"My God, my God. My child!" his father said.
"Are they helping her?"
His father did not speak.
"Answer me, Dad! Why don't you answer me?"
His father held his face. His father was leaning over him, tears falling down on his face-My face, Tristan thought with a jolt. That's my face.
And yet he was watching his father and himself as if he were standing apart from himself.
"Mr. Carruthers, I'm sorry." A woman in a paramedic's uniform stood next to him and his father.
His father would not look at her. "Dead at the scene?" he asked.
She nodded. "I'm sorry. We didn't have a chance with him."
Tristan felt the darkness coming over him again. He struggled to hold on to consciousness.
"And Ivy?" his father asked.
"Cuts and bruises, in shock. Calling for your son."
Tristan had to find her. He focused on a doorway, concentrated with all his strength, and passed through it. Then another, and another-he was feeling stronger now.
Tristan hurried down the corridor. People kept coming at him. He dodged left and right. He seemed to be going so much faster than they were, and none of them bothered to move out of his way.
A nurse was coming down the hall. He stopped to ask her help in finding Ivy, but she walked past him. He turned a corner and found himself facing a cart loaded with linens. Then he faced the man pushing it. Tristan spun around. The cart and the man were on the other side of him.
Tristan knew that they had passed through him as if he were not there. He had heard what the paramedic said. Still, his mind searched for some other-any other-explanation. But there was none.
He was dead. No one could see him. No one knew he was there. And Ivy would not know.
Tristan felt a pain deeper than any he had ever known. He had told her he loved her, but there had not been time enough to convince her. Now there was no time at all. She'd never believe in his love the way she believed in her angels.
"I said, I can't speak any louder."
Tristan glanced up. He had stopped by a doorway. An old woman was lying in the bed within.
She was tiny and gray with long, thin tubes connecting her to machines. She looked like a spider caught in its own web.
"Come in," she said.
He looked behind him to see whom she was talking to.
No one.
"These old eyes of mine are so dim, I can't see my own hand in front of my face," the woman said. "But I can see your light."
Tristan again looked behind him. Her voice sounded certain of what she saw. It seemed much bigger and stronger than her little gray body.
"I knew you would come," she said. "I've been waiting very patiently."
She has been waiting for somebody, Tristan thought, a son or a grandson, and she thinks I'm him.
Still, how could she see him if no one else could?
Her face was shining brightly now.
"I've always believed in you," she said. She extended a fragile hand toward Tristan. Forgetting that his hand would pass through hers, he instinctively reached out to her. She closed her eyes.
A moment later, alarms went off. Three nurses rushed into the room. Tristan stepped back as they crowded around the woman. He suddenly realized that they were trying to resuscitate her; he knew they would not. Somehow he knew that the old woman did not want to come back.
Maybe somehow the old woman had known about him.
What did she know?
Tristan could feel the darkness coming over him again. He fought it. What if this time he didn't come back? He had to come back, he had to see Ivy one last time. Desperately he tried to keep himself alert, focusing on one object after another in the room. Then he saw it, next to a small book on the woman's tray: a statue, with a hand outstretched to the woman and angelic wings spread.
For days after, all Ivy could remember was the waterfall of glass. The accident was like a dream she kept having but couldn't remember. Asleep or awake, it would suddenly take over. Her whole body would tense, and her mind would start reeling backward, but all she could remember was the sound of a windshield exploding, then a slow-motion waterfall of glass.
Every day people came and went from the house, Suzanne and Beth, and some other friends and teachers from school. Gary came once; it was a miserable visit for both of them. Will ducked in and out on another day. They brought her flowers, cookies, and sympathy. Ivy couldn't wait until they left, couldn't wait until she could sleep again. But when she lay down at night, she couldn't sleep, and then she had to wait forever until it was day once more.
At the funeral they stood around her, her mother and Andrew on one side, Philip on the other.
She let Philip do all the sobbing for her. Gregory stood behind her and from time to time laid his hand on her back. She'd lean against him for a moment. He was the only one who didn't keep asking her to talk about it. He was the only one who seemed to understand her pain and didn't keep telling her that remembering was good for her.
Little by little she did remember-or was told-what had happened. The doctors and police prompted her. The undersides of her arms were full of cuts. She must have held her hands up in front of her face, they said, protecting it from the flying glass. Miraculously, the rest of her injuries were just bruises from the impact and the seat belt restraint. Tristan must have swerved, for the car had swung around to the right, the deer coming in on his side. To protect her, she thought, though the police didn't say that. She told them he had tried to stop but couldn't. It had been twilight. The deer had appeared suddenly. That's all she remembered. Someone told her the car had been totaled, but she refused to look at the newspaper photo.
A week after the funeral, Tristan's mother came to the house and brought a picture of him. She said it was her favorite one. Ivy cradled it in her hands. He was smiling, wearing his old base-ball cap, backward of course, and a rarry school jacket, looking as Ivy had seen him look so many times. It seemed as if he were about to ask her if she wanted to meet for another swimming lesson. For the first time since the accident, Ivy began to cry.
She didn't hear Gregory come into the kitchen, where she and Tristan's mother were sitting.
When he saw Dr. Carruthers, he demanded to know why she was there.
Ivy showed him Tristan's picture, and he looked angrily at the woman.
"It's over now," he said. "Ivy is getting over it. She doesn't need any more reminders."
"When you love someone, it's never over," Dr. Carruthers replied gently. "You move on, because you have to, but you bring him with you in your heart."
She turned back to Ivy. "You need to talk and remember, Ivy. You need to cry. Cry hard. You need to get angry, too. I am!"
"You know," said Gregory, "I'm getting tired of listening to all this crap. Everyone is telling Ivy to remember and talk about what happened. Everyone has a pet theory on how to mourn, but I wonder if they're really thinking of how it feels for her."
Dr. Carruthers studied him for a moment. "I wonder if you have really mourned your own loss," she said.
"Don't tell me you're a shrink!"
She shook her head. "Just a person who, like you, has lost someone I loved with all my heart."
Before she left, Tristan's mother asked Ivy if she wanted Ella back.
"I can't have her," Ivy said. "They won't let me!"
Then she ran up to her room, slammed the door, and locked it. One by one, those she loved were being taken away from her.
Picking up an angel statue, one that Beth had just brought her, Ivy hurled it against the wall.
"Why?" she cried out. "Why didn't I die, too?"
She picked up the angel and threw it again.
"You're better off, Tristan. I hate you for being better off than me. You don't miss me now, do you? Oh, no, you don't feel a thing!"