matchbook

he is seven years old, plump, tanned and covered in scratches and scrapes. She is red and swollen, and tomorrow there will be bruises. Dirt films her, made into a paste with dried blood, leaving a gritty feeling on her skin that turns your stomach when you touch her bare shoulder, guide her gently inside your house. The smell of sweat, fear, blood, diesel envelops her as she repeats, “I was in a plane but it crashed. It is upside down and everyone is dead, I think.”

But she doesn’t think, she knows. She must have poked and prodded each one of them, called their names and waited through a terrible silence, full of desperate hope and the sound of night scavengers crawling, scratching through the dark. There must be smoke, maybe flames, and it must have scared her to even try to move, but you don’t know because you have never been in a plane that has plummeted to the earth. You have never spoken to a dead body and begged it to wake up. You can only assume she pleaded with them. Tear tracks run through the muddy blood paste on her cheeks. Maybe she cried when she discovered she was alone. Maybe the sobs didn’t come until she tried to wade through the scrubby mountain terrain from the crash site to your house, miles away. Maybe there were no sobs at all, just streams of warm tears down the clammy face, so determined, so composed, so expressionless even when she says, “They’re all dead.”

You wonder how much life is left in her as you walk her kindly to the bathroom, murmuring soothing sounds, and sit her on the lid of the toilet seat. In the fluorescent light her pink tank top is too garish, too summery and pulled too tight across a chest breathing shallowly. Glitter embellished butterflies encircling the slogan, “Come to Florida,” on her shirt are stained with blood. Fleshy legs stick out from dirty pink madras; bare feet poke out of ruined sandals. Her fingernails are mud caked, and you suspect they are ragged and torn under all that mess. She must have clawed her way through the debris. Bits of grass and dried leaves stick in her hair, cling to her damp neck, her ruined holiday clothes. It is November, you remember, as she says, “It was so hot in Florida.”

She doesn’t even blink when you pick some of the weeds from her hair. There are burrs and you pull at them, almost resort to scissors before you remember, this is not your child and her hair is not yours to cut. These are your injuries to mend and patch, but that is all. All of the death she has carried with her, left hovering at your door, all of it has only tasked you with watching over the living until help arrives and takes over, and just never you mind about who that will be. It’s no concern of yours, this child who has climbed out of a hole smashed in the earth by a plane crashing nose end first, who grappled her way free and staggered for miles to the porch light glowing over your door. No, she is not yours. You are only the caretaker, the message bearer. You will appear in the newspaper stories, and on the internet, and they may call you a hero or a savior, or they may call you nothing at all in their shallow R.I.P. tweets, but either way, it is not your story to claim, nor your grief to wallow in.

So you pat tenderly at the most obvious wounds and cuts, wipe pools of blood, help her probe for more serious injuries. She is beginning to give way to the shock; her eyes look glassy and the lids are drooping, her shoulders slumping, head nodding. She is expressionless when you ask, “Does this hurt? Does that?” You croon over and over, “There, there, it will be okay.” But you know soon the numbness will wear off, the adrenaline will fade, and she will come roaring out of her daze, thrust screaming back into the world, born anew to the horror and memory of the death accompanying each of her steps over the last few hours.  

You hope the police, the ambulance get here before she passes out. The thought of this seven-year-old stranger suddenly becoming your problem is like a switch going off inside you. You feel two instincts–one protective, which you can’t help, and one that is all business, all action, anything to make the seconds pass, keep her conscious, alive, safe, so the police can see with their own eyes that you did a good job–that you did the right thing. You saved a child, your fellow human being. You are a good person, worthwhile, some kind of hero at best, or guardian at least. You are someone to be counted on. Someone who counts. Someone who steps up when the chips are down and the odds against you. You don’t give in to your own fear. You don’t turn away.  

But then, what is there to turn from? Just the sight of a scratched, bloodied, wretched child, dragging death by the throat behind her as she staggers up to your door.