Chapter Forty Six
FORTY-SIX
Everything that happens next doesn’t quite seem real.
First, a propeller plane lands on a lake, its fuselage skimming across the surface like a water strider.
Next, it comes to a stop near the shore and a door flies open to reveal a tall, strong woman in a green flight suit, gray-blond hair spilling out of a tight black stocking cap.
For a second, she just stares at you like you’re ghosts.
Then, suddenly, she seems to understand that you’re alive and she starts moving very quickly.
She hops back in the plane and drives it like a boat, as close as she can get to the shore.
Finally, she comes running out with supplies, sloshing through knee-deep water.
“Oh my god!” she says. “Oh my god. What on earth are you kids doing out here?”
Before you can answer, she radios in that she’s found you, and a far-off, staticky voice sounds just as stunned that people are still standing in the wake of this fire.
Then the pilot has blankets. They look like they’re made of tinfoil, and she hands them out, unfolding them and draping them over you, asking you rapid questions about your hypothermic symptoms.
“Look at me!” she says. “Are you slurring your speech? Do you have memory loss? Do you feel drowsy?”
She’s talking so fast that you can barely understand her. By the time you’ve formed a response to one question, another one has popped up. Finally, you get space to tell her about Troy, and her face goes slack. She hands you each a drink. Then she sprints back to the plane.
You immediately open what you recognize is a warm bottle of Gatorade, fruit-punch flavor, and when you take a sip, it is undoubtably the best drink you have ever had in your life.
For five seconds or so, you are wholly transported.
You nearly fall to your knees. It activates taste buds you didn’t even know you had, and you can’t help yourself: You moan with pleasure.
But this pleasure is short-lived. Because immediately, the pilot, who tells you to call her Maddy, needs your help carrying something called a backboard.
You and Will take the front, and Maddy takes the back, and in this way, you head to the place where you left Troy.
On the way there, she finally asks what happened to you guys, and Diana tells her some details in a shaky voice.
“I wish I could say this was my first rescue for a troubled-teen program. But it’s not. What kind of group was this? You only had one guide?”
Maddy stops talking when she reaches Troy’s body, and you’ve never wanted anything more in your life than to find him breathing.
You can’t tell at first if he is, but then you see his chest rise ever so slightly.
Maddy gets down and performs an assessment, paying close attention to his burns and bruises.
And while she gives you instructions about how to help her load him on the board, she asks only one simple question.
“How did he get like this?”
The story, which Fran tells, is hard for you to hear.
During the fire, Will and Fran made a shelter similar to yours with their canoe, wedging it against a rock near the shore.
Quarters were tight with three of them under there, and when the temperature started to rise, Troy couldn’t take it.
He busted out of the fire shelter and swam the rest of the way to shore, only to be hit with burning debris when he arrived.
Maddy says he could be bleeding internally, and that you need to get him on oxygen in the plane as quickly as possible. When you ask point-blank if he’ll live, she looks you dead in the eye and says:
“I don’t know, honey.”
Then, apropos of nothing, she wraps you in a tight hug.
The kind your mom gives you when she hasn’t seen you in a while.
And for the first time, you fully realize that all of this really happened.
There is an adult here. And this one actually wants to help you. She releases you from the hug and says:
“To be honest, I don’t know how any of you are alive.”
And when you bend down, she catches sight of your head wound and tells you to lie down when you get to the aircraft too. Which is how you find yourself on oxygen, lying next to Troy on an improvised bed made of blankets, with a bandage on your head and an IV in your arm.
Diana holds your hand. Will and Fran are holding Troy’s hands.
You are all headed toward a base where you’ll then be driven to a hospital.
These facts haven’t totally kicked in yet.
This rescue still feels like something you could wake up from any minute.
There are fake-outs like these all the time in Choose Your Own Adventure books.
You find yourself in relative safety only to recognize that you’ve been brainwashed and imprisoned in a mine.
Diana gives your hand a squeeze, and you feel like you could fall asleep for a thousand years.
But instead, you look around the plane and you see that everyone is starting to zone out, staring off into the distance.
They’re already trying their hardest to disconnect from what happened.
And you don’t blame them. It’s probably the healthy thing to do in this moment.
A form of protection. But you also feel a strange preemptive sense of loss as you watch this happen.
Not because you don’t want this to be over—you very much do—but because when this plane lands, and everyone is eventually reunited with their families, that could be the end.
“Hey…,” you say, snapping everyone out of their trances.
They look toward you, concern in their eyes. You take a long pull of oxygen.
“Fear in a Hat?”
Nobody smiles. You’re all too tired for that. But nobody tells you to shut up either. And after a brief and silencing dip of turbulence, Fran finally opens her mouth.
“That Troy won’t wake up,” she says. “That’s mine. I didn’t want to say it out loud, but if we had a hat, that would be in there.”
You all look at Troy, his eyes still closed on the backboard, his body strapped down. You remember him waking up screaming on the first night, and you realize two things at once: that you love him and that he might never see Turbo again. But you swallow this down.
“I have another one,” says Will, clearing his throat. “My fear is that it’s all going to be the same when we land. Like: everything. Same as before. And all of this was for nothing.”
You assume he means his situation with his dad, his sports goals, and his loneliness. And you know that every one of you is thinking some version of this too. What if this experience has only made things worse? Or what if you’ve changed and the world hasn’t?
Will’s answer leaves only you and Diana left to share. She closes her eyes a second. Then she pulls her bruised knees to her chest.
“That I’ll never forgive myself,” she says.
She’s not looking at you. Or at least, not just at you.
“I’m going to try. But I’m not sure I really know how.”
No one asks her what she’s referring to. Maybe they know. Or maybe you all have something you need to forgive yourself for.
You want to hold her then, but you can’t move from your bed without disconnecting from your IV.
“What’s yours, Case?”
“What?” you say.
She leans down by your ear.
“Your fear?” she says. “What’s yours?”
You were never great at this game. But this time your sheet isn’t blank. This time, there’s something sitting there just waiting for you to speak it.
“That we won’t be friends,” you say.
There’s a moment of silence and everyone watches you. The vibration of the plane is all you can hear, and it’s making your ears ring. You try a yawn to unpop them.
“Why wouldn’t we be?” says Fran.
Her voice is so soft, you can barely make it out over the propellers.
“Because it’s hard,” says Diana.
Everyone turns to her.
“When you’ve been through something really painful with somebody, then they can be …
a reminder of that pain. Like, if this plane actually lands and you go back to your life and eventually feel better, seeing me might bring you back to that place of fear.
It … it can happen. Even if you care about the person. ”
You feel Diana’s eyes on you, and this time you meet them.
“It’s not fair,” you say. “But it’s real.”
The plane tilts to the left then, and suddenly you can see miles of forest out a nearby window.
And all of it has been depleted. Aside from the blinding blue patches of lake, it looks like the wilderness you traversed was a charcoal drawing that someone put their thumb on and smeared.
White smoke pours up from nearly every direction, and you wonder if everything you just experienced has all been turned to ash.
And if it’s all gone, where did the experiences go?
For now, they’re still with you—you can see them so clearly—but how long will it be until your brain decides that the memories are harmful?
How long until it erases the fish you caught or the way it felt hearing the embers bouncing off your canoe?
The same is true, you know, of Sean. You’ve tried so hard to keep the memories you have with him alive, to play them out in your head like movies.
But gradually, some of those will start to go too.
And then, tree by tree, you’ll lose him in pieces like the forest below you. You might lose everyone this way.
“It can’t be over,” says Fran, who is also staring toward the window.
“Why not?” says Will.
“Because,” she says, “we’re all connected now. Whether we want to be or not.”
No one denies it. But no one jumps up to declare allegiance either.
“We magnified each other,” she says.
She reaches out for Diana’s hand, who hesitates, then takes it.
“It was dark out there, you guys. It almost got us.”
You can feel the plane dip lower in the sky. And thankfully, this seems intentional. You’re already starting your descent, heading back to earth, where everything you’ve discussed awaits you, whether you want it to or not. Fran still watches out the window.
“But we made one another brighter somehow,” she says. “And I don’t think even our fear can kill that.”