Don't Fail Me Now(59)
“I should have made her eat,” I say to the floor.
“No,” Tim says and puts his hand on my arm, but I shrug him off. I don’t know what to say to him. I can barely even look at him. It’s not his fault I wasn’t with Cass, and if he hadn’t followed me I probably would have stayed just sitting there, doing nothing, trying to get inspired by nature. (God, was that really just hours ago that I had the fleeting luxury of not feeling like the world was collapsing around me for a second?) But he did follow me, and now I can’t think of the velvet feel of his lips without my stomach churning with guilt, because nothing will ever change the fact that while we were kissing, she was seizing on the concrete, afraid and alone. I’ll never forgive myself if something happens to her, but I’ll never be able to forgive him either. And I think he knows it.
“Is there anything else that could make her . . . do that?” Leah asks.
“Too much insulin,” I say, zipping and unzipping the front of Cass’s backpack, watching the teeth click into place and then fall apart, over and over.
The only time it happened was when she was five. That was before she could give herself shots, and it was up to Mom to do them. She had just two shots a day back then. The morning shot was much more potent than the nighttime one, and it must have been easy to mix them up. That’s what I’ve told myself ever since: It must have been easy to mix them up. Even sober. Because of course she was sober, right? She didn’t get high and then inject her own daughter with a potentially lethal dose of insulin, right after pajamas but before she’d brushed her teeth with her light-up Hello Kitty toothbrush. The reality is that I’ll never know, and I never want to know. We spent that night in the ER, all three of us wide awake, Cass nauseous and ghost-pale and tethered to an IV that made her cry, nurses coming in to adjust her dosage every hour until they were confident she could stabilize on her own. After that, I took over the shots, and Cass started doing them herself when she was nine. She has never slipped up in four years. Ever.
I look down at my sister’s backpack and notice something odd. Except for the MedicAlert bracelet and a few snack-food wrappers, the front pocket’s empty. The ever-present Ziploc baggie filled with needles and insulin is gone. I tear open the main zipper, hoping she just moved it, but all that’s in there are dirty clothes.
In a flash, I see it laid out before me like a horrible road map I didn’t bother to read: the silence, the tears, the delay in the Window Rock bathroom, her face when she came out. I’m sorry. For what? Everything. The insulin, gone. All of it. Gone.
Agony cuts through the fog with the precision of a scalpel, and I literally gasp as the truth dawns on me. There’s no way this was an accident. Cass is trying to die.
FIFTEEN
Saturday Night
Flagstaff Medical Center, Flagstaff, AZ
The ICU waiting area is a little three-walled enclave with one couch, twelve chairs, and two loveseats arranged back-to-back so that we don’t have to see anyone else’s grief up close. Not that I could think about anyone else right now. There’s a flat-screen TV playing sitcom reruns on TBS and a spread of magazines, and I wonder who could sit here and watch Seinfeld or read about Selena Gomez’s new eyebrow shape without wanting to break shit and start wailing. The nurse at the desk looks like she’s seen it all; she looks like that Munch painting, The Scream, only with bangs.
We’ve been here an hour. Cass has been here an hour and forty-five minutes. Her doctor, Dr. Chowdhury, who wears green scrubs and has a handsome, angular face with a prominent forehead vein, told me I can’t see her until she stabilizes. She seized for twenty minutes, they’re guessing, from the time she fell to the time she responded to the dextrose solution they gave her in the ambulance. They don’t know how long her brain was without oxygen—probably not long, they think, but combined with the overactivity from the seizure (“like an electrical storm”) and the mild concussion, it could cause lasting side effects. She’s still intubated and has been given barbiturates to keep her nervous system suppressed, so she’s still unconscious—not coma-unconscious, but heavily drugged. Her body will live, but her brain is anyone’s guess.
“We’ve been able to pick up activity in many of the major areas of concern,” Dr. Chowdhury said when we got there. “I’ll keep you updated.”
Many of them. Meaning not all of them. I think for the thousandth time of Cass on the verge of tears and me turning up the radio. Cass sitting down on that bench and putting on her sunglasses, turning her face away. How I’d thought she was just freezing me out like usual . . . how relieved I was that I could get away from her for a few minutes. Not knowing that they were the last few minutes she was planning on living.
A flood of tears sends me down the hall to a cavernous, antiseptic bathroom, which is lined floor to ceiling with gray tile, to double as a shower. I crouch on the toilet in the corner and weep into my knees, turning the sink water on full blast to drown out my primal, hiccupping sobs. In the car, I managed to hold it together for Denny, but now that I’m actually here at the hospital, the numbness is gone and my nerves are raw and bloody. How many mistakes have led up to this moment? How many were my fault? Mom’s? Buck’s? I know it’s useless now, but I desperately backtrack, looking for the point of no return that I missed. If I hadn’t pushed Cass aside so much lately—if I hadn’t invited Leah and Tim—if Aunt Sam hadn’t been such a cold bitch to us—if Mom hadn’t gotten arrested—if she hadn’t relapsed in the first place—if she had been happy—if any of us had been happy—if Buck hadn’t left—if, if, if.