The Shells Of Chanticleer (31 page)

“Hello sweetheart. How are you feeling?”

I swallowed, a painful sore swallow. The monitor was beeping slowly. The numbers weren’t going down but stayed the same. The jumble of wires was still tacked down with thick, sticky hospital tape on my hand. I could see out the window behind him. There was a little pink left in the sky; the sun was setting. I turned away from the window; it hurt my eyes.

“I’m good,” I said, exhaling. I squeezed my dad’s hand in response. It took a lot of energy. Everything I had.

My mom was there. She kissed me on my forehead and smoothed my hair. “I love you Macy,” she said. “You are going to be okay now.”

I nodded and reached for her arm, and clasping it, took a deep breath. And another.

My dad said, “You’ve been asleep for a while. We had quite a scare there with you. But you are out of the woods now. The doctors are pleased.”

I nodded and then with my hand motioned to my throat.

“Sore,” I whispered.

The nurse was there. She looked at the monitor and back at me and her smile was strong and encouraging. She was happy for me and I didn’t even know her.

“Let’s see if she can handle a little water,” she said. “Would you like some ice water dear?” She poured the cool clear liquid into a plastic cup filled with little chips of ice.

My dad grabbed the remote and the back of my bed lifted me upright into a sitting position, and my mom came around and fluffed up the pillows behind me so I would be comfortable. I shifted upright, slowly, and shakily took the cup of water from the nurse.

“Let her do it herself,” the nurse said.

I raised the cup and placed it against my dry, cracked lips. I tilted my head back and let the cold, cool water sink down my throat. As I did so, in the back of my mind I had a memory of watching someone tilt his head back and drink in the same way, and the memory was good, but I couldn’t place it. I drank it down and motioned for more.

“Later on she can try a cup of tea, if she’d like,” the nurse suggested.

I shook my head violently. I couldn’t stand the thought of anything warm and sweet to drink. It felt like it had been forever since I’d had water, plain and icy cold. I felt so incredibly thirsty.

“You’ve been asleep for six days,” my mom said. “Sleeping tight. We’ve been here the whole time, watching you.”

“You were having quite an argument with yourself in the last day or so,” my dad said. “You were restless, fighting for your life. When you settled down, that’s when you turned the corner and started improving. Finally, today they knew they could wake you.”

I didn’t remember any of that. I think I had been very busy dreaming, instead. Or was this the dream? I couldn’t tell. I held my cup up weakly.

“More water, please.”

They refilled it and I drank it down slowly.

“What day is it?”

“It’s Sunday night,” my mom said. “Don’t worry about going back to school, you won’t be ready for that for a while.”

“Can I go home now?”

“Not yet honey, but soon,” my dad said, stroking my forehead.

I soon learned that you don’t bounce back from near-death that easily. I needed three weeks of IV antibiotics, three times a day, to completely eradicate my superbug. I’d have home health care until that was over and I’d be homeschooled during that time. I would always be slightly at risk for infections in the future, but no more than anyone else who had been as ill and climbed back out of it.

I had gone a whole week without solid food and there was a gaping sore on my leg where they had gone in after the splinter and cleared out the infection. I didn’t even want to look in the mirror, I was sure my hair looked like a hornet’s nest.

My room was filled with baskets and vases of flowers, helium-filled mylar balloons, pink teddy bears. My condition was big news; everyone knew I had almost died. My dad went from arrangement to arrangement, reading the notes to me. All my friends, their families, the teachers, had sent words of support but I wondered why everyone was making such a big deal out of everything.
If I had died,
I thought to myself,
I know I would have been okay.

Nothing but soup appealed to me for the first few days. It was weird to not have any appetite at all. But the thought of solid food turned my stomach. They wheeled me out of the ICU and into a room with a television.

When my strength returned, I was required to stay off my bad leg. They wanted me to use crutches and wheeled in the cart with the different sizes on it to test them out. Instead I was immediately drawn to an ebony walking stick with the head of a dog that I saw in the cart. I insisted that a walking stick was what I needed. The nurses looked at me and asked, “Really? Won’t you feel like an old man with one of those?”

No, no, I insisted. All the cool people used walking sticks.

“Why do you want that Macy?” my dad asked.

“I like the dog face,” I said.

“It’s not a dog. It’s a little fox, believe me; I know my animals,” he said.

When I finally made it back to school, my classmates were so glad to see me that I forgot to care that they were all tanned and healthy and I was even paler than before break. Everyone thought it was kind of funny when I showed up at school with a walking stick, but no one would snicker at me, considering what I had just been through. I couldn’t explain why I felt so oblivious to the odd looks I got as I clomped around with it in the days afterwards.

Nor could I explain why I suddenly wanted to sit in the great room, alone with Balthazar. Father would smile at me when he saw me there, curled up on the sofa. With pride in his voice he would say: “See Macy, didn’t I predict you would grow out of your fears? That everything would be okay?”

Then I would look up at Balthazar with a strange, anesthetized memory that we were once enemies and laugh at my old self.

“Yeah, Dad, I’m afraid that you did.” My old fears were gone. I wondered if being near death for so long was what changed me. Or maybe I was still dazed from the aftereffects of all the drugs they had pumped into my bloodstream. I couldn’t tell. All I knew for sure was that I felt hopeful and happy and incredibly lucky to be alive.

Time passed. I got stronger every day. I went back to running. The first day out I headed over the bridge straight to the spot where I had stumbled. The pavement was patched and smoothed. There was no sign of the pothole that had taken me down. The dirty winter refuse of twigs and branches had been swept and cleared away. I sat for a minute in the spot where I had fallen—I don’t know why. It seemed like a necessary ritual to return to the scene of the crime.

I felt drawn to the woods nearby. I ventured from the Prairie Path and wandered in, searching, feeling in my heart that I had been there before, that there was a familiar place at the other end of the forest that was very good for me, someplace concrete and real, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly. It haunted me in the days to come, a sort of déjà vu. I could never figure it out yet could never shake it, either. Like I had promises to keep. It made no sense.

Whatever. I didn’t obsess over it. For the moment life was good. I was my old self again, completely healthy, out of the woods. Spring was giving way to summer. It was almost seventy degrees. The sun was shining, the sky was blue; I was having a good day, one of my best days ever. I turned for home and picked up my pace. Since I had been given a second chance at life I didn’t think of hurling myself off the bridge anymore. It seemed as if the edge had been taken off of my old skittish nature and in its place my mind was filled with possibilities. I had almost died at sixteen, but I had beaten death. I had been stronger than I thought I was; I had kept going. Now there were so many things I wanted to do. I hoped I could live long enough to fit them all in.

Macy’s past comes back to haunt her in the sequel to
The Shells of Chanticleer
titled:

Coming Fall 2013

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