from my temple, carefully avoiding the left side of my hairline.

I raised my hand and felt my head gingerly, remembering
the blood in the rain. There was a gauze bandage taped to my forehead.

“Scarlett,” my mother said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

I didn’t need to ask what she was sorry about. How many months had it been now that she’d been lost in her own grief, lost in the bottles of pills she lined up on her bedside table?

How many meals had she missed, how many of my silent cries had she ignored? Did she even know that I had stopped seeing Andy? Was she aware that I’d been cast in a lead for the spring play?

Did she have any idea that I was in love—unrequited or not—with Will Cohen, and did she know that his eyes were the color of life?

Did she know anything about me anymore, anything at all?

And I knew I had a choice. I could be angry. I could refuse my mother what she needed, as she had refused me.

Or I could forgive her. The choice was mine. I felt a great sensation of peace. To know that I had power—real power—and that I could decide how I wanted to feel, how I wanted to react, brought me a palpable wave of peace. I could be angry. I could blame my mother for my choices, my silent suffering over these many months.

I remembered Martin’s book on the Sefirot, and the Sefirah of
Yesod
, particularly. The book said that if the Sefirot is a map of the human body as well as the soul, and even of God,
Yesod
finds its parallel in the male reproductive organ—the penis. This had made me laugh when I’d
read it, but as I read on, I came to understand the metaphor. The penis is a bridge that can transmit genetic material from one person to another. Likewise,
Yesod
can be seen as a bridge—one that connects our inner world and outer reality.

And though it seemed ridiculous that I was thinking these thoughts while my tearful mother sat beside me in a hospital room, so ridiculous that I wondered what kind of damage I might have done to myself when I fell, it also felt very real, and undeniably right. I had power. I could be a bridge if I chose to, and I could close the gap that loomed between my mother and myself.

I brought my hand up from the blanket and found my mother’s, and my grip was strong as I squeezed her hand. “I know, Mom,” I said, and this time when my voice cracked, it wasn’t because my throat was dry, but because it was thick with emotion. “But you’re here now.”

“I am,” she cried. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

Though it was dark outside, just a sliver of the moon cutting through the velvet of night, there was light in my room. I was tired, so tired, but I knew that when I woke again, my mother would be at my side.

And she was. I awoke to sunlight pouring through the narrow hospital window and both of my parents talking quietly over cups of coffee.

My mother had brushed her hair back into a neat ponytail—a little higher on her head than she usually positioned it. It looked hopeful this way, and pretty. Her hair, though darker than mine, was thick and straight, and she
wore it longer than any of the other moms. Her skin was pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes, but she was smiling.

My dad looked absolutely radiant. He leaned in toward my mom and kept finding excuses to touch her—straightening the collar of her sweater, brushing a wisp of hair from her face, smoothing the line of her pants.

“That coffee smells great,” I said, and both of them swiveled around to smile at me. “Can I have a cup?”

“You’re too young to drink coffee,” Mom said at once.

“I’ve been drinking it every morning for months now.”

She looked over to my dad, who verified my statement with a shrug of his shoulders. For a second, she looked embarrassed, as if she should have known this about me. And then she seemed as if she might want to argue about all the reasons I shouldn’t have caffeine. But instead she said, “I’ll find you some. How do you like it?”

“Cream and sugar,” I said. “Same as you.”

“Well, that’s something, anyway,” she mumbled. “Back in a sec.”

“Good to see you awake, Scar,” said my dad. “You gave us a scare, all right.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that, Daddy.”

He nodded, sipped his coffee. “It’s a good thing that Will found you when he did,” he said. “You’d already lost a lot of blood.”

I pushed the little button on my bed, which brought me slowly up to a sitting position. “Tell me everything,” I said. “But I should probably go pee first.”

He shook his head. “You’ve got a catheter for that.”

“No way.” I dug through the blankets and sheets to verify his statement. Yep. Disgusting.

“That’s what happens when you ride without a helmet,” he said. “We’re all lucky it wasn’t worse.”

“Okay, Daddy, let’s let the injury speak for itself, all right? No lecture.”

I could tell he wanted to say more on the matter, but I cut him off. “I’ll never go on the trail again without a helmet, okay?”

This seemed to satisfy him. “Okay,” he said. “No lecture then.”

I settled in to listen to the story of my rescue. “So tell me everything,” I said.

“Well, you can imagine how upset Alice was when that horse you had ridden came galloping into the stable yard with no Scarlett,” my dad began.

“He found his way back? What a good boy.” I was relieved to hear that Traveler had made it safely home.

“Good boy, my foot. That horse almost got you killed.”

“No, it was my own fault. I never should have taken Traveler out. It was too soon … and he was too spooked still. But I needed …”

I had needed to see Will—that was what I was going to say.

“Well, the horse is fine, though he wouldn’t have been if
you
hadn’t been all right.” His face took on a funny cast, as if he were thinking thoughts he shouldn’t be thinking.

“Moving on.…” I motioned with my hands for him to keep going.

Mom came back into the room and handed me a cup
of coffee. “The doctor will be in soon to check on you,” she said. She tried to sit back in her seat, but Daddy pulled her into his lap. She laughed a little, and didn’t pull away, but her exuberance didn’t match my dad’s. She looked like someone who was convalescing from a long illness. I had the strange sensation of seeing myself in her … the weakened, brittle self I had been not so very long ago.

“Daddy was just telling me about what happened after I fell,” I said.

Mom picked up the story. “Well, Alice was a wreck. That horse you were on came tearing into the stable, and you weren’t on him, and Alice didn’t know what to do. She called the sheriff to go out and look for you, but they had no idea which trail you’d been on, so they didn’t know where to start. If it weren’t for that Cohen boy—”

“Will.” His name tasted like candy in my mouth.

“If it weren’t for Will,” she continued, “I don’t know when we would have found you.”

“He told the sheriff that he just had a bad feeling,” Daddy said. “You’d been at his house, I guess?”

I nodded. I didn’t want to tell them about my conversation with Martin; they didn’t need to know
everything
.

“So he took his dad’s Jeep and followed the trail he figured you’d take back toward the barn. He found you there, and you were disoriented and bleeding, of course. He hesitated to move you because he wasn’t sure if you’d hurt your spine, but you were bleeding so much.…” Daddy shook his head. He cleared his throat before continuing. “Anyway, he loaded you into the back of the Jeep and drove you to Two
Harbors. The hospital airlifted you out of there, in a storm and everything, and here you are, two days later.” He smiled at me. “It’s good to have you back, Scar.”

Two days had passed. It didn’t seem like it.

“Was I unconscious the whole time?”

“You were in and out. You talked some, but it wasn’t coherent—mostly about trees. And a couple of times you seemed scared, something about quicksand, it sounded like. Nightmares.”

How strange that I had said things that I had no memory of.

“Will was here yesterday. He took the morning ferry over to see you.”

I smiled into my coffee. Will had come. He had come for me on the trail. He had come to see me at the hospital.

“Alice was here too, of course. She feels just terrible. And Lily hasn’t stopped calling since she heard. I’d imagine you’ll have a lot of visitors when you get home,” Daddy said.

“They won’t need to visit me, I’ll see them at school,” I said.

Mom shook her head. “Not this week, at least. Doctor’s orders. You need to take it easy. You suffered quite a concussion.”

I raised my hand gingerly to my head. Despite the caffeine in the coffee I’d drunk, I felt woozy, a little tired. My eyes closed heavily.

Mom took the cup from my hand. “Just rest,” she soothed. “We’ll talk more later.”

When the hospital finally released me, it was late afternoon. Lily’s parents had offered up their helicopter service to fly us back to the island. My parents had to help me into the helicopter; my legs were shaky and weak, like a newborn foal’s.

As the helicopter’s blades rotated through the sky, spinning faster and faster until their whirring blur lifted us into the sky and out across the water, I watched the sun, giant and fiery and orange, dipping into the ocean. It seemed as if it would steam and extinguish in the horizon.

We had read the lyrics to a song last spring in English class, right after Ronny had died. The song struck me deeply. I had memorized it, and though I hadn’t thought of the song for months, as we crossed the ocean back toward our little island, the sky shifting from day to night, it came to me all at once:

In the gloaming, oh my darling

When the lights are soft and low

And the quiet shadows, falling

Softly come and softly go

When the trees are sobbing faintly