‘Fuckheads!’ Tyler’s friend Dan shouted.
Bold and bullish, Dan was a fat little tryhard, but his overconfidence and arrogance meant nobody stood up to him. Tyler thought Dan was hilarious. I thought he was a jerk.
‘Watch your mouth, guys!’ Mr Parks, our PE teacher who was running this little field trip, yelled from the front of the bus. ‘Come on, off the bus.’
We stepped out into the glorious spring sunshine. It was one of those pristine Seattle days when the rain has finally stopped, leaving behind a scrubbed blue sky. The air had just a hint of warmth in it, a promise that more days like this would soon follow.
Cherry trees coated in frothy pink and white blossoms peeked from between towering evergreens. In the distance I could see the start of Greek Row, a collection of Tudor, Gothic, and Georgian fraternity and sorority houses.
‘Over here, guys!’ Mr Parks waved his arms to us, his beefy biceps rippling under his white polo shirt. We shuffled over, and Mr Parks made introductions: Portage Point High, Ballard High, and Seattle Catholic Academy, the Catholic kids in the uniforms.
Somehow we’d faced off so we were separated into three groups, but once we’d been introduced, everybody started talking to each other.
Tyler had an arm draped around my shoulder, tucking me tightly against his body. Madison was just to the right of me. I felt comfortable, safe, secure in my world.
And then I saw her.
Just steps from me was a girl wearing the green school uniform of Seattle Catholic Academy. She had long, pale blonde hair, sharp Slavic cheekbones, a pointed nose, and a slightly off-center dimple in her chin.
As she swung her eyes toward me, I felt my world slipping toward the edge of a cliff I didn’t even know existed.
She looked like she could be my sister.
The girl’s eyes widened when she saw me, emphasizing the unusual shade of forest green: just like mine.
In that instant, as I looked at the face I’d known my entire life, I felt myself tumble over that cliff. I didn’t know how far I would fall or how hard I would crash, only that nothing would ever be the same.
ABI
october
‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Mrs Knight?’
I blinked at Dr Griffith, not sure I’d heard him right.
‘Your daughter is pregnant.’ He spoke slowly, as if I were a child unable to grasp his words. ‘Olivia’s suffered irreversible brain damage and she won’t wake up, but Washington State law prohibits us from turning off life support. We have to give the fetus the best chance at surviving. Do you understand?’
I nodded and shook my head at the same time. I did understand, but it made no sense, as if he’d grabbed random words from a dictionary and pasted them into a sentence.
‘Wha –?’
A knock at the door interrupted me, and a pink-scrub-clad nurse with the sad, droopy face and flabby jowls of a Saint Bernard entered.
‘Mrs Knight, your sister –’
Sarah burst past the nurse, elbowing her way into the room. Her blue eyes were laced with red, the translucent skin of her lids as raw and puffy as mine. She grabbed my hand, and I stared at her fingers. Her nails were smooth and perfectly oval, shining red, the color of fresh blood. Even now in the middle of the night, her long, perfectly highlighted hair swung and shone under the anemic hospital lights.
She pulled me in for a hug so hard it hurt my ribs. I stiffened and she dropped her arms, a shadow of hurt crossing her face. It had always been there, this slight distance between us. My fault, admittedly, but I no longer knew how to stop it.
‘Where’s Olivia? Is she okay? What happened? Why was she out in the middle of the night?’
The questions were rapid as a machine gun, asked in Sarah’s most demanding mom voice. The one she’d been practicing since I was ten and she was twenty, when our mother left me on Sarah’s front step with nothing but a backpack of dirty clothes. She’d gone home and killed herself that very day, leaving Sarah to raise me.
I shook my head, tears rising in my throat.
‘She . . . she . . .’
I didn’t know why Olivia was out in the middle of the night.
After my bath, I’d had some wine and then gone to bed with a book. I was asleep while my daughter was out doing . . . what?
The dark fog of anxiety swirled violently around me.
Panic: my old friend.
‘Mrs Knight?’ I heard from somewhere far away.
My vision blurred and a high-pitched whining droned in my ears. I couldn’t hold it away anymore. I crashed to the ground.
‘Abi!’ People rushed around me, hands lifted me up, pushed me into a chair.
I was sweating heavily. The air was like molasses, weighted like water.
Somebody pressed a paper bag into my hands, and I heard Sarah’s soothing voice speaking to me from a great distance.
‘Breathe. There you go. In, then out. In, then out.’
I used to have panic attacks all the time as a kid. But I’d learned to control my emotions, stamping them out like the flames of a fire. Sarah always said I should talk about my feelings, get them out there, but I knew it was better to push them away, pretend everything was okay. It was better not to feel anything.
Somehow, without me even wanting to, my breathing evened, my heart rate slowed. And then my hearing came back. Dr Griffith and Sarah were talking.
‘What happened?’ Sarah asked.
Sarah was good at being composed in tough situations. She never seemed desperate or panicky. I felt a stab of anger that she could manage this. I couldn’t even ask the right questions.
‘A retired paramedic found Olivia on the banks of the ZigZag River, next to the bridge. We don’t know if she fell from the bridge or – well, the police will investigate,’ Dr Griffith replied. He was crouched in front of me, holding one of my hands tightly in his. His skin felt dry and cool against my sweaty palm.
Sarah shifted in her seat next to me, her hand holding the paper bag to my mouth. ‘People come out of comas all the time –’ she began.
‘Olivia isn’t in a coma,’ he interrupted gently. ‘Comas are usu ally from a localized injury. Olivia’s suffered a massive bleed, which has damaged almost every part of her brain. I’m so sorry, I know this is hard to understand and even harder to accept, but Olivia isn’t going to wake up.’
Grief hurtled toward me,
