Don't Fail Me Now (21 page)

“So you called him.”

“Yeah.” He looks at me with an expression of heartbreaking guilt. “I know you asked me not to, but I didn't know what else to do.”

“Did you tell him where we are?” I ask.

“No, not exactly,” Tim says. “But I did tell him we were with you and that Cass was in the hospital. I asked him to call off the AMBER alert so that we could focus on getting her better without looking over our shoulders for sirens.”

“And?”

“He said yes, on two conditions.”

“Which are?”

“That he can wire me some money for food and that he and Karen can come meet us in LA,” Tim says. “To take us home on a plane.”

I let out a long, shaky breath. Mr. Harper doesn't sound like such a bad guy after all. Just a worried-sick father. A foreign species I have never observed up close. “That sounds fair,” I say. “You guys have roughed it long enough.”

“No,
all
of us,” he says. “That means you, too. And Cass. And Denny.”

“But why would they—they don't even know me. If they did, they would know I'm nobody's charity case. They probably hate me anyway.”

“They don't hate you,” Tim says. “And it's not charity; you're Leah's family. Plus, they know how much you mean to me.” He reddens. “I mean, I told them about you.”

I pull my legs up to my chest and hug them, pressing my face into the soft denim at the knees, rubbed so thin from months of squatting for condiment packets below the counter at work that they feel ready to split at any second.

“Tim—” I start.

“No, I should say it,” he says softly. “The thing is, I care about you. A lot, actually. More than I probably should after just a few days. When this all started, I just wanted Leah to feel better. I had no idea how big it was.”

“What?”

“Everything,” he says. “The three of you coming together, going to see him. I can actually
see
Leah changing. And I'm changing. I mean, you're changing me.” He blushes again. “Not that it's about me, I know I wasn't even invited.”

“I need to stop saying that,” I say.

“It's true, though.” His eyes are full of determination. “Denny and I could stay here in Arizona, for all it matters. If I'm good for anything, it's just to help you and Leah and Cass make it the rest of the way. And I know it wasn't fair for me to try to start something between us when you have so much going on. I won't do it again, and it's okay if you never want to see me again after this, but I just need you to know that—”

“It didn't mean nothing,” I say quickly.

“What?”

“On the rock. At the canyon. It didn't mean nothing.”

“Oh.” He looks completely shocked. “That's . . . not what I was expecting.”

“Yeah, well, welcome to the club.”

“Come here.” He pulls me in for a hug and holds me there until I can hear his heart beating through his T-shirt, a comforting bass line cutting through the stillness.

I press my forehead against his chest. “I just don't know how to do this,” I say. “I've never—no one's ever . . .”

“Kissed you?” He tilts my chin up and kisses the tip of my nose.

“Once, but it lasted, like, four seconds.”

“Well, believe me, that guy doesn't know what he's missing.” He holds my face in his hands as he presses his lips to mine, soft and slightly parted, like he's drinking me in breath by breath, and a feverish buzz starts down in my toes, somersaulting up through my body so fast that I have to break away before I start laughing or weeping, I'm not sure which.

“I'm sorry.” I look up to see Tim grinning. This level of vulnerability is new for me. I don't know how people do it; it feels like being bare-ass naked in the freezing snow. It's definitely going to take some getting used to.

“No,
I'm
sorry,” he says. “I told you, I can't help it.” I smile and rest my head on his shoulder, looking out at the Subway sandwich sign illuminating the parking lot of the shopping center across the street and wondering if it's like this for everyone: miracle moments hiding in plain sight, like fireflies flashing in the dark.

“I've never flown before,” I say.

“Once you take off, it's like nothing,” he says, squeezing my hand.

“Just hurtling through space.”

“But the faster you move, the less you feel it.”

“We'd have to leave Goldie.”

Tim pulls back slightly and gives me a small, pitying smile. “Do you think she'd even make it back?”

“Maybe. She's gotten us this far. I can't just leave her.”

“It's up to you,” he says. “But I noticed this morning, she's about to turn over.”

“Turn over?”

“Yeah, the odometer. It's almost at a hundred thousand. Just a few dozen miles, and it'll turn over to zeros.”

“Oh, right. It's actually the second time that's happened.”

“I figured, on a car that old. Do you remember it?”

I shake my head against his ribcage. “It was before I was born.” I try to picture Goldie's odometer clicking over to one again. Starting from scratch doesn't sound bad, but there's something a little bit sad about it, too. All those miles, gone, like they never happened in the first place. All that distance traveled and then erased from memory.

“Let's go in,” he says, rubbing my arms. “You feel like you're made of ice.”

“I don't know,” I say as we walk back to the front doors and step on the mat together, sending the automatic panels groaning open. “I think I'm starting to thaw.”

Monday Morning to Tuesday Afternoon

Flagstaff, AZ
Kingman, AZ

Cass comes to at seven fifteen the next morning. Thanks to a heads up from Munch, who has apparently forgiven me my trespasses, I've been sitting by her bed since 7:07, waiting. Bracing myself, really. I know I can't predict how she'll react, but I want mine to be the first face she sees. That much I can control, at least.

Her still-closed lids flutter for a while before they finally start to lift. I'm holding her hand again, and as those big, dark eyes come into view, I squeeze, just once. No code, no cop-out, just
I'm here
. She blinks a few times, and I realize I'm holding my breath, hoping she'll say, “What
happened
?” or “Where am I?”—anything that would make it just an accident. But she
doesn't, because it wasn't. She looks at me, and then beyond at Dr. Chowdhury and Munch, with a kind of grim acceptance. She glances down at my hand on hers but doesn't move.

“Hey,” I say, struggling not to let my smile turn into the ugly-cry grimace it wants to become. “I missed you.” Dr. Chowdury has warned me not to bring up the suicide attempt because they're transferring her to pediatric psych at eleven, and he doesn't want Cass to feel ambushed. But now that she's awake, it's actually the last thing I want to talk about. “Are you hungry?” I ask. I'm glad the feeding tube is gone; I hope she never knows it was there.

Cass shakes her head and winces.

“You sustained a minor concussion, Cassidy, so you're likely to have some pain for a few days,” Dr. Chowdhury says, crouching down on the opposite side of the bed. “I'll have the nurse bring you some ibuprofen with your breakfast, how does that sound?”

“I'm not hungry,” Cass whispers. Her voice is soft, hoarse, and a little slurred.

“You still have to eat,” he says gently. “We've been keeping your blood sugar stable with a glucose, lipid, and amino acid solution, but now that you're conscious I think it will be much more pleasant for you to take food orally.”

Cass looks at me, her eyebrows slanted down slightly, the way they've done her entire life every time she needs me to reassure her that something is okay.

I nod. “You should eat. The food here's not bad. Denny likes it.”

Her cracked lips part in a shadow of a smile that makes my heart leap. “He'll eat anything,” she says.

I stay with Cass through her meal of jiggly eggs, an English muffin with strawberry jelly, a bruised banana, and a grade-school-style carton of milk. She doesn't say much, which tempts me to make a joke about how her brain seems undamaged, but I want to keep things light, so instead I just sit there and tell her stupid, mundane details about the past sixteen hours, from describing the nurses' identifying moles and tattoos to the contents of the vending machines. Before she gets carted off for a follow-up MRI, Denny comes in nervously and hands her a get-well card that Leah helped him make, featuring rainbows and shooting stars and a pack of carnivorous dinosaurs.

“I'm framing this one,” she says, giving him a weak but affectionate squeeze. I leave her room clinging to that sentence like a life raft. You frame something you're going to keep. Framing means longevity. Framing means she wants to live. I know it's a stretch, and that I'm pinning a hell of a lot of hope on something you can get for $2.50 from a discount craft store, but I don't care. I'll take what I can get.

Tim's dad comes through with a money transfer through Western Union around lunchtime, and we pick it up at a grocery store in the strip mall across the street. Tim won't tell me how much it is—I think he feels guilty—but he says it's enough so that we don't have to siphon any more gas and can eat at restaurants and do our laundry. I feel pretty conflicted until he drives us to a cabin at a nearby campsite that he's put two nights of rent on and that comes with a fridge, microwave, cable TV, and, most importantly, a shower, a bare-bones outdoor stall with a wooden latch door that looks like the bathroom at Versailles, under the circumstances. I dig out some of the stolen bottles of hotel shampoo from my bag, and while the
kids attack some take-out burgers on their bunk beds, I stand under that shower for fifteen minutes, gazing up at the sky. I've always thought those instructions on shampoo—
wash, rinse, repeat
—were dumb, because seriously, who needs to repeat? Now I know. I repeat and repeat and repeat until the bottles are empty, and then I turn off the water and scrub myself with a ratty towel until I have what feels like an entirely new layer of skin. I fall into bed still wrapped in the towel and sleep like a brick until four thirty, when Tim wakes me up to let me know we have to get back to the hospital before visiting hours end.

Cabin, hospital, cabin. Wash, rinse, repeat. We do this for forty-eight hours while the doctors watch Cass to monitor her blood sugar and make sure she's not a danger to herself anymore. I stay with her most of the time and let Tim take Leah and Denny out to do normal kid things that ideally don't involve police or paramedics. The doctors tell me she's cooperating but not talking much, which sounds like typical Cass, only I don't know if typical is okay anymore. The doctors don't think so. They're thinking of putting her on an antidepressant but are waiting for Mom to approve the prescription from behind bars. Mostly when I visit we just sit and watch TV and avoid addressing the Grand Canyon–sized elephant in the room.

“How's it going?” I'll ask, and then she'll say, “Okay.” She calls her therapist Dr. Zhivago, even though his name is Dr. Zinsser. Snark seems like a good sign, but I know it'll be cold comfort when she's doing her own shots again. She's asked me for her phone a few times, but I keep pretending I can't find it. I don't want anyone to be able to get to her. I'm even thinking she shouldn't come with us to see Buck. Maybe Tim's newfound cash can buy her and Denny some hot dogs and a ride on
the carousel at the Santa Monica Pier. Ironically, she might be safer dangling over a boardwalk than in a room with her biological father—from a psychological standpoint, anyway.

Both nights, Tim and I share a bed. It's not premeditated, but there's only a queen and a set of bunk beds. Denny is
all about
the bunk beds, and Leah does not want to share a mattress with anyone, if she can avoid it. We both act like it's no big deal, even though we know it is. We've hardly touched since our frigid bench détente—turns out the combo of a hospital setting and a cabin room with two younger siblings isn't exactly a recipe for torrid romance—and so we ease under the covers like we're playing a game of old-school Operation, trying not to touch any of the wrong parts. But the first morning we wake up hardcore spooning, and on the second morning he wakes me with a sleepy kiss.

“Oh my God,
gross
,” Leah groans from her bed, pulling the blanket over her face.

Just like in the movies.

• • •

Cass is discharged Tuesday afternoon, thanks to a fax from the Baltimore City Detention Center signed in my mom's jagged scrawl that looks like two
M
s having a fistfight. I bring Cass a freshly laundered hoodie, socks, underwear, and jeans, but she takes hours to emerge, and when she does I see that one of the nurses has braided her hair into thick cornrows. They look good, even if they turn my stomach a little thanks to Erica, and Cass seems to be in an okay mood. She actually high-fives Dr. Zinsser, and when they snip off her hospital bracelet, she gives it to Denny as a present. He loses it in the elevator down to the parking lot, but still, it's the thought that counts.

Dr. Chowdhury leaves me with an awkward demi-hug and a Xerox listing the warning signs for suicidal ideation. “She already knows this,” he tells me, “but for the foreseeable future Cassidy should not have access to her insulin. She can continue to give herself the shots, but someone else needs to measure them out and make sure they don't exceed the prescribed dosage. And she needs to be supervised for every injection until you trust her again.”

“Got it,” I say, but my insides feel like they're eroding. I've been Cass's sister my whole life, so it's a job I've always felt sort of prequalified for. I never thought I could fail at it. Now I'm vibrating at this weird, high frequency, hyperaware of everything I do and say, not to mention everything
she
does and says. Plus, she doesn't know about Tim and me yet, and I feel like that might not go over well. The prospect of going back out on the road again like everything is normal, and like this was just a pit stop, fills me with dread.

But we've made it this far—barely—and so we have to keep going, even though I don't think any of us wants to. There's a vibe of grim determination as we trudge over to Goldie's boxy silhouette in the hospital parking lot. We might be cleaner and better fed, but we've lost any illusions that this is some kind of adventure. It's a mission now, one that almost had a casualty. The cops may not be after us anymore, but I've never felt less safe.

I insist on driving so that I can have something to focus on besides the subtly shifting planes of my sister's face. I'm shamefully relieved when she chooses to sit in the backseat even after I offer her shotgun.

“Nothing's changed,” Cass says, which nearly stops my heart until she adds, “Tim's legs are still longer.”

For about an hour, no one really says anything. But then Denny comes through with a classic “Are we there yet?” and since they can use their iPhones again without worrying their locations are being tracked, Tim and Leah tag-team mapping a route that will get us to Buck's hospice—the Golden Palms—in six hours and nine minutes, or about eight
P.M.
Which is, of course, after visiting hours. We'll have to wait until tomorrow morning.

“That'll make it exactly a week since we left,” I say. “Almost to the hour.”

“It would have been faster to walk,” Denny says. I can't tell if he's making a joke.

“Where are we staying tonight?” Leah asks. “Can it have an indoor shower, please?”

“Picky, picky,” Tim says, surreptitiously squeezing my leg.

“And no IVs,” Cass says. It's her first attempt at levity, and the rest of us don't know how to react. I freeze up, and Leah makes a weird grimace-smile, and Tim chuckles a really fake-sounding chuckle that someone could bottle and use on the laugh track for a bad TV show. Goldie shudders in agreement.

“Done and done,” Tim says. “We all could use some decent sleep.”

I take the opening. “I was thinking,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant, “maybe you and Denny should sleep in tomorrow or do something fun while we deal with Buck.”

“Why Denny and me?” Cass asks. “Why not Denny and Tim? They're the ones who aren't related to him.” Her voice is calm, but I can tell she's acting, just like me, trying to keep things light while much darker feelings roil just below the surface.

“I know, I just thought . . .” I take a breath and take a leap, deciding to be honest. “You've just been through a lot already this week. I would totally understand if you didn't want to see him on top of it.”

In the rearview mirror, I can see Cass purse her lips. “It sounds like you don't want me to go,” she says.

“That's not what I said.”

She flares her nostrils. “Right.”

“Hey,” Tim says. “We should play license-plate bingo.”

“What's the one with the purple cactus?” Denny asks.

“Arizona,” Leah says.

“Arizona!” Denny cries, craning his neck to look out the window. “Arizona . . . Arizona . . . This is boring.”

“You can go,” I say to Cass. “I want you to go.”

“Good,” she says. “I'm gonna go. But not because
you
want me to.”

“Okay,” I say.

“I see a California!” says Tim.

“
Stop
,” Leah groans.

“Stop trying to control everything,” says Cass.

“I don't try to control everything!” I say.

“Yes you do!” she shouts.

And then there's a kind of metallic wheeze and then another shudder and then nothing. Goldie goes silent, and when I step on the gas, the pedal goes all the way down to the floor with a dull thud.

“No,” I say. I watch the needle on the odometer float down to zero as we coast, slowly losing speed. I jam the gearshift back and forth in its base. “No, no, no, no,
no
!”

A tractor-trailer leans on its horn as it screams past on the right; I'm in the middle lane.

“Get over,” Tim says, looking out his window. “Get over now.” I steer the corpse of the car into the right lane and then onto the shoulder as it slows to a crawl.

“Well, this sucks,” Leah says.

“That's the theme of the trip,” Cass mumbles.

“Can we just go home?” Denny whines.