And Then He Fell. Кейт Хьюит

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СКАЧАТЬ a full-time aide—her word—to help her with the business of managing her three children’s privileged lives. But even with her aide, I know she’ll be busy; she might have even switched her phone off.

      And then I think of Lewis. “Maybe,” I say, and I reach into my pocket to curl my hand around my phone. The thought of talking to Lewis, of hearing his steady voice, comforts me. “But first I want to see Ben.”

      Dr. Stein nods. “When he is a little more stable, we’ll transfer him to the neurology department. But for now…” He opens the door, gesturing for me to go first even though I don’t know where I’m going. I step out of the room; I’m in that post-adrenalin rush, jelly-limbed and icy with cooled sweat. Distantly I hear the sound of a busy ER: beeps and sirens and someone crying. Another person groans.

      “Right this way,” Dr. Stein murmurs and I follow him to a room with heavy, swinging doors. a room that has bright lights and too many machines, all surrounding a boy in a bed who is utterly still and silent. My son.

      I walk slowly towards him, barely trusting my legs to keep me upright. The machines beep and whirr and sound very loud in the room; a nurse stands by his head, checking something. I have no idea what. I have no idea about any of this.

      I take a step closer to Ben. Remarkably he doesn’t look that injured. There is a bandage on his wrist, and Dr. Stein murmurs that it might be broken, but they can’t take an x-ray until his condition is more stable. There are no internal injuries as far as they know; the damage is merely to his brain. His brain.

      There is a little dried blood on his cheek, and his left eye is swollen shut. He is breathing through a ventilator and other tubes trail away from him like snakes.

      His head is wrapped in white bandages; it reminds me of when he used two rolls of toilet paper last Halloween to dress up as a mummy. Lewis and I took the boys trick or treating, and we shared a bag of candy corn, both admitting to a secret weakness for those nauseatingly sweet triangles of sugar. It seemed like a lifetime ago; only a year, but a different reality. This is what is real now and yet I can’t take it in; everything in me resists.

      I sink into a chair by his bed and reach out to touch Ben, but my hand falls short. I am afraid to touch him, to hurt my son. His golden-brown lashes fan his cheeks, and he almost looks peaceful, despite the bandages and bruises and tubes. Surely he cannot be as damaged as all that. Only this morning he was bouncing around, kicking his soccer ball, scuffing the walls. Only this morning I snapped at him as I wrote out a check for the month’s afterschool club and tension knotted the muscles of my neck, throbbed in my temples. All because of a lousy check, a stupid soccer ball.

      Tears crowd my eyes, gather in my throat, and I swallow hard.

      “When do you think he’ll come out of the coma?” I ask, and my voice quavers.

      “When his condition is more stable, we will attempt to bring him out of the coma,” Dr. Stein tells me. “But first the ICP needs to reduce.”

      “The ICP?”

      “Intracranial pressure.”

      “When will that be?” I’m hoping he will answer in hours, but his hesitation tells me otherwise.

      “Perhaps in a few days,” he says, and I can tell he is temporizing. “As I said before, the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are critical.”

      I nod, and reach out to stroke Ben’s uninjured hand. His skin is still soft, like a baby’s, but I’ve noticed lately he is starting that headlong tumble into pre-adolescence; he has become obsessive about me not seeing him getting undressed, and he needs to shower more than he used to. The hair on his legs and arms has become darker, coarser, not the white-blond, baby-fine hair of his toddlerhood. He’ll be ten in March.

      “Ms. Reese?” I can’t tell if the doctor sounds impatient or sympathetic. Probably both. “You should wait outside.”

      I turn to look at him. “I can’t be with him?”

      “It’s better now if you leave us room to monitor his condition. Just in case.”

      Just in case of what? I am not brave enough to ask the question. I nod and with one last look for Ben, I leave the room. Dr. Stein directs me back to the private waiting room where people hear bad news. I don’t want to go there, but I can’t face the huge ER waiting room either.

      I sink into a chair, my mind still spinning, straining in denial. I can’t believe this is happening, that this is happening to Ben, to me, and yet another part of me is not surprised at all. Another part of me, a secret, ashamed part, has been waiting for something like this all along, has known I would never get it right, that I could never manage to bring up a child right, or even at all.

      An animal sound of pain escapes me, and I reach for my phone. I punch in Lewis’s number recklessly; I don’t care about the consequences. I need someone now and it’s just a call. I’m not hurting anyone.

      But I falter when his phone switches over to voicemail, and in the end I only manage one broken word.

      “Lewis,” I whisper, and then I disconnect the call and press the phone to my forehead, squeezing my eyes shut tight as I do my best to block out the world.

       2 JOANNA

      The day it happens is like any other. No one talks to me when I pick Josh up at school, although no one really ever talks to me. I’ve never been too friendly with the other mothers at Burgdorf, besides a few tight-lipped smiles when I manage to attend an event. Usually Lewis does the drop off and pick up; I work from eight until six or seven most days. But today I pick Josh up myself, because I’ve had a cancellation. And no one says anything.

      “Hey there,” I say to Josh as he comes out of Burgdorf’s bright blue doors. A few other mothers and nannies are gathered on the sidewalk in tight little knots; the mid-October wind is chilly, funneling down Fifty-Fourth Street and they hunch their shoulders against it. Burgdorf rents an office building in midtown; only twenty years old, the school doesn’t have the kind of money that most Manhattan private schools have, with their Brownstones and big endowments.

      Josh comes to stand before me, unspeaking, but this isn’t surprising. Josh has always been on the quiet side.

      I’ve battled against Josh’s silence since he said his first word at the age of two and a half. No. Spoken very softly when I put peas on his plate, and Lewis and I rejoiced as if he’d just given a speech about world peace.

      He said a few more words over the next few months, and then we sent him to preschool and he didn’t say anything for a year.

      The director at the preschool advised testing, and so I took him to various doctors, all of whom flirted with different diagnoses. They ruled out autism or anything ‘on the spectrum’, as has become the parlance. I was relieved as well as a tiny bit disappointed. At that point I craved a diagnosis, an answer. I wanted this to be a problem I could fix, or at least treat.

      They moved on to other conditions: social anxiety disorder. Social phobia. Depressive disorder. Nothing was definitive. No one offered us anything besides more therapy, possible pills. None of it really worked.

      Lewis was, although he tried to hide it, exasperated with me. “He’s just a quiet СКАЧАТЬ