Falling into Place (4 page)

Can I cross and return to the start?”

Liz turned off the music. Breathed, and looked up again to face the silence, but it wasn't there. Not the kind she was running from. It was quiet, deeply so, but it was the kind of quiet that lived and moved and
changed
, filled to the brim with crickets and wings and the sounds of late summer.

Later, she lay on her back, staring at the curving sky and the stars, swallowed by the darkness so that she felt very small indeed. She wondered what was between the stars, if it was dead and empty space, or something else.
That's why there are so many constellations
, she thought, remembering the ones from her fourth-grade science class—Leo, Cassiopeia, Orion. Maybe everyone just wanted to connect those pinpricks of brightness and ignore the mysteries in between.

Once upon a time, Liz was happy to TP a house with Julia and Kennie, to be invited to the best parties. Once upon a time, it made her happy to look down the social tower and see everyone below her. Once upon a time, it made happy her to stand here and see the entire sky above her.

And tonight—tonight, that was what she wished for. She wished to be happy, and fell asleep with an entire sky above her.

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T
he waiting area of the emergency room is never empty, but right now, it's about as close as it gets. There's a man sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring at the ground. There's a family huddled in a circle, with eyes closed in prayer. There's a boy staring quietly out the window, a name on his lips.

And there, in the far corner, is Liz's mom, quietly eating her last pack of peanuts from the plane and paging through a magazine.

When Liz was younger, people said that she got her face from her mother and everything else from her father. But Liz and her mother share a significant something else that neither of them will ever admit—they both like to play pretend.

So as her daughter lies dying on an operating table, Monica Emerson sits with her legs crossed, looking for all the world like she cares about which celebrity couple broke up this week. On the inside, she shakes to pieces.

She flips a page and thinks of the day Liz learned to walk. Monica had gone to the kitchen to get a box of rice crackers, and when she turned, Liz was standing there behind her, wobbling uncertainly. And even as Monica yelled for her husband to get the camera, she lifted Liz off the ground and back into her arms, thinking
Not yet
.

Not today
.

Let her grow up tomorrow
.

She flips another page. When she arrived, the doctor told her that even if Liz survives surgery, even if she doesn't die today,
even if
, there's a good chance that she'll never walk again. No one can make promises.

Monica Emerson knows that the likeliest outcome will break her heart, so she does her best not to think about it. She thinks about nothing at all.

That's the thing about Monica Emerson. She is a good person and a terrible mother.

In the operating room, there are tense whispers, the brush of metal against bone, the tinny, faraway beeping that means she's still alive.

And finally, when it's over, the beeping is still there. The doctors are masks and blood splatters, and all I can think is,
This is no miracle
.

One of them—Henderson, according to the blue scribble stitched into his front pocket—breaks away and walks slowly toward the waiting area, which is never a good sign. Doctors with good news are almost as eager to deliver it as the people in the waiting room are to hear it. Only doctors with bad news walk slowly.

Monica rises to meet him, and no one sees how her hands shake as she closes the magazine, lays it down gingerly as though afraid that her trembling will start an earthquake, make the entire world crumble.

But the doctor still walks slowly, and his steps undo her world anyway.

“She isn't looking good,” Dr. Henderson tells Liz's mom. For the third time—I've counted.
She isn't looking good, she isn't looking good, she isn't looking good
. “We'll keep a close eye on her for the first twenty-four hours, and reevaluate tomorrow.”

But he doesn't really mean it, because he thinks she'll be dead by tomorrow.

As though Monica Emerson could forget, drowning as she is in the list of Liz's injuries. “Her left femur is shattered, and she has a complex fracture in her right hand. She's suffering from massive internal injuries. We've removed her spleen and set the fractures, but her body is still on the verge of shutting down. We're doing everything we can, but at this point, it's up to her.”

“What do you mean?”

I am simultaneously resentful of and impressed by Monica's composure. She's so like Liz.

“Liz is strong,” the doctor says, as though he has any idea. “She's young, and very fit. She's able to pull through this. If she's determined to, she will.”

He goes on to say that their first priority is to stabilize all the hemorrhaging and internal injuries, and they'll do another operation in a few days,
if
. Neither of them notices the boy by the window. He is braced against the arm of his chair and straining to hear. He catches only the worst snatches, “extensive internal bleeding” and “a ruptured lung” and “no one knows” and “but” and “if.” The rest is drowned out by the sound of his heart throwing itself against his rib cage.

His name is Liam Oliver. He saw the crumpled, smoking Mercedes at the bottom of a hill on his way to Costco and called the police. Now he sits at the edge of the waiting room, his eyes on the window, her name still on his lips.

He is very much in love with Liz Emerson, and it seems that she will never know.

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T
here's something about Julia that makes heads turn.

Even in the emergency room. Even in sweatpants and a shirt that has a hole in the armpit. Even with her smeared eyeliner darkening the circles under her eyes. Even with the scene of the crash still impressed on the insides of her eyelids, so that she sees it every time she blinks.

Even now.

Don't blink
, she tells herself as she almost knocks over a table on her way to the nurse's station. She doesn't notice anything, not Dr. Henderson and Monica turning the corner for the ICU, not the classmate sitting by the window.

She had stared at it for so long. There had been so much traffic. Long, long lines of it, stretching past what remained of Liz's car.

“Hello,” says Julia. Hesitantly—Julia is a hesitant person. She turns heads, but she hates being stared at. Once upon a time, she didn't care. But that was a long time ago. “I . . . um. My friend Liz is . . . she was admitted earlier today, I think. Elizabeth Emerson?”

The nurse looks up. “Are you a family member?” she asks.

“No,” says Julia, and though she knows the battle is already lost, she can't help but add, “She's my best friend.”

It didn't start out that way.

Halfway through seventh grade, Julia's parents decided that they'd had enough of each other. Her mother got the house, all the furniture, a million dollars from her worthless cheating bastard of a husband with sinfully overpriced daughter-stealing lawyers, and her dad, of course, got Julia.

Seventh grade was a horrible year. Seventh grade was puberty. Seventh grade was when Life Learning Skills became about sex and drugs instead of exercise and nutrition. Seventh grade was a year of discovery, of self and survival, of
becoming
. Liz discovered bitchiness, decided selfishness was essential to survival, and became the person she would come to hate. But that was okay, because everyone else acted the same way.

Except Julia.

Julia was . . . different.

Julia didn't wear Crocs. She didn't wear the flowy capri things that everyone else did, she didn't wear her skirts over jeans, she didn't use sports wrap as headbands, she didn't layer her tank tops. She didn't even check her phone all that often. Julia wore brands that the rest of them wouldn't even hear of for another five years. She didn't watch the shows that everyone else watched and she didn't listen to the music the rest of them listened to.

She was brave, and no one is allowed to be brave in middle school.

Liz hated her. She hated her because Julia didn't need to dye her hair or wear makeup to be beautiful, because she just
was
. She hated her because Julia didn't care, didn't care what people thought, didn't care when they stared—not back then. She hated her because Julia was different, and that was enough. Liz hated her, so everyone else did too.

Julia was strange. Julia asked for it. Julia brought it upon herself.

The final straw was this: before Julia had gotten pulled into a higher math class, she was the only one in pre-algebra to ever do her homework. When their teacher one day decided, without warning or precedence, to collect their homework, and Julia was the only one who turned it in, he gave them a pop quiz.

And since she didn't know any of the answers, Liz took a piece of notebook paper and passed it around the class so that each person could write down one thing they thought of Julia.

They said things like “You're not even that pretty” and “Go back to where you came from.” Some drew pictures and some drew diagrams, arrows linking words like
weird
and
stuck-up
and
annoying
. When the piece of paper made its way back to Liz, she folded it up and slid it across the table to Julia.

Julia's expression hadn't changed when she read it. She didn't cry, not even a little bit, and heads had swiveled and faces had twisted in surprise, confusion, disbelief—but no one was more shocked than Liz. She could barely keep her jaw from dropping through the floor.

Their teacher gave them a ten-minute warning, and everyone snapped back to attention. Except Julia. Julia was done with her pop quiz, so she flipped the notebook paper over and wrote a single word across the back. Then she folded it into a neat square and passed it back to Liz.

It was the first time Liz had ever been called a bitch.

It was then, in pre-algebra, with a blank pop quiz before her, a wrinkled piece of notebook paper in her lap, and an ugly truth staring up at her, that Liz decided that she and Julia would be friends.

So they were.

Of course Julia took the opportunity. Sadness or popularity? It was not a difficult choice. She used Liz, as anyone else would have. For the first few months, they were not friends, but amid the melodrama, they became allies.

But one day, later that year, as Julia, Liz, and Kennie sat together during a mind-numbing assembly about internet safety, Liz leaned over and whispered to Julia that 34.42 percent of all assembly speakers carried fake boobs around in their briefcases, and when Liz pointed out the speaker's briefcase, Julia had laughed so hard that she had snorted. About six teachers whipped around to shush them, but they had already dissolved into the kind of laughter that made them stupid and helpless, carefree. While the three of them were doubled over, stomachs aching and cheeks cramping, Julia looked over and realized that sometime between
then
and
now
, Liz had become her best friend.

And then she had laughed again, because there was something entirely wonderful about being best friends with Liz Emerson.

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M
onica Emerson loses her composure slowly as she walks toward the ICU. It flakes off and leaves a trail behind her, and I keep my eyes on her face. She's still calm through the first hallway, the second, the third. But as they turn deeper into the hospital, she begins to crack.

She has not cried in public since her husband's funeral. Now she does, knowing that she may soon have to plan her daughter's.

They are small tears, silent, at first—then the doctor opens the doors to the ICU and she sees the rows and rows of beds and bodies, these barely human
things
stuffed full of oxygen and tubes and
not yets
.

She sees Liz among them.

Monica thinks of the maternity ward upstairs, and the tears come a little harder. How Liz had screamed—indignantly, as though they had kept her waiting for too long. She remembers her first moments of motherhood. She does not know how to prepare for her last.

She walks closer and sees Liz beneath a thin blanket, her shoulders wrapped in some hideous hospital thing. Her toes peek out. The nail polish is chipped. Blue, once. Glittery, maybe.

As Monica sits down and looks at the unnatural color of Liz's face, her composure crumbles entirely. There is a very good chance that Liz will die here, two floors beneath where she was born. She will never go to prom, never take her SATs, never apply for college, never graduate, and it's terrifying because Liz already looks dead. Liz looks like she could be packed in a coffin and shoved into the ground.

All Monica wants to do is put her arms around what remains of her daughter, as she hasn't done in so long. But Liz is a tangle of needles and tubes, fragile as ice on an ocean.

So her mother only sits there.

The problem with Monica's brief and imminently ending motherhood is that it was always her greatest fear, being a parent. She doesn't know how to do it, especially not after she buried Liz's father. She had been smothered as a child and she tried too hard to be perfect, and here lies the final proof of her failure.