“Is he dead?” I blurt.
“No.”
“I hope he doesn’t. Die, I mean.” My hands are shaking, out of my control.
“Me, too. Want to talk about it?” he asks. I can’t tell if he’s asking in an official way or asking because we’re sitting near my puke.
“I bet it’s a traumatic brain injury,” I say. “If he doesn’t die, he’ll never be the same. Fifty-two thousand deaths occur from traumatic brain injury every year. He’s probably going to die.” I feel like stone, my heart not just broken but a blank sheet of paper. From the cold, from the slow acceptance that this is my fault.
I see his eyebrows knit together with curiosity from the corner of my eye. “You going to be a doctor?”
“Medical examiner.” There’s a lull in the conversation where part of me wants to talk about the lost scholarship and how I might never actually be a medical examiner, but I decide now is probably the worst time to analyze my path in life.
He pats my shoulder. “I know this is difficult … but … I have to ask you a few questions.”
I nod. My eyes are fixed on the driveway that, now that the bright lights have faded, slithers out into the dark night and fades into nothingness. The moon casts daffodil streaks on the flood that’s pooled in the pockets of our yard. I can’t look away.
“Seems to be a little confusion on the details of the accident. What do you remember?”
My mind is empty, a black vacuum without a single thought or memory of anything that has ever happened in the history of my life. Except for the file of these random facts that seem to keep forcing their way out of my mouth. “There was a car. It hit Benny.”
He clears his throat. “Do you remember what the car looked like?”
“It was fast.” He’s watching my every move. I’m afraid to do something wrong, say something wrong. I feel my body clenching. Behind us, Sarge thrashes, finally pulling the cypress free from the knotted ropes. He’s huffing and mumbling obscenities to himself as if he were fighting the toughest battle of his life. Maybe he is. We watch as he flings the sapling through the doorway with one sharp “HIYAHHH!”
“Okay.” The officer is hesitant, pulls my attention back to him as he scribbles a note onto a small pad of paper he lifts from his front pocket. “We’ll question neighbors, try to find everyone who drove on the road tonight, talk to body shops in case whoever did this tries to get any damage fixed.”
“It was raining, dark, the car hit him,” I manage. Now that the garage is quiet again, I feel the words breaking and splitting, but I can’t glue them together. He’s looking at me, not writing, but watching me fall apart.
“Can you tell me where your parents were when your brother got in the stroller?”
The words drag my weary eyes up to his. “Here.”
“Were they … with him, watching him?”
I nod, furiously, clamp my mouth shut, and revert back to the driveway. How could he think otherwise? OF COURSE Mom was watching him. Well, sort of. Now that I think about it, maybe she wasn’t. He stuffs the notepad back inside his pocket and removes a small business card he places in my hand. I’m still staring at the driveway, disoriented, afraid to say another thing. I don’t feel the card anyway. My skin isn’t a part of me, but this separate entity I see from the outside. This is a dream and I will wake up and everything will be fine.
“You think of anything, anything at all, call me. We’ll do everything we can to find who did this.”
I nod again. The officer’s shiny black shoes pitter-patter down the driveway as Sarge appears behind me, jingling keys in hand. He shakes them the way an owner does to a dog. “Tree’s up and watered,” he says. “Damn needles started falling and Chomperz already ate some. I knew when Brooks said he was going to that Meat Goat/Tree Farm up the road he’d be ripped off. The guy that runs that shithole is a damn Communist.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I say.
“You okay to drive?” he asks. I’m so not okay to drive. Holes are where my eyes should be; my eyes have fallen into the sockets along with all vision or clarity. But it doesn’t matter. I tell him I will drive. With his glaucoma, we’re only getting to that hospital if I do. I also can’t tell him my legs are numb, my feet won’t feel the pedals, so I just slip inside the car—the one he gave me when his depth perception started to go—turn the ignition, and follow the lingering sounds of sirens in the distance without feeling a thing. There are lights I don’t remember stopping at, cars I don’t remember yielding to, and I think, Maybe this is what happened to the person who hit Benny. Maybe they were in a daze, couldn’t tell what was real or a dream, and I realize I’m in a bad state if I’m now empathizing with the one who hurt us, instead of my hurt brother.
We drive and we drive. The total only twenty-six miles, almost a marathon’s distance, but it feels like an eternity. The car is silent, and we bathe in it, soak, too afraid to say anything at all, and it’s fine. He doesn’t bring his trusty bubble pops—the blistered plastic wrap meant to cushion packaged items—or I’d have opened my car door, at approximately sixty-two miles per hour (which is almost as fast as a cheetah can run), and let the wheels catch me, churn me into mash. Like Benny. With the wind and rain as variables, taking into account the velocity, I should be street meat about .02 seconds after opening the door.
What’s wrong with me? I think. Mom’s always nitpicking, asking why I can’t be more sympathetic, emotional, think a little less sometimes. This—as my baby brother struggles for life—is why Brynn hates me, why they’ll all hate me once they know I’m the reason he’s here. My brain doesn’t work like theirs, never has. I’m not just different; I’m now a danger.
We pull into the emergency parking lot at the Grove City PICU and Trauma Center awhile after the helicopter, and the rain is now just a light dust of cold water. If it had been this calm a couple of hours ago, Benny would be in the house playing with his car. Instead, they’ve wheeled him into some trauma room to put the pieces of him back together while his car is the safe one.
“I reckon we better get in there,” Sarge says, quietly.
I nod, my body paralyzed with fear.
He sighs, lays his hand on my leg, and pats to calm me in the way only he can. “Can’t let your head get away. You never have before so let’s not start now.” He lingers for a second, clears his throat, and steps out of the car. I sit in the quiet for another minute, hope he’s right, and reluctantly follow him inside. Even though the rain has stopped, the wind feels colder now, like the car knocked the warmth right from Benny’s chest, his soul, and filled the air with bitter frost instead.
Inside the hospital’s double doors, a nurse directs us to the Emergency waiting room where Mom, Dad, and Brynn have been put to pace. Their feet have already worn imprints into the tiles. We are the only people here, the only ones who will be on our knees tonight. Sarge offers a hand to Mom. With an empty, teary-eyed stare, she looks up at him, her father, and he blankets her with his embrace. She sobs into his jacket while I quietly, remorsefully, look on.
After a few minutes, Mom plops into an unfeeling chair and buries her head in her hands. Dad sits, rubs her back; she leans into him for comfort. He’s hurt, too, but I can see him struggling with staying strong. Brynn is quieter than usual. Her knees are scrunched up to her chest and she’s crying into them, staining them with tears.
“They took him to the operating room,” Mom sobs. “Please let him be okay. Please, God.”
We’re all stuffed into this room that’s not big but not really small. The walls are closing in, pressing us together in these two rows of chairs that are adjacent. No one says a thing as we wait for an update, and the only sounds are of the book-length pile of papers Mom and Dad have to fill out. Her hands shake as she frantically searches for the insurance card and realizes she didn’t bring her purse—she must’ve dropped it in the garage when all this happened. She’s ranting about how she forgot, what a horrible mother it makes her, when Dad calms her, hands over
his card instead.
I don’t know how much time passes. A minute, an hour, a lifetime. The operating doctor appears in the doorway, his blue scrubs stained with red, much like the police lights, and we all stand, as if standing will make his news seem better. Standing to keep our knees from buckling, pulling us right under into the core of the broken shards of earth. Or maybe standing gives us something concrete to sink into instead of just clinging to a ratty upholstered chair.
“I’m Dr. Cheung.” The man with kind eyes says. He removes his paper hat and clutches it to his chest. We’re collectively holding our breaths. It’s so quiet, only the clock’s ticking hands are heard.
“How is he?” Mom asks in a strangled voice. She dries tears on the edge of her palm, smearing them along her jawline. “He’s okay, right? Please tell me he’s okay.”
The doctor sighs. His jaws clench down, hard. “When he was—”
“Benedict,” Mom interrupts. “His name is Benedict. Benny. Call him Benny.”
He hesitates. “Benny is alive, Mrs. Paxton.”
Mom gasps, cries into her hand again. “Thank God!”
He continues. “But”—because there’s always a but—“when he was first assessed and intubated, he was unresponsive and almost died on the ride here. MRI scans show severe head trauma and facial fractures, with extensive swelling around the brain. He lost a lot of blood and needed a transfusion. My team is working to drain some of the fluid through tubes in his scalp. There was also substantial debris embedded in his skin from the road, but we’ve removed most of it.”
“But he’s okay—he’s going to be okay, right?” Mom cries. She emphasizes okay, like if she says it with more urgency, he has to agree with her. Dad moves closer; we all follow in rhythmic wave.
“We put him in a medically induced coma so as not to risk shock. I can’t tell you how long he’ll remain in this state, if he’ll ever come out of it, and if he does, that there won’t be irreversible brain damage. It’s just too early to tell. He’s not breathing on his own, but for now is stable and we hope the steroids will help bring the swelling down.” He looks away when he says stable, and I know it’s bad. He’s being polite so we don’t lose hope, or maybe for his own sake. So he can sleep tonight knowing he did all he could.
Mom’s eyes are searching like she doesn’t completely understand, but I’ve seen enough medical documentaries to feel confident in my traumatic brain injury diagnosis.
“When can we see him?” Brynn asks, her eyes and nose beet red.
“When he’s out of surgery and recovering in his room, someone will let you know. My advice? Get some rest. It’ll be touch and go through the night.”
Dr. Cheung leaves, and Mom falls into a chair as if standing was a bad omen and sitting will help put things in a more positive light. Plus, sitting gives her something to fall over, to catch her when she’s too weak. Sitting means the doctor isn’t standing here telling us Benny is dying. Everyone is quiet again, except for the sounds of sniffling noses. The room is swollen with sadness so thick, it’s suffocating me. I scratch and claw at my throat to open up the airway.
Mom’s face is flat, and she’s picking at her nails, one by one. “The police were NO help,” she says. “Said they didn’t have enough to go on—I know what I saw. And then they questioned me—ME—like I did something wrong, like I caused this!”
Dad runs his hands through his hair, then over his weary eyes, his wedding ring gleaming against the lights. He sits next to her, but this time doesn’t touch her. “What did you see, Bess?”
Her eyes narrow into slits as she jerks her head up at him. “Don’t talk to me with that tone. You couldn’t see. You weren’t as close as I was.”
“There’s no tone,” he whispers.
“The car was dark,” Brynn speaks up. “And fast. That’s all I saw.”
Sarge stirs, takes a seat on the other side of Mom. He fiddles with a patch on his army jacket. “Sometimes … our minds, our eyes, play tricks on us, you know? Make us see what we want to see, what makes sense to us at the time. Doesn’t always mean it’s the right thing.”
“Dad,” Mom says, “what are you saying?”
“When my friends were killed in combat, I wasn’t thinking about the color of the guns our enemies used to shoot at us, because a bullet is a bullet. I wasn’t thinking about the size of the grenades they launched, because an explosion is an explosion. And I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about the pang in my stomach that burned with fear because I was doing what I had to do. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you a goddamned thing about the war except the eyes of those men who died in my arms. And it doesn’t matter. I fought, and I lived. Everything else? Things my mind, my eyes, decided for me. Doesn’t make them right.”
“This isn’t about the war,” Mom snaps. She always snaps when Sarge talks about the war. She thinks he’s senile, doesn’t remember as much as he does, doesn’t feel as deeply as I know he does. Just look into his eyes, you’ll see he knows, feels, more than all of us combined. He didn’t move in with us because he needed us, but because we needed him—Mom needed him.
“This, Bess, is about hope. I’m just sayin’, when you’re praying for a certain outcome—Benny to live—the details will get foggier, less important. Because all that matters is he makes it another day. As long as we have hope, we have life. It’s out of our hands.” He pats Mom’s leg and walks to the door. “I’m getting coffee.” His slumped-over shadow fades behind the glass pane, and I feel Brynn’s eyes on me.
“You smell like puke,” she says. “It’s seriously making me gag.”
I fold my arms, bury my chin in my chest. “Maybe it’s your dirty hair.”
She continues staring, and I know she’s looking for a fight. “You saw the whole thing, didn’t you? You had to have seen it. You were in there.”
Mom’s eyes find me, Dad’s, too. Dampness coats my hands, clammy and cool. “I don’t know—it happened too fast.”
“How did Benny find the stroller anyway? It was in the trunk.” She starts crying, her eyes pleading with me. I glance at Mom, who is clenching her jaw, and I know she’s angry, confused, maybe as she retraces the events, and I can’t speak. Has she forgotten I was there, trying to confess something?
They’re waiting. For an answer. The lights above sizzle with a hum that fills the room. “I … I…”
“Is it because you snuck out to a party the other night?” the little brat asks.
“You what?” Dad asks.
“She snuck out of the house Friday. Your perfect little Birdie Jay isn’t as perfect as you think. FINALLY! Everyone will see what I’ve been saying for years. You suck, Birdie!”
“Brynn!” I cry out, prepared to jump from my seat to strangle her. I know exactly how long it would take to revive her if she went without oxygen too long. Plus we’re already in a hospital, so it seems like my chance.
“I can’t deal with this right now.” Mom stands, runs into the hallway to catch a passing nurse, almost saving me from the question. Brynn follows—a chicken that keeps pecking long after the food has run out—but our war is far from over.
Dad walks over to me, pats my shoulder with a light touch that feels different from Sarge’s. “Once we know more, I think you should drive Sarge and Brynn home,” he sighs. “Everyone’s tired. The arguing isn’t helping Mom.”
I turn to face him, my eyes meeting his. I fall into the sleeve of his crisp shirt and sob. The tears fall, a running faucet with no OFF switch. He stretches his arm around me and rubs the hair from my eyes to wipe the tears dry, but there’s something missing in his gaze, and I’m sure it’s because he knows I’m the one who unfolded the stroller—because he gave me the task of removing it from the trunk.
I agree. He places a finger beneath my chin and tilts my head up. Our eyes meet and linger as if he’s searching for some kind of truth. He says nothing before hugging me one last time, then sets me free.
In the hallway, Mom is crying into her hands, Br
ynn is clinging to Sarge, and the pain in my heart is right here, pulling me under in this massive tidal wave. Flashes of tonight are colliding, creating a new trail of thoughts, and all of my files are splayed out across the vast depths of my brain. They cannot be organized right now. Maybe not ever again.
Before high school, I wanted to be a scientist. Chemistry has always been my favorite subject (aside from physics) because it’s interesting why some things shouldn’t go together, how fast they react, and what can explode (Brynn) or implode (me). It wasn’t until we started learning about decomposition, my freshman year, that I became enamored with bodies and how, in the end, they break apart like all the particles I once loved so much. Thus, I decided to go the medical route.
But now I’m rethinking everything.
LESSON OF THE DAY: I learned a long time ago that activation energy, the minimum energy needed for a reaction, is necessary to make a chain reaction happen. Maybe it was when Dad asked me to get the stroller, maybe it was my own numbing fear of telling Mom about the party, but when I stalled Mom, I was the inhibitor, slowing her reaction to a complete stop. I am the reason we are here.
Because no inhibitor = faster reaction rate.
And faster reaction rate = possible different outcome.
And no matter what happens with Benny—my family is broken.
And no matter how you calculate it, it’s my fault.
BASH
It’s cold as shit.
I don’t sleep much, but when I’m shivering all night, I sleep even less. The sun hasn’t yet shown itself through the window above, which is blocked by an old, thin bedsheet hung by tacks. The sky is more dusk than pitch-black so it must be near dawn. I squint my eyes, roll onto my side, where a loose mattress spring jabs my rib, and try to go back to sleep. But I’m distracted by the constant buzz of my phone against the floor. The rattling won’t let up, and a sudden wave of fear washes over me. Is it about Ma?
The Inevitable Collision of Birdie & Bash Page 5
