“I wish I could say this was my first rescue for a troubled-teen program. But it’s not. What kind of group was this? You only hadoneguide?”
Maddy stops talking when she reaches Troy’s body, and you’ve never wanted anything more in your life than to find him breathing. You can’t tell at first if he is, but then you see his chest rise ever so slightly. Maddy gets down and performs an assessment, paying close attention to his burns and bruises. And while she gives you instructions about how to help her load him on the board, she asks only one simple question.
“How did he get like this?”
The story, which Fran tells, is hard for you to hear. During the fire, Will and Fran made a shelter similar to yours with theircanoe, wedging it against a rock near the shore. Quarters were tight with three of them under there, and when the temperature started to rise, Troy couldn’t take it. He busted out of the fire shelter and swam the rest of the way to shore, only to be hit with burning debris when he arrived.
Maddy says he could be bleeding internally, and that you need to get him on oxygen in the plane as quickly as possible. When you ask point-blank if he’ll live, she looks you dead in the eye and says:
“I don’t know, honey.”
Then, apropos of nothing, she wraps you in a tight hug. The kind your mom gives you when she hasn’t seen you in a while. And for the first time, you fully realize that all of this really happened. There is an adult here. And this one actually wants to help you. She releases you from the hug and says:
“To be honest, I don’t know how any of you are alive.”
And when you bend down, she catches sight of your head wound and tells you to lie down when you get to the aircraft too. Which is how you find yourself on oxygen, lying next to Troy on an improvised bed made of blankets, with a bandage on your head and an IV in your arm.
Diana holds your hand. Will and Fran are holding Troy’s hands. You are all headed toward a base where you’ll then be driven to a hospital. These facts haven’t totally kicked in yet. This rescue still feels like something you could wake up from any minute. There are fake-outs like these all the time in Choose Your Own Adventure books. You find yourself in relative safety only to recognize that you’ve been brainwashed and imprisoned in a mine.
Diana gives your hand a squeeze, and you feel like you could fall asleep for a thousand years. But instead, you look around the plane and you see that everyone is starting to zone out, staring off into the distance. They’re already trying their hardest to disconnect from what happened. And you don’t blame them. It’s probably the healthy thing to do in this moment. A form of protection. But you also feel a strange preemptive sense of loss as you watch this happen. Not because you don’t want this to be over—you very much do—but because when this plane lands, and everyone is eventually reunited with their families, that could be the end.
“Hey…,” you say, snapping everyone out of their trances.
They look toward you, concern in their eyes. You take a long pull of oxygen.
“Fear in a Hat?”
Nobody smiles. You’re all too tired for that. But nobody tells you to shut up either. And after a brief and silencing dip of turbulence, Fran finally opens her mouth.
“That Troy won’t wake up,” she says. “That’s mine. I didn’t want to say it out loud, but if we had a hat, that would be in there.”
You all look at Troy, his eyes still closed on the backboard, his body strapped down. You remember him waking up screaming on the first night, and you realize two things at once: that you love him and that he might never see Turbo again. But you swallow this down.
“I have another one,” says Will, clearing his throat. “My fear is that it’s all going to be the same when we land. Like: everything. Same as before. And all of this was for nothing.”
You assume he means his situation with his dad, his sportsgoals, and his loneliness. And you know that every one of you is thinking some version of this too. What if this experience has only made things worse? Or what if you’ve changed and the world hasn’t?
Will’s answer leaves only you and Diana left to share. She closes her eyes a second. Then she pulls her bruised knees to her chest.
“That I’ll never forgive myself,” she says.
She’s not looking at you. Or at least, notjustat you.
“I’m going to try. But I’m not sure I really know how.”
No one asks her what she’s referring to. Maybe they know. Or maybe you all have something you need to forgive yourself for.
You want to hold her then, but you can’t move from your bed without disconnecting from your IV.
“What’s yours, Case?”
“What?” you say.
She leans down by your ear.
“Your fear?” she says. “What’s yours?”
You were never great at this game. But this time your sheet isn’t blank. This time, there’s something sitting there just waiting for you to speak it.
