I thought about Karen while I walked. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Karen used to be my favorite person in the world. When I was little, she’d let me sleep in her bed during thunderstorms. She taught me to ride a bike. She used to braid my hair before school, French braids, so tight it made my eyes water.
Then Mom got sick. And Karen changed.
She was sixteen then. She stopped braiding my hair. She stopped coming home after volleyball practice. She’d go out with her friends and come home late and go straight to her room and lock the door.
When Mom died, Karen didn’t cry at the funeral. Not once. I cried so hard I threw up in the church bathroom. Karen just stood there in her black dress with her arms crossed, staring at the casket like she was angry at it.
The next spring, she tore her ACL during a volleyball game. Her right knee. I heard it pop from the bleachers. She had surgery in May, and the doctor gave her a bottle of painkillers. Oxycodone.
I remember Dad picking up the prescription at the CVS on Main Street. I remember Karen saying they made her feel like she was floating.
She was supposed to take them for two weeks.
I don’t know when they stopped being for her knee.
After the first mile, I couldn’t stop shivering.
It wasn’t regular shivering. It was the kind that starts in your stomach and spreads outward, so your whole body jerks. My teeth chattered so hard I bit my tongue and tasted blood.
After the second mile, my fingers started going numb. They felt thick and clumsy, like I was wearing invisible oven mitts. I tried to stuff my hands under my armpits, but my armpits were wet too, and the shaking only got worse.
Thunder rolled over the trees. The wind pushed the rain sideways across the empty road, straight into my face, so I had to walk with my head down.
“Just keep walking,” I whispered.
My voice sounded tiny. The storm swallowed it whole.
The road went on and on. There were no sidewalks. No streetlights after the first mile. Just a narrow gravel shoulder and a ditch on the side, full of rushing water, and on the other side of the ditch, dark fields and patches of woods.
No houses with their lights on. No businesses. No shelter.
Somewhere in the third mile, my thoughts started slipping.
I couldn’t remember if I’d passed the same mailbox twice. There was a mailbox shaped like a fish, I think, and then later I saw it again. Or maybe it was a different fish. I kept looking for road signs, but they blurred in the rain and I couldn’t read them.
At one point, I saw our kitchen window. I swear I did. It was glowing yellow through the trees on my left, warm and bright, with the blue curtains Mom sewed. I could even smell Dad’s coffee, the cheap Folgers kind he made every morning.
Then I blinked. And there was nothing there. Just black trees and rain.
My knees started trembling. My chest hurt, a tight squeezing pain right in the middle, like someone was standing on it.
And then something strange happened.
I stopped feeling cold.
I was so cold that suddenly I didn’t feel cold enough anymore. I felt almost warm. I had the strangest urge to take off my sweatshirt, because it felt too heavy and too hot.
That frightened me more than anything else that night. Because even in my foggy brain, I knew that was wrong. We’d learned about it in health class, in the unit on outdoor safety. When you stop feeling cold, it means your body is giving up.
I remember thinking about my backpack. How stupid it was. I’d grabbed my algebra homework, and I hadn’t grabbed my coat.
Number fourteen. Two lines. Find where they cross.
Then my right knee buckled.
I stumbled sideways onto the gravel shoulder. My hands hit the ground, and I didn’t even feel the rocks.
“Get up,” I told myself. “Get up.”
I pushed against the ground. My arms shook so violently I could barely lift myself. I got one foot under me. Then the other. I managed one step.
Then my left knee gave out.
My cheek hit the wet gravel. I felt it, distantly, like it was happening to someone else.
Somewhere nearby, tires hissed along the road. A car. I tried to yell. I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Not a word. Not a sound.
The car kept going.
My backpack had slipped around under my chest. I curled around it the way you’d curl around a pillow. I pressed my numb hands against the wet green fabric.
Rain washed across my face. It got in my eyes and I couldn’t close them fast enough.
I thought about the porch light going off.
About Karen staring at the carpet.
About Dad turning the lock.
Click.
And then the world just went away.
Chapter Four: The Phone Call
Everything I’m about to tell you, I learned later. From Officer Daniels. From the doctors. From the woman who found me. From my father, a long time afterward, when he could finally say it out loud.
I wasn’t there for any of it. Not really.
Her name was Rosalind Okafor, but everybody called her Roz. She was fifty-three years old and she was a home health nurse. That night, she’d worked a double shift taking care of an old man with Parkinson’s in a farmhouse out past the county line, and she was driving home on County Road 9 a little after eleven.
She almost didn’t see me.
“I thought you were a garbage bag,” she told me later, sitting by my hospital bed. “That’s the God’s honest truth, baby. A big dark lump on the side of the road. I was already past you.”
Then her headlights caught something. A flash of white.
My sneaker. The white rubber toe of my Converse.
Roz slammed on her brakes so hard her purse flew off the passenger seat. She threw her car in reverse and backed up fifty feet on a dark wet road in the rain, which she says is the most dangerous thing she’s ever done in her life.
She found me lying at the edge of the drainage ditch. My face was turned to the side. My lips were blue. My skin was white, so white it almost glowed in her headlights.
She knelt down in the gravel and put two fingers on my neck.
Nothing.
She put her ear down against my mouth.
Nothing.
“I’ve been a nurse for twenty-nine years,” Roz told me. “I knew what I was looking at. I knew it was bad. But you were so little, curled up around that backpack like a baby with a blanket. I said, Lord, not this one. Not on my road.”
She called 911 on her cell phone. She put it on speaker and set it on the gravel. Then she rolled me onto my back, tilted my head, and started chest compressions right there on the side of County Road 9, in the freezing rain, with water running into her collar.
The dispatcher counted with her. One, two, three, four. Roz says she broke two of my ribs. She says she could feel them go. She kept pushing.
It took the ambulance fourteen minutes to get there.
Roz did CPR on me for fourteen minutes.
