I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t save her. No one could. A few hours ago she was alive, walking down the street with Cole. Smiling, talking, laughing. I got in a car and came home, but not Rita. Looking back now, it’s like it happened in a dream.
I leaned over her face and listened, tried to feel for any movement of air that would tell me she was alive. Please! Please! I thought. Just a little breath! My mind was racing, but my body was calm. My mother is a nurse, my father is a cop—I know how to act in a crisis.
Cole stood next to me shouting her name over and over, wailing. He got down on his knees beside me in the street.
But there was nothing.
Only a widening puddle of blood beneath her head darkening the black tar, her elbow twisted up over her shoulder, the palm of her hand all wrong and facing up. Plastic beads from the bracelets I had made for her lay scattered in the road where all traffic had stopped.
I pushed on her chest with all my weight, fist beneath my open hand. Hard! Fast! If I could get her heart to pump, there would still be hope when the ambulance came! I counted thirty times and tilted her head back, held her nose, blew into her mouth. Come on, lungs, I thought, just a little air!
Again! Again! I listened. Nothing.
Rita was dead.
I’m reading the words I’ve written and I can’t believe it. But it’s true. I saw.
Cole lay down on the hot street, faceup next to Rita. His mouth was twisted and his face grew red and wet as he sobbed uncontrollably, gasping for breath. Rita’s blood stained the shoulder of his shirt. He pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes, elbows to the sky.
Two EMTs jumped out of an ambulance and ran over. The flashing lights were blinding, even in the middle of the day.
“Are you hurt?” A short man with dark hair and round glasses stood above me. I could see the smooth hair on his arms below his shirtsleeves.
I shook my head and stood up as a blond woman dressed in an identical blue-and-white uniform bent down to feel for Rita’s pulse. The first medic began asking Cole questions and checking him for wounds.
Everything I’d been holding in came rushing up through my body. I turned away and threw up onto the blacktop, covering the double yellow line with bits of food and bile.
“Atty!” I looked up and there was Papa, wearing his uniform. “Ti chouchou, what happened?”
I pointed at Rita. “She’s dead!”
Papa put his arm around my shoulders and tried to lead me to the patrol car, but I ducked down and ran to Cole, still lying on the ground with his hands on his eyes, rocking from side to side. I got down on the ground and put my shoulder on his chest, squeezed him tight. I could feel him shaking, sucking in air, pushing it out through the sobs. I knew he wasn’t hurt. I saw it happen.
I had been on the bus on my way to meet them, writing in this journal, looking out the window, smiling, thinking about Cole—the way that he talks with me, listens to me, sparkles his eyes at me. I tried not to think about the youth retreat, but I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering there, and it left a sour taste in my mouth. I thought about Rita and the painting she would make. My portrait. How would it turn out? What would it reveal that I couldn’t see? Would it be one of those pictures that you can’t walk past but have to stop and stare at? Now I’ll never know.
I must have been daydreaming like that for a while, because before I knew it, the bus was sitting in traffic half a block from Hennepin and Lake Street where we’d meet. I looked up and saw Rita and Cole at the corner, and I could feel my face stretch out in an even wider smile as I took them in. Cole was wearing loose denim pants and a pale collared shirt that flapped in the breeze, the top three buttons were undone, and I could taste his skin on my lips just from seeing the hint of his chest. On his wrists were the neon bracelets that he wore the day we first met. Rita was two steps ahead of him, as usual, crossing the street and walking with purpose. She wore a dark-purple sundress, almost black, with small white dots that waved as she walked, and her favorite clomping-around-town shoes—black leather clogs with a tall sole that made her bounce even higher when she moved. Her salt-and-pepper hair was tied back behind her neck. I could see her strong chin and sharp cheeks in the sunlight, but her bright blue eyes were hiding behind dark round glasses. Her wrists were covered in bangles and beads, some precious, some simply pretty. She carried a brown paper shopping bag—probably some weird fabric or an ancient tool, or maybe just some apples inside, I thought.
In a second, everything changed.
A white compact car came around the corner fast—too fast! Cole’s face twisted as he realized what was happening, but his scream was drowned out by the squeal of brakes and tire rubber skidding on the pavement as the front headlight slammed into Rita’s hip and sent her hurtling out into the road. She landed with a horrific thud and bounced once, rolled over, and lay stretched out on her back, perfectly still.
I heard the sound of my own scream and the gasp of the other passengers. Everyone began talking at once. Then I was at the door, banging with my fists. “Let me out! Let me out!” I shouted over and over until the dazed bus driver released the doors and I ran into the road. I tripped over Rita’s black clog that had flown off her foot, little colored pieces of plastic rolled in all directions.
The paramedics put Rita into a long white-nylon bag. Loaded her onto a gurney. Put her in the ambulance. Closed the swinging doors. I was still holding Cole when he stopped sobbing. He looked at me, then at the spot where Rita had been lying on the ground.
“No!” he shouted.
Cole pushed me off of him and jumped up. “No!” He punched the steel ambulance door with his fist, making a dull thump. “No!”
A blur of blue uniforms and two cops were holding him, one on each arm, as Cole struggled, kicking at the ambulance, trying to break free as they dragged him away and pushed him into the backseat of a police cruiser.
“Cole!” I screamed. I ran, but my path was blocked by another blue uniform, and then my father was holding me, his arms around me.
“It’s going to be okay, my love,” he said.
But he’s wrong. About so many things, it’s not even funny.