COMING UP FOR AIR
Maryah
Being in a coma for two weeks was nothing. Literally, I remembered nothing. Those two weeks just disappeared from my existence.
But waking up in the hospital and remembering my parents and Mikey were gone—that I ran away while intruders robbed them of their lives—was the worst pain I’d ever experienced. Doctors pumped me with enough pain meds to ease the physical hurt of my broken arm and leg, but no one and nothing could fix my broken heart.
I blocked out reality by sleeping as much as possible. Two weeks hadn’t been long enough. I wanted to hide from the waking world forever.
Krista, my cousin, my best friend, born one day after me, refused to let that happen. For over a month, since the moment I woke up at the hospital, she’d been at my side. She held me while I cried, drew hearts and flowers on my casts, promised me we’d get through it, and tried brainwashing me with her feel-good philosophies.
Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, my blow to the head required me to have brain surgery, so her brainwashing didn’t work. Too bad my head trauma didn’t wipe out my bionic memory. I’d never forget that night .
Dreary clouds passed by my airplane window. Krista sat beside me, trying to fix the wobbly latch of her tray table. We’d only been on the plane for twenty minutes, but my emotional claustrophobia was as strong as ever. Sadness and guilt had been suffocating me all day every day until I wanted to permanently stop breathing. So when my aunt and uncle offered me a chance to escape for the weekend and meet my godmother, I took it.
I never even knew I had a godmother. My parents used to live in Arizona, but they moved to Maryland after Mikey and I turned one. My uncle said Louise Luna was my mother’s childhood best friend, but they hadn’t spoken in over a decade. My aunt and uncle didn’t want me moving away, but this Louise lady insisted that she was my legally appointed guardian and convinced them that my mother would want me to consider my options.
I just wanted to get away. I didn’t know what awaited me in Sedona, but it wouldn’t be pieces of my past. No guilt or reminders of my old life.
“I never said goodbye.”
Krista blinked her big brown eyes like she was surprised to hear me speak. I hadn’t said much the last few weeks. “To my parents? You said goodbye.”
“No. Last time I saw Mom and Dad I gave them dirty looks and stormed out of the house. How could angry silence be the last thing I said to them?”
“What about at the cemetery? You stood there a long time. I’m sure they heard everything you said.”
Imagining my parents and Mikey stretched out in coffins freaked me out, so I was relieved that the funerals took place while I was in a coma. Aunt Sandy had stood over a plot of newly laid grass and told me it was Mikey’s. A bunch of sunflowers sat in a metal vase by her feet. No way would Mikey want a bunch of flowers. A bouquet of Tootsie Roll Pops or a case of Orange Gatorade? Sure. Sunflowers? No way.
My brother and parents couldn’t be covered in dirt, sentenced to darkness and living with bugs. I kept picturing them alive: smiling, laughing, dancing, and talking about when we would adopt a dog or what we needed from the grocery store. None of those things could happen if they were buried in the earth.
I fought back tears. “Talking to their tombstones doesn’t count.”
“Sure it does. Spirits hang around awhile before they cross over. They know how much you miss them.”
I shook my head, unable to look at Krista. I had to tell her. We didn’t keep secrets from each other, and I’d already bottled up the truth too long. “That night, I wished on a star that they’d leave me alone. Seconds later those men broke into our house and—”
“Whoa, Pudding, don’t be ridiculous.” She turned my chin so I faced her. “You didn’t wish for them to die.”
“But I ran away. Mikey was still alive. I should’ve helped him, but I ran out of the house. Mom and Dad might’ve been alive too.” I searched Krista’s gaze for blame. Even though I couldn’t find any, she probably wondered if I would’ve left her to die too. “I should’ve grabbed a knife, or…done something. Being alive is my punishment.”
“You aren’t being punished. Sometimes terrible things happen.” She pushed a stray hair behind my ear. “The universe works in mysterious and heartbreaking ways.”
I faced the window again.
Outside, gray clouds stretched to infinity. Were my parents and Mikey out there somewhere? I imagined them soaring like birds through the heavens, and wondered how, in a sky so endless, could there be no room for me?
I lowered the plastic window shade and let the roar of engines lull me to sleep.
∞
Unexpectedly, in all of his breathtaking gorgeousness, my angel of death was back.
In my dream, he strutted through a parking lot, looking less like an angel and more like a movie star. He was six feet tall with a confident swagger. I appreciate those who stand out in a crowd, but he surpassed that. Crowds would part and roll out a red carpet just so this guy could have a VIP path to heaven. I’d be the invisible wallflower who got trampled by paparazzi and his fans.
He’d been at my side when I first woke up from my coma, standing next to Krista like he was there to take me. But then he vanished and I hadn’t seen him since. Why would he take my family but leave me behind?
He pulled out a cell phone and looked at the sky. “Maryah’s flight took off safely. I’m coming home.”
It was only a dream, but I smiled when he said my name correctly. In real life most people butchered the pronunciation. Mariah is the common spelling, but my mother wanted me to be “special.”
He tucked his phone into his jacket and climbed onto a motorcycle, pulling a helmet over his short, dark chocolate hair. When he started the engine, I jumped in front of the bike and grabbed his handle bars, not wanting him to disappear again. Through the shield of his helmet, his spellbinding green eyes blindly stared past me.
“I could get lost in your eyes for centuries,” I confessed.
His engine rumbled to life, and he drove through me. I followed him, hovering above him as he turned down a deserted road.
Up ahead, a barrier with a large sign warned that the road was closed. Movie-star angel man swerved around it, accelerating to a speed not possible in real life. Another sign read Bridge Closed . The road ended where a dilapidated bridge dropped off into a dried-up river.
“Slow down!” I yelled, as if he could hear me over the roaring motorcycle—or like anything in dreams ever mattered.
He gunned the gas one last time. The bike launched off the bridge and flew through the air. Right before he would have crashed into the ground below, he and the motorcycle instantly disappeared.
I floated there, staring at the barren valley. “When you get back to heaven, tell my family I’m waiting for them.”
I don’t know why I said it. He was gone. And so was my family.
