CHAPTER THIRTY
All the parts that happened next came together in small pieces. Ironic, as the last thing I remembered was smashing an enchanted, dream-hijacking watch into a million atoms.
A Fragment:
I was finally dreaming a real dream because the sounds were wrong. These were not the sounds of the forest. And the temperature—both too hot and too cold. I couldn’t open my eyes. That felt way too hard. I didn’t understand why I was lying on my stomach. I never slept on my stomach.
Unless . . . this wasn’t a dream at all, and you did things you never did when you died.
But where, or even what, I was, I didn’t know.
Sensations pulled from every direction. Out-of-body, lead and stone, floating/sinking/drowning (all of these and all at once).
Smells passed over me like a confused cloud: smoke and metal; ripe, mulchy dirt.
Something burned too hot, too close. Sweat and the Jo Malone perfume Grier had given me for my birthday.
Brightness. A beam of it. My eyes were still shut, but someone needed to turn off this spotlight. Get me off this stage. I tucked my chin into my chest, and pain stabbed through my skull, end to end. Yes, this had to be death.
Voices rose as if they were at the end of a volume slider. Or emerging from a tunnel.
“Here! Over here!”
“Quick! Get the . . .” (Get the what? I didn’t know. Couldn’t hear.)
(Boots stomping over rock and dirt and crunchy glass. Heat and arms, the scrape of thick fabric.)
Pain became the very idea of power. A legion, an onslaught. Every sensation was violence. And with some other burst of strength from some other Sylvie (not this one, not her and me), my eyes flicked open once before my existence snapped back into blackness.
A Fragment:
Antiseptic. Clean (no earth, no smoke). Socks. Something squeezing my finger. A beep, beep, beep like an electronic bass line. The feeling that I could dance to it. Or sleep. Just let me sleep.
A Fragment:
I was not dreaming.
How did you know, Sylvie?
The shadow of my hand on a white sheet.
The feel of a pinch from my thumb into my index finger.
Two Fragments:
I did not die. And I was not a ghost.
How did you know, Sylvie?
Breathing. Breathing? Muted pain. The feel of my own skin—warm, not cold.
Someone in lavender put her hands to my head, and her hands did not pass through.
I hated needles, and someone in blue kept sticking me with them.
And yes, I knew that I had missed so many signs of life leaving my body in Sacred.
(A fresh memory of that was attached to me like another limb.) But here there was a hard reset, head to toe, and I felt like I was playing with full life points again.
The stuff of game potions and little red hearts that were filled up to the top.
A Fragment, Plus Another and Another:
At some point, I opened my eyes and didn’t immediately feel that this was the worst decision ever, and that more sleep was the only remedy. This particular wake–regret it–sleep cycle had gone on for quite a bit. But this time, I woke to the clearing of my entire self like a break in a dense forest.
A man to my left was saying, “Well, hello there, Sylvie.” He was so close, and he seemed to be checking things. Checking me. That was all I could come up with. He gave a small nod and asked, “Can you tell me your pain level, from one to ten? Point to one?”
A laminated paper with a row of face emojis slid in front of my face.
I gaped at the circles with pained expressions ranging from a smiley green happy face, to yellow-toned ones giving so-so vibes, to red circles full of misery.
I shook my head helplessly. The swirl inside my head couldn’t be measured by any of these flat emojis.
I shouldn’t be alive. Shouldn’t be here.
The bewildering uncertainty over what I’d just been through wasn’t represented anywhere on this paper.
“All right, all right,” the man said softly. “Let’s back up a bit. I’m Dr. Lewis. Two days ago, you were in an accident. The paramedics saved your life on-site. You’re a little banged up, but you have no lasting injuries.”
I was in an accident two days ago? Impossible. I had just been in the forest. This doctor was wrong. Inconsistencies taxed my brain so hard that it would’ve been much easier to dip my head back and return to sleep. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want easy.
My hands and jaw and shoulders began trembling because I couldn’t piece this thing together.
I still didn’t have all the parts. I couldn’t understand how Dr. Lewis said words to a lady behind him in lavender, and then my mom and dad (MOM AND DAD?) rushed in beside the bed.
Disheveled. Tearstained. My mother’s slight frame tucked under my father’s arm.
“How?” This was the first word I said. I applied it to a thousand unknowns.
My mother cried again. Her face said this was not the beginning of anything, but some horrible middle.
The woman in lavender—a nurse, she was a nurse—brought a cup to me, helped place a straw between my lips so I could drink.
“How are you here?” I pressed.
My dad swallowed hard and cupped a gentle hand around my cheek. “Michail. He sent us away in the helicopter right after we got the call. Then he had a private plane for us in Sicily. Gracias a Dios.”
“Call?” But cell service didn’t work here. And how did I even get here? “I was just at the cabin.”
“Mijita. You never made it to the cabin.”
“No,” I argued. “Tía and I have been there for a month already.” My parents exchanged worried looks.
“Doctor?” my mother managed. She clutched a gray woolly sweater tight around her shoulders. Wasn’t it summer? “You said she only had a concussion. And some cuts and bruises. You said no major head injury. But it took her so long to wake up, and now . . .”
“Mrs. Castellano,” Dr. Lewis said, “I assure you, all her scans are perfect, but Sylvie has suffered a great deal of shock. She’s confused, and that’s normal.
We sedated her to help her body get the rest she needed.
She might be fuzzy for a few more hours.
Let’s keep conversation simple. Maybe try a little food? ” He signaled the nurse.
Ten minutes later, an orderly brought two cups of vanilla pudding and a fizzy cranberry drink in a paper cup with crushed ice.
I ate and drank (ate and drank!). I watched my mom and dad under my lashes, and even though a sort of blistering confusion was wrapped around me, tighter than my bandages, there was a big, big, adventure-size realization sitting heavy in my gut.
But reality came up scrambled. Connecting all the strands (through avenues of arteries and an atlas of veins) took some time.
The clues I discovered were the kind I’d normally record in a notebook, but I didn’t need to this time.
For me to finally find my way home to what had really happened, I only had to read the paper-skin map of myself.
The imprint of a metal watch band was stamped into my left wrist.
I was marked with a splatter of bruises and bandages (forehead, thighs, right elbow, left side). Some cuts had stitches, which was fine because I hadn’t been conscious for them. But I also carried one distinct scar that had healed into a perfect welt. A line splitting my left palm into two.
My hands were decorated with a miraculously un-chipped set of pink gel nails. Graduation nails that I remembered falling off weeks ago.
There’s a reason hospitals have mental health professionals on-site. But no one summoned any doctor from the psych ward to evaluate me. If they had known what I’d realized in full, they would have called, and they would not have let me leave that hospital.
I could’ve followed my confusion and thrashed and screamed and ripped out my IV and escaped. Fourth of July fireworks at Skinner Butte will be canceled this year. I could’ve said this and so much more. I’d gathered enough prophecies to fill a dozen notebooks.
But I didn’t. Instead, everything I had seen and had been dropped into a single secret. Against the white sheets, I saw myself holding it like a red glass float, or a blue one. Tears pricked my eyelashes, and my heart was a runaway train, but I spun my secret inside my hands, around and around.
I’d woken in the ruins of a car accident I’d never experienced the first time—with one enormous difference: I’d survived. I didn’t die en route to anywhere. I didn’t fall back into another round of maddening, deteriorating limbo.
How did it happen, Sylvie? How?
The memory, the moment came with a shudder.
The watch. The backward-moving hands after the first blow I’d dared to strike.
It was the only explanation. Instead of casting me into some great, eternal unknown, the watch had moved me backward.
It had moved me here, where I had a second chance.
A great cosmic do-over. My own life was a wonder.
But then my thoughts went sideways, and I gripped the sheet, tugging painfully against the IV line.
I had been through more than hell; I’d been through .
. . time. For that reason, I tried to forgive myself for waiting this long to voice the biggest unknown I still had. Guilt came anyway and so hard.
“Tía Vivian?” I asked into the entire room.
I already knew, which is why the tears had already begun to coat my cheeks. Even before my mother disintegrated into my father’s chest. Even before my father used his words, not just universal hand motions and gestures.
“Your tía didn’t make it, nena. I’m so sorry.”