Perfect Escape (25 page)

“What’s going on?” I pulled at her hand, which had so
surprised Grayson he got that full freak-out hollow to his chest that I’d seen so many times before. But Rena wouldn’t let go of Grayson, wouldn’t tear her frightened eyes away from him. “Rena,” I said, and pulled again, wrenching her free.

“It’s Bo,” she said, her voice coming out in a panicked rasp. “I can’t get him to wake up!”

“What?” I asked, but I had already let go of her arm and was sprinting down the sidewalk back toward Hunka. I ripped open the door to the backseat and, sure enough, there was Bo, eyes closed. I reached down and shook his belly. Nothing. I jiggled him harder. Nothing again.

“Hey,” I shouted, unsnapping his harness and pulling him out. It was the first time I’d held him, really, and I was shocked by how heavy he was. How alive he felt—nothing like the little dolls Zoe and I had played with under her picnic table. “Alive,” I whispered, when the thought entered my mind. He wasn’t pale, and he was definitely breathing. But he was hot as fire, except for his hands, which were cold, and when I held him up in front of my face and jiggled him, his eyes fluttered open and then shut again. His head lolled.

Rena was pulling at his hands and feet, her breath rushing into the side of my neck in harsh, hot gasps. Grayson had come up behind us but was still standing on the sidewalk, his arms crossed over his chest. He was moaning and making that
uh-uh-uh
sound and shifting his weight.

“He’s okay,” I breathed. “He’s okay.”

Rena grabbed Bo away from me and cradled him. “He’s not okay. He won’t wake up. That’s not okay.”

“Okay,” I said, because I seemed to be stuck on this one word, my mind whirling and my chest feeling tight.
Okay
was all that would come to my mind.
Everything’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay
. In my periphery I could see Grayson, squatting now and wrapped around himself in a little ball, and could hear Rena yelling Bo’s name, telling him to wake up, and all I could think about was that I didn’t know what to do. That I was scared and that, for the first time in three days, I wanted my mom.

She always knew what to do. She always had a calm head. She’d been through so many crises with us over the years and had never looked rattled—not when I broke my arm doing a cartwheel on Zoe’s trampoline. Not when Grayson needed stitches after running his bike into the back of a parked car. Not when she came home from work and found him, naked and freezing, in the hallway shower, having been there for somewhere around nine hours. She always dropped into some calm zone, said “Let’s get to the hospital,” and saved her breakdown for later when she was alone and everyone was somehow, miraculously, still alive.

“Let’s go,” I said, pushing Rena’s back toward the car. “Grayson, get the atlas and find a hospital. Bo needs a hospital.”

Rena raced around toward the other side of the car and slid into the backseat, still clutching Bo, but Grayson stayed where he was. He moaned a low moan.

“No,” I said, pulling on his shirt, trying to get him to stand. “You can’t do this right now.” But he refused to move. “Grayson! Dammit!” I yelled, tugging some more. By now, there was a family standing outside their room watching us, whispering to one another. I looked around wildly for something that would help me get my brother to move. I could hear Rena shouting “Hurry up!” in the car.

Then I saw it. The rock. The one that Grayson had been holding when Rena grabbed onto him. It had bounced onto the sidewalk and rolled a few inches, but it was still there.

I rushed to the rock and picked it up, then rushed back to my brother and tucked it into the crease where his arms held tight against his chest. “There,” I said. “You have two now. Okay? You’re even. That means everything is going to be okay. Let’s go.” I pulled on him again, and still nothing. “Please, Grayson, I’m begging you.” I squatted next to him and rested my forehead against his shoulder. “Just please be normal this one time,” I whimpered, knowing that I had just negated what I’d said to him earlier about this trip not being a way for me to make him normal. The thought brought the tears that had been so absent in all the chaos, and I squeezed my eyes shut, letting them soak into my brother’s shirt.

After a few seconds, which seemed like hours, I felt his shoulder move. He had shifted the rock into his hand and was staring at it. I pulled back and looked directly into his eyes. “Let’s go to the hospital,” I said.

Slowly, we both got up, and somehow I managed to fold
my brother into the car and shut the door behind him. I wiped my eyes on my forearms and walked on noodly legs to the other side, then slid in.

Grayson had the atlas open in his lap.
Uh-uh
. “Take a right,” he said. “It’s not far, actually. You’ll probably see—
uh-uh
—signs as soon as you—
uh
—turn.” And then he shut the atlas and turned toward his window, his throat working
uh-uh-uh
s and his fists furiously clenching two rocks apiece.

By the time we reached the hospital, Bo had whimpered softly a couple times, so we knew for sure he wasn’t dead, and even though none of us said so, I knew what had been on all of our minds at first—that Bo could have died while we were skinny-dipping and telling stupid jokes and climbing on a ridiculous jackalope and laughing it up like this was some fun summer road trip.

For the few minutes while we drove toward the hospital, all of us seemed to kind of be in our own heads. Rena held Bo against her shoulder and was whispering and singing into his ear. Grayson stared out the window, and I was busy following the blue H signs and trying to pinpoint where exactly I’d gone most wrong over the course of the past week. Or month. Or, hell, I don’t know, my whole damn life, from the minute I popped my perfect little head
into Grayson’s imperfect little world and called him the messed-up one.

God, I was so stupid to think he was getting better. So blind.

I pulled up to the emergency room entrance, let Rena out, and then parked, taking so many deep breaths to calm myself I started to get dizzy and my hands started to feel numb.

When I opened my door, Grayson didn’t move. I paused. “You staying here?” I asked, not wanting to push him any more than I already had. “You don’t have to come in.”

He nodded slowly, then, even more slowly, opened the car door and stepped out. I waited while he tucked handfuls of rocks into each pocket, not saying a word, and then we walked through the parking garage together.

“He’s gonna be okay,” I said, not sure why I was feeling the need to say this out loud. “He’s just sick.”

Uh
. “We should’ve taken him to a doctor yesterday. Or the day before.”

“We tried. And we’re not his parents. Rena is.”

“We shouldn’t have ever left home,” he said, his voice sour. “We should be home right now instead. With
our
parents.” The automatic doors swooshed open in front of us, releasing that unmistakable hospital smell. “We shouldn’t even be here,” he continued, pausing before stepping across the threshold. “God knows what kinds of diseases we’ll pick up here. Probably get influenza and die in California.
Nobody will know who we are. We’ll just rot in a Dumpster somewhere.”

“Cheery,” I said, doing my best to ignore him by gazing around the waiting area for Rena.

There were two old ladies sitting side by side, clutching each other’s hands, and a teenager across the room whose finger was pointing the wrong direction. In another area a baby cried relentlessly, but it wasn’t Bo, and nearby a little girl lay limply across her mother’s lap, staring at a TV screen and sucking her thumb.

No Rena.

“Excuse me,” I said to a passing nurse. “We’re looking for our friends? A blonde girl and a little baby? We were parking the car.”

She looked confused for a moment, and then recognition struck. “Oh! Yeah, they took her back right away. I’m sure she’ll come out as soon as she can.”

So Grayson and I sat in the same room as the old ladies and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Hours had gone by. God only knew what time of night it was. I started feeling drowsy, but I couldn’t rest because my stomach was rumbling too loudly.

I flagged down another nurse. “Um, we were waiting to hear something about the blonde girl with the baby? Um, Bo? And Rena?”

“They’re in with the doctor right now,” she said.

“Can we go back?”

The nurse pressed her lips into a thin line. “I’m sure she’ll come out as soon as she knows something. Might take a while.”

I sat back. My stomach growled again. I felt washed out, and, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I wished I were home, sleeping in my own bed, wearing clean underwear and texting Shani about her stupid love life. For a minute, the urge was so strong, had Grayson asked one more time to leave and head back to Missouri, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I would’ve driven all night long.

But unlike Grayson, I knew that the life I was imagining back home wasn’t going to be the life waiting for me when I got there. What waited for me was lots of explaining, lots of crying, and lots of grounding. Lots of disappointment. Lots of people hating me.

My stomach cramped up again.

I couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m going to get something to eat. Want anything?” I asked, standing up. Grayson had finally made himself comfortable in our little area. He’d laid Kleenex across the arms of the chair, and the two little old ladies had disappeared behind the emergency room doors. I had changed the TV to Discovery Health, and he was absorbed in some story about a little girl with a bleeding disorder. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. “I’ll bring it to you. You can wait here for Rena.”

He nodded. “A sandwich or something?”

“I’ll see what I can find.”

It felt good to be up and about again. Something about sitting still and waiting made time seem insufferable. Not knowing what the doctor was telling Rena about Bo was driving me crazy, and I had to fight the urge when I walked past the ER doors not to storm in there and look for her room, so I could find out what was going on.

Instead, I took a left and pushed through the doors underneath a sign that read
HOSPITAL.
The hallways were dark, buttoned up for the night. I wasn’t sure which way to go, so I took a right and kept moving, past outpatient offices. There was silence. My shoes made echoed clopping sounds down the hallways. Twice I heard the hum of machines and followed the noise, hoping to find a vending machine, but only found a squat ice machine or a mini fridge with a coffeemaker on top.

I turned a corner and walked some more, coming up with nothing but more empty waiting rooms and dark alcoves. It was as if nobody ever got sick in this town. Finally, I happened upon a cafeteria, closed for the night, not to open again until six
A.M.

For a minute I stood there, my palm pressed against the glass window of the cafeteria, and looked longingly at the bags of chips and cinnamon rolls and bananas sitting on the counter. I wanted to cry, it looked so good.

Finally, I turned and went back the way I’d come and headed toward a door to the outside I’d seen when I left the ER waiting room. I’d never been this hungry in my life. Not
eating was no longer an option. I’d just swing out and get something real quick.

I grabbed my keys and patted the money in my front pocket and trotted out to Hunka. Surely someplace would be open all night.

Rena and Grayson wouldn’t even know I was gone, much less miss me.

Half an hour and what felt like a hundred stops later, I plowed through the doors into the empty hospital corridor, juggling three bags. I’d driven around forever looking for a place where I could get Grayson a sandwich, but no place was open. So I’d finally found an all-night grocery store and had gotten stuff to make our own sandwiches. My plan was to stake out a clean-looking corner in one of the empty main lobby waiting rooms, drop the food off there, then go get Grayson and let him go to town with the new antibacterial wipes I’d bought. We could picnic in the dark, and then maybe stretch out in the shadows for a free night’s sleep.

But no sooner had I stepped inside the building than I saw a ripple of blonde hair in a baby-blue sweater stepping off an elevator down the hall.

“Rena!” I shouted, much too loudly in the silence, and she turned.

“Kendra? You’re still here?” she said, blinking at me.

“Of course. I mean, I just got back. I brought sandwiches.” I held up the bags. “Didn’t Grayson tell you where I was?”

She shook her head confusedly. “I didn’t think you guys even came in when you dropped me off. They admitted Bo hours ago. I’ve been upstairs.”

“Admitted Bo? Is he going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, and for the first time I noticed how tired her eyes looked, as though she were way older than she appeared to be. “He got some virus, and you know how he wouldn’t eat much? Well, he got dehydrated, I guess. But they’ve got him on an IV now, and they said he should be fine.”

I held my hand over my heart, relief washing through me. “Thank God.” But Rena was sort of swaying, and I reached out to steady her. “Hey, you okay?”

And that’s when the tears started for real. Her bottom lip quivered and then crumpled completely, and her face scrunched up, and she started to look like she was going to buckle at the knees. I put the bags on the floor and grabbed both of her arms, stepping in close. “Hey,” I said, over and over again. “Hey, are you okay?” because that’s all I could think to do.

“I should’ve known,” she cried. “A good mother would’ve
known. What if they take him away from me? He’s all I’ve got.” She leaned into me. Bent and laid her forehead on my shoulder lightly. I smelled the funk of the river and sweat and sleep, but underneath a sweet smell, like oranges or something citrusy, and I felt the weight of her against me and I realized… I hadn’t been leaned on—literally leaned on—by a friend since the day Zoe whispered in my ear not to forget her and then moved away.

So I leaned back. And I closed my eyes. And breathed in. And I wished with all my heart that I were minutes away from Zoe’s house rather than hours, and I wished with all my heart that I’d tried really letting Shani or Lia in, rather than holding them out to keep plenty of room for a memory. And I mostly wished that I hadn’t been spending the past three years building a wall around myself, because once I felt Rena’s warmth, I realized I’d been cold for so, so long. I rubbed her back and pulled her hair out of her face, and after she was done crying, I used my fingertips to wipe the tears off her cheeks.