Her name was Rosalind Okafor, but everybody called her Roz. She was fifty-three years old and she was a home health nurse. That night, she’d worked a double shift taking care of an old man with Parkinson’s in a farmhouse out past the county line, and she was driving home on County Road 9 a little after eleven.
She almost didn’t see me.
“I thought you were a garbage bag,” she told me later, sitting by my hospital bed. “That’s the God’s honest truth, baby. A big dark lump on the side of the road. I was already past you.”
Then her headlights caught something. A flash of white.
My sneaker. The white rubber toe of my Converse.
Roz slammed on her brakes so hard her purse flew off the passenger seat. She threw her car in reverse and backed up fifty feet on a dark wet road in the rain, which she says is the most dangerous thing she’s ever done in her life.
She found me lying at the edge of the drainage ditch. My face was turned to the side. My lips were blue. My skin was white, so white it almost glowed in her headlights.
She knelt down in the gravel and put two fingers on my neck.
Nothing.
She put her ear down against my mouth.
Nothing.
“I’ve been a nurse for twenty-nine years,” Roz told me. “I knew what I was looking at. I knew it was bad. But you were so little, curled up around that backpack like a baby with a blanket. I said, Lord, not this one. Not on my road.”
She called 911 on her cell phone. She put it on speaker and set it on the gravel. Then she rolled me onto my back, tilted my head, and started chest compressions right there on the side of County Road 9, in the freezing rain, with water running into her collar.
The dispatcher counted with her. One, two, three, four. Roz says she broke two of my ribs. She says she could feel them go. She kept pushing.
It took the ambulance fourteen minutes to get there.
Roz did CPR on me for fourteen minutes.
The paramedics took over. They cut off my wet sweatshirt right there in the ambulance and wrapped me in warm blankets and put heat packs under my arms. They put a breathing tube down my throat.
On the way to the hospital, my heart started again. Weak and slow and uneven. But it started.
My core body temperature, when they got me to Mercy General, was 82 degrees.
Normal is 98.6.
Back at home, my father had no idea where I was.
Maybe he thought I’d gone to a neighbor’s. Maybe he thought I was sitting on the back porch, sulking, waiting to come in. Maybe he expected me to come back in an hour, crying and begging at the door.
I don’t really know what he was thinking. He’s never been able to tell me. He says he doesn’t remember the first two hours. He says he sat in his recliner watching the Weather Channel and didn’t see any of it.
What I do know is that nearly three hours after he locked the door, at 12:47 in the morning, the house phone rang.
Officer Mike Daniels had been with the county police for eleven years. He told me about that phone call months later, in a quiet room at the courthouse, while we waited for a hearing to start.
“Mr. Walls?” he said. “This is Officer Daniels with the County Police Department.”
Dad’s voice was irritated, Officer Daniels said. Like he’d been woken up.
“What is this about?”
“Sir, do you have a fifteen-year-old daughter?”
“Yeah.” A pause. “Why?”
“When did you last see her?”
Dad hesitated. Officer Daniels said he could hear the hesitation, the way you hear a man deciding which version of the truth to tell.
“We had an argument,” Dad said. “She left.”
“Did she leave wearing a coat, sir?”
Silence on the line.
“Sir?”
“No,” Dad said finally.
“Did she have a phone with her? Money?”
Another silence. Longer.
Karen had come downstairs by then. She’d heard the phone ring. According to Officer Daniels, he could hear a young woman’s voice in the background asking, “Dad? Who is it? Dad?”
That’s when Dad’s voice changed.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Did she do something? Is she in trouble?”
“Mr. Walls,” Officer Daniels said, “your daughter was located off County Road 9 about four miles east of your residence.”
Dad grabbed the edge of the kitchen counter. Karen told me that part. She said she watched his knuckles go white.
“Located?” he said. “What does that mean, located?”
Officer Daniels paused.
“Sir, a passing driver spotted her near a drainage ditch. She was lying in the freezing rain. Completely unresponsive.”
Dad swallowed. Karen said it was so loud she could hear it across the kitchen.
“Is she okay?”
And then Officer Daniels said the words that made my father reach for the wall.
“Mr. Walls, when that driver found your daughter, she wasn’t breathing.”
Chapter Five: Waking Up
I woke up three days later.
The first thing I remember is the sound. A steady beep, beep, beep, somewhere above my head. And a hissing sound, like air going in and out of a tire.
The second thing I remember is the pain. Everywhere. My chest felt like someone had parked a car on it. My hands burned, a deep throbbing burn, like they’d been stuck in an oven. My throat was raw.
The third thing I remember is a woman’s face leaning over me. Dark skin, gray curls, reading glasses on a beaded chain. She was smiling, and she was crying at the same time.
“There she is,” the woman said softly. “There’s my girl. Welcome back, baby.”
I had no idea who she was.
