by Beck, Jamie
I pushed out of the chair, grabbed my phone, and tried Grace once more. When it went straight to voice mail again, I dialed Sam.
“Hello?” came his exhausted voice.
“Sam. It’s Mimi.” I braced, but he didn’t bite my head off or hang up. “I’ve tried Grace a few times, but she’s not answering. Is there any news?”
A pause ensued. “Not yet. I can’t talk long. Grace will be back from the restroom any minute.” He made it sound almost as if she’d been avoiding my calls, which caused a new kind of pain to erupt.
I listened, sinking onto the sofa in tears as Sam explained all they knew. “Oh God, Sam. I’m so sorry. What can I do? Can I come get Kim for you?”
“She’s with Becky, thanks.”
My eyes widened. After ten years of learning about Grace’s childhood and watching her and her mom interact, I knew she hated having to ask her mother for help.
“Oh. Well, I can watch her tomorrow or whenever. Or drive up now and sit with you and Grace. Anything at all. Please. I need to do something.”
“No, don’t come here, Mimi. Grace isn’t in the mood to deal with anyone. It’s best if you sit back and wait it out. We won’t know anything for twelve to twenty-four hours, anyway.”
For the first time since Rowan had called me tonight, I realized that this incident might affect our friendship. My eyes filled with tears. “Of course I’ll wait. I don’t mean to push. I’m worried, is all.”
He sniffled. “I shouldn’t have convinced Grace to let Carter go to Rowan’s party. I thought it’d get him over the hump with the bullying.”
“Wait.” My body turned cold as I straightened my spine. “Are you saying the party was planned?” I glanced toward the steps to Rowan’s bedroom.
“Far as I know. Carter said that on Friday afternoon Rowan had invited him to a party. He was excited to hang with the ‘pretty’ girls.” Sam’s voice faltered a second time. “I just wanted him to be happy. We assumed you’d be at home, but we got so busy with Kim’s birthday party neither of us followed up. Jesus, I wish I could take it all back.”
Sitting alone in the dark while listening to a brokenhearted man falling apart stilled everything but my heart, which throbbed with the load of everyone’s pain. Fresh tears clogged my nose, the growing sense of Rowan’s and my blame for all this deepening.
“It’s not your fault, Sam. If I’d had any idea there’d been a party planned, I would’ve stayed home.” I dropped my head to my free hand. Maybe I was the biggest idiot on the planet, always looking for the best in everyone. My son had lied to me, like Dirk had guessed. And I’d ignored Carter’s hesitation on the lawn because I wanted to believe that my talk with Rowan had worked. “Sam, would you mind texting me any updates? I’m beside myself with worry. And please give Carter and Grace a big hug from me. You’re all in my thoughts and prayers tonight.” I might even text Uncle Tommy to put Carter on his church’s prayer list, or ask him how this was part of God’s plan. For so long I’d believed God had a big plan for each of us, so I hadn’t worried much about my daily decisions. Maybe Grace was right, though. Maybe we did control our own destinies.
Sam cleared his throat after pulling himself together. “Listen, I’ve got to go now. Appreciate the call, but it’s not a good time.”
“Of course. Bye!” I hung up without any promise of updates.
I set the phone on the coffee table, shut off the lamp, and curled into a ball, too exhausted to take Rowan to task for lying to me. That could wait until breakfast. Was dealing with his arrest enough of a consequence for him, or should I take his phone and ground him? If tonight wasn’t a wake-up call for me to rethink some of my parenting strategies, I didn’t know what was.
Eerie blue light filled my quiet house. Please, God, please let Carter be okay. I rested my forehead against my knees, replaying the night. Self-doubts polluted my thoughts. Officer Martinez had been kind, but maybe he’d been lulling us into complacency to get Rowan to talk. It would’ve been smarter to have involved a lawyer before letting Rowan blab, but my conscience couldn’t let us skirt responsibility after seeing Carter motionless on my floor.
Carter had to be okay. He just had to. Any other result was unbearable.
I hugged my knees tight, banging my forehead against them. My best friend might be avoiding me. None of us functioned well when heartsick and panicked, but I loved Grace and her family as much as I hated being helpless. There had to be some solution to bring us all together. Yet when I closed my eyes to think, only darkness came to me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
GRACE
Sunday afternoon, January 10
Shock Trauma Hospital recovery room
“Where are you going?” Sam whispered when I rose on weak legs from my seat beside Carter’s bed thanks to a sum total of two hours’ sleep, all of which had occurred in that uncomfortable chair.
“Downstairs. My mom texted. She and Kim are parking.” I sighed, wishing my mother hadn’t insisted on seeing Carter today. I had enough on my plate without her judgment piling on.
“I’ll come, too.” He pushed out of his seat.
“But Carter might wake up.”
Sam looked at Carter, who appeared to be dead to the world. “He’ll be fine for ten minutes.”
I walked to the door, too exhausted to argue.
Glimpses of Sam were all I could tolerate after fifteen grueling hours of uncertainty, because instead of seeing my husband, all I saw was the face of the man who’d broken our pact. That spawned an unsettling emotional distance. It’d been twenty years since I’d handled anything on my own. I couldn’t imagine coping with all these changes without Sam at my side, yet my anger intensified with every minute our son was in pain.
Sam could still stand and walk and run and jump. So could I. So could Mimi and Rowan and all the other kids who’d attended that party. But would my son, who’d never hurt a soul?
We strolled past open doors and a nurse station to the elevator, the endless cacophony of beeps and buzzing and chatter abrading my nerves. As we descended, I forced myself to study my husband. Disheveled bangs suggested he’d run his hands through his hair a hundred times. His pained face, etched with deep grooves and shadowed with purplish circles beneath his eyes, appeared a decade older than his forty-three years. In short, he was hurting as much as I.
In the past, we’d comforted each other with hugs and shoulder rubs, but not today. Yet my limbs and back ached for his touch. Mental images surfaced of him cheerfully massaging my feet when I was pregnant, bringing me breakfast in bed for days at a time after the births of our children, hugging me with a pep talk whenever my mother upset me, holding me endlessly after Margot’s funeral. I grieved my shaken sense of security and certainty in our marriage.
The elevator doors opened, so we exited in silence and made our way toward the main lobby with its soaring glass walls. The flat, gray winter sky outside mirrored my mood.
“Daddy!” Kim’s voice echoed off the cold surfaces as she ran to Sam’s open arms.
He scooped her up and hugged her tight, as if the sheer force of his grip could heal us all. She slid to the ground as my mother caught up to us and gave Sam and me each a kiss.
“You look exhausted,” she said, hand on her cheek.
I nodded, having no better response to something so obvious. “Thanks for watching Kim last night.” I ran my hand over my daughter’s hair, planting a quick kiss on her head.
“I loved having her. We made a candlelight breakfast this morning.” She spoke to my kids like a female Mr. Rogers—such mellow tones and cadence. When I’d been Kim’s age, my mother hadn’t the time for or interest in whimsical treats like candlelit meals, having spent all her energy anticipating my dad’s needs and blaming Vietnam for his faults. As a child, I’d never asked why she stayed with Daddy, but I’d never believed the answers she’d given Margot—about vows and God and the devil you know. I supposed that the occasional brief stretches of time that he’d stayed sober had given her hope
that he’d get better. “Kim makes terrific french toast!”
“She does?” News to me. Then again, we didn’t let Kim use the stove yet. Now she’d certainly leverage having gotten my mom’s permission.
“Where’s Carter?” Kim asked, looking around.
“In his room,” I said. “He’ll be here for a while, honey.”
“How is he?” my mother asked, not having heard anything since the handoff in the wee hours.
“Dr. Acharya removed all of the bone fragments, including the ones that had put pressure on his spinal cord. He also took bone from the hip to graft to his spine,” Sam said.
This experience had expanded my vocabulary. “Decompression” was the fancy term for removing the bone fragments from the narrow spinal canal. The hardware used to stabilize his spine—pedicle screws and rods—would be fused with bone grafts to take some of the load off the hardware.
“How did this happen?” Mom asked, fingers pressed to her temple. Thankfully, she hadn’t asked the one question we all wanted the answer to: Would he walk?
I glanced at the floor. “He fell down the stairs at a party.”
“Carter went to a party?” My mother’s features pinched together, stunned speechless that I’d allowed him to do that given our experience with Margot’s wild teen years. “How did he fall?”
“It’s still unclear, but it sounds like there’d been some horseplay near the top of the steps . . . ,” Sam added.
Horseplay. How many times had Mimi and others said things like “Boys will be boys” to minimize bad behavior? Why didn’t anyone want to hold their kids accountable or take responsibility for the values—or lack thereof—they expressed? Kimmy never got a free pass when she acted bratty, even though punishments didn’t improve my relationship with her. But in the long run, enforcing a certain level of respect and responsibility mattered.
“Were they drinking beer?” Kim’s eyes were big as quarters now.
“Carter wasn’t drinking,” I clarified, looking at Kim. “The other boys were.”
Alcohol at fifteen, as if the drinking age weren’t twenty-one. Those boys and their parents walked around as if rules didn’t apply to them. What is a society without rules? Anarchy, that’s what.
Mom asked, “Did they push him on purpose?”
“Maybe,” I said as Sam said, “I doubt it.”
With my eyes closed, I shook my head. More evidence of a widening divide. Had he been pretending to agree with me in the past, and if so, why? What other things about our relationship had I taken for granted?
“There’s been some animosity since the budget debate,” Sam added, handing my mother ammunition. “The jocks have been harassing others, but I doubt they intended things to go this far.”
My mother slapped both hands to her cheeks. “Oh, Gracie. I’d had a bad feeling.”
I glared at Sam, who had the good sense to look sheepishly apologetic as soon as her subtle “told you so” slipped out.
“Can I please see him?” my mother asked me.
“He’s sleeping, but you can come peek in. In fact, let’s get back so we don’t accidentally miss the doctor.” I took Kim’s hand, and we all walked back to the elevator.
On our way to Carter’s room, I considered how Kim might react. His surgical wounds remained covered by bandages, but I’d seen the gruesome images when googling everything available online about his specific injury—an unstable burst fracture at the T12 vertebra—and the rigor of his surgery. Thinking of the lumpy, raised scars my son would have, like those in the photos I’d seen, made me want to rip the blinds off the rods and throw things around the hospital.
Before we entered Carter’s room, I bent to Kim. “Honey, don’t be nervous when you see Carter, and don’t be loud. He’s going to be in pain for a while, and if he’s resting, I don’t want to wake him.”
Once she nodded, we entered. Carter’s eyelids fluttered open as we gathered near his bed.
“Hi, sweetheart.” My mother’s voice choked.
“Good to see you, buddy,” Sam said, relief flooding his eyes as Carter awakened.
“How do you feel?” I asked. “Are you thirsty?”
“Tired.” He attempted to shift in the bed and then cried out in pain, his grimace making every muscle in my body taut.
Kim’s chin trembled and she reached for Sam. My mother kept touching her own face, her expression fraught. The collective agony in the room closed in on me like a prison built from guilt and self-loathing. I’d never forgive myself for giving in about Rowan’s party.
Whatever pain medications they’d given Carter must have been wearing off. Meanwhile, questions in my head exploded like popcorn: What had happened last night, who’d pushed him, could he sense his legs yet? I wouldn’t interrogate him, so I asked, “Honey, what can I do?”
“Nothing.” He closed his eyes, shutting us out. Hiding his feelings, like he often had since puberty struck. A trait he’d probably inherited from me.
As a child, I’d been trained to de-escalate conflict by withdrawing to my room, listening to music, and pretending my floral wallpaper was a field of daisies far away from the fighting downstairs. By my twenties, keeping the peace and obeying authority came as naturally as breathing. Yet Sam and I had never so much as argued in front of our kids, so Carter shouldn’t have learned to swallow his feelings out of fear of reprisal.
Anxiety about my son’s state of mind made me jittery.
I exhaled slowly, stroking his forehead and squeezing his hand. “It’s okay. You don’t have to talk. Just rest.”
In truth, I didn’t want answers that I wasn’t sure I could handle. The unending hours of waiting for updates frayed my nerves. Helplessness cloyed, and my body sank onto the chair like deadweight.
Heightened awareness of my beating heart, of the blood flowing through my veins, of the itch of my dry skin, or a twitch of my calf—all the little bodily miracles that we take for granted—grabbed hold. My son had never been an athlete, but he’d enjoyed hiking and swimming. He’d enjoyed his independence. How would he handle losing all that if that came to pass? Without warning I began to weep silent, terrified tears. Kim climbed onto my lap to hug me, settling her cheek on my shoulder. Greedily I absorbed the affection despite not deserving a lick of it.
Sam kissed the top of my head and then filled the pitcher with water, which he set on the overbed table. Carter hadn’t kept his eyes open long enough to notice the red rims of his father’s eyes, but I did. He stood like a sentry on the other side of Carter’s bed. Did he regret giving permission to go to Rowan’s, or notice this stiffness settling between us, or have a solution to put our family back together?
I had no idea how much time had passed—having lost all sense of it since last night—when a stout nurse whose build reminded me of a bulldog appeared. Her jolly countenance seemed at odds with the ghastly injuries she witnessed every day.
I could never work someplace with such sorrow and pain, and with so many things beyond anyone’s control. Then again, apparently I hadn’t had nearly as much control of my own life as I’d believed.
“How are you folks hanging in?” She checked the time and made a note on Carter’s chart.
I jumped out of my seat, rubbing my biceps as if I were freezing. “Okay, thanks. Anxious.”
The nurse nodded sympathetically, then looked at Carter, who’d opened his eyes upon hearing her voice. “You’re lucky. None of your organs were damaged by the fracture, which means you won’t have any trouble controlling your bowels and bladder. That’s a big win.” She flashed a gummy smile while checking the IV. I hadn’t remembered that those were concerns, but was relieved for any good news. “Are you comfortable enough?”
Carter nodded, although maybe he was too tired to complain. He stared at her as if holding his breath. Perhaps, like me, he dreaded the answer to the only question for which he most wanted an answer.
“What now?” I asked.
“He’ll stay for four or five d
ays so we can monitor his post-op progress and watch for any signs of possible infection or other complications. After that, we’ll transfer him to our inpatient rehab facility. The doctor will give you more updates in the coming days, but usually patients with your son’s deficits are there for at least four weeks, probably six, sometimes longer. When he’s ready to be released, he’ll go home to you, but will likely have months of outpatient rehab. A lot depends on his progress in therapy.”
I nodded, taking it all in.
Kim moved on from me to hug Sam’s leg. My mother stood back, her face scrubbed to that blank expression she’d worn after a bad fight with my dad or when Margot started coming home drunk, which left me guessing what she was thinking.
While the nurse moved around Carter’s head and checked the lines and equipment, my mind wandered, organizing a to-do list. At a minimum, I had to cancel my piano lessons for the foreseeable future, talk to Carter’s teachers, hire tutors . . . And then there was Kim. A sick pit opened in my gut as I acknowledged the best thing for my daughter would be if my mother temporarily moved in with us to help care for her in my absence. Jesus, this would be daunting even if Carter regained sensation in his legs.
My list evaporated the instant Dr. Acharya stepped into the room. “I’m on my way out, but thought the patient might be awake now.”
“He is.” I donned a tremulous smile.
Carter groggily cleared his throat, his voice raspy. “Hi.”
“Hello, champ. You came through surgery great.” The doctor threw back the blanket and sheet to expose my son’s feet. “I’d like to do a quick test. Tell me if you feel anything.”
I held my breath.
When Dr. Acharya swiped a metal instrument across my son’s right footpad, two of Carter’s toes contracted. Was that a good sign? My stomach squeezed.
Carter blinked fat tears onto his cheeks. “I think maybe a tingle.”
The doctor said nothing but ran the instrument over the other foot. More toes flinched.
“I felt something—a little, but the other foot.” Hope edged his voice. “Is that right, or am I imagining it?”
