Foam! For the fire! I’d forgotten the fire for a second! Now I realized my neck and arm were stinging. “I might have some burns, actually,” I said.

She smiled at me. “You’re very lucky. The fire broke out just as we cranked up the hoses. We had it out in under a minute.”

“That does sound lucky,” I agreed.

“Plus,” she went on, waving a tiny flashlight back and forth in front of my pupils, “facedown in a ditch is the best place to be when the flames roll over.”

“So, double luck,” I said.

“Are you kidding? Quadruple. I’m amazed you’re not a charcoal briquette.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“We’re going to strap you to a short board now,” she said, “and then to a long board while we transport you to the hospital.”

“I think I’m really fine,” I said. “Just wedged.”

But now she was pulling out an oxygen mask and cupping it over my face. “We’re going to give you some vitamin O. Just to help you breathe easier.”

Vitamin O. Cute. “I’m really fine.”

“Just to be safe,” she said, winking. “Just procedure. You don’t want me to get in trouble, do you?”

I didn’t. Lady firefighters probably had the deck stacked against them anyway.

And so I held still, breathing in cool vitamin O while she attached me strap by painstaking strap into a state of snug immobilization. She also put me in a C-collar, even though it seemed perfectly clear to me that I didn’t need one. The last step, once I was secure, was also the longest: prying apart the crumpled front of the plane to free my legs. This project involved three different firefighters—who took their sweet time.

I was grateful for their care, though. Nobody took shortcuts. Nobody seemed eager to get off shift. They did things right. My nameless lady firefighter stayed right by me the whole time, asking me over and over to wiggle my fingers and toes and making chitchat to keep me calm. She told me if this had been a jet crash, they’d be calling in heavy rescue—but “these little planes are like tin foil.”

Before they had me out, I heard a helicopter. “There’s your ride,” my new friend said.

“I’m really fine,” I tried again.

“You’ll like it. It’s fun.”

“Where is Chip?” I asked.

“Is that your boyfriend?”

“Fiancé,” I said, for the first time ever.

“He’s back by the truck.”

“Is he hurt?”

“They’re doing an evaluation,” she said. “But I’d say there’s not a scratch on him.”

Once they finally had me out, and had loaded me onto a rolling stretcher, they wheeled me to an ambulance, where they cut off all my clothes with shears (“Life Flight likes ’em naked”) and started an IV with morphine.

The storm had blown off in another direction, and now the sky was remarkably cloudless. I could see a million stars up above, and I thanked them all. I thanked them for luck, and firefighters, and sirens, and flame retardant, and ditches, and bolt cutters, and good timing, and vitamin O, and hope, and miracles, and not being burned to a crisp.

The paramedics worked hard. Every time I told them I was fine, they shrugged and said, “Procedure.”

Another procedure: I had to ride in the ambulance two hundred feet to the Life Flight chopper. They wouldn’t let Chip come with me, either, even though there was plenty of room.

“I need you to stay with me,” I told him, as they rolled me away.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Do it anyway!”

“I’ll meet you there,” he called after us, arms at his sides.

If we were flying and he was driving, I thought, he was going to have to hurry up. But he didn’t hurry up. I grabbed one last glance of him as the team hustled my gurney into the chopper. He was still in the same spot, standing like a statue.

I could not believe all this fuss. Honestly. Over nothing.

Well, maybe not nothing. A brush with death. A worst nightmare come true. The crash, the rain, the fire. I might never stop shaking.

But we’d survived.

By the time I was loaded, I was pretty sleepy, though. I wondered if being afraid could do that. Or maybe it was the morphine. Or maybe just too much vitamin O. The last thing I remember before conking out was wondering if I’d have to spend the night in the hospital. I hoped not. If I could get out early enough, maybe Chip and I could still make it to a late dinner.

Crash or no crash, we still had a lot to celebrate.

Three

I WOKE UP as all hell was breaking loose in the trauma bay—but that’s not the first thing I noticed. The first thing I noticed was my back hurt like fire. And as soon as I noticed it hurting, I realized it had been hurting all along—since back at the crash site, even.

It sounds completely crazy, I know, but it wasn’t until I noticed the pain that I remembered it.

“My back hurts,” I said, to no one in particular—and I wouldn’t have even known who to say it to because there were at least twenty people moving in and out of my peripheral vision in utter chaos, calling to each other in words so fast they just sounded like noise. I recall sounds and sights in little pinpricks of memory from that room—noises and images I can’t even put into the right order. People in aqua scrubs moving with purpose, arms and bodies in motion, machines beeping. An unearthly light rained down from the fluorescent fixture above and blurred out the edges of my vision. Someone changed my IV fluids. Someone else asked for a catheter. I heard the words “x-ray” and “CT scan.”

My neck was uncomfortable in the collar, and I asked a plump male nurse with a kind face if we could take it off.

“Not until the C-spine is cleared” came a voice across the room.

“A little longer, sweetheart,” the nurse said.

Was I allergic to medications? No. Did I have any preexisting conditions they should be aware of? No. Was I pregnant? God, I hoped not.

“Healthy as a horse,” I said.

A guy I later came to recognize as the neurosurgeon paused to tell me that they were evaluating me for pressure and sensation with pinprick tests, and they were starting me on a steroid to prevent swelling because the benefits of its use outweighed the complications.

“Okay,” I said. But it didn’t occur to me until after he’d stepped away to ask, “Swelling of what?”

I said it to the room, but I got no reply.

After the evaluation and CT scan, the neurosurgeon popped into view again and began to talk nonsense. “Your scans reveal a burst fracture to your L1. We’re sending you to surgery to clear out debris. Your evaluation shows some deficits, but there appears to be some sacral sparing. The good news is that your iliopsoas seems to be functioning, and we believe at this time it’s an incomplete injury. Of course, we’ll know a lot more once we get in there.”

“Incomplete injury of what?” I asked at last.

He blinked, like he thought I already knew. “Your spinal cord.”

I held my breath a second. “Is that why my back hurts?”

But he’d turned away to a nurse with a question. When he turned back, he said, “You’re lucky. The L1 was good and crushed, but it didn’t sever the cord. Now we just need to get in there to stabilize and clean up.”

“Now?” I asked.

He nodded. “We’re heading to surgery. And while you’re there, we’ll have a plastic surgeon evaluate your face and neck and the area above your trapezius—maybe debride what he can. But that’ll be a second surgery. After you’ve stabilized. First things first.”

“What will be a second surgery?”

“The skin grafts. For the burns.”

The skin grafts. For the burns.

The surgeon was ready to get moving. “Do you have any questions for me?”

I wanted to nod, but I couldn’t. Yes, I had questions for him. A thousand, at least. I just couldn’t figure out what they were.

Instead, I asked the only question I could come up with. “Could somebody please find my mother?”

*

NORMALLY, MEMORIES HAVE a chronology to them. Even if you’ve lost pieces of the story, you usually have a sense of order, at least—this led to this. What I recall from the ICU is just a pile of images, sounds, and feelings so jumbled, it’s like a game of pick-up sticks.

They say everybody loses time in the ICU. It’s basically Vegas in there, minus the showgirls and slot machines. No windows, for one. Bright fluorescents humming at all hours of the day and night—dimmed, sometimes, but not much. Doctors, nurses, techs, residents, physical therapists, occupational therapists, social workers, case managers, administrators, family members, and just about anyone else who feels like it walking through at all hours. Machines beeping and hissing. Rolling carts with computers. Shoes squeaking the floor. Phones ringing.

It annihilates your circadian rhythms, to say the least.

Plus, you. You’re asleep, then you’re awake. The world is blurred with drugs and pain. You’re woken at all hours—to take medicines, to be turned to avoid bedsores, or even just because someone, anyone, has a question for you. You’re a passive, drugged-out element of an unearthly ecosystem that churns day and night to keep you alive—but you’re about as far from alive as it’s possible to be.