Falling into Place

Falling into Place by Zhang,Amy



CHAPTER ONE


Laws of Motion


On the day Liz Emerson tries to die, they had reviewed Newton’s Laws of Motion in physics class. Then, after school, she put them into practice by running her Mercedes off the road.

As she lies on the grass with the shattered window tangled in her hair, her blood all around her, she looks up and sees the sky again. She begins to cry, because it’s so blue, the sky. So, so blue. It fills her with an odd sadness, because she had forgotten. She had forgotten how very blue it was, and now it is too late.

Inhaling is becoming an exceedingly difficult task. The rush of cars grows farther and farther away, the world blurs at the edges, and Liz is gripped by an inexplicable urge to get to her feet and chase the cars, redefine the world. In this moment, she realizes what death really means. It means that she will never catch them.

Wait, she thinks. Not yet.

She still doesn’t understand them, Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. Inertia and force and mass and gravity and equal and opposite reactions still do not quite fit together in her head, but she is ready to let go. She is ready for it all to end.

It is then, when she releases her need to understand, that everything falls into place.

Things just aren’t that simple.

And suddenly it’s very clear to her that every action is an interaction, and everything she has ever done has led to something else, and to another something else, and all of that is ending here, at the bottom of the hill by Highway 34, and she is dying.

In that moment, everything clicks.

And Liz Emerson closes her eyes.





SNAPSHOT: SKY


We lie on the red-checkered blanket with weeds and flowers all around us, caught in the fleece. Our breaths carry our dandelion wishes higher, higher, until they become the clouds we watch. Sometimes we looked for animals or ice-cream cones or angels, but today we only lie there with our palms together and our fingers tangled, and we dream. We wonder what lies beyond.

One day, she will grow up and imagine death as an angel that will lend her wings, so she can find out.

Death, unfortunately, is not in the business of lending wings.



CHAPTER TWO


How to Save a Corpse


I watch the spinning lights close in, wrapping the scene in long lines of ambulances and yellow tape. Sirens wail and paramedics spill out, running and slipping down the great hill in their haste. They surround the Mercedes, crouch beside her, the glass crunching beneath their feet.

“No gag reflex. Get the tube ready, I need RSI intubation—”

“Can you start a line from there? Jaws of life . . . get the fire department!”

“—no, forget that, break the windshield—”

So they do. They remove the glass and carry her up the hill, and no one notices the boy standing near the mangled bits of her car, watching.

Her name is on his lips.

Then he is pushed back by a policeman, forced back to the crowd of people who have gotten out of their cars to catch a glimpse of the scene, the blood, the body. I look past the circle and see the traffic rapidly piling up in every direction, and right then, it’s very easy to imagine Liz somewhere in the long line of cars, sitting inside an intact Mercedes, her hand pressed to the horn, her swearing drowned out by the pounding bass of the radio.

It’s impossible. It’s impossible to imagine her as anything but alive.

The fact, however, is that the word alive no longer accurately describes Liz Emerson. She is being pushed into the back of an ambulance, and for her, the doors are closing.

“She’s tachycardic—and hypotensive, can you—”

“I need a splint, she’s got a complex fracture in the superior femur—”

“No, just get the blood stopped! She’s going into shock!”

As everyone moves and rushes around her, a musical of beeping machines and panic, I just watch her, her hands, her face. Her hair falling out of the hasty braid. The foundation across her cheeks, too thin to cover the graying skin.

When I look around, I can see her heart beating on three different monitors. I can see the steam her breath makes on the mask. But Liz Emerson is not alive.

So I lean forward. I place my lips beside her ear and whisper for her to stay, stay alive, over and over again. I whisper it as though she’ll hear me, like she used to. As though she’ll listen.

Stay alive.



CHAPTER THREE