Loud Awake and Lost (3 page)

“Whaddaya call a deer with no eyes?” I watched Rachel slip her messenger bag over her chair arm and then let her body fall into a yoga butterfly pose, knees pitched over the edge of her seat.

“I give up. What?” I dropped my lunch tray of grilled cheese, salad, Sprite—and braced for her bad joke.

“No eye deer.” Rachel scrutinized me. “Sooo? How was your very first morning back to the grind? Would you rather be doing arm curls and therapy at Addington? Or did you miss Mr. Altoona playing air guitar in the courtyard?”

“Ha.” Mr. Altoona was our school's manic IT guy. I cracked the soda tab. It wasn't until I'd sat down that I could feel my muscles ease. Like I'd gone a few rounds in a boxing ring, instead of just shown up six weeks late for my first day of senior year. “I'll be playing a lot of catch-up. I'm just patting myself on the back that I got through it.”

“What's your schedule?”

I ticked it off. “Concepts in Math, AP English, Theory of Knowledge, and a meeting for yearbook staff.”

“And? So far, tolerable?”

“My adrenaline's on overdrive, my brain's fried, and I probably could use a couple of Advil. But otherwise, yeah.” I nodded. “I'll survive.”

“Truth is, I always knew where you were today,” said Rachel, “by the trail of
Oh
my
God
there's Ember
s.”

I smiled. “Everyone's been amazing.” I'd been pretty embarrassed by it. I'd walked in to find my locker festooned with foil balloons. There was a fruit-and-cookie basket for me at the yearbook meeting, and a box of chocolates personally delivered to me by Mr. Singh, our school principal. I'd been bombarded with hugs from kids I hardly knew. It had been a veritable outpouring.

What I didn't trust myself to tell Rachel was how it had all seemed…
off.
Lafayette was a huge high school, nearly thirteen hundred kids strong, and in my time here I hadn't exactly distinguished myself with my unique brand of fabulous. I'd been a good dancer, I knew I was cute, I had friends—but I wasn't some physics genius or
Vogue
beauty or star athlete or the Campus-Hot-Guy's girlfriend.

Even my standout identifying feature—my long, coppery hair—was gone. Mermaid hair, Holden had called it, though I'd usually kept it pinned up in a heavy dancer's bun. After the accident they'd cut it short, and now it was chin length, with my bangs shaggy to hide my scar and with short, raggedy patches behind each ear where squares had been shaved for all my EEG scans.

My hair hadn't made me famous. But my accident had.

Crazy as it was, it was kind of like I really
had
died last February. All day, I'd been treated almost as if I were a hologram. All day I'd had this jittery sense that kids were waiting for my Tales from the Other Side. I'd wanted to find Rachel, to cling to her a little, to explain my fear of being this spectacle—a freak-show apparition at my own homecoming.

Instead I'd hid in a bathroom stall, letting the panic rip through my body in short jagged breaths. It was too much. It was too much to rejoin this slipstream of kids and classes and after-school pep rallies, caught in a dazed half-smiling, half-pretend state that just because I hadn't died, I was all the way here.

Maybe Mom was right. Maybe I wasn't ready to handle it just yet.

Emotion was a rush and roar, and I let it sweep over me. Splashed water on my face. Pulled the Shetland lock of bangs over my scar. Made it to the cafeteria in a basic state of okay.

But Rachel had her eyes on me. She always did. “
You're
amazing,” she told me now. “Go, Embie! You are strong like bull.” Another old joke, because I was a Taurus, a sign that I'd never felt kinship with. Rachel was always trying to make it better for me, probably acting on her instinct as a fair, justice-seeking Libra.

Soon enough, like clockwork, like I'd never been gone, the roundtable began to gather with all my best school friends. Kids I'd been sharing lunch with since middle school. It stunned me to see them. My eyes and cheeks were hot. Junior year seemed like both a week and a decade ago.

Sadie Anderson, Perrin Seymour, Tom Haas, and Keiji Takana. We were eight in all, including Claude McKechnie and his new Italian girlfriend, Lucia, an exchange student who even made sentences like “pass the salt” sound cranked-up sexy.

Lucia kept stealing covert glances at me. Sadie, Keiji, and Perrin were hyper-smiley, but whenever Tom met my eyes, his were careful with concern. Nobody was sure how to act.

“I'm a phone call away, Ember,” Mom had advised last night, slipping into my room with a mug of tea. “If you need me tomorrow, for any reason. Any reason at all.” Her good-night kiss was deeply familiar as always, but there'd been something strange in her tone. Something that kept me up, tossing in bed for another hour. She hadn't said anything strange. Not really. But there was something hidden in the cracks, the weight of what she'd left unspoken, that worried me.

And now here it was again. That squiggle of a question mark. That itchiness just outside my reach.

I sipped my Sprite and attempted to listen to the lunch conversations zipping past. Everyone seemed to be talking so fast, with an overspill of energy. I felt like no matter how hard I tried, I was a couple of beats behind real time. Seniors had the second-shift lunch—I was glad the school day was essentially over. Afternoon was one study session, and then I'd be heading downtown for physical therapy.

This would be my first afternoon since seventh grade without dance class. No scooting across the street to the Fine Arts building, no boomerang gossip, no yoga warm-ups in mirror-banked dance studio J, no Birdie Tallmadge stepping behind the dance line, the flat of her hand adjusting a spine or realigning a pelvis, or changing her Pandora on a vote. No more rehearsals, no more fleeting exhalant moments of landing a perfect step or mastering a sticky sequence.

I missed Birdie. Could I handle a visit? In my imagination, I saw myself opening the door of studio J, clumsy and leaden, my presence interrupting the dance line. Birdie turning, her heart-shaped face splitting with her surprised smile—“Oh, Ember! Stay awhile!”—as the other dancers broke file, shifting to murmur with one another. Some familiar faces. Others not. All in a whisper…
She's done, she can't dance…wrecked…if you actually saw her body…ruined for life.

No, I wouldn't go see Birdie. Not yet. I could handle my new scarred, warped self, but only in increments. I tuned in Claude. Crazy Claude. At least he was just the same. Slurping up pasta and spewing his opinions in a million different directions, though most of today's lunchroom topic was pretty tame: homecoming and college applications. Not that I was dealing with the second. Part of my handshake agreement with Dr. P had been not to rush the whole get-into-college thing.

“You guys want the truth? The admissions process is a scam,” Claude decreed between his fork attacks on Mount Tortellini. “You gotta save the dodo bird with one hand and invent a flu vaccine with the other. And that's just to get in to your safety school.” His eyes fixed on me. “But your college applications are cake, Ember. Survived the jaws of death. Got some cool stories out of it, huh? Frickin' good read.”

“Shut up, Claude. Don't even go there.” Rachel aimed at Claude's blandly handsome face with a carrot disk, then pegged one neatly off his nose.

“Leferrier knows what I'm talking about.”

“The dodo bird's been extinct for three hundred years.” I stared down at my grilled cheese. Greasy margarine and Kraft singles. I used to flip great ones at home, on thin rye bread with Gruyère cheese and apple slices. “Anyway, I'm not applying this semester—or maybe even this year.” I looked up. “The plan is to take everything slow.”

Claude nodded. “Nice. Although, I'd apply and then defer. You better strike while the iron's hot, Emb. While you can work the pity angle. You got pictures of the car? Before and after?”

Bing.
Another carrot bounced, this one off the tip of Claude's chin.

“Cut it out, Smarty. I'm just saying.” He shrugged. “A sympathy vote can make the difference.”

Typical Claude. Cold, right on point. That was why his bookshelves were crowded with a gold-plated plunder of Lafayette's debate-team victories. He could be dickish, but we all loved him anyway. Either that or we just loved to hate him.

“Thanks for the advice,” I said. “I'll file it.”

“Under Useless Crap,” muttered Rachel.

Claude pointed a finger at me. “Don't listen to Smart-Ass. I'm giving you good advice. You shouldn't play down what you went through, or your injuries, or the whole survivor's-guilt thing. That's one powerful essay, if you've got a handle on not overdoing the self-pity tone.”

I was staring at him as he said this, and yet at first Claude's words didn't make any sense, outside an excruciating feeling that the entire table had gone silent. My brain gnawed at it, working to peel back layers of memory—what guilt? What had I survived, that someone else had not? What—who—was Claude talking about?

Survivor. Survivor's guilt. Because I…Because there was someone…

Brutal as a nail gun to my brain, I remembered. But I couldn't rip my gaze away from Claude's. I must have looked a touch intense, because now he was faltering.

“Easy, girl,” he mumbled. “You can stop with the evil eye anytime you want. I haven't said anything you don't already know.”

“I…” I might be sick. My vision blurred. I hadn't known. Or maybe I had known on some level, but somehow it had slipped…somewhere…I…The table was waiting for me to say something. Anything. “I should pay
you
to write the pity angle for my application, Claude,” I said. “What's your rate? Don't pretend you don't have one.”

“Is it more money than what you pay Lucia to hang out with you?” deadpanned Sadie.

I felt the too-quick thrust of laughter. They all wanted to get off this subject. Talk moved back to homecoming. Claude bowed his head to focus on his pasta. I could sense the table's relief that the moment had passed, along with a lingering over-awareness that it had happened at all.

“'Scuse me.” Holding my tray, I stood up, dazed and unsteady— my low blood pressure, Dr. Pipini had warned, would kick back if I did anything too quickly.

Rachel stood, too. “You need me?”

“No. I'm fine, thanks. Stay put, finish lunch. I'm…just…” My vision blurred again, my legs were clay, propelling me in a crude, choppy animation from the lunch table, toward the tray drop, and then toward the exit doors.

Upstairs, in a quiet hall of the pre-renovated science wing, I sank down to sit beside a row of chunky metal lockers, and with trembling fingers I stuck in my earbuds. Weregirl. I'd searched them last night—they were a newish band out of Cork, Ireland, with only one studio album,
Half-Life,
to their name. I'd finally dropped deep into one of my bottom-of-the-sea sleeps before the download had finished. And then I'd completely forgotten about it.

Now I pressed play on the title track. The effect was instant, stunning. The grace and clarity of a simple vocal melody skated the surface of deep-rumbling bass drum strength. The music spun me out of the moment and washed me onto calmer shores, burying me for its duration in a safer place that my conscious mind couldn't dredge. Caught on the hook of this song, I was holding it, and it was holding me, and I was still here.

I listened once, then twice, and then I let go of the song, and I was left with the hard fact of him. I could even feel his name, even if I couldn't have said it.

Finally I stood, and somehow, like some wandering nomad who'd never been inside this school, I got to the front lobby, past security, and through the doors. Outside, the air was almost warm, one of those fall afternoons that was just a touch too muggy to be pleasant. My body matched it, a dull thudding, and my head ached. My hands didn't speak the same language as my brain; it took four tries of my fingers to key up Mom's cell phone number.

She answered on the first ring. She'd been waiting; I knew it to my core.

“I need to come home. I've got a headache.”

“Of course. I'll pick you up.”

“I think I remembered, sort of, about him.”

“Yes, yes, yes, all right—that's what I was…okay.”

“Come get me.”

“Ten minutes. Just wait right there.”

I ended the call and plugged back into the music. Sat on the steps with my fingers gripped around my knees. The locked muscles of my body held me like a robot. I jabbed the play button.
Half-Life,
track two. A brisk, more upbeat song. It pumped a blood-beat rhythm inside me, the catchy snap of verse and lyrics dancing its ring around me, blocking out my bucking, kicking thoughts.

Hadn't I heard it before? It didn't matter. What mattered was that this music had the power to transport me somewhere better, temporarily.

But it couldn't hide me from the truth.

The truth that I'd killed somebody.

Anthony Travolo. In the safety of the car, I heard Mom speak the name. As soon as she said it, I wondered how I ever could have forgotten it.

Anthony Travolo. Dr. P had said his name, too, in those early sessions. I'd had the information all along. I'd been “working through it,” Mom told me in the car. That I'd been “dealing with it the best way you knew how.”

Which apparently entailed that at some point, my brain had shoved him, his name, his death, my guilt, deep into the void.

“And that's neither uncommon nor surprising.” Dr. P spoke slowly into the phone while Mom sat upright in a kitchen chair, as if she were at church. Hands folded, listening. “You had no data chain with this person.”

“Data chain,” I repeated. I pictured a daisy chain made out of twisted, severed steel, a body mangled up inside it.

“The night of the accident, you were going to visit your aunt Gail, upstate. Apparently that young man was along for the ride. You might have been planning to drop him off somewhere. But there's no indication that you knew him well. You both were seen out at some dance clubs. The clubs, we think, are the single point of intersection.”

“Right.” Club friends. Because I was such a club girl? That wasn't me. Sure, I'd been to some clubs—anyone in Lafayette's A-squad dance liked the odd night out dancing. But I didn't have a special set of club friends. And Holden wasn't into that scene. Neither was Rachel.

But I'd heard all of this before, and now I remembered that I had. Right down to Dr. P's refusal to speak his given name. Never “Anthony.” Always “him” or “the person” or sometimes “that young man.” As if by my not knowing him, I was less culpable. Maybe this was why the name had slipped away from me so easily—along with the crime.

The visit-to-Aunt-Gail part wasn't a mystery. I'd made the trip to Mount Kisco with my parents plenty of times. My dad's only sister's country home was one of those rustic, kick-back Adirondack-style cabins. It was a perfect place to unplug, and Aunt Gail was mellow, an easygoing host.

“Ember?” Dr. P's voice snapped me to. “Are you there?”

“Yes.” I refocused. “But I don't understand. I killed someone. A person is dead because of me.” My voice was more breath than sound. “It's a major thing to forget.”

“The trauma surrounding selective recall is usually congruent with a memory disorder,” said Dr. P. “There have been many similar cases.”

“You always say that.” My voice was warning me that I was close to crying.

On the line, Dr. P suddenly seemed to remember that I was a person, not a file of case studies. “Think of it this way, Ember. Your body has taken hits that you can't even feel in your day-to-day. For example, do you realize that you won't have fully regenerated all of your lung tissue for seven years?”

Yes, I realized. Dr. P had only mentioned it a hundred times before. But so what? In seven years, I've got all-new lung tissue. In seven years, Anthony Travolo will still be dead. What kind of monster was I to have forgotten this person?

“So you need to give yourself a break. Your brain creates the shield while your body works on the repairs. And memory loss can be a natural defense mechanism to protect us from psychological damage. We never thought you'd forgotten it. Only blocked it. We were expecting this, and now you need to listen to me, Ember.” I imagined Dr. P hunkering forward in his office chair, shuffling papers, his wide shoulders up over his neck. “In recent weeks at Addington, we talked about your depression, and how much you wanted to return home. I trusted your instinct. With your parents' concession—and several conversations about it—we thought it might be best for that particular memory, of the young man, to reawaken naturally. In an atmosphere where you felt most comfortable.”

“What happened to me at school today did not feel natural,” I told him. “No offense,” I added. I was annoyed by my shrill voice, my sarcasm. I really didn't like to be disrespectful to Dr. P, who'd done so much for me. “I guess what I mean is my instinct was not for Claude McKechnie to give me that news.” I closed my eyes. “He's not exactly anybody's first pick for the circle of trust.”

“Claude might not have been the best trigger, but it seems that you transitioned smoothly. You were in complete control of the memory.”

In control? Carrying the death of Anthony Travolo around for months like an invisible skeleton wrapped around my body—this was me being smooth and in control?

Dr. P was just not helping. I told him I'd call him back later.

“Tea, sweetie?”

“No, thanks.” Ah, liquids—my mom's cure-all for everything, including accidental homicide. I drifted into the living room, Mom softly padding behind.

“So this is why everyone's been on eggshells around me,” I said, flopping onto the couch and curling up into a ball. “It must have been in all the papers, right? That there were two of us, and one survived?” For the first time, I wished I were back at Addington. The familiar unfamiliar of it. Home made everything too real.

“Your name was withheld because you're a minor. Ember, you have to understand. It was an—”

“An accident, right. It doesn't matter. I'm like Bethanne, aren't I?” Bethanne Hill was a former neighbor who'd survived a house fire she'd started by accident, which had killed her toddler sister, Violet. It had happened over ten years ago.

That first day Bethanne returned to my elementary school, I hadn't been able to take my eyes off her. She looked just the same, and yet her sister was dead because of her. What would it mean, I'd thought, to be
that
girl—guilty and left over?

Now I knew.

“Maybe you can meet Dr. Pipini tomorrow. He'd clear his day for you.”

“Sure, whatever.” I curled up into a tighter bundle, pulled up the afghan, and watched twilight drag off the sunset. Accepted the cup of tea Mom was compelled to prepare, but then I let it go cold.

Mom settled in and took out some knitting. Softly clicking needles filled the silence until I broke it.

“Mom.” I spoke through closed eyes. “Do the Travolos want to see me?”

The needles picked up speed. “I have the family's email.”

I could feel the cold, heat, cold in my skin. Thin jets of panic rose up through the floorboards of my consciousness. “Just an email? What does that mean? Do they blame me?”

“Ember, there's no lawsuit here, there's no finger-pointing and litigating.”

It wasn't really the answer to my question. I tried another way in. “Does the family want to be in contact with me? Do you think I should email? Is that what they want from me? Have you met any of them?”

“Oh, Ember, I don't have all the answers for you. I wish I did.”
Tic-tic-tic.
“What I can tell you is that they're private people. Same as us, in their own way.”
In
their
own
way.
What did that mean? Poor? Religious? Foreign? “You just tell me when you want their information, and then you and your father and I can talk about how to approach it. Let's go carefully, Ember. I don't want you to feel alone in this.”

As if my parents' company, as I hauled them out with me to any meeting with the Travolos, would purge my guilt. Of course, it was how Mom and Dad always handled my problems—by absorbing them. Not this time. There was only one person behind the wheel that night.

Anthony Travolo. I rolled it around in my brain. Forcing myself to reaccept it. He was a stranger, or so they all said. Some kid who'd needed a lift out of the city.

“What else do you know about Anthony Travolo? Personally, I mean.”

Tic-tic-tic-tic.
The clicking of the needles was steady, exact. Mom brought her math to her knitting. “Very little. From Bensonhurst. No criminal record. They showed me a photograph. I'd never seen him before in my life. You might have met him at a party. You'd fallen in with some different people, after you and Holden broke up.”

And now what did
that
mean? My mother's voice was not a window to her soul; it was all bricked up in neutral.

The grandfather clock in the hall was antique and never kept the right time. Now it chimed six courteous bells, although it was only half past five. I'd spent hundreds of peaceful, happy versions of this afternoon. My mother knitting, me doing homework or reading or dozing, the muted sounds of passing cars making a soft quilt of noise.

Would I ever know a truly peaceful sleep again?

“Dr. P tried; he really did.” Mom broke the silence abruptly. “But the death was so hard on you. Unbearable—you couldn't even speak about it. So Dr. P decided to take his cues from you. Which meant, ultimately, not speaking of it at all. It just seemed to be the best way to solve it temporarily. So much of you was broken, and needed mending. Inside and out.”

“Solve it?” I snorted. “Anthony's death isn't a calculus problem. It's not like we solved anything. In fact, I'd call it pretty regressive—as Dr. P would say—to have blocked the whole thing out.” My voice was just way too horribly, childishly snappish. I wanted to control it, I wanted to sound stable, but it was as if I couldn't hold on to my center.

And I'd got Mom uptight, too. I could tell by the way she set down and gripped her knitting on her lap. “You're right. It's not solved. But you can't go back and undo it, either. Young people die in car accidents. The fatalities are staggering. It's horrible, it's unspeakably tragic, but it happens, and not just to you, Embie. There are hundreds of thousands of brand-new drivers on the road every year.”

“So it
was
my fault!” I sprang up. “You think Anthony died because I didn't know what I was doing! If I'd been thirty years old, a seasoned driver, then none—”

“No, no—stop it, Ember!” Mom dropped her needles to clap her hands to her ears. “That's not what I meant. I wasn't thinking—I was speaking statistically. I wasn't referring specifically to you. Not at all.”

But of course she was. The silence stretched accusingly, a distance between us.

“And I really don't want to watch you lying on that couch,” Mom continued in a bare, thin voice, “with senior year and everything you worked so hard to get just passing you by, while you obsess on the past.”

“Whatever. On this couch, right in your sight, is where you like me best,” I mumbled. Hating myself, hating that I knew how to hurt her so easily.

“Maybe I'm protective. Fine. That's just a mom's job. But I don't want you trapped here, beating yourself up endlessly about this. And
nobody
can tell me it wasn't a mistake that you went back to school so early.” Mom spoke with force. “I warned Dr. Pipini. I warned him more than once. You need the comfort of your home.”

Did I? Because home didn't feel very comforting right now.

I walked back into the kitchen, where I picked up the newspaper clipping that Mom had laid out for me to see when I got home from school. Rereading it, scouring it for anything I might have missed, anything that hadn't appeared in my Google search—which had brought up the same clip, along with a brief notation of Anthony Travolo's funeral services, which had been held out on Long Island.

The accident had occurred in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. February 14th at approximately 9:30 p.m. Anthony Travolo of Bensonhurst, aged nineteen. My name was withheld. Both of us had been taken to Weill Cornell with grave injuries.

“He never regained consciousness.” Mom spoke wearily from the kitchen door, where she'd been watching me. “So he went peacefully. He wasn't from our neighborhood or school district.”

“Nobody knew him?”

“You'd have to ask around. But he didn't have any overlap with your close Lafayette friends. No drugs, no alcohol. No indication of foul play.”

“Why were we going to Aunt Gail's?”

“She said you'd called about a week before, and you hadn't mentioned a guest. That's why we think you were giving him a lift, dropping him off somewhere before Gail's. You hadn't told me you were going to visit her, either—I'd never have let you drive in that storm. Never. I suspect your plan was to call us once you'd gotten there. That bridge was a sheet of ice. The car skidded, you lost control, and that, unfortunately, is the whole story.”

A story with a lifetime of consequences. I dropped the clipping. I was sleepy. Addington-nap sleepy, as if my body yearned to spend a few hours in the dark, healing.

Mom went to the fridge and began to take out options for dinner. Ordinarily I would have helped. Not tonight. I didn't have the energy to lift a loaf of bread. I wandered back to the living room, to the couch. I wrapped up in the afghan and listened to dinner being prepared. Through closed eyes, I could feel the room gradually turn to night.

Did it matter that I didn't know Anthony Travolo? Probably not.

It's not as if knowing him would have changed anything.

One night, one car, one bridge, one survivor. I was here and he wasn't. The poison of this knowledge was inside me. Now and forever.