Flutter Read Free

glance at the boy’s face. He looks serious, almost grim. The colors come in my peripheral vision now—I see them like a prism, feel them there, and I know I’m going
.
    “Can you help me?” he pleads
.
    “What?” I say, feeling the familiar thrum begin behind my eyes
.
    “Please, help me,” he says
.
    “I’ll be back,” I say
.
    “Esperanza,” he says. And now he smiles
.
    And I am gone
.

Two
    The intercom clicked on, and then I heard the nurse’s voice. “Did you need something, hon?”
    “No, I just accidentally hit the button,” I answered, rolling my eyes at myself.
    The intercom clicked again. “Emery, you didn’t eat any of your breakfast.”
    “Loretta, it smelled like pickled eyeballs.”
    “Do you need some chocolate?” Loretta’s voice asked.
    “No thanks,” I answered. But then I thought better of it, pushed the button again. “Something with peanut butter.” Loretta laughed her crazy, loud laugh, and I heard it in stereo, over the speaker and through the open door of my hospital room.
    “I’ll bring you a snack in a while.” Loretta didn’t knowwhat was wrong with me, but she was pretty sure it could be cured with chocolate.
    I flicked the power button on the side of my laptop and sat myself up more comfortably in the bed. I opened up my pink notebook and recorded the date, the time of my last two loops. I described them clinically, scientifically, avoiding emotion and sentiment. But it was difficult to be that way, now that my loops were becoming something
more
. They were usually calm—mundane, really. Just my boy and me fishing in the stream behind his barn, snacking on blackberries, not talking much. Or a very old and very bald Dad teaching me how to drive a stick shift on some nameless country road, snorting with laughter while I ground the gears and swore under my breath. And sometimes it was just me. Me sitting cross-legged in the sand, staring out at the surreal turquoise water, running my fingers through the clean white sand. Me eating ice cream in my backyard. Me alone with a feeling of completeness. A feeling of calm. These were normal loops.
    Requests for help, warnings from Dad, these were new developments. And even though there was no official scientific term for
freaked out
, that didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling it.
    I stared at the last sentence in my notebook.
Esperanza
. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that in Spanish it meant “hope.” I grabbed my laptop, searched for the meaning. There it was.I was right.
Esperanza
= “hope.” I wrote that down in my notebook, circling and underlining the words. What did my boy want me to glean from this?
    I sighed. I wasn’t too familiar with hope lately. The Spanish or English version.
    What did my boy mean by it? Did he
hope
that I could help him? Why the Spanish version? I remembered the fleeting panic in his eyes when he asked if I could help him.
    Then I wrote down one more word:
scared
.
    I closed the notebook and my computer, and shoved them onto my bedside table, my vision finally beginning to clear from the loop, the headache shrinking. I looked around my room.
    Long-term patients—lifers, as some called themselves— liked to bring things from home, make their rooms more comfortable, more personal. Heather down the hall had recently gotten permission from the board to paint a mural on her wall.
    I stared at the blank, pale blue of my walls. There were no knickknacks. No pictures. No signs of life.
    This would not be my life.
Could
not be my life.
    I had planned to leave this place many times. I made the decision constantly, on again and off again in my mind, but had never actually left. I thought that … that they would eventually believe me. They didn’t. They wouldn’t even listen.
    I would give Dad and the team one more chance, and if it didn’t work, if they didn’t do a one-eighty and believe me wholeheartedly, well, then I was going to leave.
    I pushed away my hospital blankets and climbed out of