At one point, I saw our kitchen window. I swear I did. It was glowing yellow through the trees on my left, warm and bright, with the blue curtains Mom sewed. I could even smell Dad’s coffee, the
cheap Folgers kind he made every morning.
Then I blinked. And there was nothing there. Just black trees and rain.
My knees started trembling. My chest hurt, a tight squeezing pain right in the middle, like someone
was standing on it.
And then something strange happened.
I stopped feeling cold.
I was so cold that suddenly I didn’t feel cold enough anymore. I felt almost warm. I had the strangest urge to take off my sweatshirt, because it felt too heavy and too hot.
That frightened me more than anything else that night. Because even in my foggy brain, I knew that
was wrong. We’d learned about it in health class, in the unit on outdoor safety. When you stop feeling cold, it means your body is giving up.
I remember thinking about my backpack. How stupid it was. I’d grabbed my algebra homework,
and I hadn’t grabbed my coat.
Number fourteen. Two lines. Find where they cross.
Then my right knee buckled.
I stumbled sideways onto the gravel shoulder. My hands hit the ground, and I didn’t even feel the rocks.
“Get up,” I told myself. “Get up.”
I pushed against the ground. My arms shook so violently I could barely lift myself. I got one foot under me. Then the other. I managed one step.
Then my left knee gave out.
My cheek hit the wet gravel. I felt it, distantly, like it was happening to someone else.
Somewhere nearby, tires hissed along the road. A car. I tried to yell. I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Not a word. Not a sound.
The car kept going.
My backpack had slipped around under my chest. I curled around it the way you’d curl around a pillow. I pressed my numb hands against the wet green fabric.
Rain washed across my face. It got in my eyes and I couldn’t close them fast enough.
I thought about the porch light going off.
About Karen staring at the carpet.
About Dad turning the lock.
Click.
And then the world just went away.
Chapter Four: The Phone Call
Everything I’m about to tell you, I learned later. From Officer Daniels. From the doctors. From the woman who found me. From my father, a long time afterward, when he could finally say it out
loud.
I wasn’t there for any of it. Not really.
Her name was Rosalind Okafor, but everybody called her Roz. She was fifty-three years old and
she was a home health nurse. That night, she’d worked a double shift taking care of an old man with Parkinson’s in a farmhouse out past the county line, and she was driving home on County Road 9 a little after eleven.
She almost didn’t see me.
“I thought you were a garbage bag,” she told me later, sitting by my hospital bed. “That’s the God’s honest truth, baby. A big dark lump on the side of the road. I was already past you.”
Then her headlights caught something. A flash of white.
My sneaker. The white rubber toe of my Converse.
Roz slammed on her brakes so hard her purse flew off the passenger seat. She threw her car in
reverse and backed up fifty feet on a dark wet road in the rain, which she says is the most dangerous thing she’s ever done in her life.
She found me lying at the edge of the drainage ditch. My face was turned to the side. My lips
were blue. My skin was white, so white it almost glowed in her headlights.
She knelt down in the gravel and put two fingers on my neck.
Nothing.
She put her ear down against my mouth.
Nothing.
“I’ve been a nurse for twenty-nine years,” Roz told me. “I knew what I was looking at. I knew it was
bad. But you were so little, curled up around that backpack like a baby with a blanket. I said, Lord, not this one. Not on my road.”
She called 911 on her cell phone. She put it on speaker and set it on the gravel. Then she rolled me
onto my back, tilted my head, and started chest compressions right there on the side of County Road 9, in the freezing rain, with water running into her collar.
The dispatcher counted with her. One, two, three, four. Roz says she broke two of my ribs. She
says she could feel them go. She kept pushing.
It took the ambulance fourteen minutes to get there.
Roz did CPR on me for fourteen minutes.
The paramedics took over. They cut off my wet sweatshirt right there in the ambulance and wrapped me in warm blankets and put heat packs under my arms. They put a breathing tube down my throat.
On the way to the hospital, my heart started again. Weak and slow and uneven. But it started.
My core body temperature, when they got me to Mercy General, was 82 degrees.
Normal is 98.6.
Back at home, my father had no idea where I was.
Maybe he thought I’d gone to a neighbor’s. Maybe he thought I was sitting on the back porch, sulking, waiting to come in. Maybe he expected me to come back in an hour, crying and begging
at the door.
I don’t really know what he was thinking. He’s never been able to tell me. He says he doesn’t remember the first two hours. He says he sat in his recliner watching the Weather Channel and
didn’t see any of it.
What I do know is that nearly three hours after he locked the door, at 12:47 in the morning, the house phone rang.
Officer Mike Daniels had been with the county police for eleven years. He told me about that phone call months later, in a quiet room at the courthouse, while we waited for a hearing to start.
“Mr. Walls?” he said. “This is Officer Daniels with the County Police Department.”
Dad’s voice was irritated, Officer Daniels said. Like he’d been woken up.
“What is this about?”
“Sir, do you have a fifteen-year-old daughter?”
“Yeah.” A pause. “Why?”
“When did you last see her?”
Dad hesitated. Officer Daniels said he could hear the hesitation, the way you hear a man deciding which version of the truth to tell.
“We had an argument,” Dad said. “She left.”
“Did she leave wearing a coat, sir?”
Silence on the line.
“Sir?”
“No,” Dad said finally.
“Did she have a phone with her? Money?”
Another silence. Longer.
Karen had come downstairs by then. She’d heard the phone ring. According to Officer Daniels, he could hear a young woman’s voice in the background asking, “Dad? Who is it? Dad?”
That’s when Dad’s voice changed.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Did she do something? Is she in trouble?”
“Mr. Walls,” Officer Daniels said, “your daughter was located off County Road 9 about four miles east of your residence.”
Dad grabbed the edge of the kitchen counter. Karen told me that part. She said she watched his knuckles go white.
“Located?” he said. “What does that mean, located?”
Officer Daniels paused.
“Sir, a passing driver spotted her near a drainage ditch. She was lying in the freezing rain. Completely unresponsive.”
Dad swallowed. Karen said it was so loud she could hear it across the kitchen.
“Is she okay?”
And then Officer Daniels said the words that made my father reach for the wall.
“Mr. Walls, when that driver found your daughter, she wasn’t breathing.”
Chapter Five: Waking Up
I woke up three days later.
The first thing I remember is the sound. A steady beep, beep, beep, somewhere above my head. And a hissing sound, like air going in and out of a tire.
The second thing I remember is the pain. Everywhere. My chest felt like someone had parked a car
on it. My hands burned, a deep throbbing burn, like they’d been stuck in an oven. My throat was raw.
The third thing I remember is a woman’s face leaning over me. Dark skin, gray curls, reading
glasses on a beaded chain. She was smiling, and she was crying at the same time.
“There she is,” the woman said softly. “There’s my girl. Welcome back, baby.”
I had no idea who she was.
I was in the pediatric ICU at Mercy General. They told me that later, when I could stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time.
I had severe hypothermia. My heart had stopped on the side of the road. The doctors called it a
cardiac arrest from the cold. They had to warm my blood slowly, through tubes, over hours, because if they did it too fast my heart could stop again.
I had pneumonia from breathing in rainwater. I had two cracked ribs from the CPR. I had frostbite
on three fingers of my left hand and two on my right. They didn’t know yet if I’d lose any of them.
I had a breathing tube for the first two days. It was out by the time I woke up, but my throat still felt like I’d swallowed sandpaper.
“You died for a little while,” the ICU doctor told me on the fourth day. Her name was Dr. Feldman. She said it gently, sitting on the edge of my bed. “About fourteen minutes. You’re very lucky. Cold can do that sometimes. It slows everything down. It protects the brain. If you’d been found any
later, or if that woman hadn’t known CPR…”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.
The woman with the gray curls was Roz.
She’d come to the hospital every single day. She sat by my bed after her shifts, in her scrubs, reading her Bible and doing word search puzzles. The nurses told me she’d been there when I first opened my eyes, and that she’d cried so hard the charge nurse brought her a whole box of
tissues.
“Who are you?” I croaked the first time I could talk.
“I’m the lady who broke your ribs,” she said. “I’m sorry about that, baby.”
Then she told me the whole story. The garbage bag. The white sneaker. The fourteen minutes of counting.
I lay there listening, and tears ran out of the corners of my eyes and into my ears, and I couldn’t
wipe them because my hands were wrapped up like boxing gloves.
“Why did you stop?” I whispered. “Nobody else stopped.”
Roz thought about that.
“Because I saw you,” she said. “And once you see somebody, you can’t unsee them. That’s the whole thing, baby. That’s all of it.”
My father was there too.
I didn’t see him at first. Roz told me he’d been there since the first night. He’d been sitting in the family waiting room down the hall, because the hospital social worker hadn’t allowed him into my room until she’d talked to the police.
When I finally saw him, it was the fifth day.
He was standing in the doorway of my room. He was wearing the same gray sweatshirt I’d seen him in that Tuesday night. He hadn’t shaved. His eyes were red and swollen and there were deep
purple circles under them.
He looked about twenty years older than he had five days ago.
He didn’t come in. He just stood there, holding onto the doorframe with one hand, the way he
must have held onto the kitchen wall.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
Then I turned my face toward the window. I didn’t decide to. I just did it.
When I looked back, he was gone.
Chapter Six: The Label
On the sixth day, a woman named Angela Reyes came into my room with a clipboard.
She was the hospital’s pediatric social worker. She was young, maybe thirty, with braids pulled back into a bun and a soft voice. She sat down in the chair Roz usually used and pulled it close
to my bed.
“I need to ask you some questions,” she said. “Some of them might be hard. You can stop anytime. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“When a child comes into the hospital the way you did,” she said carefully, “we’re required by law to report it. To Children’s Services. There’s a caseworker assigned to you now. Her name is Mrs.
Bell. And the police have an officer looking into what happened.”
“Officer Daniels,” I said. Roz had told me his name.
“That’s right.”
She asked me to tell her what happened that night. Everything. From the beginning.
So I did. I told her about the algebra homework. About Karen coming down the stairs. About the orange bottle and the label turned toward Karen’s palm. About Dad not asking to see it.
I told her about the phone call on Sunday. Dad saying, She’s not available to discuss a prescription. Dad saying it was an insurance mix-up.
Angela Reyes wrote it all down. When I got to the part about the phone call, she stopped writing
and looked up at me.
“The pharmacy called your house,” she said slowly. “About a prescription in your name.”
“I guess so. I don’t know. I’ve never taken anything.”
She wrote something down and underlined it twice.
Officer Daniels came that afternoon. He was a tall man with a shaved head and a quiet, deep voice that made you want to tell him the truth. He stood at the foot of my bed with his hat in his hands,
the way police officers do in movies when someone has died.
“I talked to your dad,” he said. “The night you came in. I asked him about the pills. The ones your sister said she found.”
“He believed her,” I said.
“I asked him to show me the bottle.” Officer Daniels paused. “He went home and got it. Brought it to the station the next morning. He hadn’t read the label until I asked him to.”
He looked at me steadily.
“The name on the bottle was yours.”
My heart did something funny in my chest. The monitor above my bed beeped faster. A nurse
looked in from the hallway.
“I didn’t…”
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