Laura’s eyes were still closed when she heard her mother’s scream. 

Katie was the first one to her. Dropping her sandals, and sprinting in her bare feet, she didn’t even have the mental energy to judge her mother for screaming a second time as she slid to her sister’s side in the sand. Laura appeared to have fallen flat on her back, but Katie hadn’t noticed if she had fallen on rocks or anything sharp. She cradled her big sister’s head and reached for her hand. 

“Are you okay?” 

Gasping for air, Laura rolled onto her side. Katie watched desperately as Laura pulled herself up onto all fours, pulling her hair out of the way as she tried unsuccessfully to catch her breath. Finally, like an opened flood gate, the oxygen returned to her lungs. 

“I’m okay,” Laura coughed. “Just got the air knocked out of me.”

As the girls realized that Laura was not in immediate danger, it occurred to them that Katie was the only one at Laura’s side. They looked at each other, then looked back together at their parents, like they had done not-so-long ago to the happy couple holding hands as they walked toward the beach. 

Their parents were not happy now, though Mrs. Mulligan was once again holding her husband’s hand. And Katie realized why her mother had screamed the second time as the girls took in the image of their mother hunched over their father’s fallen form. 

Mrs. Mulligan spoke her husband’s name clearly and loudly several times as she shook him. “Ben. Ben. BEN.” It had been a very long week. First, with the delay in receiving her luggage, then the lost reservation, then not one, but two flat tires. She would have lost it after the second flat except for the fact that they happened to pull into an auto shop in a heavenly beach town.

But this. This was too much. 

Mrs. Mulligan shoved it all aside as every cell in her body coalesced to save her husband. 

Katie sprinted back the direction she had just come, landing now at her father’s side in confusion. 

With a steadiness Katie had never before heard in her mother’s voice, Mrs. Mulligan calmly and firmly instructed her daughter to go get help. “It’s his heart,” she said, as she checked his pulse on his wrist with her index and middle finger. 

Furrowing her brow, Katie repeated the words, “His heart?” As the words fell out of her mouth, the picture she had been unable to complete earlier came together—the other word on the prescription bottle that she had seen, but not fully processed: “Benjamin”. Her mother hadn’t been worried about her father seeing the meds when they fell out of her purse, she was worried he would see that Katie had seen the meds. Because he didn’t want his daughters to know about his heart condition because he never shares “the important stuff”. 

“Katie.” Mrs. Mulligan raised her voice to snap her daughter back into the present moment. “You are the only one who speaks French. I need you to go get help for me. Can you do that?”

Katie nodded, rose to her feet and sprinted off toward the surf shack. 

Having only just recovered from her fall, Laura felt paralyzed, though not in the way she had feared on the impossibly long way down from the top of the bunker. She had imagined an entire scene in the milliseconds from bunker to sand, including the wheelchair she would be stuck in for the rest of her days. But the paralysis she ended up with was not physical, but rather in fear. And the feeling that she had only just swallowed, of her stomach jumping into her throat during the fall, returned in full force, upturning her breakfast onto the beach. 

She stayed there on all fours, shaking, remembering, dissecting every comment she had made toward her parents over the past week: to her mother about overpreparing and worrying too much, then to her father about being old. Apparently he was older than she had realized and her mother had reason to worry after all. 

Trying to muster enough breath, enough courage to make her way to the father she wondered if she had literally scared to death, Laura begged to no one in particular that her father’s breath would return as hers had and that she would have a chance to actively avoid heights in his presence for several years to come. In what felt more like a child’s wish on a star, she hoped also for a chance to take it back, to have never even approached the bunker, to have turned around to go get ice cream with her nerdy sister, her worry-wart of a mother, and her father, breathing, living, walking, laughing, and chanting, “Everything happens for a reason.” 

As Laura wheezed in and out, she thought the same thing Katie thought as she departed the empty surf shack, rushing back into town to seek help, and the same thing that their mother thought as she continued to check her husband’s vitals with laser focus: if everything happens for a reason, what reason could there possibly be for this?