Work Text:
Laura Lee can’t remember the last time she drowned. Not the drowning part, at any rate, though she’s pictured constantly what she must have looked like, floating face down in a cloud of blood as everyone screamed. Like a beautiful Shakespearean tragedy; like a girl in a painting. She remembers the waking up though. Pain and bright sun and faces leaning over her, everyone looking, everyone worrying, everyone there.
They told her, later in the hospital, how close she’d come to losing her life. How rare it was for the CPR to work so well, for her to come coughing back to life before the paramedics even arrived. How she was a miracle. God had plucked her from the jaws of death, and set her firmly back in the world with no room for argument; if you could get a Sign, this was a giant flashing neon banner lighting up the sky. And so Laura Lee went forwards with a renewed fire in her heart. She was supposed to be here, her life had meaning, there was a purpose set out for her that she only had to find.
It wasn’t exactly that she’d wanted to die, she reasoned later in her prayers, wrestling with guilt about the lies and the stress she’d caused and the fights with the insurance company. It was simply that in that moment, she hadn’t cared very much either way. She’d wanted something dramatic, she’d wanted something, anything but the here and now.
And in a way, it had worked.
She was the centre of something, and nobody was laughing. For a moment there was nothing left to do right or wrong. She lay on the poolside, and breathed (and threw up pool water, which didn’t quite fit the beautiful tragic image), and the world happened around her. They carried her. It had been years since anyone had carried her, and when she cried nobody stared or asked what the matter could be, only stroked her hair and said “oh, sweetie”, “it’s ok, you’ll be ok”, “I know.” From the new perspective, looking up at the sky as the stretcher swayed, the blue had never seemed so deep, and it was easy to believe that God was in the clouds. Betty had even asked to go in the ambulance with her. Betty, who had barely spoken three words to Laura Lee, and was now holding her hand. She was the other side of the sirens and lights. She was the other side of everything.
And they listened to her lungs and stitched her head and told her the concussion would take a while to pass, and everyone kept saying how brave she was. How well she was doing. White walls and white sheets and flowers on the table, and her parents there to read Winnie the Pooh and tuck her in with Leonard, and messages that she was in everyone’s prayers.
When she walked regally back into church she wasn’t Laura Lee the weird girl, who talked back to pastors about what Jesus would’ve really wanted, who stood on the side of the clapping games and asked the wrong questions and was somehow too much and not enough all at once. She was Laura Lee who’d Almost Died. The miracle child. They asked what it was like, what she’d seen, if she’d been to heaven. They listened in rapt attention when she told them. The excitement did wear off after a while, and they stopped being extra nice to her. But Laura Lee knew God was with her. She was supposed to live, and she was bloody well going to, wholly and properly and unapologetically.
She thought she might try out for the soccer team.