If You Were Here Read online

  “This looks bad,” the paramedic with the clipboard said. “Any word on the shooter?”

  “Cops put so many holes in that kid that if he drank a Coke it’d come shooting out in every direction.”

  “Damn,” the first paramedic whistled. “I should probably wait to hear the whole story, but right now I’m looking at this kid here and thinking that the other guy got what he deserved.”

  The second paramedic adjusted the IV running into Daniel’s arm, pulling a piece of tape off a roll with his gloved hand and securing the IV tube against Daniel’s skin. “Yeah, and it’s a shame about that teacher.”

  “She didn’t make it?”

  “Gone when they got to her,” he said quietly. “I guess she got shot in the stomach. She bled out before anyone got there.”

  The ambulance hit a pothole and everything inside jostled. The sack of fluid connected to Daniel’s IV swayed on its pole. With the same hand, the paramedic reached out and touched Daniel’s arm again as a way of making the patient feel like someone was there. They’d been trained not just to offer medical care, but also to remember that every person who ended up in the back of their ambulance was an actual human being who belonged to someone. He applied a light pressure to Daniel’s arm that he hoped was reassuring.

  As they wheeled into the short, curved driveway of the hospital, the paramedics started the process of readying Daniel for transport. The situation was critical enough that he’d have to be moved into surgery as quickly and smoothly as possible. There was no room for error.

  The sounds and smells of a busy hospital penetrated the haze that Daniel’s mind had wrapped him in. He could feel the stretcher being wheeled down the hallway, and in a remote way, he knew that something unpleasant awaited him at the end of this ride.

  “Prepping patient for x-rays and surgery,” said a female voice. “We’ll need to determine the entry point and find out where the bullet is lodged,” she said. “Do we know that it’s only one entry point?”

  “We’ve checked him out, and there’s only one bullet hole,” said the same paramedic who’d decided that Blake had gotten what was coming to him.

  “Couldn’t have gotten shot in a worse place, really,” the female voice said. “But he’s lucky, because Dr. Margin is on today and she’s the best neurosurgeon in the tri-state area.”

  “Not sure this kid would see anything that’s about to happen as ‘lucky,’” said the paramedic. “But I’m pulling for him.”

  “Thanks, Matt,” the woman said. She came in closer to Daniel, which he could tell because her voice was louder in his ear. “Hey,” she said gently. “I’m Stacy, and I’m going to take you to get an x-ray. You’re in good hands,” she said, squeezing his fingers for emphasis.

  Daniel’s mind tried to process the voices and the words, but he’d lost the ability to view the situation he was in from a different vantage point. Now it was all blackness and echoing voices. And Stacy’s hand grasping his fingers. Stacy. She sounded nice. He wondered if she had kids, or a dog. Maybe a golden retriever. He’d have bet she had a husband. Someone who played on a baseball team on Friday nights and called her “Stace.”

  And then Daniel wondered why he was able to have all the thoughts he was having but couldn’t even open his own damn eyes. Open! he shouted in his head. Sit up! Do something! You aren’t dead! But as far as his ability to move and talk and think, he kind of was dead.

  For Daniel, time started to move like a river. It flowed over and around him, and he had no concept of where it started or where it ended. Voices came and went, and he could feel his body moving slowly as the bed he was on was pushed through hallways and swinging doors. The overhead lights were visible through his thin, veined eyelids, but he was powerless to open them and see where he was being taken.

  The sounds and routines of the operating room sprang to life around him as he lay motionless on the hospital bed. Sterilized instruments were placed in careful order on trays next to the operating table, and nurses and doctors scrubbed in behind a glass window, holding their hands up so they wouldn’t attract germs.

  Dr. Margin entered the operating room. She backed through the swinging door, hands held in front of her as she waited for a nurse to snap her latex gloves into place.

  “Music, please,” she said, looking at the nurse closest to the computer. “I think I’m in the mood for 80s today.”

  “Tears for Fears?” the nurse asked, clicking her mouse.

  “Sure.” Dr. Margin approached Daniel, looking at his still face. “Hmm,” she said pensively, scanning his head and taking in the wound on the side of his freshly shaved skull. “Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

  The opening notes of “Head Over Heels” played through the speakers as everyone took their place in the operating room. Within minutes, they were ready.

  Dr. Margin picked up the shiny silver instrument and held it in one hand as she took a deep breath and watched Daniel’s face. “Let’s do this.”

  11

  January 9, 1986

  Head Over Heels

  Mr. Peabody had a boombox sitting on the bottom bleacher by the outdoor track. “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears blasted into the cold morning as we ran our morning laps half-heartedly.

  “So have you talked to her yet?” Roger’s breath puffed out in a cloud in front of him as we jogged side-by-side on Thursday morning. We had P.E. second period, and I’d come to him directly from Mrs. Henderson’s English class with Jenny still on my mind.

  “I asked her if I could borrow a pencil,” I said lamely. “And she said yes.”

  Roger stopped running. By the time I realized he wasn’t next to me, I was a quarter of the way around the track.

  “Dude,” Roger shouted. “A pencil?” His skinny white legs stuck out from his navy blue gym shorts. “That kind of talk is not going to get you laid.”

  I stopped running and turned to face him. “I just want to get to know her,” I said.

  “Then ask her what she’s doing tomorrow night. Ask her what she did last night. Ask her what her favorite song is. But for fuck’s sake, don’t ask her for a pencil!” Roger started running again and caught up with me just as the P.E. teacher blew his whistle at us.

  “We’re running, we’re running,” I said, waving a hand to show him we’d heard.

  “So you need to make a move. What’s it going to be?” Roger’s breath filled the air again and I could feel the coldness tightening in my own lungs as we tried to catch up to the rest of our class.

  “Well, I don’t know. I was thinking I could read ahead in our book in English class and ask her about something like I don’t get it. Or I could find out where she works and show up there—”

  Roger stopped running again. “No.” He held up a hand. “No, no, no.”

  I kept jogging in place so the teacher wouldn’t blow his whistle again. “No what?”

  “You’re overthinking this. How about if you just ask her to a movie or something?”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. It’s that simple.” Roger licked his chapped lips. “We could double if you want.” He glanced around to see if anyone was nearby. “I’ve got one or two fish squirming on the hook right now myself.”

  “Who?” I wasn’t sure I believed him.

  “You know…a few chicks. I want to keep it under wraps until something pans out.”

  “Right.” I nodded at him like I honestly believed him. “But can you reel one in before tomorrow? Because I’m thinking Friday might be a good night.”

  Roger ran his hand over his chin like he was dragging it over stubble. “Yeah….I could probably seal the deal on one of these cuties by the end of the day. Let me get to work.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder and gave me a shove. “Now keep running. Mr. Peabody is about to take away our points for the day.”

  We broke into a fast run and caught up with the two fattest kids in class so that we weren’t bringing up the back of the line anymore.

&n
bsp; “Hey,” I called to Roger as he ran towards the locker room. “What are you doing after school today?”

  “Eating.”

  “Other than that?”

  Roger turned around and jogged backwards. “Not much. Whatcha got in mind?”

  “I have something I want to show you,” I said.

  Roger raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know, dude. I might not want to see it.”

  “Not like that. I need your help with something.”

  “Sounds intriguing.” Roger kept jogging in place as he held up his middle finger at Mr. Peabody’s retreating figure. “I’ll be over after dinner.”

  I waved at him as he shoved past the two fat kids and raced through the double doors to beat everyone to the showers.

  The hallway was crowded after the final bell rang that day. I waited until a group of basketball players had walked by my locker before I spun the dial and yanked it open. As I was pulling out my history book to take home with me, I caught a glimpse of Jenny out of the corner of my eye. She was standing at another girl’s locker, her eyes scanning the busy hall.

  I needed to talk to her again. I needed to ask her out for Friday night. But I had no idea how to approach her and I felt sick just thinking about it.

  Without letting my brain talk me out of it, I slammed my locker and walked across the hall. She was leaning against one of the turquoise lockers, holding her math book to her chest as she talked animatedly with the other girl.

  “Jenny,” I said. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears.

  Jenny stopped talking and looked at me. “Oh. Hey.” Her face was impassive. I knew why I didn’t remember New Year’s Eve and our kiss (or whatever had happened), but I had no idea why she always gave me such a blank stare. It was like she’d never seen me before. Could I really be that unmemorable?

  “It’s Daniel,” I said, pointing at myself.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

  “I’ve gotta catch my bus,” the other girl said to Jenny. “Call me later?”

  “I will.” Jenny pushed off the locker like she was about to walk away.

  “I was wondering if you wanted to…I don’t know…”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “Go to the movies with me tomorrow night. Or something.”

  “Or something?”

  I had no idea why she was making this so difficult. I wanted to just walk away and pretend I’d never asked, but finding this girl had been so hard, and something in her serious eyes made me want to peel back the layers and figure out what she was all about.

  “I want to take you out,” I said firmly. “I’ve wanted to see you and talk to you since New Year’s, and you’re making this really hard.” It came out stronger than it sounded in my head, and her face softened.

  “Since New Year’s?” she asked, dipping her chin so that her straight bangs fell over her forehead. “I never even heard from you after New Year’s.”

  Jenny started to walk away from me. I followed her.

  “Roger and I spent the entire next day trying to find you,” I said. My voice was too loud in the nearly empty hallway. The words echoed after her. “We went to Heather’s and then to Emily’s, and all I got were some bullshit stories about you going from one house to the next. Why were you so hard to find?” Against my better judgment, I was starting to get mad at her. I didn’t feel like I deserved the cold shoulder she was giving me.

  “You looked for me?” She spun around in the middle of the hallway. “Heather never mentioned that. Neither did Emily.” I could see by the look in her eyes that she didn’t believe me.

  “We went over to Heather’s and she was about to watch Sixteen Candles in her basement. She told us to go to Emily’s.” I rattled off the story as proof that I’d tried my hardest that day. “Emily’s mom didn’t want to let her talk to us, but we finally got it out of her that the cops came and you left in the middle of the night and went somewhere else.”

  Jenny was nodding, her eyes trained on the floor beside me as she chewed her lower lip. “That’s true,” she said quietly.

  “We hitchhiked through the snow,” I said. Desperation was setting in. “And I was only wearing parachute pants—it was cold!”

  I’d meant it seriously, but at this, Jenny’s face cracked and I could see that she was about to give in. She had an amazing smile.

  The mildly angry feeling inside of me started to melt as she laughed, and before I knew it, I was laughing too.

  “Parachute pants?” she giggled. “In the snow?”

  “Yeah,” I said, grinning at her like an idiot. “And we hitchhiked with old people.”

  Her laugh kicked up a notch and she clutched the textbook to her chest again. “With old people?”

  I nodded at her. This girl was a total mystery to me. “Yeah.” I wasn’t laughing anymore. “I would have done anything to find you.”

  My serious tone killed her laughter. “Me?” She looked up through those straight, dark bangs and stared directly into my eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said, searching her face. “You.”

  We stood there for a minute as the hallway emptied out completely. The door at the end of the hall slammed shut. We were alone.

  “So.” Jenny took a nervous step backward. She blinked a few times, but didn’t look away. “Now that you’ve found me, what are you going to do with me?”

  12

  December 17, 2016

  Broken Wings

  Daniel’s unmoving form lay still under a tightly-fitted white sheet and hospital blanket. The bandages were wrapped around his head, and his eyes were closed under the fluorescent overhead lights. The room was empty and clean—he’d just been moved there after surgery, and the mountain of flowers and cards that would soon fill the room hadn’t even been delivered yet.

  The sound of monitors beeping and the hushed voices of the nurses on the ICU floor outside Daniel’s room filtered into his brain. All images of Blake and the hallway and Mrs. Henderson’s English class yesterday morning had dissolved as he slept. Daniel had no memory of crouching behind tables as Blake shouted his name in the empty hall, and no memory of their confrontation after Mrs. Henderson had fallen to her knees, bleeding to death inside the classroom.

  As Daniel’s eyes moved slowly beneath his eyelids, all that he was conscious of were sounds. A doctor opened the door to his room and walked in with a clipboard in hand, his face serious and concerned as he assessed the situation. He walked over to Daniel’s bed and stared at the young patient as the ventilator caused his chest to mechanically rise and fall. The steady hum and beep of the machines was the only sound in the room aside from the ballpoint pen scratching across the clipboard as the doctor took notes.

  “Where is he? I want to see my son!” A woman’s voice echoed through the ICU. “Let me see him!”

  The doctor set his clipboard on the foot of the bed and rushed to the door to see what the racket was about.

  Lisa Girch was standing at the nurse’s station with wild hair and a raincoat that hung off her bare shoulder, revealing a tattoo of a blue bird and a heart on her pale, freckled skin. She tugged the jacket over her shoulder as the doctor approached.

  “Ma’am,” he said, reaching out a hand that he never intended to touch her with. “You need to calm down.”

  “Calm down, my ass!” Lisa shouted, reeling around. As she did, the contents of her cracked leather purse spilled from the counter, tubes of lipstick and bottles of pills scattering across the polished floor and rolling underneath the plastic chairs in the waiting area.

  “You brought my son in yesterday with a head injury—Daniel Girch. He was shot and then he went right to surgery and I didn’t even—” Lisa was getting herself worked up to the point that hyperventilation seemed like a very real possibility.

  The doctor finally made contact with her, placing one large, strong hand on her bony elbow. “This way, ma’am,” he said, nearly dragging her birdlike body along beside his. She
clomped after him, her ankles wobbly on her tall wedge sandals. The shoes were a poor choice for both the weather and the situation. “You can see him now, but only briefly.”

  The door to the hospital room was the only thing that stood between Lisa and her son, and although her first instinct was to shoulder the door like a football player and race through the room to see and hold her only child, at the threshold to the room she paused.

  “Is he…” She faltered, nearly tugging her elbow out of the doctor’s firm grip. “I mean, will he…”

  “He’s alive, Mrs. Girch.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to correct the tall, handsome, middle-aged doctor with the distinguished crow’s feet and the blue vein running across his temple. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t a “Mrs”—had never been anyone’s “Mrs”—but something in her gave way at that moment, and all she could think about was her child.

  “I’m ready to see him,” Lisa whispered, putting a hand against the wooden door.

  Inside, Daniel lay just as before, his bed a solitary island floating on a sea of shiny linoleum. The sound of the machines punctuated the silence.

  The doctor stepped into the room behind Lisa, holding his tongue as the woman took in the heavily bandaged head of her comatose son. She’d forgotten about the purse she’d dropped—which a nurse was now dutifully collecting and refilling with its former contents—and instead of worrying about how her chipped nail polish must look to the doctor, or whether Darren, her latest boyfriend, would show up unannounced to borrow fifty dollars for his next fix, she simply stared at Daniel. Her baby boy. The only person she had left in the world who was whole and undamaged by time. Until now.

  Lisa fell to her knees next to his bed, unable to hold herself up on shaking legs any longer. The doctor rushed up behind her to catch her fall, his hands grasping her narrow ribcage and getting tangled in the belt of her cheap trench coat.

  “Can he hear me?” she croaked, trying to right herself on the thick heels of her sandals.