“Charge to three hundred!”
Choose sunshine, baby. Always choose sunshine. You look so much prettier with the light in your eyes.
“CLEAR!”
Wyatt. Wyatt. Wyatt.
“Again!”
I grasp onto the thought. A faint touch of dawn in the night sky. A flickering candle, guiding me back.
“We’ve got sinus rhythm. Pressure is returning.”
The sun is rising.
“We got her back, barely. Let’s get her to the OR, stat. She’s still got a long fight ahead of her tonight.”
* * *
When I wasten years old, I borrowed a tattered copy ofGone with the Windfrom the library after school one day. I didn’t want to — the librarian thrust it into my unwilling hands when I discovered the latest volume ofThe Babysitters Clubhad already been checked out by brown-nosing Susie Lowell and wouldn’t be returned for fourteen insufferable days.
I fully expected to hate every word of the dog-eared volume, which felt thicker than the dictionary in my hands. I remember walking home, backpack near to bursting, zipper straining under the effort, vowing not even to crack it open. Surely nothing so long-winded and old-fashioned could be of interest to my barely-formed brain.
And yet…
I opened it.
I flew through the pages until my eyes were shot with red, until my lids were drooping closed, until the flashlight clutched in my fingertips ran out of batteries and I was forced to close the cover and fall asleep, otherwise risk waking Cynthia and whichever husband she was married to at that point.
For the next week, I lived between those pages. Every spare minute. I couldn’t put it down. I was captivated. I’d never read a story like that in my life. Up till then, it had all been perfect heroines and infallible princes. The villains never won. Good always prevailed over evil, no matter what.
Not in that book, though.
War and deceit and betrayal and agony saturated those pages. There were no clear-cut lines, no perfect characters. Just a flawed heroine who does what she can to survive, whatever the cost. A woman who spends half her life in love with the wrong man, too stubborn and self-destructive to recognize her own folly until it’s far, far too late to rectify things.
I cried, when I finished — big, miserable, crocodile tears. And the next day, I marched that stupid, horrible, awful book straight back to the library, shoved it into the amused librarian’s hands, and demanded answers.
Where’s the next one?
She said there was nonext one. I’d reached the end.
I tried reasoning with her.
Surely, the story cannot end like that. Surely, Scarlett finds her way back to Rhett. Surely, the author did not mean for me to live the rest of my life hanging by my fingertips on the edge of a cliff, wondering what happened to characters I’ve come to love so deeply.
I glared at the librarian when she shook her head no.
I didn’t understand. I thought, frankly my dear, the authormustgive a damn. She must write a better ending. A happy ending, where all the characters get the things they deserve. Otherwise, what was the point of reading the dumb book in the first place?
The librarian laughed and said it was good practice.
For what?I hissed, full of piss and vinegar.
For life,she said, handing me the Babysitter’s Club book that I no longer had a lick of interest in.
I never read Gone with the Wind again.
But I never forgot the lesson it taught me.