“I have to go.” I get out of the car and run inside before he can see the tears really start to fall.

I wake up in the middle of the night again, and this time I know right away: I’m not alone. My eyes focus on the rocking chair.

Grandmother is there, but for once she’s wearing different clothes: an open pink robe over a faded blue nightgown. Her skin is less wrinkled, her hair swept into a neat bun.

“Grandmother,” I say, sitting up.

She seems blind, the way her eyes move across the room. “Don’t be afraid, Natalie,” she says, and then she’s gone.

“Grandmother,” I say into the night. “Grandmother.”

No response. I try to think about the song Beau played in the band room that night, the feeling it gave me. I try to tune in to my own anxiety. That part’s easy—there’s a lump in my chest and a weight in my stomach, that indescribable feeling that something’s wrong.

I hear Gus whining at the door. I get out of bed to let him into the hall, and he trots right to the stairs, thumping clumsily down to the foyer. A light from down in the kitchen reaches the fringes of the stairs, and hushed voices drift along it.

I creep down the steps and follow the hallway to the kitchen. Mom and Dad are sitting at the table across from one another, and when Mom notices me standing in the doorway I see that her eyes are red and puffy. Dad turns around and looks at me, revealing his own sunken and dark gaze. “Hey, sugar cube,” he says softly.

“What’s wrong?”

They exchange a look and Mom starts to cry, covering her mouth with her thin hand. Dad tips his head toward the yellow wooden chair beside him, but I can’t move. My feet weigh a thousand pounds, and my heartrate’s like I’m in the middle of a sprint. “Dad?” I urge, my voice little more than a squeak.

He sighs and stands, setting a hand on Mom’s shoulder as her slim frame shakes with silent tears. “Honey, he’s alive,” Dad starts, “but Matt Kincaid’s been in a car accident.”

20

When we get to the hospital waiting room, everything happens at once. Joyce Kincaid grabs me in a hug and cries into my hair. Raymond shakes Dad’s hand but can’t say a word. But the worst thing, the hardest thing, is the drop in my stomach, the flicker in the blue chair in the corner, under the mounted TV.

The flicker during which, for a split second, I see Beau, sitting hunched over his knees, his hands pressed together and resting against his mouth, his eyes on the gray speckled floor. Sitting a few seats away from him are different versions of Joyce and Raymond, both silent. Joyce looks over at Beau, and I swear her lip curls hatefully in blame.

They don’t see me, but I see them over my Joyce’s shoulder as she death-grips me and sobs beside my ear.

I see them, and I know what it means. Both Matts are here.

Oh my God.

The doctor comes through the swinging gray doors. He’s a young, skinny blond guy with wire-frame glasses and a too-big white jacket.

“Mr. and Mrs. Kincaid, would you come with me?” he says. His expression is grave, devastating, and he barely looks away from the wall he’s chosen to focus on. Joyce breaks down further, and Mom gently rubs her back.

“Come on, Joyce,” Raymond whispers as he tries to free his wife from my arms. He leads her closer to those gray doors, toward bad news, and I take a few steps after them.

“I’m sorry, Miss,” the doctor says to me. “Family only.”

“She can come,” Joyce says. “She’s Matty’s girlfriend. She can come.”

I don’t correct her, but my whole body pinches at the mistake. The doctor nods and takes us inside. I don’t catch most of his words over the noise in my brain, the two sides of me screaming two different versions of the same story.

He was drunk. He wouldn’t listen. There was nothing you could do. He’ll be fine.

You let him drive away. You could’ve called the cops. He’s going to die. He’s going to die twice over, and you ruined his life.

Suddenly I become aware of Joyce’s escalated whimpers beside me, and I return to the sound of the doctor’s falsely calm voice. “. . . induced a coma,” he’s saying. “We’ll need to operate, and then we’ll have to let the swelling go down. It’s possible he’ll suffer from brain damage, but we can’t say how severe.”

“Possible,” Raymond repeats as he rubs Joyce’s shoulders. “Possible, Joyce, not absolute.”

She’s shaking her head, her eyes closed tight against her tears, her ears closed off from his words, and I can’t feel my legs.

Can’t feel my legs, or my heart, only the hollow in my stomach.

I’m backing away, but it’s like someone else is controlling my body with a remote. I don’t mean to leave them, but I do. I turn. I run.

I am running away.

I’m running through the horrible gray doors back into the horrible blue-gray waiting room, where everything’s different—the Other Joyce and Raymond sitting somberly in their chairs, far away from Beau, my own parents gone. I keep running.

I run out of the hospital, and then the hospital’s gone. The busy intersection of two highways gone. The Steak ’n Shake, the Christmas Tree Shop, the Check-into-Cash, gone. Everything gone but the trees and rolling blue-green hills, which crash like waves under my feet, threatening to pull me under.

But they can’t, I think.

As long as I keep moving, they can’t pull me under.

And I run. I run hard, feeling flecks of moisture—not-quite rain—dampen my skin.

Grandmother, where are you?

I’m afraid.

Help me.

Help me.

“Please.” The word tears out of me, wrenched sideways and tattered to shreds by my gasping lungs. “PLEASE!” I scream.

A bright white light explodes in front of me and, for a split second, I think, she’s coming for me. She’ll pull me out of this. I’ll leave it all behind.

In the next instant, my feet make sense of an abrupt change in the earth’s texture, from soft and malleable to stiff and flat. The sounds of hooting howls and singing crickets morph into a car laying on its horn, and the aroma of dewy night is now the stench of burning rubber. I’m in the middle of the road. There’s a car just yards away from me, barreling toward me too fast to stop.

For some reason, in that moment, the only thing that occurs to me to do is to cover my eyes. I throw my forearm up to block the screaming headlights when something collides with me, throws me sideways, and the car goes speeding past.