In an Instant(30)

It’s the worst possible outcome, worse than had they discovered him dead. I watch as the search team shuffles to their cars, their heads bent in defeat and their prayers shifting from hope that Oz is still alive to pleas that he is dead and will therefore be spared any more suffering.

He is not dead. He is curled on the rock where Bingo left him, no longer calling for my mom or my dad. Alone and terrified, he trembles, and watching him destroys me.

Though I know he cannot hear me, I tell him I love him and that Bingo is safe, and then I leave, deeply ashamed for being too much of a coward to stay.

When Burns delivers the news to my mom, she barely reacts. She thanks him for keeping the crew out as long as he did, then gathers her things from the ambulance and walks with Uncle Bob toward the waiting deputy’s car. It will drive her to the trauma hospital in Riverside where my dad and Chloe are being treated.

She is shell shocked, I tell myself, shaking away the other impression that struck me when she received the news: relieved.

No, I scream. Resigned. She knew it was coming and was therefore expecting it; the news wasn’t a revelation and therefore wasn’t devastating like it would have been had her hopes been high or if she’d been surprised. Her only crime is not having the energy to fake it, to pretend she is destroyed as everyone expects her to be, including me.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Uncle Bob asks as he opens the door to the deputy’s car for her.

My mom shakes her head. “Karen and Natalie need you.”

He pulls her into his arms, and she melts against him, her head against his chest and his chin resting on her hair.

“I’m here if you need me,” he whispers, and the tenderness between them makes me wonder if more than friendship might exist between them. Uncle Bob’s affection for my mom is clear. It always has been. Her sentiment toward him is not as defined.





32

My mom startles at the sight of Chloe in her bed. Her hair is buzzed around her forehead, a swatch of gauze covering the gash. Her eyes are closed. A white sheet is draped over her, her bandaged hands on top of it. Moonlight streams in from the window, glancing off her pale skin and making it glow. She looks like a wounded angel, and I feel my mom’s chest loosen with the relief of seeing her, so much she scarcely notices Chloe’s blistered ears or the blue hollows around her eyes or the black tips of her fingers and toes that extend beyond the splints.

I sit with my mom as we wait for her to wake, nurses coming in often to check on her and change her dressings as the machines hum and whir around her, the steady bleeping and scrolling squiggly lines reassuring. Though she burns with fever and her breathing is sometimes erratic, her pulse keeps a steady, comforting rhythm.

Aubrey arrives a little before eight. She is strangely unchanged, and it is disconcerting to see her. Like staring directly into the sun, it hurts to look at her yet feels amazing at the same time.

My mom stands, and they fall into each other’s arms.

Aubrey is my mom’s. She loves my dad, and my dad loves her, but Aubrey is my mom’s. They have one of those cute, comical, easy mother-daughter relationships. Both like to shop and go to sappy movies, and both could spend every day at a spa being pampered and every evening checking out the latest restaurants in Orange County. We always kid them that they should become mother-daughter food critics. They would be great. Aubrey would be generous, and my mom would be nitpicking and harsh.

They sit beside each other, mirrors of each other, feet on the floor, hands clasped on their thighs. Aubrey has been crying. I know because her eyes are red and she is not wearing mascara, a trademark sign that her sensitive tear ducts are inflamed.

But now, sitting beside my mom, she is stoic. She says little, worry lining her face as she watches Chloe and thinks about me, absently turning the engagement ring on her finger as she silently counts the stones. When she first got the ring, she proudly announced it had twenty-two small diamonds around the center stone to symbolize each month she and Ben had been together before he’d proposed. I examined it and, just to mess with her, said there were only twenty-one. She must have counted those diamonds a hundred times after I said it, and it became a running joke, everyone teasing her and asking if she was sure there were twenty-two diamonds.

“They put Dad in a medically induced coma,” she says after some time, “to help with the swelling in his brain.”

My mom nods. The doctors updated her before Aubrey got there. The surgery went well. His leg was put back together and his spleen removed, but they won’t know the extent of the head trauma until he wakes up, which they are hoping will be in a week or so.

“He’s going to be okay,” Aubrey says. “So is Chloe.”

She doesn’t mention Oz or that he is still out there and that there is still hope, and neither does my mom. And the longer I wait for them to do so, the more upset I become, until, unable to take it a second longer, I leave.





33

I arrive in Mo’s room as the door opens and Aunt Karen walks in, causing Mrs. Kaminski to turn from her vigil beside the bed. She stands quickly and guides Aunt Karen back into the corridor.

“How is she?” Aunt Karen says when the door closes, her face lined with concern.

Aunt Karen suffered first-degree frostbite on her fingers and mild shock. But after a day in the hospital, she is nearly fully recovered. Her hair is styled and her makeup neatly applied, and other than the glossy salve on her hands, she looks exactly as she did before the accident.