The Night Olivia Fell Read online

  Yesterday we’d had a heavy make-out session in my room before my mom got home from work. He got a little too excited, and I’d felt so pressured I burst into tears. He could be like that sometimes: too insistent and intense. But weren’t all boys?

  He leaned away from me and cracked his neck. I shuddered, grossed out by the sound of his bones popping.

  “I’m sorry about . . . you know,” he said. “It’s just, I love you. I think we’ve been together long enough to show it that way.”

  “Soon, okay? I’m just not ready yet.”

  “I was thinking. . . .” He leaned closer and kissed my cheek wetly. “Maybe one of these weekends we could make it extra special? Go somewhere, just us? You could tell your mom you’re spending the night at Madison’s.”

  I wanted to laugh at how ridiculous he sounded. What would we do, rent a hotel room for the night? Besides, I didn’t want to have sex yet. I wasn’t going to be one of those stupid knocked-up teenagers—like my mom was.

  But I didn’t say that. Instead I smiled and said: “Sure, yeah, maybe.” I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, and if it would make him happy, I’d let him think we could go away for a night.

  The bus lurched to a stop, and I realized we’d arrived at the University of Washington.

  “We’re here!” somebody shouted from the front of the bus.

  Madison pulled her earbuds out and pointed out the window. “There’s everybody else!”

  I followed her gaze. A group of about forty teenagers was gathered at the end of the parking lot. Half of them were wearing casual clothes, but the other half were dressed in matching uniforms: the girls in green tartan skirts with green blazers and knee-high stockings, the boys in gray pants and green ties.

  “Preppy dicks!” Peter shouted. A slice of sunlight shone on his red hair and lit the smattering of freckles across his face. He was watching Madison, waiting for a reaction. For his sake, I hoped he stayed away from her. She would eat him alive, and Peter was actually a pretty nice guy. Tyler called her a thot behind her back. If she weren’t my best friend, I’d probably agree. She’d go out with a different guy every weekend, then dump him the next day.

  “Fuckheads!” Tyler’s friend Dan shouted.

  Bold and bullish, Dan was a fat little tryhard, but his overconfidence and arrogance meant nobody stood up to him. Tyler thought Dan was hilarious. I thought he was a jerk.

  “Watch your mouth, guys!” Mr. Parks, our PE teacher who was running this little field trip, yelled from the front of the bus. “Come on, off the bus.”

  We stepped out into the glorious spring sunshine. It was one of those pristine Seattle days when the rain has finally stopped, leaving behind a scrubbed blue sky. The air had just a hint of warmth in it, a promise that more days like this would soon follow.

  Cherry trees coated in frothy pink and white blossoms peeked from between towering evergreens. In the distance I could see the start of Greek Row, a collection of Tudor, Gothic, and Georgian fraternity and sorority houses.

  “Over here, guys!” Mr. Parks waved his arms to us, his beefy biceps rippling under his white polo shirt. We shuffled over, and Mr. Parks made introductions: Portage Point High, Ballard High, and Seattle Catholic Academy, the Catholic kids in the uniforms.

  Somehow we’d faced off so we were separated into three groups, but once we’d been introduced, everybody started talking to each other.

  Tyler had an arm draped around my shoulder, tucking me tightly against his body. Madison was just to the right of me. I felt comfortable, safe, secure in my world.

  And then I saw her.

  Just steps from me was a girl wearing the green school uniform of Seattle Catholic Academy. She had long, pale blond hair, sharp Slavic cheekbones, a pointed nose, and a slightly off-center dimple in her chin.

  As she swung her eyes toward me, I felt my world slipping toward the edge of a cliff I didn’t even know existed.

  She looked like she could be my sister.

  The girl’s eyes widened when she saw me, emphasizing the unusual shade of forest green: just like mine.

  In that instant, as I looked at the face I’d known my entire life, I felt myself tumble over that cliff. I didn’t know how far I would fall or how hard I would crash, only that nothing would ever be the same.

  3

  * * *

  ABI

  october

  “Do you understand what I’m saying, Mrs. Knight?”

  I blinked at Dr. Griffith, not sure I’d heard him right.

  “Your daughter is pregnant.” He spoke slowly, as if I were a child unable to grasp his words. “Olivia’s suffered irreversible brain damage and she won’t wake up, but Washington State law prohibits us from turning off life support. We have to give the fetus the best chance at surviving. Do you understand?”

  I nodded and shook my head at the same time. I did understand, but it made no sense, as if he’d grabbed random words from a dictionary and pasted them into a sentence.

  “Wha—?”

  A knock at the door interrupted me, and a pink-scrub-clad nurse with the sad, droopy face and flabby jowls of a Saint Bernard entered.

  “Mrs. Knight, your sister—”

  Sarah burst past the nurse, elbowing her way into the room. Her blue eyes were laced with red, the translucent skin of her lids as raw and puffy as mine. She grabbed my hand, and I stared at her fingers. Her nails were smooth and perfectly oval, shining red, the color of fresh blood. Even now in the middle of the night, her long, perfectly highlighted hair swung and shone under the anemic hospital lights.

  She pulled me in for a hug so hard it hurt my ribs. I stiffened and she dropped her arms, a shadow of hurt crossing her face. It had always been there, this slight distance between us. My fault, admittedly, but I no longer knew how to stop it.

  “Where’s Olivia? Is she okay? What happened? Why was she out in the middle of the night?”

  The questions were rapid as a machine gun, asked in Sarah’s most demanding mom voice. The one she’d been practicing since I was ten and she was twenty, when our mother left me on Sarah’s front step with nothing but a backpack of dirty clothes. She’d gone home and killed herself that very day, leaving Sarah to raise me.

  I shook my head, tears rising in my throat.

  “She . . . she . . .”

  I didn’t know why Olivia was out in the middle of the night.

  After my bath, I’d had some wine and then gone to bed with a book. I was asleep while my daughter was out doing . . . what?

  The dark fog of anxiety swirled violently around me.

  Panic: my old friend.

  “Mrs. Knight?” I heard from somewhere far away.

  My vision blurred and a high-pitched whining droned in my ears. I couldn’t hold it away anymore. I crashed to the ground.

  “Abi!” People rushed around me, hands lifted me up, pushed me into a chair.

  I was sweating heavily. The air was like molasses, weighted like water.

  Somebody pressed a paper bag into my hands, and I heard Sarah’s soothing voice speaking to me from a great distance.

  “Breathe. There you go. In, then out. In, then out.”

  I used to have panic attacks all the time as a kid. But I’d learned to control my emotions, stamping them out like the flames of a fire. Sarah always said I should talk about my feelings, get them out there, but I knew it was better to push them away, pretend everything was okay. It was better not to feel anything.

  Somehow, without me even wanting to, my breathing evened, my heart rate slowed. And then my hearing came back. Dr. Griffith and Sarah were talking.

  “What happened?” Sarah asked.

  Sarah was good at being composed in tough situations. She never seemed desperate or panicky. I felt a stab of anger that she could manage this. I couldn’t even ask the right questions.

  “A retired paramedic found Olivia on the banks of the ZigZag River, next to the bridge. We don’t know if she fell from the bridge or—well,
the police will investigate,” Dr. Griffith replied. He was crouched in front of me, holding one of my hands tightly in his. His skin felt dry and cool against my sweaty palm.

  Sarah shifted in her seat next to me, her hand holding the paper bag to my mouth. “People come out of comas all the time—” she began.

  “Olivia isn’t in a coma,” he interrupted gently. “Comas are usually from a localized injury. Olivia’s suffered a massive bleed, which has damaged almost every part of her brain. I’m so sorry, I know this is hard to understand and even harder to accept, but Olivia isn’t going to wake up.”

  Grief hurtled toward me, crashing into me and beating inside my chest like a giant, furious animal.

  “And she’s pregnant?” I whispered.

  “Yes,” Dr. Griffith replied.

  I looked at Sarah. Her jaw worked, as if she were chewing leather.

  “How far along?” I asked.

  “We’ll do an ultrasound to find out for sure, but the HCG hormone indicates about thirteen or fourteen weeks.”

  I thought back to what we were doing three months ago. It would’ve been July. Olivia was out of school. She was studying for her driver’s test, taking practice SAT tests, swimming, hanging out with her friends.

  We hadn’t done anything special. Money was always tight, and I was saving for the tuition I knew I’d have to pay when Olivia went to college. I couldn’t put my finger on when something might’ve changed, when she would’ve gotten pregnant. She must not have known. She would’ve told me if she’d known.

  “Surely the baby’s been exposed to radiation, chemicals . . . ?” Sarah trailed off.

  Dr. Griffith winced. “Yes. Possibly. Probably. We do a standard pregnancy test when female patients are admitted, but it was delayed by the surgery.”

  A dusty vent blew stale air into the room, the noise an obnoxious whine. Sarah and Dr. Griffith had lapsed into silence.

  “I want to see her. Right now.” My voice was hollow and flat.

  “Of course,” Dr. Griffith said immediately.

  Sarah helped me to my feet, and we followed the doctor down the corridor, toward the ICU.

  Despite the harsh reality of the stark white hallway, a part of me still clung to the faint hope that Olivia wasn’t here—that this was all some horrible mistake, some silly clerical error. Not my daughter.

  Dr. Griffith walked briskly to the end of the hallway and turned left, then waved a security badge at a locked door. Inside the ICU Jen Stokes, Olivia’s best friend’s mother, hovered over a bed that was surrounded by beeping, clunking machines. A stethoscope dangled from her neck.

  “Dr. Stokes,” Dr. Griffith greeted her.

  “Jen?” I stared at my neighbor. Just a few hours ago, I’d been at a barbecue at her house, and now we were standing in the ICU. She was wearing faded jeans and an old Seahawks jersey under a lab coat. Her eyes were red, her dark curls a messy halo around a pale face. Her hands were clasped into tight fists and pressed into her belly.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I called her,” Sarah explained; then I remembered that Jen was the senior doctor in the emergency room here.

  “Abi, I’m so sorry.” Her mouth worked as if she wanted to say more, but nothing else came. She broke eye contact and looked down.

  I followed her gaze, but it took me a moment to realize that the person she was staring at was Olivia. My daughter was as white as the sheet she lay on. Her body was too still, as if all her dynamic energy had been trapped beneath the sheet draped over her.

  A tangle of IV bags and pumps surrounded the hospital bed. So many tubes and lines I couldn’t count them: down her throat, breathing for her, up her nose, keeping her stomach empty, flowering from her chest, recording her heartbeat. The ventilator next to the bed made rhythmic blip, shhhh noises.

  Her head was swathed in white bandages, stark against her face. She had a deep cut above her right eyebrow, a sickening black and purple bruise blooming across her left temple, and a spray of scratches across her nose and cheekbones.

  I stared at my daughter, and the agony I felt wasn’t just emotional but physical. A sharp pain wrenched in my chest so it seemed my heart must’ve stopped, but I could feel it, I could hear it; it betrayed me by continuing to beat when it should have frozen in my chest. The pain and impotence were white lightning searing through me.

  My gaze drifted to Olivia’s abdomen, still flat and smooth, no hint of the baby tucked within.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind I registered Jen leaving the room. The emotions piled up, threatening to crack me open, splintering me into a billion little pieces. I reached for Olivia’s hand, wanting—no, needing—to be connected to her.

  Her wrist lay limply in my hand, but something was missing. The silver charm bracelet Olivia always wore was gone.

  In its place was a string of black and purple bruises.

  4

  * * *

  OLIVIA

  april

  “That girl. Jesus. That was creepy,” Tyler said the Monday after our field trip to the University of Washington. We were eating lunch at our usual table in the cafeteria, the one next to the neatly stacked towers of orange chairs used for pep assemblies.

  “I know, right!” Peter said. His carrot-red head bobbed in agreement. “What was that about? Do you have a sister we don’t know about, Liv?”

  I shook my head emphatically. “No way.”

  Next to me, Tyler shoved a handful of fries into his mouth. “She was totally your doppelgänger,” he said. “My dad says everybody has one somewhere.”

  “I guess.” I set my peanut butter and jelly sandwich down, my appetite suddenly gone. I didn’t want to talk about this. Why wouldn’t they just shut up?

  “She had the same butt chin, too,” Peter added. “She looked just like you.”

  Tyler frowned at Peter. I ground my teeth together, waiting for Tyler to make some snappy clapback. Tyler always called my chin dimple a butt chin. Not in a mean way, just in a Tyler way. But I knew he wouldn’t like anybody else saying it.

  But Tyler went back to his fries. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

  Madison laughed and bit into a carrot stick. “Having a chin dimple doesn’t mean you’re related to somebody, you idiot.”

  “She’s not my sister, all right?” I snapped. “I’ve never even met her before.”

  Everybody went quiet. My heart pulsed in my neck and I looked down. I felt them all exchanging looks. I was the peacemaker. I never lashed out or got involved in arguments.

  I picked at the edge of my sandwich until it was as bare as a stone. I hated the dry feel of crust in my mouth. When I was a kid my mom would cut the crusts off my sandwich, snip away the square edges, and cut a little bite-size hole in the middle so it looked like an O. I suddenly wished she were here to reassure me.

  Madison abruptly changed the subject. “Sooooo, my brother’s coming home next week.”

  My head snapped up and blood rushed to my cheeks. I let my hair swing in front of my face to hide it, chewing hard on a strand of hair.

  Tyler snorted and dropped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me closer to him. “Can he score us some pot?”

  “Tyler!” I shushed him.

  “Shut up, fuck-face.” Madison’s dark eyes flashed. “It was only one time. He was just stupid enough to get caught.”

  “Wait. I thought he was in New York. Isn’t that where your parents sent him after he got caught dealing?” Peter’s freckled face creased with confusion.

  Madison scowled. “Once! And it was only pot.”

  She was mortified that everybody knew Derek had been sent to a private East Coast school to “reform” him. We all drank sometimes and a few of our friends smoked pot, but only stoners and losers actually dealt it.

  Peter’s eyes darted between Madison and Tyler, sensing the tension.

  “Olivia,” he said, changing the subject quickly. “You don’t have swimming practice
tomorrow, right? Could you help me with some chemistry shit later? I’m on that homework grind, trying to catch up again.”

  “Sure.” I darted a look at Tyler. His brows folded down. I could tell he wasn’t happy with me studying alone with Peter.

  He could be a little possessive sometimes. It wasn’t like I’d ever cheated on him or anything. He was just like that: all macho on the outside but sort of insecure on the inside. I knew it was just because he loved me, though.

  “Thanks, dude.” Peter grinned at me.

  I scraped myself out of the hard metal chair. “I’m going outside for some fresh air. Wanna come, Mad?”

  Madison unfolded her slender frame and stood, brushing off her black leggings and black sleeveless sweater. She tossed a hard glare at Tyler and Peter and huffed toward the door.

  We stepped into the cool belly of April and headed for the quad, huddling on a bench near the fountain. We were the only students around, the air still too crisp to sit outside.

  Clouds raced overhead as if they were on a conveyor belt; one minute it was sunny, the next threatening rain. Squinting at Madison, I tried to judge her mood.

  I fiddled with the bracelet on my left wrist, pulling the cool metal through my fingers, back and forth.

  “Sorry about Derek,” I offered.

  “ ’S okay. Sorry about that girl.” She picked a hangnail. “I’m sure she isn’t, like, your sister or anything.”

  I appreciated her saying it. No matter how moody Madison could be, I knew I could always count on her. It’s probably why we were still best friends all these years later.

  We’d met in kindergarten and became friends when it turned out we both hated playing dress-up. I didn’t want anyone knowing my mom made me wear long underwear under my clothes all winter. Madison just wanted to play outside.

  “Do you think you’ll, you know, look her up?” Madison asked.

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to admit I’d talked to her in the bathroom at the University of Washington.