Blink Once

by Cylin Busby

  “Wait!” Mom said. “I have to say something first.” She leaned over me and looked into my face. “We’re right here, can’t wait to see you after. We’re right here, West, the whole time, okay?” I blinked yes and saw the relief wash over her face. I could tell, she was suddenly strong. Maybe the doctor’s pep talk had worked.

  “Go get ’em, West,” Dad said awkwardly as they rolled me away. Once we were in the large white operating room, things moved quickly. There were five or six people there, and they all moved efficiently; sometimes I couldn’t tell whose hands were on me and where. One person was swabbing my arm for a needle, another was checking my trach, someone was injecting a syringe into my IV. They all talked to each other as if I weren’t there, as if I were asleep already, or invisible.

  “Have you seen this procedure before?” one woman asked.

  “Amazing.” The guy standing over me nodded. “Dr. Louis is the real deal, brilliant. I just wish he’d take on more residents.”

  The woman shrugged. “Some of them don’t like a bunch of students asking questions, you know, they just want to do their thing.”

  “All right,” the man on my left said as he capped off my IV tube, “this guy is not waking up anytime soon.” I knew what he was talking about a moment later as I felt whatever he had injected into me take hold—icy cold in my veins, my mind fuzzy.

  “Can you check the tray for a small punch forcep?” someone said, and I thought for a second they were talking to me. I turned my head to look for it, whatever it was, but that side of the room was suddenly empty. On the other side, everyone was gone too. I was alone. Where were they? I could hear music playing softly, classical music, and it felt so good and warm to just lie there. When I closed my eyes, I saw a hazy blue light, as if I were at the beach. I noticed Frankie, my old golden Lab, was down by my feet, keeping my legs warm, keeping me company. I hadn’t seen him since I was eight, when we’d had him put to sleep. “Frankie,” I said. “Good dog, that’s a boy.”

  Chapter 21

  I’m coming down the escalator at the mall. I’m so high up I can see everything. I can look around and see everyone, what everyone is doing. They are all like characters in a video game, moving around busily, like ants. Standing still and watching everyone else move makes me so happy; I love the feeling of calm washing over me. No one even sees me there. I’m coming down the escalator for a long time and I want it to last longer and longer. I close my eyes.

  The sun on the lake is so bright that even with my eyes closed I can feel it coming through my lids, sparkling off the water, the reflection like mini-fireworks twinkling. Her hand is on my back. “Tell me again,” she says, “what happened.” She runs her hand over the scars. When I turn, I can’t see her face. I shield my eyes from the glare, but I see only a shadow of a girl sitting next to me—her silhouette, a black cutout.

  Someone is crying. “No, no.” A girl is crying, sobbing. “Don’t, don’t …”

  Olivia.

  A phone is ringing. “How do you turn this off?” someone is saying. “They shouldn’t even have this in here.”

  Mom.

  I couldn’t see, couldn’t open my eyes. I heard shuffling noises—someone was near. My hand came up to my eye, and I felt … tape. A thick piece of tape from eyelid to mid-cheek. I tried to pick it off, but then I stopped. I’m dead. I’m dead, and when I open my eyes, I’ll be in a coffin, in a morgue.

  “Oh, you want that off?” a voice said. The tape was peeled back carefully and I saw a face, a woman I didn’t know. “Hi, I’m Tracy. I’m your nurse.” She spoke very slowly and carefully. “You’re in the hospital; you’ve just had surgery.” She peeled the tape off the other eye and I could see the entire room. “You were in an accident. Don’t try to talk; you have a trach tube in. You’re breathing on your own so we’re going to remove that tomorrow, okay? Raise your hand if you can hear me.” She smiled when my hand went up. “Stay calm, I’m going to get your parents; just relax.” I raised my hand again.

  My hand.

  I looked at it. It was my hand.

  I moved my toes. I bent my knees up. Something jabbed in my stomach, hard. I felt around and found a big tube, like a vacuum cleaner tube, taped to my side and going into my lower abs. It hurt like hell to touch it.

  My head was pulsing with pain. It felt like there was a band around my forehead, like a hat that was on too tight. But when I reached up to take it off, nothing was there.

  “West!” Mom raced into the room, “Oh, honey, how are you? How are you?” She looked terrible, like she hadn’t slept in days. “How do you feel, oh, you’re moving! Look at that”—she turned to Dad—“he’s moving! He’s moving!”

  A huge grin spread over Dad’s face. “Well, they said it went great, but it does feel good to actually see it with your own eyes, doesn’t it?” he said. Mom was jumping up and down like a cheerleader, yelling with excitement. She stopped and tried to collect herself. “How do you feel, do you feel okay?” she asked.

  I moved my hand up to my head and touched my forehead.

  “Your head hurts?” she asked.

  I pointed to my forehead again, then made a thumbs-down sign. “Okay, I understand,” Mom said quickly, but weirdly she had this huge grin on her face, like me being able to tell her I had a headache was the best thing that had ever happened to her. She put her hands over her face and started crying again.

  The nurse stepped around them and held up my wrist. “I’m just going to check everything out, West,” she said, then turning to my parents, said, “The headache is very common with this type of procedure; it’s more like a migraine from a spinal tap. I have something I think will work, but I think the doctor is going to want to see him before we administer that.” Then she turned to me and asked loudly, “Did you understand that, West?” I raised my hand, but my head was hurting so bad I had to close my eyes.

  “We’ll give him the dose right away, because it does take a while to work and we don’t want him in this much pain. It will make him a little groggy for a few hours,” she explained.

  “But he can’t fall back into a coma, can he?” Mom asked.

  When she said that, my eyes flew open. Had I been in a coma? How long ago was the surgery?

  “No, he’s okay,” the nurse reassured her. “He’s doing absolutely great, in fact; this medication will just break the headache, nothing else. Let me go get that. You all can visit for a few minutes until Dr. Louis gets here.”

  Mom pulled a chair over to the bed and Dad stood beside her. “Can you feel your toes?” she asked, so I pulled my legs up to show her. The tube in my stomach really killed, too, so I pointed to it.

  “That’s a feeding tube, to make sure you were getting enough calories,” Dad said quickly. “Did they say that would come out with the trach tomorrow?” He turned to Mom.

  “Oh, I don’t remember.” Mom looked flustered. “Dr. Louis said something about being able to swallow—let’s ask him when he gets here. West, you’re so skinny already, we want to make sure you can eat before they take the tube out.” When she spoke to me, the volume went up. Why was everyone talking to me so loud?

  My head hurt so bad that I felt like I could see sounds. With my eyes closed, I saw sparks when a loud cart wheeled down the hall. In a minute, the nurse was back with something in a syringe. “This should do the trick,” she said, injecting it into my IV.

  Mom was talking away nervously. “You don’t know how nice it is to be able to have him tell us how he feels—I mean, it’s been three months! I’m just so happy, I can’t even tell you. When did Dr. Louis say he would be here?”

  “He’s on his way; let me go see if he responded to the page we sent him,” the nurse said as she left the room.

  I got the feeling she was psyched to get away from Mom, who was acting like a crazy lady. Why did Mom keep saying three months—it hadn’t been that long. Maybe a month. Was it longer? I was confused; my brain felt scrambled.

  Mom and Dad sat down whil
e they waited, and spoke in murmurs. I could see that they were sitting next to each other, heads close together. I could catch only snippets of their conversation; I didn’t want to hear it. My head hurt too badly, and the medication wasn’t helping yet. Finally, slowly, I started to feel the band around my forehead loosen up a little bit. But I also started to feel like I was drifting off. I remembered Dr. Louis coming into the room and talking to Mom, then asking me to lift my hands, to touch my nose, but it all felt like it was happening in a dream. I did my best, and he seemed happy with that. “You just rest now, West. He needs lots of rest, then we’ll be able to gauge where we go from here.” I drifted back to sleep hearing Mom talking to him, Dad asking some questions. I felt good, warm and sleepy, and I knew that everything was going to be okay.

  When I woke up, the room was darkened, and I was alone. My first thought, now that my head felt better, was of Olivia. She was going to be so happy to hear that I was doing fine, that everything had worked. I had to have Mom or Mike call her right away. I drifted back to sleep thinking of what she might say, and how soon I could see her.

  The next morning, Mom was there again when I woke up. “Hi, sweetie,” she said when I opened my eyes. “They are going to take you in for a brief surgery just to remove the trach and the feeding tube. The doctor said it’s a fifteen-minute procedure, at most, but you’re ready for it today, okay?”

  I gave her a thumbs-up. Then I motioned that I wanted to write something by pretending to hold a pen and writing in the air.

  “Oh, you want to write? Okay …” Mom searched her purse and found a pen, then took a card off the bedside table and held it up for me to write on the back. My hand was pretty wobbly, but not as bad as it had been before. I wrote Olivia.

  “Who’s that?”

  Then I wrote, Tell her I’m OK.

  “Is this someone Mike would know? Or Allie?”

  I wrote Mike. He knows. Hospital. I knew Mike would remember the pretty girl from the room next door. Have Mike tell her. I’m OK.

  By now I was exhausted and my giant scrawl had filled the back of the card. Mom took it and tucked it into her purse. “I’ll call him when you’re in surgery and make sure he gets the message,” she said. “How’s your head? Is it better today?”

  I gave her an okay sign with my fingers just as two orderlies came into the room to wheel me into surgery. “This is a quick one,” one of them said. “We’ll have him back in no time.” Mom grabbed my hand before they took me out.

  “I’ll be right here, sweetie.” Exactly what she had said last time.

  The guys wheeled me down the hall and into an operating room much like the one I was in last time, only with less people. A guy in a mask leaned over my face. “Hi, West,” he said loudly. “Today we’re going to remove your trach. It’s a fast procedure, but it can be painful, so we’re going to put you under for this. When you wake up, don’t try to talk right away. Let’s give it a day or two, okay?”

  I gave him a thumbs-up to show him that I understood. He nodded to a woman who was standing by my IV stand. I didn’t even have a second to feel myself falling asleep, instead I just woke up back in my hospital room. I thought for a moment that they had forgotten to do the surgery, that something had gone wrong, because not enough time had passed. It felt like one minute. But when I reached up to my throat, the brace was gone, the tube was gone—now it was just my neck, skin, and a big bandage taped down over my lower throat. The feeding tube was also gone, a small bandage in its place.

  Mom wasn’t in the room when I woke up, so I decided to try talking. “Hi,” I said to the empty room. It sounded very froggy, not like my voice at all. “Hi,” I tried again, but air came whistling out under the bandage on my throat, making it almost impossible to say anything. Before I could try it again, Mom showed up and Dad was with her.

  “That was fast, and you’re already awake.” Mom was staring at the bandage on my throat. She moved down the blanket to peek at the bandage on my stomach. “He said three stitches.” She turned to Dad. “Out next week.”

  “Looking good, buddy,” Dad said, taking a seat next to me. “How do you feel?”

  I raised my hand to make a sign, but then decided to give it a go, to try to talk. “Okay,” I said. My voice was low and raspy; I sounded like a creepy whispering guy from a horror movie.

  Dad’s grin said it all. Mom turned away so I wouldn’t see her crying, but I knew she was crying again. “The doctor was just telling us that if you place your fingers here”—Dad took my hand and put two fingers over the bandage on my throat—“the air won’t come out quite as much and you can talk a little bit more.”

  I tried it, pressing down just a little. “Hi.” Definitely better, louder.

  “Like that.” Dad smiled. I knew it was hard for him to look at me, his son, covered in bandages, thin, and with long, greasy hair that stuck to my forehead. His face looked pained.

  “But he also said give it a day or two to close up; they don’t put stitches there,” Mom added.

  “Olivia,” I said, pressing down on the gauze again.

  “Oh, yes, I had Mike tell her that you were okay,” Mom answered. “And she was very happy to hear it.” She gave me a little smile. “I’m sure he’ll tell you more when he’s here this afternoon. I think he was a little surprised to hear that you knew her at all. And you know how we all feel about Allie….”

  “I should go get the doctor, right?” Dad said nervously. I could tell he did not want to get into a conversation about my girl problems right now—or ever. Mom nodded and he left the room.

  After he walked out, Mom took my hand and scooted closer to me. “I’m so happy, I can’t tell you how happy I am. I wasn’t sure this was going to work, that we would get you back after all this time,” she started.

  The doctor walked in with Dad behind him, a huge smile on his face. “This is exactly what I want to see, my friend,” he exclaimed as he adjusted the bed up. “You’re going to find that talking is difficult for a little bit, until this closes up.” He peeled back the bandage on my throat. “Looks wonderful. This can take a week or a little more, okay? Your vocal cords are like every other muscle in your body, and we’re going to give them all time to come back; you’ve been immobile for long enough that you’ll need physical therapy to get back on track. Do you understand?”

  Without the brace and trach, I found that I could nod my head easily now.

  “Wonderful. So my colleagues and your parents will talk to you more about the schedule and where you’ll be going next. We find that patients who start therapy immediately come much closer to a full recovery, and that’s what we want for you.”

  I nodded again.

  “Okay, so”—he turned to Mom and Dad—“we are ready to move him on Thursday. Until then, it’s rest and we’ll just monitor his progress.”

  “Thank you so much, Doctor,” Mom said, grabbing his hand in both of hers and shaking it up and down. “Thank you.”

  “Shall we?” He motioned to the hallway and they followed him out. I closed my eyes, but I could catch a little of what they were saying. Watching for infection, the medications I was on. Then the doctor said something about “overwhelming” me. At first I thought he was talking about doing too much physically, but it was clear from the conversation that they were talking about overwhelming me in other ways—mentally. “Unless he asks you directly … ,” I heard him say. Then something about “… will come back to him slowly, when he’s ready.” Were they talking about the accident, because I remembered that clearly, the bikes at the quarry. Mike’s face over mine, looking down at me, asking me questions. Mike’s eyes, so close up, his pupils like tiny dots in an ocean of bright green. “You’re okay,” he kept saying. “You’re going to be okay.” I fell into a druggy-haze nap thinking about the accident. Had something else happened that I couldn’t remember? Something they were worried about? I ran over everything in my head, watching it like a movie. The way I fell. Mike. Allie crying and crying.
I could see all of it clearly. But what I couldn’t remember was whatever happened next. How did I even get to the hospital? Did Mike take me in his car? Did they call an ambulance? I tried to think, but there was nothing there. Just blackness. Not even a dream memory. Until I woke up at Wilson and met Olivia. Everything that came before was lost.

  Chapter 22

  Mike’s eyes, his pupils big this time, were directly over my face when I woke up. He backed away quickly when I jerked awake, like I was Frankenstein’s monster come to life.

  “Holy crap, they weren’t kidding. You really aren’t a vegetable anymore. Can you talk?”

  I put my fingers over the gauze. “How’s this?” I rasped.

  Mike grinned. “Well, that’s sort of like talking,” he joked. “It is good to have you back!” He pulled over the chair and sat next to me. “I can’t get over it. You really are okay, right, you can move and everything?”

  I lifted one leg, then the other, like a good student, then held up my middle finger. That’s what he gets for calling me a vegetable.

  “Nice.” He smiled. “You seem to be back to yourself.” Mike sat and stared at me for a few moments, nodding, like he was wondering what to say. I didn’t know what to say either.

  “So, I don’t know how to ask you this except to ask it: is your brain okay?” he finally said.

  I gave him the finger again as an answer.

  “Okay.” Mike smiled shyly. It was weird, like we were getting to know one another again. When Mike came to visit me at Wilson Center, he seemed more himself. What had changed? Why was he being so serious now?

  “Here’s why I’m asking.” Mike looked down for a moment. “Because your mom told me you wanted me to tell Ollie Hudson you were okay. And so, I did it, but man, really? Since when? Forgive me, bro, but that chick is nasty. She’s got a mustache. I heard she has the herp, down there.” He pointed to his crotch.