I want to believe that modern medicine can put Brice back together again. TV shows have shown me countless times that surgeons perform miracles on a daily basis. As long as I don’t ask Dr. Heyman what Brice’s outlook is, in his professional opinion, I can go on telling myself that everything will be fine. That if I just stick by Brice’s side through all of this, we’ll be walking out of here together in three months tops.
But feeding my delusion will only leave less of me to take care of Brice. I need to know the truth so that I can be strong. So in a barely audible whisper, I ask. “What’s going to happen to him? Really?”
“So you want the whole truth, huh? You really will have to meet my daughter. You’d be like two peas in a pod.” He clears his throat. Up until now, we’ve both been staring across the lobby, watching the flashing lights of ambulances across the way pulling up to the Emergency Room. Now the weight of his stare is on me. “If he survives the next week, he’ll be in the clear. But that’s where the hard work begins. He’ll have to come to terms with his new reality while his body mends itself. Only then can he reach the foot of the mountain.”
“Don’t you mean the peak?”
Dr. Heyman shakes his head. “Sadly, no. The mountain is physical therapy. Many give up along the way. It’s horrible because you don’t just have to lie there as doctors do all the work. You have to force yourself, every day, to give it your all. Push through pain and doubts. Not for months, but for years. Even then I can’t guarantee he’ll ever walk again. We’re waiting for the swelling to go down to see the condition of his spinal cord. It’s just a waiting game at this point.”
I’ve stopped eating at this point. The bag of chips sits limply in my lap, the soda on the bench beside me. I’m staring at the tile floor, but each time I blink, I see Brice’s face. Bloodied. Broken.
Dr. Heyman looks over at me. “I know that telling you to go home is going to be useless, but you do need some sleep.” He points up. “If you go up to the fifth floor, you’ll find the maternity ward. That waiting room has the most comfortable couches in the hospital. Why don’t you try to get a bit of shut-eye? We’ve got your number, so if anything happens, I’ll be sure to give you a call. I’m on call the rest of the night so I’ll be around.”
When I open my mouth to tell him that I’d rather wait outside the ICU, a yawn cuts my argument short. I don’t even know what time it is, except that it’s so late as to be early morning now. So instead of giving back excuses as to why I couldn’t possibly sleep at a time like this, I nod and stand to leave.
“Take this,” Dr. Heyman says, handing me the chicken sandwich. “You need it more than me.” He accentuates this statement by pointing at his belly. The brief tired smile he gives quickly falls away. “Look. I know this is hard to believe, but you’re going to be okay. Life is never going to be the same, but one day you’ll look around and realize that you’re happy again. But before that happens, both you and Brice are going to have to suffer a lot more. But I believe you’re strong enough to make it through. So don’t give up hope, okay?”
The corners of my mouth struggle to produce a convincing smile. “Thank you, Dr. Heyman.”
“Not a problem.” He tosses all the empty plastic wrappers in the nearest trash can. Then he’s turning a corner, heading for the elevators. Although I said I would try and sleep, I haven’t moved. It’s as if I can’t focus on my body when all I can think about is Brice’s. The worst part is that I haven’t seen him since they wheeled him away for surgery, so I don’t know how bad he looks. I try to imagine him wrapped up in gauze and stitches, but each time I do, all I can think of is the carnage hiding under all that sterile cotton.
Chapter 10
Four days later, Brice opens his eyes.
I’m not there to see it, but the news is relayed to me by Dr. Heyman when I come back to the hospital after my first full day out of the suffocatingly sterile building. Suddenly I regret getting the idea in my head that I should try and get our affairs in order sooner rather than later. I should have been here so I could be the first thing he saw upon waking. What if he thinks I’ve abandoned him?
As much as I hate having missed out, today needed to happen. I’ve been ignoring Greg’s calls for too long. The funny part is that when I finally got back to him, he wasn’t upset in the least. Looking at him—how we met and what he does for a living—one might assume the man to be on the wrong side of understanding. But the reality is that he’s been extremely accommodating, even going so far as to insist that the contract not be canceled, but put on hold until Brice can return. The only thing that bothered me about our meeting was his final say on the matter:
“I do hope he recovers quickly,” Greg said in the nondescript lobby of his porn factory. “But in the unfortunate event that he’s unable to return, perhaps we can tweak the terms of our agreement to more suitably fit your new situation. After all, I wouldn’t want to lose my new star.”
At the time, I’d just smiled and thanked him for his time. I wasn’t going to be working without Brice, which is what I assume he was saying in a roundabout way. There’s simply no way I could do scenes with anyone else. I wouldn’t subject myself or our relationship to such a hideous strain. Especially not at a time like this. There are always other ways to make money.
The rest of my afternoon proved this to be demonstrably false, however. Scanning through hundreds of job listings turned up nothing that really fit. I considered modeling at first, but the gigs were all just smokescreens for escorts. Then I searched office jobs around the area, but they all either started out as unpaid internships or required years of experience I didn’t have.
On my way back to the hospital, the money worries temporarily overtook my concern for Brice. Money isn’t something either of our families has an abundance of. I’ve been as good as an orphan since my family stopped talking to me after I left the Jehovah’s Witness community. It’s been years since I’ve heard anything from them, much less received any sort of financial aid. For all I know, my parents could have died in some cruel plane crash, and I truly am an orphan. All I know for sure is that they wouldn’t spit on me if I were on fire, and that tells me all I need to know about my once family.
When I walk into Brice’s hospital room, I think he’s asleep again. That his brief visit to the conscious world has fluttered away like a leaf on the wind. Underneath the gauze and casts and blankets, it’s not easy to see movement, let alone the flicker of his eyelashes. I fall into the seat beside the bed with a little too much angst and far too loud a sigh.
“Rough day?” comes a raspy voice beside me.
I’m back up on my feet in an instant, grabbing at Brice’s one good hand. His fingers squeeze back. “You’re awake,” I say, the emotions I thought I had conquered back now with a vengeance. I’m wiping my sleeve at my cheeks, biting my lips as I hold back sobs. “They told me you’d woken up, but when I came in the room, I thought you were sleeping again. I’m so sorry, Brice. I’m so sorry.”
His face is half covered in bandages, but I see the sliver of an eyebrow rise up towards his hairline. “What do you have to be sorry for?”
“It was my idea to go to the barbecue restaurant. If we’d eaten anywhere else, you wouldn’t be like this.” And now the sobs. There’s no holding back now. No hiding the fact that I’m not strong enough to do this.
Brice pulls my head down to his chest. I cuddle up to him gingerly, ever cautious of hurting him more. “That’s no way to live.”
“What?”
“Always thinking ‘What if?’ You can’t do that to yourself. I mean, what if I hadn’t walked into your room that night and seen your computer screen. I never would have known about your secret life on the Internet. We never would have slept together or met Greg. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be here now, but I wouldn’t take back that first night for the world.”
I don’t know what to say to this. It’s true, but I never traced the steps back that far.
“Even if I knew
it was going to end here. It was worth it,” Brice says and leans forward to place a kiss on my forehead, in the process straining something that makes him groan. He’s grimacing when I look up at him, but he tries to smile. “I wouldn’t trade any of it. Because you’re here now too. And that’s what really matters.”
I wish I could say the same, because right now, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give to make Brice whole again. Although he’s the one in the hospital bed, I feel like I’m the one who was split open that day. Half of me wants to believe that everything will be fine. Like he said, we have each other, so we can get through this. But the rest of me is crunching numbers, working out how long it’s going to be before I can take Brice home.
I’m swollen up inside, ready burst and release all of my anxiety on Brice, but I stop myself. This isn't the time. The only thing he should be thinking of is resting. I’ll have to carry the burden of this stress by myself.
I’m not with Brice two minutes before his mother bursts in the door. At the sight of her one and only son finally awake amidst a congregation of machines beeping all around him, Maggie breaks down. She throws herself across Brice, who yelps and rubs at his side. After a few minutes, I’m able to pull the weepy woman away, but it means pulling myself away too. Before heading out into the hall, I mouth at Brice, ‘I’ll be back soon’.
Guiding Maggie by the elbow, I get us to the same benches where Dr. Heyman gave me the truth about Brice. So it’s fitting that the moment we sit down, Dr. Heyman walks by.
“Just the people I wanted to see. I was just on my way up to see your son,” he says, kneeling down in from of Maggie.
Maggie’s crying again. She never really stopped. So it’s down to me to do the talking. “So you’re optimistic about his outlook?”
“I won’t know anything until I run a few tests. Now that he’s awake, we can finally get down to business.”
Something is niggling at me. A thought that I wish I could banish, at least for the time being. But being practical, I can’t help but throw it out. I’m won’t be able to stop worrying over it otherwise.
“There’s a slight problem,” I say as Dr. Heyman is standing back up.
“What’s that?”
I hesitate, but I have to get this out. “Brice doesn’t have insurance, so I’m not sure how feasible physical therapy is going to—”
Dr. Heyman claps his hands together and smiles up at the sky before looking back down to me. “Our patient might not have insurance, but the driver of the car did. And since he was 100% at fault, it’s all going to be coming from his policy. So you can at least take that worry off your plate.” He looks to his watch. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see about getting started with that gamut of tests I was talking about.”
He pats Maggie’s shoulder and walks off, leaving me to clean up her weepy mess.
I can’t get a word from her. She simply cries, face covered, not responding to my hand running up and down her back. These aren’t happy tears either, not that I can blame her. No matter the height of Dr. Heyman’s optimism for Brice’s outlook, the fact remains that at the moment, he can’t even get out of his hospital bed without assistance. That is a hard reality to face for anyone, especially a mother.
Her soft sobs eventually calm enough to ask for a tissue to wipe her eyes and nose. Then, as if the past ten minutes hadn’t happened, she stands and excuses herself.
“I’m going to be late for my shift if I don’t scurry off now,” she says, still sniffling, but refusing to acknowledge her weakness. “Be a dear and watch over Brice until I get back. Before that, though, could you head over to the welcome desk and see about getting me a parking voucher?”
I assure her that I will while she claims that she needs time to clean up in the bathroom. While I’m walking across the lobby, my brain is buzzing about in the background, trying to wrap around something that’s bothering me about Maggie. She’s never been the super emotional sort. I always saw her as a bit stoic, especially in regards to her son. It seems like Brice was always an afterthought in her life, something to be managed more hands-off than with motherly caresses. Now she’s acting as though her whole world is falling apart.
There’s a missing piece I’m not seeing, but I can’t be sure what it is.
The guy at the front desk stamps a little card and hands it over without a word. His eyes are locked on his phone, hidden just out of sight under lip of the desk. When I return back to the bench beside the vending machines, Maggie is nowhere to be seen. A peek inside the bathroom reveals that she’s not there either. Then the realization hits me: Maggie didn’t drive here today. She took a cab because her car is in the shop. She mentioned it in passing earlier, so why am I holding a free parking voucher?
I wait around for five minutes, giving her the benefit of the doubt that she simply forgot how she came to the hospital today. We’re both under significant stress, so it wouldn’t surprise me if she had an ‘oops’ moment like this. As the clock drags on, I wonder more and more where she might have disappeared to.
My one and only conclusion is that she headed back up to Brice’s room, perhaps to see him one last time before she had to head off. Maybe there was something she forgot to ask him. So I take the elevator up and navigate back through the halls and into the ICU where I see through the window that Maggie is leaning over Brice. I begin to walk in, to tell her the funny little anecdote of how she must have forgotten that she didn’t bring her car, when I catch the tail end of her one-sided conversation.
“…what I’m going to do. I know I should have told you earlier, but now I guess it’s too late. They said if I don’t pay rent this month, I’m going to lose the house. Now you’re here and I’m just lost.”
In the span of about five seconds, I cycle through a whole spectrum of emotions. First, there’s shock that her finances have gotten so bad. I knew that Maggie was no good at budgeting, but I didn’t know that she was on the verge of losing her house. Then there’s selfless anger on Brice’s behalf. How dare she unload this on him right now? He can’t do anything besides feel shitty about the situation. It’s just extra weight for him to bear during a time that he should be focused only on his recovery.
The final emotion, the one that sticks, is a mix of horror and resignation. After my disappointing job hunt today, I can’t just turn my nose up at Greg’s offer any longer.
Chapter 11
For the next three days, I convince myself that as long as I remain inside the hospital, I won’t have to face the real world and all its consequences. I eat in the cafeteria or from vending machines, clean myself the best I can in bathrooms late at night when no one else is likely to come in, and sleep on the sofa in the maternity ward’s waiting room, just as Dr. Heyman taught me.
Brice is all there mentally, which is a massive relief. The concussion he suffered was minor, and they’re confident that it will heal without major consequences for the future. The same can’t be said for the rest of his body.
Despite the painkillers he’s hooked up to, Brice is in constant agony, though he hides it well. So well I sometimes forget that under his hospital gown, sixteen of his bones are either cracked, broken, or shattered. But I do catch him staring out the window sometimes, a heartbreaking expression of misery painting his expressions. But that’s only ever when I first show up in the morning, for about half a second before he notices my presence.
But today’s sad moment was hours ago. It’s now lunchtime, so I’m spooning weak beef broth to his lips, saving the strawberry Jello for last. Brice has been quieter than normal, but it would be selfish to always expect him to be putting on a mask for my sake.
A bit of broth dribbles down his chin, and while I’m wiping it with a napkin, he asks, “You haven’t heard from my mom in the past few days, have you?”
I bite my lips and shake my head. “The last time I saw her was four days ago. Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he says, unconvincingly. He’s back to stari
ng out the window. “I think she’s just busy.” He sighs. Turns to me. His eyes are trying and failing to hide heaps of worry. “I used to help her pay the bills, so I think she’s just looking for an extra job. I guess I’m just worried. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” I ask incredulously, as though I hadn’t overheard their earlier conversation. As though I didn’t have a plan in the works to remedy this exact situation.
He waves me off with his bandaged hand. “We’ve got some savings, so it’ll be fine.”
I’ve known Brice all my life. He’s never had more than five hundred dollars in the bank at one time. Not that it’s his fault. Whatever extra he managed to make went straight to his mom.
“Maybe I can help out,” I offer.
“Really?” he asks, unable to contain his burst of hope. But then he’s glaring at me, trying to see through me. “I know Greg has basically dropped us, but you’re not going to go back to camming are you? I’m really not into the idea of guys getting off to you, thinking they can have you if they just tip enough money.”
“No camming,” I say, agreeing with him. “I was planning to tell you the good news tonight after I snuck in some burgers, but I got a job. A real job.”
Brice actually tries to sit up at this news, but he’s stopped by the fact that he physically can’t. “That’s great! Where is it?”
“It’s actually funny,” I say. “You’re going to laugh. But that Brazilian barbecue place was looking for servers and—”
Cammers With Benefits (FWB Series Book 1) Page 8
