The Foreseeable Future Read online

  “What would Elliot be?”

  “Elliot would be a horse. Aloof, regal.”

  “Wow,” said Elliot, but it was clear he was flattered.

  “What about me?” I asked.

  Sara turned and squinted, her face extremely close to mine. She had the densest eyelashes of anyone I’d ever known. They were so long they almost touched her eyebrows. “You’re like a cat,” she concluded. “You know who your friends are.”

  I was about to ask her to animalize herself—a challenge she wasn’t likely to accept—when, down by the water, Cameron stopped running. I watched as she hunched her shoulders and folded at the waist. She attempted to sit in a chair that did not exist, and then she fell to the sand.

  “What the hell?” I heard Elliot ask, his voice slow and heavy.

  And then I was running. Because a part of me knew exactly what I had seen. In night school, we had watched videos of the moment when a person’s heart stops beating. Cameron’s collapse was unambiguous. It was textbook.

  Another part of me was in denial. Cameron was a kid, and a girl—not an eighty-year-old man. She wasn’t sick, as far as I knew. She hadn’t been mixing Red Bull and Adderall. She had been playing catch with a boy.

  The dry sand squeaked against my heels. The wet sand cut into my toes. The ocean had never felt so far away.

  At the edge of the water, Seth was kneeling beside Cameron’s body, gently smacking her face. “Wake up, Cam. Wake up.”

  “Move,” I said, pushing on Seth’s broad shoulders.

  “I think she fainted,” he said.

  “No. She didn’t.”

  I opened Cameron’s mouth to check if she was breathing. She wasn’t breathing. “Call 9-1-1,” I told Seth, who might as well have been a stranger, he seemed so remote.

  “I don’t have my phone.” He spoke with the vacancy of someone who really was about to faint. But my friends had caught up to us, and they had phones. Sara dialed the number and Elliot took off sprinting in the direction of the tents.

  Cameron’s lips were faintly blue. “Fuck,” I said, and made sure her head was flat against the sand.

  “What are you doing?” Seth asked. “You’re going to hurt her.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, apologizing for everything that was about to happen, feeling both like I’d already failed and like I had no choice. “She’s not breathing.”

  I stacked my hands against Cameron’s breastbone. I locked my fingers and stood on my knees, so I could press down with the weight of my upper body. Compressions were supposed to match the rhythm of some pop song from the seventies, but I couldn’t remember what it was. At first, I could only remember the number three. As in: Three percent of people are successfully revived by CPR.

  And then I remembered our instructor, Joan, saying, “If you feel the person’s ribs break, you’re doing it right.”

  I pressed harder.

  Sara was still talking into the phone. Some random people were hovering over Cameron’s body, blocking the sun. I wanted to stop. I was in so much searing pain; it felt like someone had lit my arms on fire.

  “I have to stop,” I said out loud. But no one offered to take my place.

  I was supposed to do thirty compressions on Cameron’s chest before attempting to breathe air into her lungs, but either I forgot or I was terrified, and I never counted to thirty. And then Elliot was back. He had brought the firefighters with him. One of them grabbed me around the waist and pulled me off of Cameron. The other took over compressions.

  I let myself fall backward. The sun was a bruised orange against the black screen of my eyelids. I heard the sirens, the ambulance plowing through the sand, the paramedics unloading a gurney.

  One of them asked, “Does the victim have a known heart condition?”

  I had forgotten all about Seth, but now I listened to him say, through sobs, “No. She’s always been healthy.”

  And I was gone, way too far gone to wonder how Seth knew anything about Cameron Suzuki’s heart.

  NINE

  I didn’t realize I had left my sandals on the beach until I was sitting in the waiting room, staring down at my bare toes encrusted with wet sand. That panicked, vulnerable feeling washed over me—the one you get just before you figure out you’re dreaming.

  I nudged Sara. “Hey. I’m not wearing any shoes.”

  She looked at me, her summer tan diluted by the fluorescent lights, and then down at my feet. “Audrey,” Sara said, “where the hell are your shoes?”

  On my other side, Elliot stood abruptly and went to the vending machine, which was making a sound like a lawn mower. The sound competed with the screams of some kid across the room. Squeezing a carton of two-percent milk, the toddler sobbed, “I want it to be choc-o-late,” over and over, always exhaling on the last syllable.

  Seth had gone with Cameron in the ambulance, after the paramedics shocked Cameron’s heart into responding with a weak pulse that convinced no one she would survive. I hadn’t questioned Seth’s decision to go with them until my friends and I were halfway across the beach, heading for my car. The ambulance had left long, erratic tracks in the sand, swooping around logs and umbrellas.

  “Why did he go with her?” I’d asked Elliot. “Why didn’t you go?”

  The way he stared at me, it was like I’d spoken a foreign language.

  Sara’s eyes grew wide. She tilted her head, studying me. “Audrey. Cameron is Seth’s ex.”

  I blinked.

  “They were together for most of senior year. You didn’t know that?”

  I wanted to cry, but only because I’d wanted to cry since the back doors of the ambulance had slammed shut and I understood that we were, most likely, never going to see Cameron again. So she was Seth’s ex. Seth wasn’t my anything. A girl from school had collapsed at the Fourth of July festival and now we needed to go to the hospital. There was nothing else to discuss.

  Noticing how hard my hands were shaking, Elliot requested the car key. Sara, sitting up front, accused him of not knowing which corkscrew of a road climbed the hill to Steeds Memorial. He had repeated Fuck you, just under his breath and with a lot of space between the two words. As if the words carried less weight when separated. As if he knew he’d eventually want to take them back.

  Now Elliot was crossing the windowless waiting room, handing me a bottle of water. I chugged half of it. Looming over my chair, he gave me a nod of approval.

  “I did it wrong,” I confessed, capping the bottle.

  I knew Cameron was dead. And I also knew that if someone else had reached her sooner—one of the firefighters, or a real nurse, or just some guy with strong biceps and a good memory for Baywatch reruns—she might have made it.

  Holding out hope required more energy than I had left.

  “You don’t know that,” Sara said, a beat too late. She began scratching at the skin above my knee, gently and rhythmically. Sara sometimes forgot that people were not animals—that I, especially, was not one of her barn cats, soothed or excited according to her whims.

  But I did know. In night school, our instructor had promised that the trick to effective CPR administration was to stay calm, and I had not stayed calm. I had drenched my T-shirt with sweat and come close to quitting before the firefighters even showed up. Joan had also told us to perform thirty compressions before beginning mouth-to-mouth. I had forgotten to breathe for Cameron. And wasn’t that the step literally anyone else would have remembered—from their poolside fantasies, or, at least, from the movies?

  I still had no memory of Cameron and Seth together. I didn’t know if they had been prone to making out in the hallway, or posing for yearbook photos. Whether they had been the couple most likely to get married, or run the country, or have twenty kids and their own reality TV show.

  A set of glass doors slid open on the far side of the waiting room, and Se
th appeared. His ponytail had come loose, and he’d upgraded his usual smile to a grin so broad it crinkled the skin around his eyes.

  Why did he look so happy?

  Seth stood in front of me, gesturing for me to stand. I did and he wrapped his arms around my middle. “You’re going to break my ribs,” I said, enjoying the pressure of his arms. Not wanting him to let go.

  “I don’t even care.” He shifted to give each of my friends, whom he barely knew, an equally bone-crushing hug. They hugged him back, like Seth had always been one of us. He said that Cameron was going to be fine. Totally, completely fine. She had regained consciousness in the ambulance. She needed a pacemaker. Her life would resume.

  More arms wrapped around my waist, making it difficult to breathe.

  A fan of the facts, Elliot asked Seth, “Do they know what caused it?”

  With minor difficulty, as if trying to pronounce something he’d memorized for a quiz, Seth said, “It was a cardiac rhythm disturbance.”

  Sara kept shouting my name, which she did when she was mad at me—but also, apparently, when she was ecstatic. “You didn’t do it wrong! Audrey Nelson, you saved a person’s life!”

  And I kept shaking my head. Someone else was responsible—the firefighter with his confident hands, the paramedics with their defibrillators.

  Everyone in that waiting room was waiting for me to say something. To jump up and down, or weep with joy, or just bow my head in humble acknowledgment of what I had done.

  I could hear that kid sniffling over her milk, which still was not chocolate.

  The praise was too much. The roomful of strangers staring at me was too much. My longing to feel Seth’s skin against mine—a longing he had triggered just by hugging me—was too much, and also entirely inappropriate.

  “I need to go home,” I announced. “I’m really sorry. I just feel like I should go home, put some shoes on.”

  Confused, Seth looked down at my bare feet. In the next moment he recovered and fixed me with an intense stare. “Do you want me to drive you?”

  My bottom lip actually shook as I tried to tell him, No, stay.

  “What about Cameron?” Elliot asked.

  Seth threw a glance over his shoulder, toward the glass doors. “She’s pretty out of it, but . . .” A sigh made his chest rise and fall. “Yeah. Her parents are here. I should probably stay with them.”

  It took me a second to realize that Seth knew Cameron’s parents. He knew them well enough to be a source of comfort.

  “I’m okay,” I managed, holding out my hand, asking Elliot to relinquish my car key. “I promise.”

  The indecision in Seth’s eyes would mean something to me, someday. Right now, all I wanted was to get the hell out of that waiting room.

  So I did.

  I grabbed my car keys and abandoned my friends, and Seth, and the girl whose heart had stopped beating. Rattled was not a sensation with which I was totally familiar. All shook up was not a state in which I often found myself. I needed to catch my breath. Alone.

  But then, once I had my hands on the steering wheel and the radio tuned to a familiar Emmylou Harris song, I realized I was okay. Everything was fine. I had been terrified, but it had never been my own life or my own body on the line. And Cameron had lived. Someday she would die for real, but now there was a good chance I wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

  The hill leading down to the highway was steep, surrounded by colossal trees that, if rotten or storm-cracked, could easily fall and block the road. In Crescent Bay, everything crucial—public schools, emergency rooms—had been built on higher ground. Ordinary storms were not our main concern. People in town loved to talk casually about the tsunami—they called it the big one—that would someday take us all down.

  It was a source of local pride, this idea that we lived here fearlessly.

  * * *

  * * *

  For a minute I hung out in the driveway, leaning against the car, not yet ready to go inside. The air still smelled like fireworks, and I remembered the cheap dollar-store sparklers with which Rosie and I had always tried to write our names against the sky. I remembered Jake kneeling over a Roman candle, Dad calling cheerfully from the front porch, “Don’t set your thumb on fire!” while Mom buried her face in her hands.

  The truth was that no one ever worried about anything when she was around; we were confident she would worry enough for the rest of us.

  The house was stuffy, retaining the day’s heat. In order to get past the entryway I had to kick aside a collection of Jake’s shoes, avoid toppling a precarious tower of library books, and step over a crate of tangerines Dad had brought home from the farmer’s market. I was mid–obstacle course when Jake came running at me, waving his phone in the air. “People are saying you saved a girl’s life!”

  His eyes were wide and frantic. Just meeting his gaze wore me out.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” he said. “Did you turn off your phone?”

  “It’s dead,” I answered.

  We were joined by our father, whose gray hair was sticking straight up, like he’d been nervously massaging his head for a while. “Some Facebook users are under the impression that you’re a hero.” Dad spoke casually, as if relaying a theory he’d read about in the New York Times.

  Jake babbled, “It’s so weird, though, because they’re saying it was Cameron Suzuki, and that she was with Ben O’Malley’s little brother when it happened, and I didn’t think you hung out with them. I didn’t think you even knew those kids.”

  “She doesn’t, I swear!” In striped socks pulled up to her knees, Rosie came slipping down the hallway. “She only knows, like, two people. It wasn’t you, right, Audrey?”

  Half the town had attended the Fourth of July festival; of course everyone was posting about Cameron’s collapse. Normally, I would have relished the chance to keep my family members in suspense before confirming the wildest rumor circulating Crescent Bay. But my sole ambition for tonight was to hole up in my room, maybe mess around on my phone until I fell asleep. If I was being honest, I wanted to check Mom’s blog. Reading Sprung Free in Italy! had become my default Internet activity. It seemed, almost, like the responsible thing to do.

  My dad and siblings were still staring at me, wanting to know if I’d returned home a hero.

  “It was me,” I said. “I mean, I was there.” I tried to corral the three of them toward the living room, but they each took a step closer to me, Jake so he could continue his interrogation.

  “You were there as a bystander? Or you were the person who performed CPR on Cameron Suzuki after she had a freaking heart attack?”

  I pretended to think about it. “The second thing.”

  “How do you know CPR?” Dad asked.

  “Um, from her job?” Rosie’s tone implied a harsh duh. “Was it super hard?”

  “We should celebrate,” said Jake.

  Dad mentioned the bottles of apple cider living in our garage.

  “No, this calls for actual champagne,” Jake insisted.

  “That cider is really old,” I said. “I think Mom bought it for my middle school graduation party.”

  Dad said, “Perfect. It practically is champagne.”

  My brother made a face. “I think we have some pizza bagels in the freezer. Audrey, would you like some celebratory pizza bagels?”

  “What I would like is some celebratory personal space.” I waved my arms until my family finally moved away from the front door. My hopes of hiding in my room had been dashed, but once I assumed my preferred position on the couch—my back against the armrest, legs stretched across the cushions—I felt more relaxed, ready to be interviewed.

  “I learned CPR in night school,” I told Dad. “And yeah, Ro, it was pretty hard.”

  My sister asked, “Is this Cameron person, like, a friend of yours? Or is it g
oing to be super awkward next time you see her?”

  Before I could think of how to answer, Jake cut me off. “Not everything is awkward, Rosie. Some things are more life or death.”

  Rosie wrinkled her nose. “Death is so awkward.”

  Dad was sitting, knees up, in his La-Z-Boy recliner. “Did this girl regain consciousness right in front of you?”

  “No,” I said. “They resuscitated her in the ambulance, with the defibrillator.”

  He looked thoughtfully toward the blur of the ceiling fan. “So maybe you didn’t save her life.”

  “Maybe,” I admitted, wishing he could just cop to being proud of me, like a regular dad.

  “Is it fair to say you’ll never know?”

  “Sure. It’s fair to say I’ll never know.”

  Dad smiled, a fan of ambiguity.

  My brother jumped to his feet and disappeared inside the kitchen. I heard the pop and hum of the freezer door opening. As he searched for pizza bagels, Jake called, “Hey, Aud, maybe you went into the right profession. Maybe you should be a doctor! You can save lives on the regular and make us all rich.”

  He sounded practically giddy with awe. I glanced at Dad, wanting to gauge his reaction to Jake describing my summer job as a profession. Dad may not have shared my brother’s outward enthusiasm, but a ghost of a smile remained on his face. He was stunned, I realized.

  “Can we call Mom?” Jake asked, re-entering the room. He had left the microwave whirring, and now a vaguely pizza-related smell wafted in from the kitchen. “This is going to astound her.”

  Panic flashed in Dad’s eyes. “But we normally talk to Iris on Sundays,” he said, his voice clipped.

  Apparently their separation had rules. Rules that would be compromised if the four of us Skyped our mother without warning.

  “We talk to her all the time,” Jake said, confused. “She’s our mother. . . .”

  “Right,” Dad said. “But, Aud, perhaps you want to talk to Iris privately? You must be overwhelmed.”