Blink Once (26 page)

The Olivia I knew, the girl I met, was the real Olivia. The girl who died at Wilson—I didn’t even know that girl. The girl with the short hair, with the scarred face. That reminder of Olivia was gone. Now all I had was my memory.

My eyes are closed, but I can hear the sounds of people swimming, the bright sun warm on my face. I’m lying down, and she’s next to me. When I look over at her, the sun is so bright, I can’t see her face, just her profile as she sits up. She puts up one hand to shield her eyes, the wind carries her long hair back, floating. “Who are you looking for?” I ask her, as she scans the lake. “You,” she says. “I’m looking for you.”

As I brushed my teeth, I thought about the dream. It was the same, yet different every time. Sometimes I’d be sitting up on the blanket and she was beside me, her hand on my back, or she’d be walking toward me. But we were always at the lake, and I could never see her face, just a shadow of
her, her silhouette, her profile, her hair blowing. I knew it was her, but she was just out of reach. No matter what I did, how I covered my eyes, the sun was hitting her just the right way so that I couldn’t see her, not really. Not the way I used to.

“Mike’s here,” Mom called, and I threw on a T-shirt, grabbing a jacket on the way out. “Take this.” Mom tried to push a toasted bagel into my hand.

“I think we’re going to get something on the way,” I said, but she closed my fingers around the bagel. I knew she thought I was still too skinny.

“You tell him to drive slowly, carefully.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you boys talked me into this.” But I could tell that part of her was thrilled that I was doing something normal—going to an outdoor concert with friends on a summer Saturday.

Mike honked and I kissed Mom on the cheek. “I’ll call you, and we won’t be late—the band we want to see is on this afternoon. We’ll probably bail right after that.” I bounced out the door and down the steps, feeling good and light. Sometimes in the morning, I would be stiff, and it could take some time for everything to click into place, but lately it had been easier, smoother. The physical therapy had paid off—my gait was pretty much normal now, no limp. Unless you asked me to touch my toes, you’d never know anything was wrong with me. “Don’t take up snowboarding,” the
physical therapist had told me at our last session, “and you should be fine.” Snowboarding and skiing were on the list of nos because of the twisting motion, something I had lost and would never get back now that my spine was fused together in two spots. A lot of things were off-limits. But there were plenty of things I could do, things I’d never tried before, like swimming, which I was really getting into.

I started going to the pool at school as therapy—taking the weight off my legs while I did some exercises. Mike joked that I was practicing for synchronized swimming, like girls do in the Olympics. “Hey, old lady, when are you getting out of that pool?” But one of the swim coaches started giving me some tips, and then I added in the practice hours. I didn’t have a lot else to do. Plus I liked the feeling of being underwater. There was something about the silence of it, how the water blocked everything out, that focused me.

Now I was thinking of joining the team next year at school. The coach said I had the right build for it, and I needed to do something to fill those afternoons I used to spend at the ramps anyhow. I didn’t want to even let myself get to the point where I missed biking; I wanted to fill that spot with something before it had a chance to become a hole.

“Oh come on, man, that bagel reeks like a bag of onions,”
Mike complained when I climbed in. “Eat it or get rid of it quick.”

“He’s nervous,” Allie offered from the front seat. “You know, little miss Erin,” she whispered.

“No, I’m not nervous. Just because I’ve been asking this girl out for six months, and she’s finally going to hang out with me, why would that make me nervous? I’m sure she’ll think it’s very cool that I drive a ten-year-old car that smells like onions, and that I’m bringing the famous coma boy and his ex-girlfriend along for our date. I’m sure that seems totally normal to her.”

I leaned up and patted his shoulder. “My mom wanted me to tell you to drive really safely, or should I remind you after you pick up Erin?”

“Now’s good,” Mike said. “Seriously, guys, don’t mess this up for me. Just be normal.”

“Oh, what will we talk about?” Allie joked. “Maybe that time Mike streaked naked through the football game last year? She might be interested in that story.”

“Oh, I know,” I chimed in. “I can tell her all that stuff you said about her when you visited me in the hospital. There was something about her legs, or was it her—”

“Yeah, okay, we get it,” Mike interrupted. He shook his head, turning the car into the neighborhood where Erin lived. “Honestly, it never fails to freak me out when you bring up stuff that I told you when you were a vegetable.”
He shook his head and turned to Allie, asking her, “I mean, doesn’t that freak you out?”

Allie turned and looked back at me with a small smile. We had a long talk a couple of weeks ago about that, among other things, over coffee one afternoon. “You have this look on your face sometimes, it’s like this sadness that kills me. And I just feel … I just hope that’s not about me, or anything I did or said—or didn’t say—while you were in the hospital,” she explained as we sat in the café. She was right. The sadness wasn’t about her, but I didn’t know how to tell her what it was exactly.

“I know you’ve been through a lot. And I feel like I wasn’t there for you as much as I could have been. But I am now.” She looked down into her half-empty cup and got quiet for a moment. “I want to tell you something.” She paused, looking up at me. She got so serious, I braced myself to hear something bad, like that she’d starting dating someone. But she surprised me. “You know how if you cut down a tree, you can look at the rings and see how old it is?”

I nodded.

“In bio class, our teacher was talking about how if you look closer, you can actually tell what the weather was like for each year—when the tree got lots of rain, or when there was a drought, just based on the darkness and thickness of the rings. It helps us to study the weather from hundreds of years ago, like we can look at the rings of all these trees
and figure out there was a bad drought, like, fifty years ago; it’s a living record.”

“Okay … ,” I said, trying to follow her.

She smiled. “Don’t laugh. It made me think of you. Like, if you were a tree, how this year for you, this ring, would be light, almost invisible, a drought year. It’s like a year where you almost weren’t here. But you know what? There are lots more rings for you, in the future, I just know it. Lots of good rings. Solid rings. Does that make sense?”

I looked at Allie’s blue eyes and her freckled face and felt nothing but love for her. She was a great girl, a true friend, even if we weren’t together, even if we never were again, she was someone who cared about me, and that’s all I needed to know. What had happened in the hospital, the way she handled my accident, it was forgiven. I reached over and took her hands across the table at the coffee shop and we sat like that a long time, in silence. Since then, every time I’d seen her, it was easier to hang out. I actually felt like we were closer than we’d ever been—closer than when we’d supposedly been in love.

Mike pulled up outside Erin’s house. “Get in the back,” he growled to Allie as Erin came out the front door. She was wearing shorts, a concert T-shirt, and a pair of cowboy boots.

“Hey,” she smiled, coming over to the passenger side door. She slid in and Mike introduced us. “I’ve been dying
to meet you! You’re totally famous at school. And Mike told me we’ll both be juniors next year.”

Allie gave me a quick eye roll as she got settled in and Mike started the car. It wasn’t long before we were at the Moonlight, a diner halfway to the city, and Mike suggested we stop. “I’m in,” I said, noting that Mom had been right about the bagel. I could eat two breakfasts a day for a while and not catch up with the weight I’d managed to lose over the winter.

“So?” Mike leaned in and whispered to me as the girls walked ahead of us to get a table.

“What?” I asked. Mike motioned toward Erin, trying not to be too obvious. “Oh, she seems cool,” I admitted.

“Yeah, right? She’s it, I mean she is really
it,
” Mike said, and I could tell he was completely gone on this girl, a full-blown crush. It was nice to see him so happy.

When we ordered and settled in, Mike seemed to relax a little bit—once it became clear that I was not going to embarrass him, and that Erin totally looked up to Allie and hung on her every word. Mike almost squirted himself with ketchup trying to get out the last drops of an empty squeeze bottle for our fries. “I’ll grab a new one,” I said, taking the bottle from him before he did something disastrous.

As I walked up to the counter, I heard Erin’s voice behind me: “He seems so normal … ,” and that made me smile. From what Mike and Allie had shared, I had been
the talk of the school a few months ago. It was going to be a big disappointment to everyone in the fall when “coma boy” returned, looking and acting so normal—well, on the outside, at least. Maybe Mike and I should plan something special for the first day, some sort of stunt with a wheelchair or something. He’d be into that. I turned back to look at him and was relieved to see he looked more chill, his arm slung over the back of the booth.

That’s when I noticed her. A girl sitting at the counter with her back to me. I felt my breath catch in my throat.

Her pale shoulders showed through the thin straps of her white sundress.

Long dark hair tumbled down her back, stopping in just the right place, above a small waist circled with a red belt.

Before I could stop myself, before I could think, I put my hand on her, touching her shoulder, her skin warm under my fingers. “Olivia,” I whispered. I would know her anywhere. I wanted to breathe her in.

But the eyes that turned to me, bright and hazel, the face—no. It was wrong, all wrong.

“Hi?” the girl said curiously, looking at me.

I shook my head, trying to wake up from the dream, the vision of what I had wanted to see. “I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

“That’s okay.” The girl turned around again and left me standing there for a minute, unsure of what to do.

“Bro, ketchup!” Mike yelled, and I snapped into action, asking the server for a new bottle, which she handed me without even meeting my eyes. When I sat back down at the table, I was sweating; I could feel my forehead was wet and cold. The conversation went on around me, and I realized my friends had no idea what had just happened. Of course they didn’t. Why would they? They barely remembered that day when I woke up asking for a girl named Olivia. No one remembered Olivia. No one but me.

I looked over at the girl at the counter again. Her hair was right, but the freckled arms—how could I have missed that? Of course it wasn’t her. It couldn’t be her. It would never be her.

As Mike shoved french fries into his mouth, making Erin giggle, I tried to pull myself back into the conversation. But my mind went to what Allie had said, about the tree and the rings inside. I realized all at once that she was wrong. The ring for this year wasn’t light or barely there, it wasn’t a drought. In the tree of my life, this year was a ring dark and deep, embedded further than any other year had been or ever would be. This was the year when I was hollowed out and came back from nothing. This was the year I faced everything and came out of it somehow. I wanted to think it had something to do with me, with my own strength, but I knew that wasn’t true. I hadn’t done it alone. I could never have done it alone.

Sometimes at night when I was at the pool, in the quiet stillness underwater, my mind would go to that place. To the hospital, to the people there. It was as if my heart could travel, over the miles, over the months that had passed, and I was back with her. Through the dark hallways, the sounds of the machines running. The feeling when I opened my eyes and she was in the room, when I had waited for her all day, and then she was there. Olivia. That closeness again. Like it used to be. But then something happens to bring me back, something in the real world. And I come back, and I’m alive; I’m me, but I’m alone. I was still getting used to that. And I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to be okay with it. If I would ever stop missing her. Maybe, maybe someday. But not yet.

Allie noticed how quiet I was; she always did. “You okay?” she asked, looking at me closely.

I picked up my soda and took a sip. “Yeah.” I hoped she wouldn’t notice that my hand was shaking.

“Let’s go!” Mike said, standing up and grabbing the check. “Good times await.”

When we walked outside, I took one last look back at the girl at the counter. Through the glass from the parking lot, it could be her, if you looked at just the right angle. Almost.

I heard my name. Just a whisper.

West.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, let the feeling wash over me.

“You coming or what?” Mike called out. When I turned around, they were waiting for me, by the car. My friends.