3. Louise
3
LOUISE
The streets were dark and empty as Louise’s mother, Bobbie, drove her home from the hospital. By the time the doctors agreed to release her, after what seemed like every possible test and scan and evaluation, it was nearly midnight.
Louise watched numbly as the familiar sights of her neighborhood flashed past, the quiet storefronts, restaurant patios with chairs stacked neatly, 1920s bungalows lined up in rows.
It all kept playing on a loop in her mind. The ambulance ride, the hours in the emergency room, her mother’s shocked, horrified face. And the minutes right before the crash, the fight she’d had with Peter. They rarely argued, and yet he had been distant when he picked her up to go to the pool that morning, his features strained as he stood at her door, holding a grease-stained bag of fast food.
She thought it was because of what happened at Kyle’s party, even though he’d told her he remembered nothing from the night. But as they drove away from their neighborhood, he looked at her and asked the one question she wasn’t expecting.
“Do you really want to go to NYU?”
Louise hadn’t known what to say at first, was relieved that it wasn’t about Peter’s confession the night before. But she also didn’t understand the question. NYU had been her plan for years, an idea sparked in a tiny hotel room on Louise’s sixteenth birthday, after a tour in which Louise’s mother had gushed loudly over every library and dorm and class building. She and her mother had sat up in their hotel bed that night poring over the course catalog on her mother’s phone.
“Look at all these econ classes, economics of media. Economics of innovation. Microfinance and calculus. Your big nerdy math brain would be in heaven,” her mother said, half teasing. But her eyes were so bright and alive that Louise could feel the excitement take root inside of her own body.
“Yes, come on, you know that,” she said to Peter. “I leave on Friday.”
“And then what? Major in economics? Go off to conquer the world of finance?”
The bite in his voice surprised her. Peter had been uncharacteristically quiet about her plans for college ever since she told him she had chosen NYU, but she had tried not to take it personally. He hadn’t gotten into a single college, not even his “safety” school, and even though he tried to laugh it off, she knew he was deeply embarrassed about it.
“What is your sudden problem with NYU? It’s a great school.”
He chewed on the nails on his left hand, a nervous tic. “It is a great school. For some people.”
Louise’s head pounded from her hangover. She didn’t want a fight. She only wanted to enjoy their last few days together in Richmond. “What is your point, Peter?”
Peter continued to chew on his nails, even though they were already worn down to the skin. “It just doesn’t…it doesn’t seem like you.” He checked the mirror as he merged onto the traf fic going over the James River, which churned beneath them, high from the previous months’ rains.
Louise rubbed her temple. She didn’t know what he was talking about, who exactly he thought she was. Every single moment of the last two years, every class, every extracurricular, had been mapped out to lead her to NYU. “We’re not six years old anymore. Playing dress-up in your basement. From what I remember, you wanted to be an astronaut. How’s that going for you?”
Peter’s mouth twitched at the memory, but he kept his eyes on the road. “Point taken—it’s just…” He took a small breath, as though steeling himself. “Tell me this isn’t just for your mom,” he said. “Say it once, and mean it, and I will never bring this up again.”
“Why would you say that?” she asked. Her mom loved NYU, but Louise had chosen to apply. She had chosen to enroll. And yet Peter was acting like she was some kind of puppet? “Of course it’s not for my mom.”
“She’ll be okay, Louise,” Peter said lightly. “She’s been okay now for a long time. You don’t have to base every decision off of what you think will make her happy.”
Louise’s stomach twisted. Peter knew, more than anyone, how that worry had shaped her life, how her mother’s unyielding sadness, her bouts of depression in the years after they moved from her family’s orchard to Richmond, had carved its way through her childhood like a river, creating vast gorges and valleys. Now he was acting as though she could simply pretend it never existed, as though that experience didn’t still live in every cell in her body.
“So be like you then? Tell everyone I’m taking a year off because I didn’t get into college? Still get celebrated with my parents buying me a car? It doesn’t work that way for me, Peter. No one pats me on the head for being a screwup—”
Louise stopped, immediately flooded with regret. “I didn’t mean that,” she said quickly, but Peter didn’t look at her, his jaw clenched.
Louise went on, rambling. “I think it’s great you’re going to take some time off. You get to travel. And go anywhere. And…and do anything.” She watched him anxiously, waiting for a sign he heard her.
“I’m not a screwup,” Peter said quietly.
And then in a flash of brightness, a screech of tires, the memory ended, replaced by another image: Peter, sprawled on the ground.
Every time she closed her eyes now, she saw him on the ground, broken and vacant, and then in the course of both milliseconds and an entire lifetime, alive, wide-eyed and awake and talking to the paramedics.
Her mother parked the car in front of their house, and for a few seconds neither spoke. She had been quiet since the hospital, tense in a way Louise didn’t understand, even as test after test came back normal, even after they spoke to Peter’s mom, Marion, and found out his tests were also normal, that they couldn’t find anything broken or damaged other than a handful of minor scrapes and bruises.
Louise looked back at Peter’s dark, white Cape Cod–style house across the street and touched her bruised shoulder.
“Let’s get you inside,” her mother said. “You must be starving. I can make you something if you’d like.”
“Mom,” Louise said, her voice cracking. She felt the words rise inside of her, the words she had wanted to scream all day, at everyone she saw in the hospital, at all the doctors and nurses who shook their heads and said they were both so lucky, to have survived, to come away without any real injuries. She had wanted to scream at Peter when she finally saw him, on her way out of the emergency room. He was being kept longer, for observation, and he had been asleep when her mother steered her into his room, and even then, Louise wanted to yell the words, wake Peter up and tell him what she knew beyond any doubt, what she saw on the street.
“Mom, Peter was dead,” Louise said.
There was a silence so deep that Louise wasn’t sure Bobbie had heard her.
“You just went through something very traumatic,” she finally said. “It’s normal to be…to be confused. You need to sleep. It will all feel better in the morning.”
With a wince, Louise unbuckled her seat belt and followed her mother up the brick walkway toward the house. “You’re not listening. He was dead. He went through the windshield and his neck was broken. I know it was. I saw it.”
Bobbie stopped and turned toward her. Even in the dark, Louise could make out the paleness of her skin, the way her hands trembled slightly.
“All that matters is he’s alive. You did CPR. You saved his life, and he’s going to be just fine.”
“I told you his neck was broken. It was bent. It was all wrong.”
Her mother shook her head, as though trying to force away the truth of Louise’s words. “You were in shock. Your eyes played tricks on you. You didn’t see what you thought you saw.”
Louise felt a surge of anger. “I wasn’t in shock. It was real. I saw him. He flew out the windshield, Mom. It wasn’t just his heart. It was…it was…everything. CPR shouldn’t have saved him.”
Her mother rubbed her face, smudging what was left of her makeup. She had turned forty earlier that year, and despite a few new wrinkles, was much younger than most of the parents of Louise’s classmates. “Louise, please, it’s late. And you’re exhausted. Maybe you hit your head harder than you remember. And you were…hallucinating, or things were jumbled, or you were dazed. Let’s just go inside.”
Bobbie strode quickly toward the house without looking back.
By the time Louise made it inside, her mother was already in the kitchen, pulling bread from the pantry. She was usually too busy with evening showings or listing appointments to cook, and over the years she had perfected the art of a sandwich dinner. She called it her one true domestic skill.
“I’m not hungry,” Louise said from the doorway.
Her mother picked up a knife to cut the loaf of bread, but she froze, holding it in midair.
“Mom.”
She shook her head again. “Not yet,” she said, the words so slight Louise wasn’t sure if she meant to say them out loud.
She put the knife down, closed her eyes, and gripped the counter. The only sound in the house was the hum of the refrigerator and the distant night noises from the yard, chirps of cicadas and crickets, the occasional rumble of a car.
“You’re right,” she said at last. She opened her eyes, which shone under the kitchen lights. “It was real. And I believe you.”
Louise let her mother guide her to a seat at the kitchen table. Her anger was gone, and her entire body felt hollow, exhausted in a way she had never experienced.
“I think I brought him back. He was gone and I brought him back.”
“I know,” Bobbie said. “I know you did.”
Louise’s confusion deepened at her reaction. There was no shock, no surprise, only a sorrowful kind of understanding.
“I should have told you. Years ago.” Bobbie clasped her hands together on the table. “I didn’t know if you’d be like me, or her,” she said. “I tried to believe you wouldn’t be.”
“Be what ?”
Bobbie took a deep breath, as though willing herself to say the words. “A healer.”
Before Louise could respond, she reached out and set a hand on Louise’s sore shoulder. At first it was just a small, hesitant gesture, uncertain. But then she increased the pressure, and warmth began to spread under Louise’s skin, a trickle, and then a wave, until the pain was gone.
She gazed up at her mother, her mind shifting and rearranging a hundred memories from when they’d lived in Crozet, the sting of scraped knees and burns that lost their edge with a kiss from her grandmother, sore throats and stomach aches and growing pains that receded like a tide when her great-grandmother held her.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I know,” her mom said sadly, withdrawing her hand. “I don’t even really understand it myself, honey. I don’t know if I can explain it to you.” She steeled herself. “But I know who can.”
* * *
Louise woke to the sound of tapping on her bedroom window. For one blissful moment, she rolled over, relieved. It had all been a horrible dream, the accident, the hospital, her conversation with her mother. But as she sat up, she felt the sting in her eyes from where she hit the airbag.
The tapping grew louder and more insistent. Louise pulled herself to her feet and crossed the room, glancing at her phone. It was nearly four in the morning, and only one person could be here at that hour.
When she opened the window, her eyes went immediately to the hospital band around Peter’s wrist. She didn’t want to see his face, picture him the way he had been on the ground.
“Are you okay?” he asked her.
She tried to nod but she couldn’t look away from the band.
“Louise.”
There was a rawness in his voice, and finally she made herself look up. She didn’t know what she expected, but there was nothing out of the ordinary, no sign that they hadn’t just spent the afternoon at the pool as planned.
“Are you okay?” he repeated.
She leaned against the window frame. “I’m okay.”
A garbage truck rumbled by in the dark street behind them.
“You don’t look okay.”
Louise didn’t know what she could possibly say to him. It felt absurd to talk, to pretend she hadn’t felt the absence of his heartbeat only hours earlier, and the explosion of electricity as she pumped her hands into his chest.
“I’m tired—that’s all.” She stalled, feeling the weight of the next question. “I’m the one that should be asking how you are.”
Outside the window, Peter slumped against the opposite side of the frame as her. “I’m fine. I don’t know how. No one does. The doctors were so insistent on finding something wrong with me I’m pretty sure I got every test there.” His eyes darted toward Louise. “They said it’s because of you. That you did CPR. That you saved my life.”
Louise pressed her forehead to the cool window frame. “I don’t know.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
For the first time since she came home, Louise felt an order to her thoughts, a sense that the world could right itself. He was there. He was alive, standing at her window, and they were acting the way they did as kids in the summer, sneaking out to play in his tree house with flashlights and scare each other with ghost stories. Did it really matter how he was alive? Or was it enough that he simply was?
She wanted to tell him everything. He was the only one in her life she could always be honest with, who knew about the stretches of darkness that consumed her house in the years after they moved, who had always been there waiting in the chaos of his own loud, messy home, ready to welcome her in. But she felt the words lodge inside of her. She didn’t even understand yet what her mother had told her in the kitchen, or all of the implications. So, she told him the one true thing she could. “I thought you were gone. But I couldn’t let you go.”
Without a word Peter leaned through the window and wrapped his arms around her. He held her so tight that it hurt, but Louise didn’t care. She breathed deeply into his shoulder, the smell of his laundry detergent mixing with the smell of hospital, alcohol, and bleach and plastic.
“Thank you,” Peter murmured into her hair. “It feels so stupid to say that. It’s not enough. It will never be enough. But I still have to say it.”
The weight of his arms, the pressure of his chest against hers, she wished desperately she could reverse time, go back before the accident, to the party, to when he told her he loved her. If she could change that one moment, she could change everything that had followed.
Abruptly, Peter let go. Louise could sense his embarrassment, as though he too were remembering the party, what he said, what she didn’t.
“It’s a little blurry,” he said without meeting her eyes. “But, in the car, before the crash. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I know I was being a jerk.”
It seemed irrelevant now, to argue about college. Peter was alive. It was all that mattered. “No, I’m the one who should be apologizing. I should never have said… I don’t think you’re a screwup, Peter. You’re one of the smartest people I know. I just wanted you to shut up and—”
“Why don’t we just call an asshole truce?” he said, waving her away before she could finish.
Louise could tell he was uncomfortable with her attempts to smooth over what she’d said earlier. Nothing made Peter more self-conscious than his struggles in school, especially when he always compared himself to Louise and his older brothers, one of whom was in law school and the other premed.
“I wasn’t at my best either,” he continued. “And I know you can decide what you want to do. You don’t need my advice. I’m an idiot. I shouldn’t have brought up the stuff with your mom… It wasn’t—”
“It’s fine,” Louise interrupted. She didn’t need him to rationalize it or try to apologize. She only wanted to pretend the conversation had never happened, tuck his words away in a dark, secret place where she wouldn’t ever have to wonder about them. “We don’t need to talk about it.”
“Okay, so then what do I owe you?” Peter said abruptly. “I mean, would a cheeseburger do? Gift card? I think twenty-five dollars is probably sufficient for saving my life, right?”
“I think I deserve at least fifty dollars.”
Peter nodded and played with his hospital bracelet. “I’m exhausted. I need to go to sleep, and my mother will kill me if she knows I broke out of invalid jail. I just wanted to check to see how you were.”
“I’m okay, really. It’s just been a long night.” She motioned toward the sky, the lighter shade of blue at the edges. “Almost morning.” She didn’t know what else to say to him, how to lie, pretend the landscape of their relationship hadn’t drastically shifted.
“Well, after I sleep until at least noon, I’ll call you. Maybe we can try the pool thing again.” He winced. “Only my car is totaled…so…”
Louise started to nod, but then recalled her conversation with her mother. I’m a healer. And your grandmother. And you, it seems . She can explain it better than me. “I’m not going to be here later, actually. I’m going to Crozet with my mom.”
Peter cocked his head in confusion. “To…?”
“To visit my grandmother.”
“With your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you don’t have a concussion?”
Louise rolled her eyes. “I am not concussed. It was my mom’s idea.” She paused, aware that she would have to lie to him. Peter knew that her mother and grandmother had almost no relationship, that they barely spoke to each other.
“She wants to try harder,” Louise said as she chewed on her lip, hoping he wouldn’t see through the lie. “I think it was the accident. Shook her up. So yeah, I said we could go see her.”
He watched her closely. “Okay, that’s weird, and random, but fine. What about the plans we made for this week, though? Midnight movie at the Byrd. Float night at the pool. This is our last week together… I mean…”
Louise was surprised to hear the urgency in his voice. Peter had never needed her the way she needed him. He had other friends, people he could easily call up to grab a meal or go see a movie. “I’ll be back tomorrow night, at the latest. I promise. I just have to take care of some family stuff.”
She knew how vague she was being, but she didn’t know what else to say to him, how to explain that she had to see her grandmother to find out why he was alive.
Peter remained unconvinced, but finally he nodded. “Call me when you get back?”
“Of course.”
When he was gone, Louise lay back down on her bed and absently rubbed her shoulder. The pain was only a distant echo, like the last soft rumbles of thunder after a storm. She stared at the ceiling, at the glow-in-the-dark stickers she’d put up years earlier, her own private sky, littered with stars.