The Blue Girl (8 page)

            
Are the nail beds blue?

            
Does the person exhibit signs of pulmonary edema?

            
Does the person have a persistent cough?

            
Is the skin blue at any points other than arms, hands, and extremities?

I don't know what pulmonary edema is, but fortunately it's in blue and underlined, indicating a link. I click on it, and the new screen explains that it's a “swelling of the lungs or lung tissue.”

That day at the lake, the girl didn't breathe for a long, long time. It seemed like forever when Audrey leaned over her and tilted her neck back exactly the way they taught us
CPR
at the end of last year on the dummy named Annie. Greg got in all that trouble for squeezing it and trying to mount it and for being a general pig. I sat next to Audrey in the gym that day, and I remember I couldn't pay attention because I kept thinking about my lungs and my own cilia and bronchial tubes. Everything could shut down at any minute. Nobody can prove that it won't. One second you could be breathing and the next your lungs could collapse. I didn't think Audrey was listening because she sat there looking down at the floor. I thought of asking her if she ever wondered how it would feel to have asthma or to just quit breathing, or if she felt her breathing was safe, but I knew how crazy it would sound so I didn't ask.

I guess Audrey listened better than any of us, because she knew just what to do that day. She turned the girl over just the way the woman had shown us that day with the dummy in the gym, and she used the flat of her hand
when she pounded the water out of the blue girl's lungs. I can still remember the water spurting out, brown and thick with stench. When she pumped the girl's chest, I could see Audrey's mouth moving as she counted. She tilted the girl's head back. Everyone was yelling and crying: Rebecca's mother, even Mama. I looked up at Mama's eyes full of tears just when the girl started coughing.

Mama
, I said on the way home,
don't be sad. Audrey saved her
.

Mama said,
Someday when you get older, you'll see that sometimes you wish you weren't someone's mama. You'll wish it was just you, you all alone
.

I didn't say anything, but I wanted to tell her that I felt that way already, even though I'm only fifteen. How will I feel when I get older and my cells start to die off and my gray matter gets soft? What will happen to me then?

When I hear Mama come in after midnight, I shut off the computer and climb into bed with the questionnaire under the blanket. It's dark, but I've already memorized the questions. Cyanosis, it said on the website. Caused by lack of oxygen. I breathe as deeply as I can and try to imagine the oxygen seeping into my cells.

I dream the blue girl is back. She's sitting outside on the grass behind the auditorium eating something out of aluminum foil. Rebecca and I stand by the window on the
second floor looking down at her. She looks right back up at us. Her mouth moves very slowly as she eats.

She got bluer
, Rebecca says.

Audrey comes up behind us. I turn around to her, but she looks right past me out the window. She's wearing a gray sweater that hangs off her shoulders. It looks like her shoulder bones might pop right out of her skin, and her eyes look all hollow with dark veins around them. I look down at her fingernails to check to see if they're blue, and they are. My poor friend Audrey, just a mass of cells.

Doesn't she look bluer to you?
Rebecca asks.

I'm not sure if she's talking to me or to Audrey, so I don't say anything and neither does Audrey. We just stand there at the big window that looks out over the field and watch her as she picks stuff out of aluminum foil and eats it.

What do you think she's eating?
Rebecca asks.

I think maybe cheese or pieces of meat, something with a lot of protein and vitamin B. She needs riboflavin to oxygenate her blood. Rebecca thinks she eats plants that grow out by the lake.

Maybe she eats blueberries
, Rebecca says, and then she moves away from the window and says,
I'm going to find out
.

She turns around and walks down the stairs to the double doors that lead out to the field. I grab Audrey's sleeve to pull her along. Her feet shuffle when she walks,
and for a second on the way down the stairs, I think that if I let go of Audrey, she'll fall and her bones will crack open as her body slams into the steps, and I won't know what to do because I haven't studied the skeletal system enough.

I reach over to hold both hands around Audrey's arm when Greg sneaks up behind us.

What the fuck do you think you're doing?
Greg says.

Audrey slips away from me. Rebecca starts pulling on the door handle. The doors are made of metal, and they bang every time Rebecca yanks at the handle.

The blue girl's out there
, I tell Greg.

No fucking way
, Greg says.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Audrey leaning against the wall, shaking her head. I'm about to ask her what's wrong when the bell rings. I press my biology book hard against my chest and tell myself to think about my cells because it's getting harder and harder to breathe. I think,
Swollen epiglottis, bronchial obstruction
, when the door flings open, slamming against the wall and sending Rebecca flying into me. My biology book sails out of my arms and lands with a crack on the floor. The blue girl just stands there at the top of the stairs. Her lips tremble as she stands there staring at us. She looks at Audrey and then at Rebecca and then at me. I try to smile at her, but I can't, my lips won't move.

All of a sudden her mouth opens. She looks like she's going to speak, and then a wind comes out of nowhere, a huge gust that makes all the butterfly clips fly out of my hair. The wind blows harder. The glass rattles in the windows. I see Audrey in the corner, pinned against the wall by the wind, and I think,
Someone has to come, someone has to help us
. The blue girl's mouth opens wider, and the wind spins all around us. It hurts my ears. It sounds like screaming.

Greg yells,
Shut the fucking door!
but before anyone can move, the blue girl gets caught in the wind. It looks like slow motion, like a movie, her arms and hands twirling around in the wind. Her legs fly up in the air and her hair whips around. The wind knocks me down, hard. I feel the hard floor against my spine. A pain shoots through my lower back, and as I try to get up, I think,
I've broken a vertebra before I could memorize which one is which
.

Everyone runs out of the classrooms and into the hall. I lie on the floor with a stabbing pain in my back. Mr. Davis yells for everyone to crouch down and hold their arms over their heads like a crash position. Rebecca is screaming, Greg is screaming,
Fuck this! Fuck this!
The wind howls and blasts through the hall. I feel my body twisting as the wind blows me across the floor. Audrey reaches for my hand.
Hold on, hold on
, she says, and I grip her hand as hard as I can, so hard I can feel the ligaments in my arm stretching.

I lift my head for a minute. Every nerve ending in my brain must be shooting messages at once. My brain feels overloaded, but I keep my head up as long as I can to watch the blue girl spinning in the wind, to see if I can tell if she's breathing. When the wind finally stops, the girl stops in mid-air and then spits out a fountain of water that covers everything. All I hear, just before I wake up, is the splash.

Libby

I
AM NOT A PERSON WHO DREAMS. SOME PEOPLE MIGHT
say that this is not possible, that everyone dreams, that dreaming is part of the brain's natural function, that the psyche has to release, has to relieve itself, has to figure itself out. But for me, there is nothing to figure out. Diseases spread. We pass afflictions on to our children more terrible than anyone could imagine. We try to undo the undoable. Babies are born blue. People seem to die and then seem to live again, even though life seems impossible.

I used to dream but not anymore, not for a long time. When I did dream, I was a frequent dreamer. I kept a diary next to my bed and wrote the dreams down when I woke up. Before Ethan and Rebecca, I'd sometimes read the dreams aloud to Jeff in bed in the morning. He was never interested, I know that now. I complicated things, he told me years later, and he did what he could to settle me. Once he bought me a dream dictionary so I could look
up the meaning of the symbols, but after Ethan was born it all stopped. I'd dreamed too much, Jeff said. It was time to wake up.

Now I am awake, or as awake as it is possible to be. I cannot imagine being more awake than I am now.

I haven't told the others, Magda and poor Irene, but when the blue girl first appeared that day on the lake, I felt awake for the first time in years. She was a rumor until then, a whisper overheard in the parking lot of the grocery store. A dream, except I'd stopped believing in dreams. When I heard about this strange blue person who lurked somewhere around the lake area—I don't think we knew then that she was a girl—I thought maybe I would be able to dream again, that I would look forward again to nighttime, to sleep. I felt comforted by the possibility of dreaming again. I thought there would finally be an end to this blankness. And there has been, even without new dreams, because I have awakened. The blue girl, who came to our woods and almost drowned in our lake, has awakened me.

Of course when I first heard about her I thought of Ethan. How could I not? I thought of the day he was born, how the doctor had told me first to push and then suddenly not to push so hard. My first baby—how was I to know how hard to push? Wasn't that the point, the pushing? Afterwards, they told me I'd pushed too well, that I
was too good a pusher. He descended so fast, they said, faster than they'd wanted him to.

Why are they saying that to me?
I asked Jeff.

He didn't answer. I kept waiting and waiting for them to bring the baby over to me, to lay him on my chest the way I'd seen in all the movies. They were cleaning him, the nurse said. I told her they didn't need to. Jeff told me to stop yelling, and I thought,
Who's yelling? Not me
, but I know now I must have been. The nurses gave each other looks. If I close my eyes, I can still see those looks. I'd like to ask them how they think it must have felt for a new mother, a first-time mother, lying there on the bed, not able to see her newborn son, wondering what those looks were all about. When we took him home, my mother told me that I could always have another child, that I could try again.
Try again at what?
I wanted to say, though of course I never said those words aloud.

When they finally handed him to me, I saw. I don't remember whether Jeff stood by my side or leaned over to me to look at the baby—his baby, just as much as mine—or whether he touched my hand or arm or kissed my forehead. I'd had all sorts of images of the birth in my mind before it happened. Yes, I anticipated the pain, but then I imagined the tears, the happy tears of witnessing the coming of a new life. There was none of that. When I held my
son in my arms, I immediately saw that his head was large, his eyes close together, his face and hands a purplish blue.

He came down the canal so quickly
, the doctor said,
that his color isn't quite right yet. He'll redden soon, not to worry
.