Chapter One
Once upon a time in the Kingdom of Hartha, there was a girl named Linorra Dragonrider. She was a smart girl, but young and naive. She believed that the world she lived in was all there was, and that she was the master of that world. She never thought that anything difficult or terrible would ever happen to her. She was wrong.
I don’t remember much from the day of my accident, but I remember Rogue barking furiously. He was somewhere in the woods, running farther and farther away as I lay on the rocky trail, facing a sky as brilliant and blue as a Steller’s jay.
I squinted up at the brightness, tracking that very bird as it flew toward the sun. Its wings beat a hectic hwa-hwa-hwa as it fled, as spooked as my horse had been. The silky, gold-tipped grass around me waved from the gust it kicked up as if to say “Farewell, little bird.” Its silvery black head was all that stood out against the sky before it disappeared entirely.
#
I awoke to a sharp stabbing in the right side of my chest. My throat and lungs burned each time I sucked in a breath, which was difficult, given the tube in my throat. It was like trying to breathe through a straw. My right wrist throbbed with pain, but I couldn’t see it clearly through the goop in my eyes. My hands, hot and sweaty, were stuffed into puffy white mittens. The rest of me was freezing, especially my feet.
Sunlight streamed into the room from a window on my left, brightening the sterile white room into something incongruently cheerful. My mother stood in front of the window, facing away from me. She pushed a suction cup against the glass to attach the crystal prism that usually hung in our kitchen window. It caught the light and scattered colors around the room. The rainbow cut across the white walls like a scalpel.
I tried to speak, then remembered the tube. Mom heard me stir and turned to face me. I reached out to her, and she smiled but didn’t come closer. A pretty, red-haired nurse in blue scrubs was on my right, leaning over me to wipe the ointment from around my eyes.
“Avelina, you’re waking up from sedation,” said the nurse. Her voice was gentle and clear, but a little too loud, as if she were used to talking exclusively to elderly people. “We’re gonna try to get that breathing tube out, okay?”
I nodded. I didn’t care about the tube nearly as much as getting those disgusting mitts off my hands so I could scratch my face.
“Can you pick your head up off the pillow?” she asked, and I did. “Good! I think you’re ready, you just need to wake up a little more, okay? Are you in pain?”
I nodded again, thinking, What a dumb question.
“Okay, I’m gonna keep a little bit of pain medicine going for you, but not too much. I’ll come back in a bit and check on you.” Quietly to my mom, she added, “You can go stand next to her. It’s okay. It’s good for her to see a familiar face while she wakes up.”
“Thank you,” she responded. The nurse scuttled through the large sliding glass door to the right of my bed.
My mother, Giana, wore dark jeans and a green T-shirt that had a picture of her own bay horse, Gem. It was her lucky T-shirt, the one she’d designed for the family business, Silverstone Stables. It was rumpled and had a coffee stain on the bottom. Dark circles showed prominently below her hazel eyes, and loose strands of straight black hair hung from a messy bun perched high on her head. Somehow, she managed to make it work.
My father used to call her a timeless beauty. With smooth, caramel skin that never progressed past the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, her age was always difficult to pinpoint. We were roughly the same height, but that’s where the similarity ended. I have fair skin and my hair is a chestnut brown that turns auburn when I get too much sun. Plus, I have a dimple in just one cheek that makes my face asymmetrical when I smile. Dad used to call me a genetic anomaly, but he swore it wasn’t because of the dimple.
“Time for you to wake up, lazy bones,” Mom said as she walked to the foot of my bed. It was the same thing she used to say to me when I was a kid. She pulled out some soft woolen socks and tugged them onto my feet.
I motioned to the walls around me with my mitted hands, trying to ask where I was and what had happened. She had no idea what I was trying to say.
“Dad will be back in a minute. He always steps out two minutes before people come in to say important things. I’m sure the doctor will be here before he gets back from the bathroom.” She must have been nervous because that was a lot of talking for her. A chunky jade and malachite ring adorned her left index finger, and she absentmindedly rubbed the stones with the thumb of her right hand.
I gave up on communicating and closed my eyes. A few minutes passed and my mom let me rest. She was good like that.
The nurse eventually returned, followed by a dark-skinned physician, who leaned over me to press a stethoscope against my chest. The doctor smelled strongly of lemon, like the scent of the cleaning products that I hoped the hospital used. She peered down her long nose at me, nodded her head, then walked back out without a word, nearly bumping into my father, Alberto. The nurse remained behind and gathered a few supplies, pulling out a blue paper mat the size of a dinner napkin to lay on my chest.
“What I miss?” my dad asked. Mom rolled her eyes. He chuckled and sat down in a boxy chair pushed into the corner of the room.
Another woman, the respiratory therapist, I believe, came to stand across the bed from the nurse. She fiddled with the breathing tube, did something with an empty syringe, then pulled off the stickers that held the tube onto my face.
“Okay, one, two, three!” the therapist said enthusiastically and yanked the tube out, as if pulling a foot-long plastic tube out of someone’s throat was the most natural thing in the world.
I coughed violently as she set the monstrous thing on the paper mat and wrapped it up to be thrown away. Every cough sent lightning into my ribs and out through my back. I gasped for air while the disconnected ventilator dinged insistently. The respiratory therapist sucked foamy slime out of my mouth with a suction wand thingy while the nurse slipped oxygen tubing around my ears and into my nose.
“Good job, Avelina,” the nurse said as she untied the mittens, tossing them into the garbage. “Cough that stuff up. Don’t try to talk right away. Your throat will be irritated from the breathing tube, but your oxygen levels are good. I’ll come back in a couple minutes, okay?” She got her own stethoscope out, listened to my lungs again, then left the room with the respiratory therapist.
My dad stood up and walked over to the foot of the bed. “Look at you!” he said in that Spanish accent everyone loved. “You are a survivor!” He smiled his usual genuine smile, but his eyes were red, and his face had a few days’ growth of patchy beard.
My father was a proud Spaniard, from Málaga, but his grandmother, who helped raise him, was from Scotland. He used to say that explained our mutual blue eyes as well as his impeccable English. He was about five-nine with shoes on but was always a giant in my mind, one of those inexplicably likable people who could put you at ease immediately, no matter what was happening. He smiled down at me, then at my mom. I could see his bald spot shining with sweat despite the cold room.
Mom glided over to stand next to him, and he wrapped an arm around her waist. She leaned on him a little, staring at the fat tube jutting out of my right rib cage, just under my armpit. She didn’t say anything, reverting to her usual MO.
“You were asleep for three days. Can you believe it?” Dad asked.
“My back can,” I croaked as I stretched out. Even at the age of twenty-six, three days in a hospital bed took its toll. “My chest hurts right in the middle.”
“Well, Fanny trampled you,” he said, “and, uh, you died for a minute.”
My eyes snapped to his face. “I died?”
“Just for, like, a minute. Your lung collapsed, and your windpipe got cut off, then you died. Your heart stopped, but the doctor says your brain is fine. They put that tube in your chest, did CPR, and brought you back. Cool, huh?”
I stared at him, then glanced over at my mom, giving her my famous What the hell? expression. She shrugged.
“Drew came to visit you yesterday,” she said.
I focused on my woolly feet. Drew was my ex-girlfriend, an artist, and my first and only real relationship and heartbreak. She had been my college roommate for two years and was the first girl I ever kissed. We broke up the day after graduation when Drew confessed that she’d been accepted to the master’s program at CalArts. I offered to follow her there, but she said we needed a clean break. I hadn’t taken it well.
Now, two years after finishing that degree, she was trying to reestablish a relationship and had been texting me almost every day. I had moved back home to work for my parents at Silverstone Stables, wanting desperately to build some semblance of an adult life. I wasn’t interested in dredging up the past. At least, I didn’t think I was.
I pretended that my mom hadn’t mentioned Drew. I needed to shoot the elephant in the room. I took a semi-deep breath, coughed until my face turned pink, then asked, “Did you find Rogue?”
Nobody said anything for what seemed like forever. A blood pressure cuff on my left upper arm inflated and deflated of its own accord. I waited, coughing a few more times and looking back and forth between my parents.
Finally, my dad said, “Rogue never came out of the woods, Lina. We searched for him, but . . . he’s gone.” The stab I felt was worse than my chest tube.
Rogue was my dog, but that tiny noun is grossly inadequate for describing what he really was to me. He meandered into my life when I was fifteen, when I had just begun figuring out who I was and what I wanted to be.
We weren’t exactly sure what he was either. Rogue looked like a pharaoh hound, except huge. The vet said that he was about four times bigger than normal, so he couldn’t possibly be a purebred pharaoh hound. She had recommended a DNA test, but my dad said that was a hilarious waste of money and refused.
Rogue had a rich auburn coat everywhere except for a white patch on the left side of his face in the shape of a handprint. His eyes were a deep amber that followed everyone around the room, missing nothing. He had these adorably huge Dumbo ears that stood straight up and turned pink when he got excited or nervous.
When he first came to us as a stray, Rogue never wanted to leave the house. He would just throw himself on the ground and go limp when we tried to make him go outside to do his business.
My mom said he had abandonment issues, but that stinker knew exactly what he was doing. My dad had to pick up his ninety-pound body and carry him out. Since he wasn’t fully grown yet and eventually got up to a hundred ninety pounds, that was not a winning strategy.
One day, about a month after we found him, he followed me into the bathroom. When I pulled my pants down and sat on the toilet, Rogue tensed, and his ears turned bright pink. Then he walked in a little circle and lay down, facing away from me. It was the funniest damned thing I’d ever seen. I laughed for literally days after that, and every time I did, his ears would turn pink again.
After that, Rogue used the toilet. Yes, I’m serious. He would wait for everyone to get busy, then run in there. Based on the mess, it must have taken him a couple tries to figure out how to get his butt in the right place, but he did it. That is how I learned that my dog was brilliant, and I treated him more like a person than a pet.
For ten years, Rogue was my best friend. I talked to him about everything, including the secret stuff. He was there every time I had a bad day, which could be fairly often. I used to talk to him when I was alone in my room, telling him about what frustrations or exciting events had happened. He was the first one to hear that I had a girlfriend, a full six months before I told my parents.
He was there, whining, when I left for college, and he was there when I came home for every break. He had gone missing a couple of times during the school year. My mom said he was out searching for me, which sounded like nonsense. Then again, he hadn’t disappeared since I came back to start working for my parents.
I couldn’t believe he was gone. I wouldn’t believe it. My throat tightened in that burning way that precedes crying, and I squeezed my eyes closed.
“I’ll search for him when I get home,” I said, my voice breaking.
My mom didn’t meet my eyes, but my dad asked, “Lina, do you remember what you told us when we found you?”
I shook my head. I remembered that little bird, the bright sky, Rogue barking, and . . . something else. The barking had stopped suddenly when I heard it. What was it? A man’s voice, I thought. No, that must have been my dad when he got to me.
“You said that a white wolf had spooked Fantasma,” he said and waited for me to put together the pieces.
I was still clamping down on the emotion burning in my throat, and speaking would have broken the tenuous hold I had on my grief.
“Baby,” Mom said, “Rogue was more than ten years old. That’s ancient for a dog his size. You remember our shar-pei, Molly, don’t you? She only lived to be ten, and Rogue was three or four times her size.”
Is, I thought. Not was.
“He saved me,” I whispered, choking on the words. A tear escaped my right eye. I moved to wipe it away but forgot about my wrist. A lightning bolt flew up my forearm to my elbow and I winced. A few more tears slipped out, running down both my cheeks.
My parents glanced at each other, making vague gestures and facial expressions that indicated a silent continuation of a previous disagreement. They were always talking to each other like that. My dad sighed, saying, “Okay, we can search for him again when you get home.”
I guess my mom won.
I nodded and closed my eyes. The nurse, Tarah, came in and helped me maneuver my chest tube so that I could lie on my left side. The pain in my chest was excruciating, but at least I got to blame that for my crying. She said chest tubes hurt like a son of a bitch and that I would feel a lot better when it came out.
Nevertheless, she offered me some pain medicine, to which I responded, “Yes, give me all the drugs.” That made her laugh, and we were friends after that. She pushed something into my IV, then bundled me up in a stack of heated blankets.
My mom handed me my favorite book, The Crystal Key, then my parents left. It’s actually children’s fiction, too short to be called a novel or even a novella, but something about it has always been so relaxing to me. When I was fifteen, my mother got me a signed copy from the author, Violet Atticus. I had been reading it once a year ever since. I always liked to read it when I was sick or depressed. It made me feel like I was hanging out with an old friend.
The story is about a young woman named Linorra Dragonrider, who finds a magical key that opens doors to other worlds. She uses the key to search the universe for the lost dragons of Hartha. When an evil queen kidnaps a man she believes to be her future husband and demands his life in exchange for the key, Linorra must decide between love and the safety of all the lands.
It’s a simple story, but I’ve always identified with the girl, not only because her name is similar to mine, but also because she had to learn how to trust herself and be brave in the face of ignorance, deception, and fear.
I read until the light coming through the window dimmed to the point that I had to choose between turning on the overhead light or turning over to go to sleep. I asked Tarah to stick the book in my pack and resolved to start calling people in the morning to help me find my Rogue.
