Being Henry David - By Cal Armistead Page 0,79

lot of canoeing and portaging once he got to the wild and I don’t have a canoe. But that doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I’m here, seeing the same landscape he saw, pretty much the way it looked back in the mid-1800s.

And just like Henry, I have the same destination: the mountain’s summit. Except Henry never quite made it. He climbed to South Peak, the second highest peak, and even though that’s way impressive, let’s face it, it’s still not the top. My goal is to get there for both of us. Hiking up the side of the mountain, I get a good rhythm going, breathing hard but making good progress. The incline is sharp, a wooded path through trees and bushes and over random rock formations. So far, so good. Conditions are still great as far as I can tell, not a lot of clouds. That’s important when you’re climbing up to where the clouds live.

Focused on steady walking and breathing, my brain clears and I’m able to relax and think like when I settle into the cadence of a good run. And as soon as I do, my thoughts fall into that last black hole of time I couldn’t recover, until now. Listening to the pace of my own feet crunching on rocks while climbing the mountain, I’m able in a semi-detached way to examine the missing moments and days right after the accident.

When my forehead smashed into the windshield, I got a concussion. Brain sloshing against my skull knocked me out, but not for long. Not long enough.

I was aware of people rushing to the car window, saying hang in there, that the ambulance was coming, that it was going to be okay. But it wasn’t. At first, Rosie wailed and whimpered like a baby animal caught in a trap, but then she went silent with her blue eyes wide and empty, and that was worse. My head hurt so bad and everything was blurry and I couldn’t get to her, couldn’t help get her free. Somebody outside the passenger window gasped and said, “Her leg. My God, her leg,” and I had to look. But after one quick glance at the place where her leg was supposed to be, I couldn’t grasp the sight of blood and bone. My brain locked into wondering, what happened to that other pink sneaker? Where did it go? As soon as I get out of this car, I have to find it.

The ambulance arrived and I can still see the lights flashing, hear my sister screaming while they tried to free her from the wreck. I kept telling them I had to go out there in the road to find the sneaker, but they kept telling me hush, that I was going to be okay. They didn’t understand. The trip to the hospital is a blur, and for the next couple of days I guess I swam in and out of consciousness while my brain did its best to recover.

Flashes of memory: bandage on my head, IV drip in my arm, my parents coming to see me, Mom crying. It runs together, those days in the hospital. Sleeping for hours and eating meals brought on a tray, watching TV shows with my eyes glazed over, barely registering what I saw. Then, about the third day after the accident, Mom came to see me and when the doctor came in, he told us I could go home.

As soon as the gauzy haze in my head started to lift, it was all too clear what had happened to Rosie. Her leg was so badly mangled in the wreckage, they couldn’t save it. One legged, broken ballerina. Even after I was better, I stayed in my bed all day, every day, refusing to go to school, pretending my head still hurt more than it actually did. Couldn’t face the idea of what happened to my baby sister. What I did to her.

Finally, I couldn’t stand living inside my own body, couldn’t deal with the guilt. I knew I either had to run or I would end up hanging myself in the garage. It was that simple.

So I threw some stuff in a gym bag, emptied my savings account, and got ready to run to New York City, the biggest, baddest place I could think of. I was prepared to vanish into the crowds and somehow cease to exist. Disappear off the grid.

Before I left, I stopped at the hospital to see Rosie.