by Lee Woodruff
James was sedated now; a “medically induced coma” they called it, and the surgeons had done all that they could for the moment. Brain injuries were so individual, they explained, the outcomes too unpredictable to offer any sort of accurate prognosis. So much depended on exactly where the person was injured and how severely. Age and level of intelligence could be factors in recovery too, they said. There were so many unknowns, Margaret had told him. But overall it was not good.
What happened next was up to James and whatever willpower was left in that little, broken body. The car, with the son of one of Maura’s neighbors driving, had apparently struck him at a relatively slow speed. But it was the way that James had been hit, the angle of the impact, that had ruptured and bruised organs and the fact that he’d flown through the air and landed on his head. Roger hadn’t thought until this moment about whether or not he’d been wearing his bike helmet, but the question flitted through his mind as he stood at the ground floor elevator bank. It wouldn’t change the outcome now, he thought glumly. He exhaled, stepped into the elevator, and pressed the button for the fourth floor.
Roger set down his bag and briefcase and removed his blazer, feeling like a traveling salesman as he watched the floors click by in red digits. God, how the hell did anyone mentally gird themselves for something like this? You imagined it, experienced it occasionally with people your own age, but was anyone ever prepared to visit a critically injured grandson’s hospital room?
He stepped out of the elevator and saw Margaret almost immediately, positioned by the ICU curtain down the hall. He met her eyes and saw something veiled and pleading in them, but then there was relief, a subtle unburdening played across her features relaxing her brows. He could tell instantly how upset she was from the tight coil of her body, but he knew that Margaret would refrain from showing Maura her raw fear. She would need to remain ramrod strong for her daughter, for all of them. That was her calling card. Signature Margaret. The artificial lighting in the ICU corridor gave a jaundiced hue to Roger’s partially tanned forearms. He was aware of the smells of the hallway, antiseptic and ammonia mingled with what he imagined was the sweaty smell of human fear.
“Hi.” Roger set his bag gratefully at his feet in the hallway and moved toward Margaret, arms outstretched. She placed both hands on his upper arms, rose on her toes, and offered her cheek, as she always did in public, something he’d grown accustomed to over the years. He felt a softening, a slump of her shoulders as one rogue sob escaped, and he drew her closer. Something about her vulnerability, her neediness of him, made Roger squeeze harder, and they stayed that way for a few moments until she pulled away to study him. She dabbed the wetness in her eyes, collected herself, and then assessed him, as if checking for damages.
“You OK?” Roger asked her softly, and Margaret nodded, looking inside the room toward the corner, where his daughter was leaning over the bed, obscuring the view.
“Hi, honey,” Roger boomed, more brightly than he felt and too loudly for the circumstances.
“Daddy!” Maura jumped up and rose from the bed, out through the curtain and into her father’s arms in one almost continuous motion. As they hugged, she began to cry, convulsively, her shoulders shaking, and he patted her back as if she were still a small girl.
“Oh, Dad.” She lifted her head off his chest, and swirling across her face like a tempest, he saw terror and guilt, grief and pain. Roger recalled suddenly how easy it had been to comfort her when she was young. The wrongs and injustices in her life had been trifles then, bloodied knees and bruised hearts. He had thought, when they’d sent her out into the world, that they had prepared her for life. How did anyone prepare his or her child for this? he wondered.
“It’ll be OK, honey, it’s OK.” In the absence of knowing what to say, Roger continued hugging and patting her in a reflexive response.
His eyes strayed through the wide opening in the curtain to study James on the bed behind Maura, and his first thought was how pale and small his grandson appeared, lying so immobile. There were tubes seemingly everywhere, and bruises and cuts on his arms and other parts of his body that were visible above the sheet. His scalp had been shaved on one side and a giant angry seam of scabbed skin ran across the one hemisphere, with what looked like oversize staples holding it all together. James’s head swelled oddly outward like a balloon on one side, giving his face a lopsided look, and both of his eyes were bruised and blackened. A machine behind him made a whooshing sound, and Roger realized with a jolt that it was breathing for James, keeping time in exact intervals as his small rib cage rose and fell in a rhythmic shudder. Roger released Maura and moved to the bed, drawn by the fragility of his grandson, the sight of a life suspended in the balance so graphically.
“I’m here, James,” he said thinly. “I’m here.” He didn’t know where to touch, what to touch; every inch of James seemed broken somehow or under siege.
“I’m sorry,” said Maura. “About your business meeting. That all of this … pulled you away, I mean.” She let out the last part in an almost inaudible voice. Now, standing apart from her, he took in her appearance. Her thick, dark hair was limp and unwashed, her blue eyes red rimmed. There was a smear of blood on her inner wrist, and Roger realized that the pressed jeans and clean cotton shirt she was wearing now had probably been brought to the hospital for her by Margaret or her husband, Pete. Whatever she’d had on at the time had most likely been covered with blood, he thought grimly. She looked defeated, determined, and terrified.
“Come, sit, Maura,” Roger said, taking her arm and guiding her back into the padded chair next to James. “Have you had anything to eat?”
Maura looked up at him numbly, as if she hadn’t understood the question. She nodded and reached for James’s hand in the bed.
“I’ve been trying,” said Margaret authoritatively. “She’s managed a few bites.” Roger nodded. He looked up as his son-in-law entered the small room with cups of coffee in a cardboard holder, and Pete’s eyes met Roger’s with a noticeable relief. He handed a Styrofoam cup to Margaret and then to Maura and turned to offer the third to Roger.
“Roger! Thank God, welcome. Coffee? I can get another one downstairs.”
Roger shook his head and held up his hand.
“Take it, Roger,” urged Pete. “You’ve been traveling.”
He reached up to clasp the cup and studied Pete’s sunken eyes, bluish around the sockets from shock and fatigue. His shoulders slumped slightly, his normal, more boisterous self diminished in the tiny space. Each of them in the room seemed older and sluggish, as if their life force had been extracted suddenly.
Roger watched Pete reach out to his daughter and stroke her back. Sipping his coffee in the austere hospital hallway, Roger let his thoughts drift toward a happier moment, Pete and Maura’s late-September wedding day more than a decade before. The glorious Indian summer that surprised them all with its staying power had abruptly retreated, and there had been a bite in the air. Roger recalled how through the fuzzy edges of too many scotches at the country club reception, he’d walked out to the dock to study the crescent of white lights twinkling up the North Shore of Lake Michigan. He had wondered then about the prospects of his daughter’s happiness. It occurred to him, with a sudden stab of sorrow, how you could know your child her whole life, and then she entered into marriage and a part of her was forever cloaked in shadow.
If Roger had harbored early misgivings about Pete Corrigan, he had come to view him as the antidote to balance out his daughter’s sometimes selfish and willful streaks. Roger had liked Pete since Maura had first brought him home in her sophomore year of college. Two years older than his daughter, he’d attended high school a few towns away, and Roger had casually known Pete’s parents, June and Stan. The Corrigans owned an insurance agency, which Pete had inherited, and coincidentally, maybe a decade before Maura had met Pete, Roger had purchased a homeowner’s policy from Maura’s father-in-law for the cottage in Door County.
On
paper, he was great son-in-law material: dependable, a good provider with a built-in career in his family business, the solid ex-high-school-football type still in decent physical shape. Pete had an even temperament and no funny earrings or designer facial hair. Moreover, he was a practicing Catholic, something that had appealed to Roger after the string of Jewish and Protestant boys Maura had dated in high school and college. He was a straightforward, sturdy, uncomplicated person and by all appearances a decent father. Beyond that, it was hard to judge and certainly not his place.
Roger had to admit that he’d been somewhat surprised by the choices each of his three children had made in a spouse. Early on he had realized that the best course was to keep his own counsel. The qualities in particular mates that he’d thought suitable or unsuitable had no bearing on the way things ended up. And Roger certainly knew firsthand what a fickle and unpredictable institution marriage could be.
“The only people who know the real story are the people it involves,” Margaret would always say when the kids would gossip or criticize someone at school, baiting her and trying unsuccessfully to bring her into the ring. They would laugh at her righteousness. But what she said was true, Roger reasoned. And marriage, especially, was a private entity. You could look in from the outside, see the lights in the windows, the beds made and the table set, and assume that there was order and contentment. But the truth was, as Roger himself knew after more than four decades of marriage, it was ultimately a fluid thing, a shape-shifter, holding different, private characteristics at varying points in time.
Roger’s reverie was interrupted by the arrival of the young neurosurgeon, Dr. Oberg, who bustled into the room, his surgical mask hanging limply on the side of his chest by one tie. He couldn’t have been more than forty, but the fatigue in his face and his vague impatience lent him the appearance of someone much older. His eyes registered initial surprise at so many family members crammed into the small space in the ICU. Introductions were made all around, and the doctor, who seemed clearly pressed for time, began to give his pronouncement.
It hadn’t yet been twenty-four hours and James’s condition was unchanged, it hadn’t worsened, which was good, Dr. Oberg said. But it was impossible to predict exactly what his life would look like after recovery. If he recovered. There was no way to know what he would be left with, but based on where he’d been injured, on the right side of his brain, he would probably have physical and cognitive issues. And all the rest of it—his speech, memory, and the extent of his mobility—would be revealed in time. The doctor’s face was neutral, like a mask, and Roger wondered how many times a day he delivered speeches like this.
“First,” Dr. Oberg went on to explain, “we need James to wake up. We need him to fight. And then when we see signs of him waking up or responding to our commands, we can begin to lower the medication and help him come out of the coma. He is still on the knife’s edge.” The doctor spoke in a quiet tone, averting his eyes from the respectful, anxious family members who felt the jab of each word, hanging on his sentences like worshipers.
Dr. Oberg looked almost uncomfortable behind his glasses, like he wanted to bolt. Roger imagined he was the sort of physician who felt more comfortable in the operating room than at the bedside. The ability to take action must be so much more preferable than standing amid this raw and palpable sea of grief and fervent expectation, parsing people’s ability to hope.
“So what’s our next milestone, what are we looking for him to do, doc?” Pete asked, and Roger noticed for the first time that Pete was graying slightly at the temples, little flecks just beginning right at the hairline, fine as a fishing line.
“It means we need your son to fight hard for these next seventy-two hours,” the doctor replied. “They are going to be critical.”
3
Four days had passed since the accident, and Maura felt as if she hadn’t showered in weeks. Her tongue was thick, breath sour, her eyes dry and devoid of tears. There was a dull ache in her lower back from leaning over the bed rail to stroke James’s hand, whisper to him and assure him, regardless of his lack of response, that she was there. All food tasted like cardboard, and she’d actually had to spit out the muffin her brother, Stu, had tried to force her to eat this morning. He and his wife, Jen, had traveled from Milwaukee the day after James’s surgery and had toggled back and forth between the hospital and her children at home.
“Keep talking to him,” the nurses had said. “He hears you somewhere in there, and that will help knit his brain back together.” And so she talked. She told him the story of the day he was born; she read him the news from the Chicago Tribune sports section that Pete had found in the cafeteria. She’d described his room at home, his siblings, and how much his dog Rascal missed him, sleeping on top of James’s pillow each night, waiting for him to return. And when Maura searched for new topics, just to keep the words coming, she began to name his friends at school and read their get-well cards aloud. The simplicity of their hand-scribbled messages comforted her. She’d even counted in Spanish, something she had been drilling her son on for an upcoming vocabulary test. When she had exhausted all of her energy and it was time to return to the house and pray for sleep, she would ask the nurses to make sure that his favorite CDs kept playing softly on the boom box her sister Erin had brought to his bedside.
The images of what Ryan and Sarah were doing now at home and exactly who was minding them at any given time intruded periodically, and she pushed those thoughts out of her head, as if shutting a door. Maura couldn’t possibly think about anyone beside James right now. It would only tear at her, and there were so many needs outside this ICU that could splinter her focus if she let them. Every molecule of her energy needed to be wholly focused on her son, as if she could heal him through sheer will and the forcefulness of her maternal love.
The thought of ministering to her other children’s simple needs, once the unremarkable but constant features of her day, now merely exhausted her. Contemplating the simplest actions, like reading a book to Sarah or organizing laundry, felt like summiting a mountain. But the hardest thing, the most difficult thing for Maura, was to cease replaying the accident over and over in her mind.
Anytime she stopped moving, when she collapsed in the hospital chair next to James with her legs tucked up under her, or when she paused at the porcelain drinking fountain in the long ICU corridor, she would see the images, as if a cinema were flickering through a private, internal screen. The bright flash of chrome, the abrupt swerve of the handlebars to the left, off the sidewalk, as if all of those admonishments, all of those warnings she had constantly made to all three of her children, all of the “be carefuls” and “look both ways,” had never been uttered. In the film loop of her mind, she was inside James, looking out of his eyes. It was as if Maura actually were her son.
In her head, she could correct it. Maura would rewind to the exact moment when his bike fenders clattered noisily toward the curb. In her new, revised version of the day, she would be positioned vigilantly on his left, able to put a steadying arm on his bike, instead of yards behind, pushing Sarah’s stroller. Maura would have waited until the car had passed, looked carefully in both directions with him, and then given him permission to cross as she eased the stroller’s wheels over the curb behind him.
“Stop, honey,” she imagined telling him as she instinctively caught him veering toward the road. She would have anticipated the pure childlike excitement that blurred caution and wiped thoughts of safety from his nine-year-old brain. The incident would have produced that surge of adrenaline and heart-thumping drama that pounded in your veins after a crisis had been averted and lingered momentarily as a physical reminder of the close call. Later that night at dinner, the example of James’s carelessness, his forgetting to look both ways, might have gotten a mention, a parental reinforcement. And after he was safely tucked in bed, after she had brushed his bangs back from his forehead, the memory of his near miss, those few seconds of terror, might have retur
ned to remind her how lucky they all were before it faded and then disappeared.
But that was magical thinking. There were no do-overs. And every time she let her mind wander, every time she gave herself the luxury of contemplating the “what if,” of revising history, she was slapped in the face by the enormity of the fact that this was really happening.
Each day since the accident was a carbon of the one before. Doctors, nurses, and interns whisked in and out of the curtained area to study the machines, to take James’s vitals, or to change his IV drip. When a nurse accidentally dropped a tray, causing them all to jump, Maura fought the irrational urge to yell at her, to scream at all of them to leave James alone. She would care for him. She was responsible for all of this and he was her baby, her very first baby. She would fix him, fix this.
When Maura was with James, physically beside her son in the hospital, there was a vestigial well of adrenaline within her that she could exist on for weeks if needed. She could feel it rising and propelling her forward as she questioned the doctors and nurses, followed his medications, checked on continuity at shift changes, and watched the monitors for the most minuscule changes. Maura would draw from her own body to nourish him, as she had done when she was pregnant, using the essential parts of herself to sustain a life. In those moments when she was by James’s side, talking to him, stroking his skin, applying lotion to his feet, she didn’t experience fatigue the way she would have imagined. In those moments it was as if all of her senses and nerve endings were standing alert, like shavings on a magnet.
Maura felt the presence of someone behind her and turned to see that Pete had walked into the hospital room, interrupting her circling thoughts, and she was momentarily confused. It was too soon. Was he coming from home? She glanced out the window and realized that the day had evaporated; time in the ICU existed like a black hole. How was it dusk already?
