by Amber Jaeger
There were several hospitals grouped close together and I tried to be intelligent about choosing a parking garage closest to St. Worth’s but in the end I had to admit to myself I wasn’t sure which hospital was which. Not helping was the fact I had to find a parking spot with no cars on either side to minimize my chances of hitting anything. It still took three tries to get the truck in straight after I found a spot.
Grandma kept up with me through the parking garage, down the stairs, into and out of the wrong hospital, up different stairs, across a walkway spanning a busy street, into the right hospital and down to the emergency room. We were both out of breath when we finally checked in at the security/triage desk.
I settled in to wait, figuring it would be quite a while. Lincoln had had so many sports related injuries I knew the routine when it came to waiting for someone in the emergency room, so I was a little surprised when a man in a suit with a name tag that didn’t pull out on a retractable cord came to get us after only a few minutes.
“Bixby Gray?” he asked, looking at a clip board.
I focused on the shiny spot of his bald head and forced myself to swallow the spit warning of vomit to come. “Is my dad okay?” I finally was able to ask. Grandma started shifting around beside me and I wished I had remembered to bring her nerve pills—for both of us.
“I have a private waiting room right over here if you’ll follow me,” he said blandly.
I stood up but dropped all my weight into my heels, as if this stout black man was going to drag me through the waiting room. “Whatever it is, I need you to just say it right now.” Grandma was fidgeting even more and I started to panic. Did her damaged brain somehow already perceive what must be the tragedy at hand? I mentally slapped myself for starting to get hysterical and waved the man towards the waiting room.
After we were seated and the door was shut, he said, “My name is Clive, and I’m a social worker with the Department of Human Services.”
I nodded, waiting for him to get to the point. Grandma still wasn’t settling down, so I pulled out my reserves, lemon cookies. I always had a few in my purse and those paired with the crappy cup of coffee I had gotten in the waiting room would keep her happy for a while.
“I have a few questions for you, since our patient can’t answer any of them on his own—”
“What? Why can’t he talk? Is he—” I interrupted, starting to panic again.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Please, just a few questions. I believe that the nurse said you confirmed you were family? And his name is ...” he asked, rifling through his clipboard.
My chest loosened when I heard Clive refer to my dad in the present tense.
“Travis,” Grandma piped up in between bites of cookie. “Travis Gray.”
“That’s right,” I confirmed, smiling that Grandma could remember that.
“Any pertinent medical history? Diseases, prescriptions, major surgeries, that sort of thing?” Clive asked.
“Yes, he takes medicine for high blood pressure. That’s it though, nothing else.”
“High blood pressure?” Clive asked. “That seems a bit unusual.”
“I know my dad’s not overweight or anything, but with driving a truck he doesn’t eat the greatest or get any real exercise. Plus he is getting older.”
“Ma’am ...Bixby?”
“Short for Bianca,” I said for the thousandth time in my life.
“Right, Bixby. Would you mind just making a positive identification on your ... father?” he asked.
“I can see him?” I asked, jumping up. “Right now?”
I stepped on his heels twice following him out the door and was too buoyed to be annoyed when he paused to talk to a nurse and motioned me back to keep the conversation private.
Clive stopped outside a curtained doorway and turned to me with a frown. “If this isn’t your dad ... Well, is there anyone else it could be?”
I shook my head impatiently. I could hear a machine measuring heartbeats on the other side of the curtain and one small cough.
Clive frowned again but pulled back the curtain.
I couldn’t see him at first. The foot of bed was pointing towards the doorway and his face was obscured by the rise of his chest and starched white sheets. I stepped closer, towing Grandma behind me by the hand. I walked closer towards the head of the bed, not knowing I was holding my breath.
It wasn’t my dad.
I felt the blood vessels around my eyeballs go tight and my vision went white in places. My hand moved aside tubing and bandages without any direction from my brain. Part of me knew Clive was waiting for some type of verbal response and another part of me knew I had to get Grandma out of there before she got confused.
“Linc!” she cried, grabbing the guy’s arm. Too late.
“I’m sorry,” I heard myself tell Clive. My voice sounded funny, like my tongue was too big. It felt too big. And I tasted blood. Had I bitten my tongue? “Grandma, come on, that’s not Dad.”
“Not Travis!” she cried happily. “Linc!”
“No, not Linc,” I whispered.
At this, the man in the bed opened his eyes. They focused blankly on Grandma and me, then sharpened in terror. Everyone, including the nurse that had snuck in, remained silent while a dull grinding noise began rising from the man’s throat.
I looked wildly from Grandma to the man in the bed to Clive to the nurse. My third time looking to the patient in the bed his eyes opened wider and he stopped mewling and burst into tears. “Bixby?” he cried.
I stumbled to the edge of the bed, shoved by Grandma. The man in the bed looked old, his eyes were purple from eyebrows to cheekbones. His face was gaunt, like he had lost weight and bandages covered half of what I could see of him. But his hair was a very dark blonde and his skin a very rosy pale. I looked into his hazel eyes and knew. Totally impossible, but I knew.
“Linc?” I whispered.
“Oh my God,” he whispered back. “I forgot you existed.”
“No way,” I mumbled, stumbling away from the bed and into Clive.
“So this isn’t your dad?” he asked.
I shook my head, trying to edge further away.
“Do you know who he is?”
I shook my head again.
Grandma shoved me back towards the bed. “Lincoln!” she cried, pointing.
The man in the bed turned his watery eyes back to me. “Bixby, it’s me. Don’t you recognize me?”
“This is totally impossible,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Clive broke in. “I’m going to need some answers here. This obviously isn’t your father but do you know him?”
“Lincoln,” Grandma chirped happily, plopping down in a chair next to the bed.
I tried to work some spit into my mouth as Clive and the man in the bed waited for an answer. “He looks like my brother but my brother …”
“Yes?” Clive prompted.
“My brother …” I looked closer at the Lincoln look alike, searching for irrefutable proof. “Wait, can you roll over?”
“Bixby, it’s me,” he pleaded.
“Right, but if I could just see your back,” I asked, already knowing what I would see and also knowing it was impossible.
Understanding lit his eyes and he carefully rolled over under a tangle of wires and tubes.
I parted the hospital gown over his back and a fully colored, inked phoenix came into view. I scraped the gown up over his shoulders and saw the upturned beak, pointing at the three small stars, the blue and the green in the flame burning the bird. Our dad had let him get the tattoo for his seventeenth birthday. Linc had drawn it himself. For a long moment I stared then with shaking hands I pulled the gown closed. A thin gleam of silver slid out from my shirt sleeve.
Air squeaked out of my tight throat and I fumbled to pull my sleeve down.
Clive and the nurse were looking at me expectantly. I helped the man roll back over and searched his face.
“This is my brother, Lincoln Gray,” I finall
y said and burst into tears.
I could hear the other people in the room questioningly throwing around words like “missing person” and “runaway” while Lincoln and I cried and hugged each other. They let us have our reunion but when we pulled away to wipe our faces and blow our noses, Clive was right there with his clipboard.
“I have a few, actually several, questions I’m going to need the answers to,” he said sternly.
Lincoln looked to me anxiously. “I don’t know … anything,” he said worriedly.
I opened my mouth, paused and then shut it. Everyone was looking at me. “I ... I have to go to the bathroom,” I finally said lamely.
Chapter 4
A NURSE WITH A SYMPATHETIC look fixed on her face led me to small bathroom where I gratefully locked myself in. I sat on the closed toilet lid for a few minutes, thinking I might want to cry more. I even squeezed my eyelids shut a few times, but no luck. Finally, I had to settle for splashing cold water on my face. It felt so good to be distracted from everything happening I practically gave myself a shower then slowly, methodically wiped my face and hands dry with the scratchy brown paper towel.
I stopped at my wrists.With wonder and fear, I stared at the silver bracelets encircling each of them. They were the same thin, perfect ovals from my dream. And like in my dream they didn’t have hinges or clasps and were too snug to be pulled off. I tried anyway but they didn’t move, nor did the thin, delicate metal bend when I tried to pull it. But most alarming were the same thin, gauzy wisps of chain coming from each bracelet, joining at about my knees and falling away to the floor and seemingly under the door. Just like in my dream.
My mind processed all this with calm, numb thoughts. “Maybe I’m in shock,” I whispered to myself, trying to catch the thin chains in my hands and failing. They were almost see through and I could push them to the sides with the palms of my hands and pull more chain from under the door by lifting my hands above my head. But when I tried to grasp them they dissipated like smoke then reformed.
I sat back down on the closed toilet lid and folded my legs underneath me. With a fearful reluctance, I thought back to my last dream, trying to bring forth all the details.
Jordan had held my wrists, had grabbed them, really. And hadn’t I thought something about that felt unusual? But what? And what had I promised? What exactly had I promised?
My head snapped up at this because I knew exactly what Jordan had promised—my brother back. And here I was sitting the bathroom like a zombie when my brother was somehow back from the dead and waiting for me, hurt, in a hospital bed.
I threw the door open and nearly plowed down the nurse waiting on the other side. “Sorry,” I said, politely shoving past her.
“Just a second,” she replied, grabbing my wrist. I froze, staring at her hand. The smoke chain seemed to drip from the back of it. I held my breath as she slid an ID band below the bracelet and secured it with a little plastic snap.”For security reasons. He’s being admitted,” she said apologetically, making no mention of any gauzy smoke chains.
I nodded mutely and made my way back to Lincoln’s bed.
The head of his bed had been raised and he was sitting up drinking a plastic cup of apple juice. Grandma sat next to him, smiling so wide I could see almost all of her teeth. He set the juice down when he saw me looking in. “Bixby,” he asked,”are you okay?”
I felt my eyes tear up and my chin tremble. “Yeah,” I said, sitting down at the foot of his bed. “I should be asking you that.”
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Yeah, I guess I’m fine. I mean, obviously I am, I’m okay now.” He bit his lip, a rare nervous gesture from him. Lincoln was never nervous—about anything. It just wasn’t his personality.
I took a shallow breath then asked the question I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to. “Where were you?”
“I was ... I was at a homeless shelter. I was with all these guys and I slept on a cot and drank this really awful coffee.”
I closed my eyes in relief. It didn’t really explain anything that had happened, but it was better than him saying, dead, or heaven, or the afterlife, or just plain old nowhere.
“Linc,” I said slowly, “do you know how you got to the homeless shelter?”
He bit his lip again and shook his head.
“Has anybody, um, explained anything to you?”
“Explained what?”
Grandma took Linc’s hand and looked at me expectantly. I took the other hand and a deep breath. “You and Ben were going to the swim meet in South Bay. You took his car and on the way there they think maybe a deer ran out in front of you guys.”
Linc stared at me blankly and I continued. “He must have swerved, because the car went off the road and hit a tree. It … it caught on fire. They said something about a fuel pump, or poor maintenance or something.” I swallowed hard, not knowing how to say the next part. “It was pretty quick and there was nothing anyone could do to help, the fire was too hot—”
“Is Ben dead?” Lincoln gasped, jerking up. Grandma just looked at me.
“He is, but—”
Lincoln just shook his head and started crying again. He and Ben had been close, always playing the same sports and riding to most of the games together. They usually took Ben’s crappy Honda because it got better gas mileage than Linc’s beefed up Isuzu.
“Linc,” I said quietly. “There’s more.”
“Why didn’t I get him out of the car?” he wailed.
“Nobody got out of the car,” I told him. “I ... I don’t know what happened, but both of you ... we thought you both died.”
Something registered on his face. “Was that were I was? Dead?” he asked wonderingly.
“Of course not!” I snapped, frightened. “You must not have been in the car. Or you must have ... been thrown.”
“How long ago was this?” he asked.
“A week and a half,” I replied quietly.
“Didn’t anybody wonder where I was for the last week and a half?” he asked, tearing up again.
I couldn’t help it, I started crying again too.
“We thought it was you in the car. We buried you a week ago.”
Linc’s face was paling and he didn’t say anything for a long while. “Like, with a funeral and everything?”
I just nodded.
“Everybody thinks I’m dead?” My strong, macho brother trembled and turned white. “So, if I’m not dead, then who did you guys bury in my grave?”
Now the blood was draining from my face. I could feel it. “I don’t know,” I whispered.
Grandma got up and left the curtained room. I was too shocked to chase after her or to be grateful when she returned with a nurse.
I explained in a whisper a short history of what had seemed to happen and she left to get the guy with the clipboard. He in turn listened and left to call the state police. When the two cops showed up, they were already familiar with the accident and seemed as confused as I felt. They only talked with us for a few minutes before leaving to call a supervisor.
The afternoon dragged into evening. Linc was transferred to a private room, thankfully complete with a real armchair and couch. The interviews with the police continued and were supplemented by exams with more doctors and nurses suddenly concerned Linc may have been thrown from a car. Both were interrupted occasionally by the lab people drawing more blood or a tech coming to take him for another X-ray or CAT scan. I left the room only once, to call my home answering machine and change the message to tell my dad to call the number to the hospital. He had a cell he brought with him on the road but it almost never had service.
Grandma and Linc were both asleep when the nurse finally came to tell me I had a call.
“Hey Dad,” I said quietly, aware everyone at the nurses’ station was pretending not to listen.
“Bixby, what the hell is going on?” he bellowed into the phone.
I turned my back on my audience and cleared my throat. How w
as I supposed to explain his dead son had come back to life and that we needed him when none of that made any sense? Dead people don’t come back to life and we hadn’t needed Dad since he had pretty much bowed out of our daily lives after mom died. “Me and Grandma are at the hospital in Grand Rapids. There was some awful mistake—well, not awful now, but it has been for the last couple weeks. Well, I mean, now it’s going to be awful for someone else—”
“Bixby!” my dad shouted.
“Linc’s not dead,” I blurted out. “He’s hurt, and he must have been in the car crash and he has a head injury and doesn’t remember anything but he’s not dead,” I said in rush.
“I’m in Iowa,” my dad said. “I’ll be there in five hours.”
“Kay,” I whispered before he slammed the phone down.
I snuck back into Linc’s room but could have probably paraded in on elephants. They were both out cold, snoring like it was a competition.
I curled up in the armchair with a thin blanket and closed my eyes. I felt myself starting to drift when a little icicle of fear stabbed me in the chest.
I had no idea what was going to happen when I fell asleep.
I popped the chair out of the reclining position. There was no way I was going to let myself go to sleep.
Morning, and my dad, found me red eyed but awake. I got a cursory hug from him then he went to stand awkwardly at the foot of Lincoln’s bed. I excused myself to do what freshening up I could with water and the caustic soap provided in the tiny bathroom.
Dad was talking to a doctor in the hallway when I made my way back. I overheard the words “recovery” and “miracle” but dad shooed me away with a glare when I tried to stop and listen.
“Everything okay?” I whispered to Linc back inside the room.
He shrugged. “I guess so. You know Dad.”
Yeah, I did.
When my dad came back in, all he said was,”Take your grandma home and get some sleep.”
I opened my mouth to argue but his glare stopped me. I kissed Linc on the forehead and stalked out of the room, Grandma at my heels. Truth was, I didn’t appreciate my dad’s intrusion. He was never around, he was never involved. He crawled into a shell when mom died and never came out, not even when Grandma started going downhill and we started having to take care of her instead of the other way around.
