Back Again (The Short Story)

by Susan May

  Dawn would stand back, watching and helpless, knowing there was nothing they could do to change it. Then they would clamp electric paddles to his chest, his broken body arching as the current travelled through him.

  It would make no difference. His heart had stopped, the injuries too great—internal bleeding, a left lung punctured from a broken rib, his pelvis broken in five places. The blood on his clothes had come from another broken rib piercing outward through his chest. The impact was so sudden and violent it was like a hammer had been taken to his brain; the subsequent swelling destroyed any chance he had of survival.

  He was gone, but the paramedics would rush him to the hospital, attempting resuscitation all the way. Dawn would travel with him, holding his hand, her body numb while her mind willed him to survive. The initial shock made it too easy to believe there would be a miracle, that the doctors in the hospital could glue him back together, reverse whatever had happened.

  As they pulled up to the emergency doors, one paramedic would continue to work on him, while the other would leap out to brief two doctors and a nurse waiting with a gurney. He would be rushed into surgery, everyone running down the brightly lit corridors attending to Tommy, while the medical staff called out commands to each other that Dawn couldn’t understand.

  Sitting in the waiting room, Dawn would clutch a cup of coffee a stranger had brought her. She would never drink it. A man with a gentle, quiet voice—a counselor, she found out later—would come sit with her. He would talk of hope and God and strength. The first few times she didn’t listen, never heard a single word he said.

  Two hours, thirty-seven minutes and twenty-two seconds after the accident, a doctor in pale-blue scrubs would approach her. He would find her still holding the coffee, still staring at the wall.

  “Mrs. Graham,” he would say.

  She would look up and answer, “Yes,” thinking she was only acknowledging her name. She wasn’t. She was giving him permission to say the words that would change her life. What followed was the same as in the movies—exactly like it. He would say: “Mrs. Graham, I’m very sorry. We tried. His injuries were too severe.”

  At first, Dawn had thought he’d said, “We’re tired,” and she began to answer, “Me, too.”

  Then the counselor—whom she hadn’t realized was still there—leaned across, patted her arm and said, “Dawn, are you okay?”

  She had nodded and mumbled, “Okay,” because she had to be strong for Tommy. He wouldn’t want her crying and making a fuss. He didn’t like standing out in a crowd and had asked it of her—an eleven-year-old guiding her behavior. How funny.

  Slowly, she would turn to the counselor and say something she would only remember later. Something ridiculous.

  “When can I take him home?”

  Then, twenty minutes after that… No, if she were getting the story straight, it would be twenty-two minutes and fourteen seconds later (always those damn fourteen seconds would be there—she’d noticed that) someone would come and ask her if they could take his organs.

  He could save lives, help other families; her tragedy could become a blessing for someone.

  Not a blessing for her, but for some other mother she didn’t know and would never meet. In return, she would receive gratitude and a small comfort. Very small comfort.

  Finally, her sister would arrive, her curly tangle of hair flying out behind her as she ran down the hall, tears rolling down her cheeks. She’d travelled across town, the peak hour traffic was horrific—her sister had a tendency to exaggerate.

  Not too long after her sister’s arrival, she would be shepherded into the hall and down the corridor, a corridor that felt as if it would never end. The noise of the hospital would crush in on her, but she would see nothing, except that door. It loomed ahead, growing in size with every step until there was nothing beside her, the door, and the handle that would turn to swing it open and allow her entry into hell.

  When she entered the room, she would see him immediately. Tubes where there should be a smile and a monitor beeping out the rhythm of a life that no longer existed. For a moment, she would be confused.

  Why was he breathing? Had there been a mistake?

  “No,” the counselor would say, as again he touched her arm. She had wanted to say, don’t touch me. I don’t know you. But then he would continue before she could.

  “Mrs. Graham, the life support is for the—” He would bow his head for a second and add, “I’m sorry.”

  After that she would walk over to where Tommy lay, tentatively touch his hand, and trail her fingers across his brow. He would feel warm. Still warm.

  Her sister’s voice would come from behind, followed by the feel of her arm wrapping around Dawn’s shoulder. Strangely, that would be the catalyst. The simple weight of her sister’s arm would bring her back to reality. That touch would break her there, in that moment. She would feel it as if there were a physical snap in her head, followed by a pulse through her body as if a floodgate that had held back the sorrow had been raised, and grief could now rush in and drown her.

  Then Tommy would be in her arms, and she would clutch him sobbing and wailing like an injured, trapped animal. The sound would resonate through her, into her, shaking her to the core. It would be ten minutes and several seconds of this—she knew the exact time, but these seconds didn’t matter. The important times were coming, when she would realize what was happening. Those seconds mattered—those and that fourteen that kept sneaking in.

  A doctor’s entrance to the room would halt her crying. This time he would want to help her, to give her a sedative—possibly admit her. He would take her pulse and keep talking about the shock and the effect it would have on her system.

  Her sister would answer on her behalf. As if listening through a wall, she would hear them discussing how often and how many tablets she should take.

  Then they would stand, and her sister’s arm would snake about her waist. A silence would settle between them, an empty deadness of unspoken words, because there were no words to speak.

  On the walk to the car park, she wouldn’t be present in her body. She would be in the car before she even realized that the day had turned to night. The darkness would come as a shock.

  She would then notice that the dashboard clock glowed 10:38. To her it would feel as if only a few minutes had passed since she’d sat in the car waiting for Tommy, watched him give that little I see you there wave.

  Her mind at that moment would travel back to the day before, how at that same time Tommy had been tucked in bed while she washed up. She’d been thinking, her hands deep in suds, how much easier it would be if Craig hadn’t been such a bastard, if he’d never gone on that conference, never met that woman. Maybe then she wouldn’t be washing up at this time, maybe they’d be sitting with a glass of wine watching cable.

  She would sit in the car too afraid to move, looking ahead to the empty, yawning future filled with days holding nothing except tears, sleep, and unwavering pain, and she would think, This is my life—it’s over.

  Dawn’s sister would then break her reverie. She would lean across to stretch Dawn’s seatbelt across her chest and click it in. Her sister would stop, then, and put her arm about Dawn’s shoulders. Again, that action, her touch, would bring her mind back to the moment.

  She would turn to her sister and, in a voice that she didn’t recognize, say, “Can we go get Tommy now?”

  There would be a pause. A very long pause.

  Her sister would say, “Darling, no. He’s gone, Dawn.” Then in almost a whisper, “Remember?”

  Every time her sister said it, each time she heard those words, Dawn would reply, “He’s not gone. He’ll come back. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Movement 5

  The first time she lived through losing Tommy it registered in her mind as simply a sequence of terrible events linked together by moments of tears and excruciating pain, alternating with a feeling of numbness. She travelled thro
ugh them as if she were a passenger on a train impassively watching the scenery travel by, unable to get off or to control the journey.

  The funeral was the next dreadful thing to endure, but, by then, Dawn had become accustomed to the heavy feeling that had swallowed up her mind and soaked into her body. She constantly felt as if she were wading through mud the consistency of thick, wet cement.

  The feeling clung to her words, her breath, and her heart. To her surprise, she found if she just gave in to it, somehow it lightened a little, allowing her to at least move and put one step before the other, one thought after the next.

  Seeing the coffin for the first time caused her legs to give way, as if every muscle in them had instantly dissolved. Every particle of air was sucked from her lungs, and she was left desperately gasping for air.

  Hands reached for her, scooping her up, bearing her weight. She wanted them to let her go, allow her to fall into the dark abyss that might swallow her up and smother her, so that she could feel nothing.

  Her sister had stayed with her since that day, and she would stay for another week—or, she insisted, for as long as she was needed.

  Craig came by every day—and her, the other woman, his wife. He said he didn’t blame Dawn, and kept repeating phrases beginning with “If only” and ending with, “I guess none of it matters now.”

  Dawn wished he wouldn’t come. If she could have just fought off the sludge, she would have told him so. In the end, it was easier to listen—or half-listen—until eventually she just tuned him out. He wasn’t really talking to her anyway; he was just speaking words into the void that Tommy had left.

  The funeral came and went. It was dreadful and unbearable but somehow she made it through. The pills helped, her sister’s arm helped, the outpouring of support helped, and when the day was over, she realized that you can live with anything. It’s just a matter of the degree of living you crave. She craved nothing now, just a way out of the dark tunnel and the emptiness that colored everything.

  In the following days, all she desired was the surrealism of sleep. In that alternate world she sometimes found Tommy, and peace, until she opened her eyes in the morning, or the afternoon, or whenever the pills wore off. Always she would awake with the same memory of his face staring at her in the rear-view mirror. That one image would pierce her heart, then the void would close in on her.

  Ten days after that day, she’d found herself half way through the thought haunting her the most: if only she’d gotten out of the car—

  Suddenly, she was no longer in her bed and no longer in a world with rules she understood. She was back again to the day of the accident. Not back again in her mind or her memory, but back again to that morning as if nothing had happened, as if the clock had been reset.

  She was in her kitchen preparing breakfast. Tommy was sitting at the bench slurping down his cereal as he always did, while little splashes of milk accumulated about his bowl.

  What was happening? It felt too real to be a dream. Everything was there, the smells, the feel, and the sounds. When Tommy looked up and said, “Mom, juice please?” as if he’d never died in her arms, she felt only an incalculable rush of relief. It was an infusion of happiness so pure it could have lifted her off her feet. The topsy-turvy world was suddenly righted. Her chance to change everything was here, magically bestowed upon her.

  Whether it was real or not, it was a better place than where she’d lived since he’d died.

  She opened her mouth to answer him, to tell him he could stay home from school today and skip his guitar lesson, and that they would keep a wide berth from that street and that moment lying ahead. As she spoke, she immediately realized that this second chance was not the gift she had first imagined. She turned to the fridge to pull out the juice, her heart collapsing in despair, one thought ringing in her head.

  I’ve gone to hell.

  Movement 6

  Each time he spoke to her, she would attempt to answer differently than she had before, but she’d discovered the first time that she was powerless. The words that came out did not spring from her current thoughts, but were simply a repeat of her previous utterances. She couldn’t alter her physical movements either; every action was merely a replication.

  How cruel to be sent back to this moment with the potential to change everything, only to discover she was bound and gagged, merely a passenger trapped inside her head. Something else now controlled her body, whether fate itself or the Dawn who belonged in this day, but not the Dawn who had come from ten days ahead.

  With every opportunity that arose that day, she tried to warn him or anyone with whom she came into contact. After she dropped him at school, she had returned home to clean the house exactly as she’d done on that day. When the phone rang, and she found, just as before, that it was her friend Kelly asking Dawn if she could mind Felix the following Thursday, she tried to splutter out, “Help me. Tommy is will be killed.”

  What left her mouth, though, was the same answer she’d given before. “Of course I can. Tommy will love having him here to play. They’re fun together.”

  She felt like screaming, for Tommy would never again play with Felix. Instead, Kelly would be standing by Tommy’s grave on that coming Thursday, sobbing into her handkerchief and glancing toward Dawn with profound sympathy.

  Later, as she wrote an email to Tommy’s teacher about an upcoming school camp, she’d found another opportunity to intervene in the future. Words the original Dawn had conceived appeared on the screen before her. She only had a vague memory of the email, so she studied the screen as if every letter was part of a secret code she must decipher.

  Good morning Mrs. Green,

  Just wanted to let you know that Tommy is going to…

  As each word appeared, her heart pounded harder. Could she change them, will them from her fingers? Could she type: Tommy is going to… die. You need to keep him at school.

  She felt an energy flow from her mind into her hands, and for a brief instant she also felt hope move through her. If she could only type the new words and warn the teacher, he might be saved.

  Then the words appeared to dash that hope.

  … need someone to check his food at camp. He has a nut allergy.

  By the time for the school pickup rolled around, she was beside herself with fear and dread. Opening the car door, she’d tried to pull her hand back, to force herself to not enter, but there’d been no connection between her thoughts and her body. Her legs still swung in beneath the steering mount, her hands still found their place on the wheel, and the key slipped into the ignition and was turned. All of the actions were against her will.

  As the car pulled out of the driveway, she understood how someone being led to the electric chair must feel: the inexorable feeling of mounting horror as each passing moment brought the inevitable closer, while your mind screamed that this terrible thing couldn’t happen.

  When she arrived at school, a smiling Tommy climbed inside the car, and her heart melted. It was such a relief to see him there again, whole, alive, and breathing. Suddenly, the grimness washed away, and she was just so darn happy.

  Then followed the crumbling of her joy, as she realized she couldn’t even lean across to kiss him or tell him that she loved him. She tried though, flexing every muscle in her body. When that failed, she tried to manipulate just one side of one lip. Not a muscle could be moved, not a hair swayed, not one moment could be changed.

  In the first living-through of the days that followed the accident, she had revisited those ten minutes from when she picked Tommy up until his guitar lesson. She realized something terrible. Not once had she said that she loved him that day.

  The morning had been the usual pandemonium to get out the door on time. Then, in the afternoon, it had been a rush to get him to his lesson—the traffic around the school was diabolical. When she’d picked him up, her thoughts had been of dinner and whether she would have time to make a casserole or just do pasta.


  Tommy had kept trying to tell her something about his day, but the news had come on the radio. This time of day was her only chance to catch the report. So she’d shushed him. Obediently, he’d hushed. A song she liked had followed the news, and she’d drifted off into mouthing the words, and so had forgotten to ask him what it was he wanted to share.

  They’d barely made it on time to the music studio that was housed in an old white building, snuggled between small strip shops on a corner. She’d managed to find a parking spot just outside, which was a relief. Usually she was forced to park across the road in the supermarket parking lot and walk him across the road. That day she was tired and glad she could stay in the car and relax.

  Tommy had bounded out the door as she unlocked the trunk. She watched him in the rear-vision mirror as he struggled to drag the guitar case out. Once he had it clear, he’d turned and waved to her.

  Each time she lived this moment, she would think about those fourteen seconds that lay in the future and how that was all they had left on this day. Fourteen seconds was long enough for her to say “I love you,” long enough for her to get out of the car and stop him, long enough to change everything.

  Her phone then drew her attention. She checked in on Facebook, looked up the weather for the week, and answered two texts. Mundane and pointless activities made even more so knowing what lay ahead. She had come to despise these moments of frittering away precious minutes, yet she was forced to endure the shame of them each time.

  The first time back, she was surprised to find that she suddenly put down her phone, reached for her bag at her feet, and pulled out her purse. Then she headed across the road. Dawn had forgotten the entire fifteen minutes before the accident—the trauma no doubt. As she crossed the road toward the supermarket, bit by bit the knowledge of her future actions crept back to her. The recollection was vague, though, and it took on the feeling of something happening for the first time.

  She realized she was going to buy pasta for dinner. Hope rose within her. The supermarket was filled with people; maybe she could say a word, change an action or create a scene that might delay her leaving the store. Then she wouldn’t be there to open the trunk and Tommy wouldn’t be standing behind the car.