“That we won’t be friends,” you say.
There’s a moment of silence and everyone watches you. The vibration of the plane is all you can hear, and it’s making your ears ring. You try a yawn to unpop them.
“Why wouldn’t we be?” says Fran.
Her voice is so soft, you can barely make it out over the propellers.
“Because it’s hard,” says Diana.
Everyone turns to her.
“When you’ve been through something really painful with somebody, then they can be… a reminder of that pain. Like, if this plane actually lands and you go back to your life and eventually feel better, seeing me might bring you back to that place of fear. It… it can happen. Even if you care about the person.”
You feel Diana’s eyes on you, and this time you meet them.
“It’s not fair,” you say. “But it’s real.”
The plane tilts to the left then, and suddenly you can see miles of forest out a nearby window. And all of it has been depleted. Aside from the blinding blue patches of lake, it looks like the wilderness you traversed was a charcoal drawing that someone put their thumb on and smeared. White smoke pours up from nearly every direction, and you wonder if everything you just experienced has all been turned to ash. And if it’s all gone, where did the experiences go?
For now, they’re still with you—you can see them so clearly—but how long will it be until your brain decides that the memories are harmful? How long until it erases the fish you caught or the way it felt hearing the embers bouncing off your canoe? The same is true, you know, of Sean. You’ve tried so hard to keep the memories you have with him alive, to play them out in your head like movies. But gradually, some of those will start to go too. And then, tree by tree, you’ll lose him in pieces like the forest below you. You might lose everyone this way.
“It can’t be over,” says Fran, who is also staring toward the window.
“Why not?” says Will.
“Because,” she says, “we’re all connected now. Whether we want to be or not.”
No one denies it. But no one jumps up to declare allegiance either.
“We magnified each other,” she says.
She reaches out for Diana’s hand, who hesitates, then takes it.
“It was dark out there, you guys. It almost got us.”
You can feel the plane dip lower in the sky. And thankfully, this seems intentional. You’re already starting your descent, heading back to earth, where everything you’ve discussed awaits you, whether you want it to or not. Fran still watches out the window.
“But we made one another brighter somehow,” she says. “And I don’t think even our fear can kill that.”
FORTY-SEVEN
In the days that follow, you are mostly alone.
After an initial evaluation, you’re all treated in different rooms and, eventually, different hospitals. Then you’re interviewed separately by the police about Silas, and by the media for stories that die down as quickly as they flare up (“Worry Warriors of the North Found Alive!”). Your cell phones are lost to the woods, and by the time they’re replaced, it’s too late to exchange information, so you know little aside from a few basic facts. Will had severe dehydration. Fran got sick, presumably from lake water. And most importantly: Troy is alive but still unconscious.
Diana alone gets your number. She calls you as you heal from an infection, a bad case of cellulitis that laid you out for days, while intravenous antibiotics swirled through your body and you drifted in and out of consciousness. But this time around, you pick up the phone, still drowsy and dizzy from the infection. You chat mindlessly about hospital food and your new fame until the painkillers knock you out for the evening. Her grandmother won’t let her leave the house, she says, or else she would visit.
This goes on for a few weeks. Your parents, who sobbed openly when they saw you, burst into tears anew every morning when they show up to your room. They thought they lost another child, and now they can barely take their hands off you whenthey’re around. Your mother’s hand has been in your hair for what feels like 70 percent of each day. Sometimes she sleeps there at the hospital. The love is real, and it’s good, but one morning when they ask what they can do to make you more comfortable, you say, “Start talking about Sean,” and your mom has to leave the room. When you wake up later that evening, they’re sitting by your bed.
“We can try,” says your dad.
Somehow, though, despite the real food, the warm clothes and bed, and the glorious medication, you can’t shake the feeling that you’re still trapped. Not in the woods, or even in the hospital, which allows you to go for walks outside now that you can make it to your feet without a dizzy spell. It’s more like a prison of your own making. You can’t quite adjust to being back, and when you finally walk out of the hospital for good one morning and return home to your old bedroom, you realize what it is: Your life cannot begin again when one of you hasn’t truly returned.
Until Troy wakes up, you are stuck between worlds.
So as soon as your parents let you go outside unaccompanied (contingent on hourly check-ins), you find out where he is, and you make the journey to the suburban hospital that holds him. It’s not until you finally make it there, shuffling through the long quiet hallway on the fifth floor, and open the door, that you see it’s not just you who’s been stuck. In the room, alongside Troy’s parents, are Fran, Will, and even Diana, sitting cross-legged on the floor. They’re nearly unrecognizable now that they’re healthier, but you can kind of match your image of who they were before with what you see now.
“We were wondering when you’d get here,” says Diana.
