Falling into Place Read online

  Liz walked for so long that she was almost entirely certain that she had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the dark, that a bear would be along momentarily to maul her to pieces, eat her left hand, and leave her to bleed to death on the grass just off the trail where no one would find her until she was nothing but a skeleton, which they would ultimately hang up in the science room so that the human anatomy and physiology classes could study her—when, suddenly the trees ended and she saw the tower.

  It wasn’t as tall as she remembered.

  When she was younger, her father would bring her here on the first Wednesday of each month. Her father didn’t work on Wednesdays and she didn’t have preschool on Wednesdays. Wednesdays were important to them, Wednesdays were theirs. They came to make wishes on whatever was around—dandelions in the summer, red and falling leaves in autumn, snowflakes in the winter, sunshine in the spring. Sure, she had been a short four-year-old, but now, staring up at the tower that had once seemed to reach heaven, she finally began to understand how much had changed.

  Still, she climbed it. The stairs were steep and creaking. She didn’t run up like she used to, because there was no one to race her.

  She was more wobbly than ever by the time she got to the top, but she told herself that it was the adrenaline and the height making her sway. When she threw her head back, she could see the sky bending away from her, and it seemed closer than usual. As though if she tried, she could snag a star on her fingernail, but she didn’t move.

  It hurt, hurt to hold still, so she leaned against the railing with the metal pushing against her lungs, and she closed her eyes.

  “Well, hello, darling with the ocean eyes,

  How many secrets keep us apart?

  A sea of poems, a field of sighs,

  Can I cross and return to the start?”

  Liz turned off the music. Breathed, and looked up again to face the silence, but it wasn’t there. Not the kind she was running from. It was quiet, deeply so, but it was the kind of quiet that lived and moved and changed, filled to the brim with crickets and wings and the sounds of late summer.

  Later, she lay on her back, staring at the curving sky and the stars, swallowed by the darkness so that she felt very small indeed. She wondered what was between the stars, if it was dead and empty space, or something else. That’s why there are so many constellations, she thought, remembering the ones from her fourth-grade science class—Leo, Cassiopeia, Orion. Maybe everyone just wanted to connect those pinpricks of brightness and ignore the mysteries in between.

  Once upon a time, Liz was happy to TP a house with Julia and Kennie, to be invited to the best parties. Once upon a time, it made her happy to look down the social tower and see everyone below her. Once upon a time, it made happy her to stand here and see the entire sky above her.

  And tonight—tonight, that was what she wished for. She wished to be happy, and fell asleep with an entire sky above her.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER SIX

  If She’s Determined

  The waiting area of the emergency room is never empty, but right now, it’s about as close as it gets. There’s a man sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring at the ground. There’s a family huddled in a circle, with eyes closed in prayer. There’s a boy staring quietly out the window, a name on his lips.

  And there, in the far corner, is Liz’s mom, quietly eating her last pack of peanuts from the plane and paging through a magazine.

  When Liz was younger, people said that she got her face from her mother and everything else from her father. But Liz and her mother share a significant something else that neither of them will ever admit—they both like to play pretend.

  So as her daughter lies dying on an operating table, Monica Emerson sits with her legs crossed, looking for all the world like she cares about which celebrity couple broke up this week. On the inside, she shakes to pieces.

  She flips a page and thinks of the day Liz learned to walk. Monica had gone to the kitchen to get a box of rice crackers, and when she turned, Liz was standing there behind her, wobbling uncertainly. And even as Monica yelled for her husband to get the camera, she lifted Liz off the ground and back into her arms, thinking Not yet.

  Not today.

  Let her grow up tomorrow.

  She flips another page. When she arrived, the doctor told her that even if Liz survives surgery, even if she doesn’t die today, even if, there’s a good chance that she’ll never walk again. No one can make promises.

  Monica Emerson knows that the likeliest outcome will break her heart, so she does her best not to think about it. She thinks about nothing at all.

  That’s the thing about Monica Emerson. She is a good person and a terrible mother.

  In the operating room, there are tense whispers, the brush of metal against bone, the tinny, faraway beeping that means she’s still alive.

  And finally, when it’s over, the beeping is still there. The doctors are masks and blood splatters, and all I can think is, This is no miracle.

  One of them—Henderson, according to the blue scribble stitched into his front pocket—breaks away and walks slowly toward the waiting area, which is never a good sign. Doctors with good news are almost as eager to deliver it as the people in the waiting room are to hear it. Only doctors with bad news walk slowly.

  Monica rises to meet him, and no one sees how her hands shake as she closes the magazine, lays it down gingerly as though afraid that her trembling will start an earthquake, make the entire world crumble.

  But the doctor still walks slowly, and his steps undo her world anyway.

  “She isn’t looking good,” Dr. Henderson tells Liz’s mom. For the third time—I’ve counted. She isn’t looking good, she isn’t looking good, she isn’t looking good. “We’ll keep a close eye on her for the first twenty-four hours, and reevaluate tomorrow.”

  But he doesn’t really mean it, because he thinks she’ll be dead by tomorrow.

  As though Monica Emerson could forget, drowning as she is in the list of Liz’s injuries. “Her left femur is shattered, and she has a complex fracture in her right hand. She’s suffering from massive internal injuries. We’ve removed her spleen and set the fractures, but her body is still on the verge of shutting down. We’re doing everything we can, but at this point, it’s up to her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I am simultaneously resentful of and impressed by Monica’s composure. She’s so like Liz.

  “Liz is strong,” the doctor says, as though he has any idea. “She’s young, and very fit. She’s able to pull through this. If she’s determined to, she will.”

  He goes on to say that their first priority is to stabilize all the hemorrhaging and internal injuries, and they’ll do another operation in a few days, if. Neither of them notices the boy by the window. He is braced against the arm of his chair and straining to hear. He catches only the worst snatches, “extensive internal bleeding” and “a ruptured lung” and “no one knows” and “but” and “if.” The rest is drowned out by the sound of his heart throwing itself against his rib cage.

  His name is Liam Oliver. He saw the crumpled, smoking Mercedes at the bottom of a hill on his way to Costco and called the police. Now he sits at the edge of the waiting room, his eyes on the window, her name still on his lips.

  He is very much in love with Liz Emerson, and it seems that she will never know.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Pop Quiz

  There’s something about Julia that makes heads turn.

  Even in the emergency room. Even in sweatpants and a shirt that has a hole in the armpit. Even with her smeared eyeliner darkening the circles under her eyes. Even with the sce
ne of the crash still impressed on the insides of her eyelids, so that she sees it every time she blinks.

  Even now.

  Don’t blink, she tells herself as she almost knocks over a table on her way to the nurse’s station. She doesn’t notice anything, not Dr. Henderson and Monica turning the corner for the ICU, not the classmate sitting by the window.

  She had stared at it for so long. There had been so much traffic. Long, long lines of it, stretching past what remained of Liz’s car.

  “Hello,” says Julia. Hesitantly—Julia is a hesitant person. She turns heads, but she hates being stared at. Once upon a time, she didn’t care. But that was a long time ago. “I . . . um. My friend Liz is . . . she was admitted earlier today, I think. Elizabeth Emerson?”

  The nurse looks up. “Are you a family member?” she asks.

  “No,” says Julia, and though she knows the battle is already lost, she can’t help but add, “She’s my best friend.”

  It didn’t start out that way.

  Halfway through seventh grade, Julia’s parents decided that they’d had enough of each other. Her mother got the house, all the furniture, a million dollars from her worthless cheating bastard of a husband with sinfully overpriced daughter-stealing lawyers, and her dad, of course, got Julia.

  Seventh grade was a horrible year. Seventh grade was puberty. Seventh grade was when Life Learning Skills became about sex and drugs instead of exercise and nutrition. Seventh grade was a year of discovery, of self and survival, of becoming. Liz discovered bitchiness, decided selfishness was essential to survival, and became the person she would come to hate. But that was okay, because everyone else acted the same way.

  Except Julia.

  Julia was . . . different.

  Julia didn’t wear Crocs. She didn’t wear the flowy capri things that everyone else did, she didn’t wear her skirts over jeans, she didn’t use sports wrap as headbands, she didn’t layer her tank tops. She didn’t even check her phone all that often. Julia wore brands that the rest of them wouldn’t even hear of for another five years. She didn’t watch the shows that everyone else watched and she didn’t listen to the music the rest of them listened to.

  She was brave, and no one is allowed to be brave in middle school.

  Liz hated her. She hated her because Julia didn’t need to dye her hair or wear makeup to be beautiful, because she just was. She hated her because Julia didn’t care, didn’t care what people thought, didn’t care when they stared—not back then. She hated her because Julia was different, and that was enough. Liz hated her, so everyone else did too.

  Julia was strange. Julia asked for it. Julia brought it upon herself.

  The final straw was this: before Julia had gotten pulled into a higher math class, she was the only one in pre-algebra to ever do her homework. When their teacher one day decided, without warning or precedence, to collect their homework, and Julia was the only one who turned it in, he gave them a pop quiz.

  And since she didn’t know any of the answers, Liz took a piece of notebook paper and passed it around the class so that each person could write down one thing they thought of Julia.

  They said things like “You’re not even that pretty” and “Go back to where you came from.” Some drew pictures and some drew diagrams, arrows linking words like weird and stuck-up and annoying. When the piece of paper made its way back to Liz, she folded it up and slid it across the table to Julia.

  Julia’s expression hadn’t changed when she read it. She didn’t cry, not even a little bit, and heads had swiveled and faces had twisted in surprise, confusion, disbelief—but no one was more shocked than Liz. She could barely keep her jaw from dropping through the floor.

  Their teacher gave them a ten-minute warning, and everyone snapped back to attention. Except Julia. Julia was done with her pop quiz, so she flipped the notebook paper over and wrote a single word across the back. Then she folded it into a neat square and passed it back to Liz.

  It was the first time Liz had ever been called a bitch.

  It was then, in pre-algebra, with a blank pop quiz before her, a wrinkled piece of notebook paper in her lap, and an ugly truth staring up at her, that Liz decided that she and Julia would be friends.

  So they were.

  Of course Julia took the opportunity. Sadness or popularity? It was not a difficult choice. She used Liz, as anyone else would have. For the first few months, they were not friends, but amid the melodrama, they became allies.

  But one day, later that year, as Julia, Liz, and Kennie sat together during a mind-numbing assembly about internet safety, Liz leaned over and whispered to Julia that 34.42 percent of all assembly speakers carried fake boobs around in their briefcases, and when Liz pointed out the speaker’s briefcase, Julia had laughed so hard that she had snorted. About six teachers whipped around to shush them, but they had already dissolved into the kind of laughter that made them stupid and helpless, carefree. While the three of them were doubled over, stomachs aching and cheeks cramping, Julia looked over and realized that sometime between then and now, Liz had become her best friend.

  And then she had laughed again, because there was something entirely wonderful about being best friends with Liz Emerson.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Not Yet

  Monica Emerson loses her composure slowly as she walks toward the ICU. It flakes off and leaves a trail behind her, and I keep my eyes on her face. She’s still calm through the first hallway, the second, the third. But as they turn deeper into the hospital, she begins to crack.

  She has not cried in public since her husband’s funeral. Now she does, knowing that she may soon have to plan her daughter’s.

  They are small tears, silent, at first—then the doctor opens the doors to the ICU and she sees the rows and rows of beds and bodies, these barely human things stuffed full of oxygen and tubes and not yets.

  She sees Liz among them.

  Monica thinks of the maternity ward upstairs, and the tears come a little harder. How Liz had screamed—indignantly, as though they had kept her waiting for too long. She remembers her first moments of motherhood. She does not know how to prepare for her last.

  She walks closer and sees Liz beneath a thin blanket, her shoulders wrapped in some hideous hospital thing. Her toes peek out. The nail polish is chipped. Blue, once. Glittery, maybe.

  As Monica sits down and looks at the unnatural color of Liz’s face, her composure crumbles entirely. There is a very good chance that Liz will die here, two floors beneath where she was born. She will never go to prom, never take her SATs, never apply for college, never graduate, and it’s terrifying because Liz already looks dead. Liz looks like she could be packed in a coffin and shoved into the ground.

  All Monica wants to do is put her arms around what remains of her daughter, as she hasn’t done in so long. But Liz is a tangle of needles and tubes, fragile as ice on an ocean.

  So her mother only sits there.

  The problem with Monica’s brief and imminently ending motherhood is that it was always her greatest fear, being a parent. She doesn’t know how to do it, especially not after she buried Liz’s father. She had been smothered as a child and she tried too hard to be perfect, and here lies the final proof of her failure.

  I almost put my hands on her shoulders—they’re thin, sharp, just like Liz’s—and tell her It’s okay, it’s not your fault, she was already breaking, but I don’t.

  It’s hard to lie when the truth is dying in front of you.

  Monica runs her fingers across Liz’s raggedly chewed nails, and she still doesn’t see. I forget the lies and try to whisper the truth in her ear, but she can’t hear me over the beeping machines.

  A nurse watches us. She gives us ten minutes, fifteen, before she breaks away from the clump of monitors in the center of the room. Her scrubs are c
overed in pink dinosaurs, and they look out of place among the grays and blues—she looks out of place, a little too hopeful, a little too brave.

  She is very gentle when she touches Monica’s arm and says, “I’m sorry. I can’t let you stay any longer, ma’am. The risk of infection is too high.”

  It’s kind and very blunt, and I like that she doesn’t hide behind bullshit. She doesn’t say Liz is strong, because she isn’t right now.

  Monica almost refuses. But she takes a long look at the stranger who is her daughter, and after a moment, she nods. She reaches out for her, but at the last instant, her fingers tremble and she pulls back.

  SNAPSHOT: BAND-AID

  Liz is sitting on the kitchen counter, a Band-Aid on her knee. Monica is trying to hug her, and Liz is pushing her away.

  A little while before, she had been jumping rope by herself in the driveway, humming the theme song from Arthur. The world had started coming into focus by then, the sky had grown flat and distant, and I was starting to fade.

  She had jumped three hundred and sixty-eight times when a bug flew into her mouth. She screeched and tripped, her legs tangling in the rope. She fell and tore her knee open, and when I tried to help her, she didn’t notice.

  She had gone inside, trying very hard not to cry. Monica sat her on the kitchen counter and patched her up, all the while telling her how brave she was. It went to Liz’s head a bit, so when Monica tried to hug her, Liz pushed her away and said, “I’m fine, Mom! It’s nothing. Just leave me alone.”

  Monica’s heart broke a little bit, and she never tried to hug Liz again.

  Later, I would try to push them back together, but neither would budge.

  There were little gestures after that—a pat on the back on Christmas, a squeeze across the shoulders on the first day of school. But Monica was too afraid of being overbearing, and Liz tried too hard to be strong.