The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes

by Randi Davenport

  “Listen,” I said. “Help me move him to his bed.”

  Chase stirred, eyelids fluttering. He still couldn’t talk. He looked so cold, and his skin was wet and it wouldn’t take much for the air blowing across his skin to cool him more. We were able to get him to his feet and then, with our hands under his armpits and our arms around his waist, move him the three or four steps to his bed. He was bleeding just above the ear or maybe it was his ear. I told Robertson to go downstairs and wait for the ambulance. I looked up and saw Haley, who stood in the doorway in her pajamas, once again witness to some brutal thing that brought Chase trouble.

  “Mom?” she said. Her face was still and serious.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t worry, sweet pea. It’s okay.”

  She watched me intently. I used the towels to try and dry Chase off. His eyes were open now but he was staring and still. I pulled a blanket up over his damp skin.

  “What’s the matter with Chase?” Haley said.

  I tucked the blanket around him and he watched me. His lips looked bluish.

  “Chase had a seizure,” I said. “He got hurt. The ambulance is on its way. But he’s okay. He’s okay.” I paused. In my head, I’d already called the neighbors to get Haley a place to stay. “Do you think you can go over to Betsy’s tonight, until I get home?” I said. “I don’t know how long I’ll have to stay at the hospital. If you go over to Betsy’s, it’ll be fun. It’ll be like a sleepover.”

  She nodded, wide-eyed, unsmiling, frightened but willing to do whatever I asked.

  “Go get your jacket and your shoes,” I said. “Get Giraffic.”

  She held her stuffed giraffe out in front of her. When Chase first started having grand mal seizures, Haley would come to get me and say, Chase is having a grandma. Now, whenever he seized, she ran to her room and closed the door and got in bed with her stuffed giraffe and pulled the covers over her head.

  “Get your shoes,” I said again. “And get your jacket.” I looked at her, small and thin, wavering in the doorway with her little solemn face. “Don’t worry,” I said. “They’re just going to take him to the hospital and check him over. He’s going to be okay. Don’t worry, sweet pea.” She looked past me to Chase and I walked over to her and picked her up and hugged her, and felt her arms and legs wrap around my body just the way they had when she was a toddler. The sound of sirens drew closer, and the neighborhood filled with whirling light. An ambulance pulled in the driveway and a fire truck had pulled up out front, along with a police car and the EMT car. It was a mild January night, still in the first hours of dark, when the neighborhood was awake. People began to open their doors and step outside to see what the commotion was. They walked from farther down the street and clustered in a little group under the streetlight in front of our house.

  The paramedics came into the room with their gurney. One crossed to the bed and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Chase’s arm and then pumped the cuff until it was full of air. Robertson came into the room behind them, buttoning his ratty cardigan. “If it’s okay with you, I’m going to go now,” he said.

  “What?” I said. I stared at Robertson as if he were an alien someone had inconsiderately dropped into my house. It didn’t seem possible that he would leave now, when things had gone so terribly wrong, when this had happened on his watch.

  “I’m going now,” said Robertson. “If it’s okay, I’m going.” He didn’t wait for my answer but turned and walked away from me through the hallway and I heard his steps on the stairs and then the sound of the front door as it opened and banged shut behind him.

  A paramedic stood by my elbow and kept asking me what happened.

  “He was brushing his teeth and he lost consciousness and fell,” I said. “We think he had a seizure. He has a seizure disorder and he missed his meds this morning.”

  “And he’ll seize when he doesn’t get his meds,” said the para-medic. He looked at me. “I’m just confirming,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. “That’s right.”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “In there,” I said. “In the bathroom.”

  “Did you move him?” asked the paramedic. His voice was sharp, curt, unsympathetic. He walked away from me and looked into the bathroom, where the toilet seat lay split on the floor and blood smeared over the tile. There wasn’t nearly as much blood as I thought there had been but any blood was too much. Chase’s blood.

  “He was cold,” I said. “He was bleeding and lying on the floor and I wanted to get him warm.”

  The paramedic looked at the toilet seat on the floor. “He hit that?”

  I nodded. “It came off,” I said stupidly.

  “You shouldn’t have moved him.”

  “I know,” I said, pleading. “But he was bleeding.”

  Chase tried to sit up on the bed.

  “No, no, buddy,” said the paramedic, who was writing something on the sheet of paper on his clipboard. He opened his fingers and pushed gently with his palm flat on Chase’s chest. “You just lie still, okay? I’m just getting your blood pressure. Can you tell me if anything hurts?”

  “My neck,” said Chase.

  “Where?”

  Chase raised his arm, his muscles loose and soft, and waved at the direction of his neck.

  “Where?” said the paramedic. “Show me again.” He knelt by the bed with his clipboard and stethoscope. He had a kind face and wore wrinkled blue pants and a rumpled blue jacket. I thought about the paramedic who had made a balloon animal with a face out of a latex glove during Chase’s first ambulance ride. I thought about the paramedics who had lifted Chase out of the bathtub the year before, unconscious and wet and still seizing, blue lips, soft and still, and who lay him on his bed, with his blue blanket over him, and listened intently to his heart and heard it fluttering, beating rapidly, like a caged bird or a trapped mouse, frantic and pumping too hard, and made notes on the clipboard and then carried Chase over to UNC Memorial, and wouldn’t take him to Duke Hospital, even though that was where my insurance said he had to go, saying he could die in the ambulance and they weren’t allowed to risk that. They stabilized him at UNC and then transferred him to Duke, where a pediatric cardiologist diagnosed the too-rapid heartbeat of atrial tachycardia. The ER reports from both UNC and Duke say status epilepticus but no one said those words to me.

  This latest paramedic was practically shouting. “Where does it hurt, buddy? Show me where it hurts.” I noticed that as soon as someone realized that Chase had difficulty communicating, he raised his voice, as if Chase were deaf. The paramedic leaned over him and said, “Does it hurt here?” He lay his hand on the back of Chase’s neck and Chase put his own fingers just above that, on the back of his neck halfway to the base of his skull.

  “Okay,” said the paramedic. “Lie still, there, buddy. Take it easy, now. Don’t move.” He called for a collar and a backboard. He held Chase’s head steady while the other paramedic slipped a collar beneath it and then strapped the front of the collar in place. Chase’s hands went to the collar like birds, loose and flapping but searching, as if to say, what’s this? The first paramedic touched Chase’s hands and said, “It’s just a collar to keep your neck still. You can take it off when you get to the hospital.” The gurney was already unfolded in the room and one of them braced it with one foot and used the other to drop the frame down until it was the same level as the bed. They slid the backboard under Chase and then carefully, tenderly, moved him from his bed to the gurney. Haley watched from the doorway and I said, “Go downstairs, quick now,” and she ran off and I could hear her footsteps on the stairs, a little rabbity thumpa-thumpa-thumpa, and then they carried Chase out of his blue room with the wallpaper border of astronauts bouncing on the moon that Chase had picked out himself as soon as we bought our house and they made the difficult tight turn in the hallway and then carefully down the stairs and out the front door and then down the front steps, where they let the wheels of
the gurney hit the sidewalk but all I heard was ringing metal, the sounds of metal against metal, things snapping into place. They checked the straps and tucked in the blankets and called out to Chase in cheerful voices. “You’re going to get a ride in the ambulance! Hang on there, buddy! We’ll get out of here in no time!”

  And Chase lay on the gurney in the darkness, his eyes dark and watchful, his skin the bluish color of powdered milk, not moving.

  “You can’t ride with us,” one of them said to me, “but you can follow behind. Just stay close.”

  “Are we going now?” I asked. Haley stood next to me, leaning her shoulder against my waist, watching the ambulance and the fire truck and the police car and the EMT vehicle.

  “Soon as we call in, we’ll be on our way.”

  Betsy stepped out of the deep shadows that separated her house from mine and asked if she could do anything. The firemen who’d been waiting in the driveway turned away from the house and jumped back in the truck. Doors slammed. Someone revved the engine.

  “Can you take Haley?”

  She nodded. “As long as we need to,” she said.

  “I don’t have her sleeping bag.”

  “We’ve got extra,” she said.

  Someone called out, “Ma’am? Ma’am? We’re about to get underway here.”

  Haley stood behind me, her face white and anxious, wearing her blue coat with the pink trim and her white rubber boots. She held back but also gave the impression of someone who was leaning forward, as if at the starting line of a footrace. I swung her up through the air and hugged her.

  “You’re going to hang out with Betsy and Laura,” I said. “Isn’t that cool? It’s okay,” I said, “it’s okay. Chase had a seizure but he’s going to be fine. You’ve seen him have seizures before and he’s been okay, right? He’s just got to go over to the hospital and get checked out. And I’ll come get you as soon as we get home.”

  She shivered in my arms and then pulled away.

  “Come on, Haley,” Betsy said. “You can sleep in Laura’s room. That’ll be fun.”

  “Ma’am,” the paramedic called again. “You following us?”

  The ambulance pulled out first, then the white car painted with the words Emergency Management Team, then me. I turned to watch Haley walking up the steps to Betsy’s front door and my stomach dropped as I thought of the things Haley had to bear.

  That night, there was a basketball game. Cars on their way to the Dean Dome backed up along Manning Drive in front of the hospital and there was no getting close to the place, no special lane kept clear for ambulances. We sat in traffic, first the ambulance, then the EMT car, then me. The first two were able to inch forward and occasionally someone would let them squeeze along, because they were vehicles that looked like they were on official business, and had their spinners going, and every so often, the ambulance would let loose with a whirling bleat. No one saw my car as in any way connected to this caravan and I drove along, sticking as close to the back of the EMT car as I could manage and whispering to myself, “Okay, okay now, just let me through, just let me get through.” Once, I slapped my palms hard on the steering wheel and yelped, “Hey, I’m with them!” In the stillness of my car, my voice conveyed nothing but utter disbelief at being blocked by the other cars, at the other drivers not being able to know my predicament, my child in that ambulance, the bloody freaking basketball game traffic in the way.

  They parked the ambulance in the bay and I was able to find a place out front. By the time I got back to the unit, they were wheeling Chase along the hallway to a pediatric trauma room. They’d slapped an oxygen mask on his face in the ambulance and as they wheeled him under the bright greenish light, he began to vomit. The team at his side cried out and hurried faster, and he vomited more. He was in a neck brace and on a backboard so he vomited lying flat on his back, with an oxygen mask strapped over his nose and mouth. Someone reached down and pulled that back and then he was in a room and two nurses were hooking up a suction machine to clear his mouth and airway and another wiped his face and the doctor came in and yelled about a CT scan of his head and the next thing I knew, we were in radiology, and I was watching Chase as the team gently moved him to a sliding table that would pass his body through the big spinning donut that was the CT machine. They invited me back to the control booth and as I watched, black and white images of Chase’s brain appeared, pools of light and pockets of darkness, no really identifiable structures other than the familiar shape of a brain in a skull, and below that the notched and ringed latches of vertebrae locked together in a column, and then the technician leaned forward and looked carefully, and punched buttons, and the view changed, and she turned to me and she said, “This is looking at the brain from above.”

  A little while later, the radiologist came in to read the pictures from the scan, now spread out like items on a menu on the screen in front of him. He took his time and leaned in and breathed deeply and looked again. He wore a long white coat; a pad of paper clipped together with a ballpoint pen stuck out of his hip pocket. He straightened and stood with his arms folded across his chest and leaned back a little bit on his heels and then bent from the waist and dropped his hands to the countertop in front of the screen and got in close for a very good look.

  Finally he turned to me. “The good news is that his head is clear,” he said. “I don’t see any evidence of massive brain injury. We worry about that when someone comes in vomiting after a fall, after a loss of consciousness. The vomiting, whatever it is, is unrelated to the fall. It’s from something different, maybe a virus he picked up at school.”

  He paused and looked back at the images. I sensed a “but.”

  “You see this?” he said and pointed to a black space surrounded by light that looked exactly like the black spaces surrounded by light above and below it. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get a better angle. Give me a lateral view,” he said to the technician. She punched some keys and the image changed to the familiar image of the vertebrae that attach the skull to the neck.

  “This is what concerns me,” he said, and pointed to a faint shadow along the neck bones. “Frankly, I’m not sure what we’re seeing here. I’m going to call neurosurgery for a consult. His head’s clear but it looks like he may have sustained a neck injury. We wouldn’t want him going home without having looked at that very carefully.”

  “Is that dangerous?” I asked. “What kind of neck injury?”

  “It can be,” said the radiologist. “You see where this is? Up high, at C3? That’s of greater concern because of the location. Did he complain of pain in this area?”

  I nodded blankly. I didn’t yet know the language of neurosurgeons, the way each of the vertebrae in the spine is mapped and labeled, the way each has its own number and letter, starting with CI, for the first of the cervical vertebrae, descending first to TI at the start of the thoracic vertebrae, and then to LI, for the beginning of the lumbar spine.

  “I suspect there’s an injury here,” said the radiologist. He frowned at the shadow and pointed at something. “Hard to tell because of the swelling. Let’s send you back out to the ER and have neurosurgery take a look.”

  Chase was back on the gurney by this time, with a foam collar cinched around his neck. We waited for neurosurgery in a glass-walled room in the pediatric ER. After a while, a boy came in with a broken arm. An exasperated woman who I assumed was his mother accompanied him. She wore gold capri pants and gold lamé mules and a dozen necklaces and yards of bracelets at her wrists and ankles; she jangled when she walked. The nurse pulled the curtain between us for privacy but there was no privacy at all. The broken-arm boy’s mother was on her cell phone within minutes complaining in the same impatient tone, with the same infuriated words, to many different people, that she was stuck in the ER because her moronic son had been stupid enough to break his arm during his Little League game. She had other choice opinions of her child and no fear of sharing them. I sat next to Chase and after a few minutes reached
over and held his hand. He’d stopped vomiting and lay still, languorous in the drowsy state I knew came over him after a seizure. I held his hand so he could feel me there, as if the things that had happened to him had happened to me as well, as if my presence could teach him patience in the face of these things that hit him like a bolt out of the blue, as if my presence could matter in any way at all. Mostly, I felt helpless and the white foam collar fastened around his neck made me swallow a sob.

  The woman with the cell phone stuck her head around the curtain.

  “What are you in for?” she barked.

  “He fell,” I said.

  “Huh,” she said. “These kids. This whole thing is a pain in my you-know-what.” She studied Chase. “So what’s wrong with him?” she said. “He looks pretty good to me.”

  “They think he hurt his neck,” I said.

  “His neck? My boy broke his arm! His arm! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that, but I tell you what. I’ve had it up to here”—she violently slashed her hand through the air somewhere in the vicinity of her throat—“with his shenanigans. He does this stuff on purpose, you know. He’s always trying to get my goat.” She stared at her watch and then gave me a hard look, as if I might somehow also be responsible for the inconvenience of her evening. “Almost ten thirty,” she snapped. “I can think of a million places I’d rather be. This is just insane!”

  She flapped the curtain closed for emphasis, the way someone might slam a door. Then she was back. “Well,” she said. “Good luck to you. I can see they’re coming now. About friggin’ time. Do they think we have all day?”

  When the boy with the broken arm was fitted with his cast and gone, we waited for neurosurgery. Every so often, a nurse breezed into the room to check Chase’s vitals, ask about vomiting, and tell us that neurosurgery had been paged but must have another patient somewhere else in the hospital. Around midnight, I told Chase to get some sleep but he was already quiet, his eyes closed. I turned the lights out in our room and sat in the dark while Chase slept. I leaned my head against the wall and tried to close my eyes. I thought of Haley. I wondered how she was doing at Betsy’s house. I wondered when we’d get out of there. I wondered if I should just let her sleep the rest of the night there or wake everybody up so I could bring her home. I wondered how much longer we’d have to wait. I wondered if I should go and try to find the doctor myself. I wondered if I was going to have to buy Chase his breakfast from the vending machines. I tried to remember how much money was in my wallet. I wondered if this was anything serious. I wondered how I would know.