My chest is still.
The bird is still?
“There were birds in your room—a lot of them,” Eli says, her voice shaking. “I heard them screaming, so I came in.” She looks completely terrified.
Jason’s fingers are wrapped around mine very tightly.
What just happened?
I can’t really feel my hand in the real world at all, but I can feel Jason’s. I want to shake my fingers out of his grasp. I feel like he’s holding me somewhere I don’t want to be. And that’s not okay. It’s Jason. I want him to hold my hand.
My dad’s crying, but he’s got my other hand.
“Don’t worry, Az,” he says. “They’re helping you breathe. That’s why you had the seizure. You’re okay. It’s okay. Mom was at the lab but she’s on her way.”
Everything looks as though I’m seeing it from the bottom of a swimming pool.
“It was like you were drowning,” Jason says, so quietly I almost don’t hear him. “You were completely blue, and you weren’t breathing. Your chest was . . . spasming and making this sound I’ve never heard before. I gave you mouth-to-mouth.”
I look at his mouth. It touched mine. I think about the note he gave me. It’s still in my pocket.
I blink a couple of times for yeah, I get it. But I don’t. I remember the bird—god, the bird—and I jerk and try to sit up again. I have to get it out.
I wonder if I’m having a heart attack. My lungs feel crushed and full of something all at once.
“I have the letters in my backpack,” Eli says, her voice not quite her voice. “The I-love-you lists, and the apologies. But I never made mine. Now I will, okay? I’m making one for you right now, because I’m sorry for all the times I pretended you weren’t my sister and said we weren’t related, and the time I stole your sweater and the time I made fun of you because you coughed so hard I told people you swallowed your phone—”
I look at Jason. I look at him and I don’t know how but for a moment I forget the bird and I say { }.
“Aza, are you listening?” my dad asks me, and there’s panic in his voice. More than panic. “CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
I look at Eli, and say { }.
“I’m sorry, Aza! I didn’t mean any of anything I ever did wrong!” Eli is crying now, and talking as fast as she can. She’s apologizing for things she didn’t even do.
I look at my dad, and say {{ }}. I try to give him extra for my mom.
My dad is fading out. All I can see are my own eyelashes and my own eyelids, and somehow, also, my own brain, all the pathways inside it, everything dark and narrow, and getting narrower, bookshelves closing in, books crushed, falling into muddled piles, pages crushed, words mangled, and me, running through it all, trying to get out before the walls collapse.
I feel the entire inside of my body folding up, some kind of awful origami. I thought it would hurt, but the pain I’ve been feeling forever and ever is actually something that’s ceasing to matter to me, just like my bones no longer matter to me, and I inhale, and exhale, and
Bird in my chest
Bird in my chest
Ships in the sky
Last moments before dying
Like this, the last moments of this, storm, bird, confused, cold can’t talk can’t tell anyone I love them can’t—
How far are we from the hospital?
I stretch my head and try to look into the front. The driver has red hair. He glances at me.
We swerve.
I hear Eli sobbing. I hear Jason talking fast to me. I can feel his breath on my ear. I’m watching the driver, and the ambulance skids, and I see the guy twisting the wheel. Shoving it hard.
We spin slowly in a circle in the middle of a frozen road. Everyone’s screaming but me, because I can’t. I’m trying to breathe, to stay, but I’m not staying.
I’m going.
The windows of the ambulance are freezing over, and here’s my family, and here I am, on this gurney, and it doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did.
Life and death aren’t as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn’t like walking into a new country. This is walking into a new room in the same house. This is sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there’s a glass wall between.
I’m right here. And not.
If this is it, then I’m ready. I’m dark matter. The universe inside me is full of something, and science can’t even shine a light on it. I feel like I’m mostly made of mysteries.
Inside my chest, I hear the whistling of a little bird, something singing me to sleep.
The ambulance is stopped, lights and sirens still on, ice beneath our tires, and the EMT in the back with us radios for a helicopter, her voice panicky, “Emergency . . .”
The red-haired medic runs out and looks up at the sky. “Signaling,” he shouts. He goes into the white, and all around him is a halo of snow.
I’m an ocean with a giant squid inside it. There’s a bird buffeting, flying around and banging hard against my ribs.
“Pneumonia,” the paramedic says.
“Aza, don’t,” my dad says, an order. “DO NOT DO THIS.”
I want to listen.
I look at my dad. I’m looking at myself, and what I was is starting not to matter to me at all.
Where am I going?
Readyreadyready says the bird in me. And someone outside answers Readyreadyready.
Something hits my chest, hard, and then it’s gone. My chest? Is it even mine? Then, no, I see, it’s the medic using crash pads on my heart.