and every wound healed twice as fast. As Kina dug deep, my dad winced a few times, but eventually the cut stopped bleeding and he left the enclosure. We started walking up the hill toward the trailer. I freaking hate hospitals, he said, an explanation.
Now as Trina wheels me down the hallway—my mother trailing behind—we pass people in casts, or shuffling with walkers or crutches. My room is in orthopedics, but my father issomewhere else. We have to get into the elevator, and go down to the third floor.
The sign next to the double doors we enter says icu.
In this hallway, nobody’s walking around except the doctors.
Trina stops pushing the chair and crouches down in front of me. “Are you still feeling up to this?”
I nod.
Trina backs into my father’s hospital room, pulling the wheelchair, and then turns me to face the bed.
My dad looks like a statue. Like one of those marble warriors you see in the ancient Greece section of a museum—strong, intense, and completely expressionless. I reach for his hand and touch it with one finger. He doesn’t move. The only reason I know he’s still alive is because the machines he’s hooked up to are making quiet noises.
I did this to him.
I bite my lip because I know I’m going to cry and I don’t want Trina and my mother watching.
“Is he going to be all right?” I whisper.
My mother puts her hand on my shoulder. “The doctors don’t know,” she says, her voice breaking.
Tears are running down my face now. “Daddy? It’s me. Cara. Wake up. You have to wake up.”
I’m thinking about all those stories you always hear on the news, the miraculous ones, where people who were never supposed to be able to walk get out of bed and start sprinting. Where people who were blind can suddenly see.
Where fathers with brain injuries suddenly open their eyes and smile and forgive you.
I hear the sound of water running, and a door opens—one that leads to the bathroom. The younger version of my dad that I hallucinated yesterday walks out, still drying his hands on hissweatpants. He looks at my mother, and then at me. “Cara,” he says. “Wow. You’re awake?”
That’s the moment I understand that he was never a figment of my imagination. It’s a voice I recognize, now housed in a different, adult body.
“What is he doing here?” I whisper.
“I called him,” my mother says. “Cara, just—”
I shake my head. “I was wrong. I can’t do this.”
Immediately, Trina whirls the chair around, so that I am staring at the door again. “That’s all right,” she says, not judgmental at all. “It’s hard to see someone you love in that condition. You’ll come back when you’re feeling stronger.”
I pretend to agree. But it isn’t just facing my father, unconscious in a hospital bed, that has made the floor drop out of my world.
It is seeing my brother, who’s been dead to me for years.
I can’t say that Edward and I were ever close. Seven years is a lot, when you’re young, and there just isn’t all that much that a high school kid will have in common with a kid sister who is still using her Easy-Bake oven. But I idolized my big brother. I would pick up the books he sometimes left on the kitchen table and pretend that I understood the words inside; I’d sneak into his room when he went out and would lie on his bed and listen to his iPod, something he would have murdered me for if he knew I was doing it.
The elementary school was a distance away from the high school, which meant that Edward had to drop me off in the morning. It was part of a negotiated deal that included my parents paying for half of the eight-hundred-dollar beater he foundat a garage, so he’d have his own wheels. In return, my mother insisted that my brother physically deposit me on the steps of my school before going on to his.
Edward took this direction literally.
I was eleven years old—plenty grown-up enough to navigate a traffic light’s walk signal alone. But my