Rapid Falls(14)

He’d picked a pair of jeans that were two inches too short and an ugly T-shirt from when I coached a kids’ volleyball camp last summer. I was too tired to ask what happened to the clothes I had been wearing, though I knew I should.

My dad exchanged low murmurs with the head nurse outside the door as I dressed; I had a feeling he was taking me from the hospital without the doctor’s permission. Warnings of not allowing me to sleep more than two hours unsupervised rang down the hallway as we walked out the sliding glass doors. I wondered if staff at bigger hospitals, like the one we were heading to in Nicola, were as casual with their treatment plans. People cared more about each other in Rapid Falls than about doing things strictly by the book.

When we got to the car, my dad stopped. He pulled me in for an embrace so tight that tears unexpectedly filled my eyes. My dad never paid this much attention to me. Just the other day, he’d hung up a picture of me in my graduation gown in the upstairs hallway. It hung beneath the framed picture of his parents, who had both died from cancer when I was a baby.

“I wish they could see you now, Cara,” he had said. “Next year Anna will be here as well. They would be so proud of both of you.”

I had nodded, but frustration knotted my shoulders. My father could never congratulate me without mentioning Anna too. But today, as he held me in his arms, it felt like nothing in the world was more important to him than me.

“Damn. I forgot to get you an extra pillow. Are you going to be okay in the car for this long?” His forehead was creased with concern as he released me.

“I’m okay, Dad.” I smiled even though my legs were shaky as I walked to the passenger side. When I reached for the handle of the car door, it felt cold despite the warmth of the summer day. I jerked away, shaking my hands to get rid of the feeling of my fingers grasping for purchase.

“You okay?” my dad asked.

“Fine,” I said as I reached out again and forced my hand to unlatch the door. I slid into my seat and stared out the window. The small hospital slipped out of view, changing to trees covered with tiny budding leaves.

I was one of the last babies delivered in Rapid Falls Hospital before state funding dictated that all deliveries take place in Nicola, about an hour and a half away by ambulance. I had spent nearly every day of my life here. I knew Rapid Falls so well that it was difficult to give directions without using landmarks like “turn right past the woodlot the Kinleys used to own” or “keep going straight at the intersection where Mrs. Jones rear-ended the school bus.” I sometimes imagined how Rapid Falls must have looked to my mom when her car blew a flat on her way to a camping trip up north, if she had felt confused when directed to the Piper garage.

My grandpa ran the place then, but my dad was on duty when she limped her VW Bug into the service station. She told me once that when he smiled at her, she felt as if she had known him forever.

The paper birch trees would have been whispering to each other in the summer wind, the small field beside the shop dotted with bright flowers. Weeds, mostly, but even dandelions looked pretty on a sunny day. My mom told me that everyone smiled at her in Mr. Johnson’s grocery store, where she bought a Coke while my dad fixed the tire. When my dad finished the work, he asked her if she wanted an ice-cream cone. At the small stand about a mile down the road, she marveled at the flavors she hadn’t tasted since she was a little girl. My mom never made it to her camping trip that weekend. She spent the next three days with my dad. He taught her to fish and took her up to Rapid Falls. Six months later, they were married. I was born three months after that. My mom chose a flowing wedding dress. In the pictures, you can barely tell she was pregnant, except for the frown on her father’s face. Her parents moved to Florida when I was six. They don’t visit much. I wondered if my mom would have moved to Rapid Falls if she hadn’t gotten pregnant so fast. She was an only child, which was why Anna had been born so quickly after me. My mom said she wanted to give me a brother or a sister because she had always felt so lonely growing up.

Jesse was an only child too. He always wanted to know what it was like to have a sister, but I couldn’t answer. It felt like he was asking me to explain what it was like to have two legs instead of one. That’s how I felt about Rapid Falls too. I couldn’t describe what it was like to live there. I had never known anything else. It was the reason I wanted to leave, to go to a place where no one remembered that Anna beat me at every track meet in elementary school, even though she was a year younger. I wanted to be someone who made decisions: a state representative or a senator. Rapid Falls didn’t even have a mayor. City people learned about ideas and art, not the minutiae of their neighbors’ lives. The few times I’d visited Fraser City with my mom, the streets vibrated with energy. The only thing in the air in Rapid Falls was the faint odor of cedar when the mill was planking wood. Rapid Falls made me feel like my life was already decided for me. In Fraser City, my choices would be my own. And Jesse’s. That’s how I’d always imagined it, anyway.

We turned onto the highway and sped past the only hotel in town, the Rapid Falls Inn. Everyone who lived in Rapid Falls knew the road to Nicola well. It was the place where we visited dentists, went back-to-school shopping, and played in sports tournaments. Wealthier families traveled to the Nicola airport to fly even farther away. Not us. I had never been on a plane and neither had Anna. My dad didn’t like to travel, and it seemed like my mom had gotten tired of asking. I imagined packing a suitcase and entering a different world with the assistance of a paper ticket that entitled me to a new life, a new place, a new start. Somewhere where my sister wasn’t lying in a hospital bed and my boyfriend wasn’t dead at the bottom of a river.