Then the door banged open and the lights snapped on and I sat up bleary-eyed and Chase tried to sit up on his gurney but the short man in green scrubs and long white coat and green skullcap who stood in front of him said, “No, just lie still. I need to have a look at you.” His voice was very soft, almost gentle and girlish. He turned to me and his glasses winked in the light and he said, “This is the boy who fell during a seizure?”
I nodded.
“Ricardo de Soto,” he said. “I’m from neurosurgery. Can you tell me what happened?”
He nodded and wrote things down while I spoke. Finally he said, “I saw the CT scan. I agree with the radiologist. There’s something there that needs to be more fully evaluated. I’m ordering X-rays. If there is a serious injury to the C-spine, it can be very dangerous for the person to go home without proper care. We need to see what an X-ray will tell us.” He paused. “It’s hard to be sure because of the swelling. He might have some spinal instability.”
I kept nodding as if I understood what he was saying. I had not yet realized that Chase had a serious injury, that he was really injured at all.
“Let me do an exam before you go to X-ray.” He turned to the gurney. “Chase,” he said. “Can you wake up for me? Good boy! All right. Give me your hand. I’m going to have you sit up now.”
Chase swayed sleepily on the edge of the gurney but followed the neurosurgeon’s finger with his eyes and touched his nose with his own index finger and squeezed the neurosurgeon’s hand and said “Ouch” in a convincing and irritated voice when the neuro-surgeon began to prick his arms with a small pin and ask him if he could feel that or this or how about that?
Finally he asked Chase where it hurt and Chase tried to take off the foam collar to show him but the neurosurgeon said, “No, no, don’t do that! Just show me without taking the collar off!”
Chase didn’t move. I put my fingers on the top of the collar. “Does it hurt here?” I said. He shook his head no and his hand flew up and brushed the back of the collar, in the middle of his neck.
“All right,” said Ricardo de Soto. “Let’s get you down to X-ray.”
AT TWO, WE WERE moved to the adult ER, where Chase lay on his gurney in the hallway because all the rooms were occupied by people who were just a little bit down on their luck. The woman in the room directly in front of us paced up and down in front of the glass window; she shook and moaned and occasionally cursed. A sheriff’s deputy came around the corner and stopped at her door. He never looked our way but pulled out a fat pad of paper clipped with a ballpoint pen, paused as if he were bracing himself for a big leap from a high place, and then pushed the door open. The woman in the room began to wail as soon as she saw him and then she tried to run past him but he stood between her and the doorway and said her name over and over again: “Dorothy Weeks. Dorothy Weeks. Dorothy Weeks.” Then he began to describe the amount of crack cocaine they’d pulled from her suitcase after the car was stopped. She stopped wailing and retreated to the corner farthest away from him and began to scream, “Mother fucker, mother fucker, motherfucker!”
Chase lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. I told him to get some sleep. He wanted to sit up. I asked a passing nurse if we could be moved, the motherfucker woman being who she was, but the nurse said that was impossible.
We went to X-ray. I followed the gurney and waited inside the room while Chase stood in front of a flat beige box and the technician slid the frame of film in behind him. Afterward, I could see the shadow that had everyone worried but I still didn’t know how it was different from the shadow that lay above it or the others spread out below.
At four thirty, Ricardo de Soto came by and told us that Chase could go home, but only if he promised not to remove the neck brace and to return in the morning to get a different, better brace from the Brace Shop. He’d stapled directions to that department on our discharge sheet and pointed these out to me.
“What do you think is wrong?” I said.
“There’s too much swelling to say conclusively but we believe he’s got some spinal instability,” he said. “We cannot rule it out tonight so he must wear the brace morning, noon, and night for the next week and then return for a second set of X-rays.” He looked warmly at Chase. “Can you do that?” he asked. “Can you keep that brace on, no matter what? It’s very important that you don’t take it off.”
“Cool,” said Chase.
“Can you do it?” Ricardo de Soto said again. This time he put his hand on Chase’s arm. “This is very serious. I need to know that you can do this.”
“I can do it,” said Chase.
“No taking it off at school,” he said. “No taking it off because something feels itchy.”
“Okay,” said Chase.
He looked at me. “You understand?” he said. “The brace must not come off, not for any reason.”
I nodded again and he seemed satisfied.
“I’ve written down the name of a pediatric neurosurgeon and we’ve made an appointment for Chase one week from today. Come thirty minutes early so he can go to X-ray.”
When we left the ER the sun was starting to come up. Out in the parking lot, I scraped a thin sheen of ice off of our windshield while Chase shivered in the front seat and waited for the car to warm up. When I got in, he asked for U2 and I put the tape in before we turned west through town, traveling alone through the still and silent streets.
I SHOULD HAVE SUPERVISED Robertson. I should have stayed home on his first day of work. When I learned that Chase had missed his meds, I should have made him lie in bed for the rest of night, where he would seize safely, no danger of falling. A million things came to me that I could have done differently. These were quickly replaced with a million thoughts of the ways I forever failed to keep Chase safe.
AT DINNERTIME, WE SAT at the dining-room table and I brought plates of pasta and bowls of salad from the kitchen. I had to call Haley three times before she came in and sat in her chair across from Chase and picked up her glass of milk and began to drink, kicking one foot against the table.
“Stop that,” I said and she stopped.
The brace held Chase’s head and neck in place and he could not bend his face to his plate. He tried to lift his fork to his mouth. Food fell down his shirt and into his lap.
“Gross,” Haley said. She was eight now, nearly nine. She moved the flowers in the middle of the table a little bit so she would not be able to see Chase.
“Let me get you a spoon,” I said.
He didn’t wait but dug his hand into the plate of pasta and shoved it into his mouth. Curls of pasta fell from the plate and bits of tomato dripped onto the floor.
“Chase,” I said, my voice rising, the familiar tug of impatience and sadness rising in me. “Wait a second, Chase.” I said. “Just wait. You’re getting food all over the place.”
I found a clean dish towel and wrapped it around his neck brace and spread it out like a giant napkin so that it covered the front of his shirt. “Here,” I said. “Use your spoon. Just get closer,” I said. “It’ll be all right.”
He sat strangely straight and tried to maneuver the spoon from his plate to his mouth. Food tipped onto the table and then the floor.
Haley picked at the pasta on her plate and watched the tops of her knees under the table. After a few minutes she looked at me and said, “May I please be excused?”
“Haley,” I said. “Your brother can’t help it.”
She kicked the table and picked up her fork and poked at her food. She looked at me, her eyes grave, her face solemn, so serious that her expression seemed to exceed anything you ought to see on a child’s face. At night, I’d tuck her in and sit on the edge of her bed and sing to her in the dark, the light from the hallway cutting a clean trapezoid onto the floor, and hope that she could hear in my singing all of the things I was sorry for: that she had to live with Chase’s troubles, that she had to live with me as I took care of Chase’s troubles, that she had lost her father, that
she often got lost in the shuffle, that I had to work, that there wasn’t enough of me to go around. I knew she played by herself most of the time and invented long stories for the people who lived in her dollhouse. I often found her in her room with the Sorry! board set up, each player a different stuffed animal save for Haley, who threw the dice for everyone and marched the little men around the board and congratulated her giraffe when he made a particularly good move.
CHASE LIFTED HIS SPOON and dropped pasta down into his collar. His face was impassive but I knew he was hungry and frustrated. And yet he just kept at it, trying to eat as best he could.
Haley looked at her plate. “My appetite isn’t on this,” she said.
“What’s your appetite on?”
“Nothing.” She put her fork down. “May I please be excused? Please?”
“All right,” I said at last. “Go ahead. Just put your plate in the kitchen.”
THE NEXT DAY, I made a point of taking Haley into the woods near our house so she could ride her bike. The bike had been Chase’s bike, a dirt model that was supposed to grow with Chase until he was nearly six feet tall. When he was younger, he’d ridden everywhere on his Huffy, but he got this bike when we moved to North Carolina and he gradually lost interest in it, just as he lost interest in other things.
It was a good bike though, and I thought someone should get some use out of it. Haley got a lock for it that was her very own and sometimes rode it to school. This was around the same time she took up skateboarding and used to stand at the top of the hill in front of our house and step up on her skateboard and then fly down the hill in a straight, heart-stopping shot, bending her knees to steer around cars parked in the bike lane, the sound of wheels rolling on asphalt everywhere; she jumped off only when the skate-board had rolled to a sudden and silent stop. Then she scooted the board on one foot back to the top of the hill and did it again
She rode ahead of me out into the field and I followed behind. Just beyond the field, the trail dipped down into a natural culvert that was mostly dry but in spring could fill with water. Now it was glazed with crispy plates of silvery ice. Haley pushed off and put her feet on her pedals and rode down into the dip, her bike clattering faster and faster over the dirt and loose rocks and then flying up to the other side, where she dropped her feet back to the ground and stopped to look back at me, breathless, hair flying under her helmet.
It was a sunny mid-winter day awash in golden light. A soft breeze rustled through the dry yellow grass and as I passed into the field I glanced up into the pines and saw an owl standing still on a branch, so quiet I nearly missed him, and then so present, I couldn’t imagine how he would not be visible to everyone who came by. A turkey vulture turned slowly on a coil of air over the field. High up and far away, he was just a slice of dark against the blue sky.
Haley turned where the trail made its way back under the trees, and yelled at me again and I jogged to catch up with her. The trail followed the hillside down to the creek; halfway there, some kids had built a big bike jump, mounding dirt into a huge pile and then tamping it down until it was smooth. You could see the tire marks that led up to the mound and the way the earth had become flat and bare on the other side of the jump from all of the times bikes and their riders had come down hard.
Haley pedaled down the path and pulled up next to the jump and studied it.
She looked back over her shoulder at me as I approached. “I’m going,” she said.
“Are you sure?” I said. Then, not wanting to sound dubious or discouraging, I amended that. “I’ll watch from here,” I said. “That jump looks great!”
She wheeled the bike back up the trail. She threw one leg across the seat and put her hands up and tested her helmet and then pushed off hard with one foot and lifted the other to the pedal. She pedaled hard and fast down the path and leaned forward over the handlebars and bent down low, coming at the jump with as much velocity as she could muster. She rode up in a sharp curve and one bike wheel came up off the dirt but something caught the rear wheel and it did not follow. Instead, Haley left the bike, left the earth, and sailed out over the handlebars and somehow landed flat on her back on the packed earth below the jump.
“Haley!” I shrieked and started for her.
She raised herself on her elbows and pushed her helmet back out of her eyes. She looked at me and began to laugh. I leaned down next to her to see if she was okay and then sat in the dirt next to her and watched her laugh until tears rolled into her hair and she slapped the earth with the flat palms of her hands and then rolled up in a ball and clutched her stomach, laughing.
“Are you okay?” I said. “Haley? Does anything hurt?”
She shook her head, no, no, and wiped at the tears and straightened herself out. By now I was laughing, too, although I didn’t know why, maybe just because it seemed like the only possible response. “You should have seen yourself go,” I said and she howled anew.
After a few minutes, she grew still and lay flat on her back and sighed deeply, catching her breath, and looked up at the sky. I sat next to her in silence and listened to the wind move in the dry branches and to the distant sound of the creek moving its slow winter water past its banks. She turned her head to look at me and gave me a sly look. “Go again?” she said.
I could not say no.
A WEEK AFTER THE ACCIDENT, Chase and I went back to the hospital and donned our heavy lead vests so that Chase could have his neck examined. He sat patiently on the stool while the technician slid plates the size of small posters into a box behind his head and lifted his chin and told him not to move. Afterward, the pediatric neurosurgeon showed us the images, ghostly pale against a bluish background, the fine sharp white of bones, the chiaroscuro of luminous shadow, and explained that Chase had instability in his cervical spine. She explained the consequences of not treating this: quadriplegia at some point, when the spine slipped further out of place. The certainty of this outcome meant that Chase should have surgery. She reached behind her and picked up a tawny model of the human spine. It was shaped like an upside-down cobra and rattled a little as she moved it around, as she pointed to the parts of the spine injured in Chase’s fall—up high at C3, meaning he was lucky to still be alive—and explained that she would come in from the back and stabilize the spine with titanium rods and allograft, the putty of bone mixed up from a cadaver donor.
“Can I see that?” Chase asked. When the neurosurgeon handed the model over, Chase held it in his lap and then touched the bones of the spine and made the spine move.
“Pretty cool,” said the neurosurgeon. “Right?”
“Do you understand, Chase?” I said. “Do you know what we’re talking about?”
He gently touched the bones at C3. “This is where you’ll do it,” he said.
“On you, though, Chase,” I said. “Not on the model.”
“I know,” he said. “Right here.” He patted the bones tenderly and looked up at us. “It’s okay,” he said. “I want to be able to walk.”
WE CROSSED THE WALKWAY from the parking deck to the hospital before dawn so the building looked like a dark square against the darker sky, a square lit by blocks of white and yellow and greenish light. The air was thin and cold and smelled like rain. Chase took my hand as we passed from the covered breezeway out to the open drive and we made our way around the construction fences and orange pylons. Inside, the lobby was empty and we rode the escalator to the first floor, where I gave Chase’s name to the man behind the counter. The room was dim and quiet. The palms in the corners were dusty. I tried to interest Chase in a magazine but he said no and sat with his bear on his lap and looked around. A family of three generations came in, the patient, his wife, and their four children, and his mother and his mother’s sister, and they spread out in chairs across from the television set and the children immediately began to roll on the floor with one another, except for one small girl, who sat in her mother’s lap and pushed her head back against her mother’s sternum wh
enever the others came too close.
The man said something to the boys and they stopped wrestling and just then, a tall man in blue scrubs came through the door and we stood and followed him upstairs to the surgical suite. Chase was given a gown to wear and a paper hat and red socks with rubber chevrons on the bottom to keep him from falling if he chose to walk across the slick floor. The nurse came along and rubbed Emla cream on the back of Chase’s hand and told us it would take effect in a little while; when it did, she’d be back to put the IV in. Chase sat in his vinyl recliner and stared straight ahead and I flipped through the TV channels to see if there might be something he’d be interested in and we settled on the news. When the anesthesiologist came along, I asked if I would be able to go back to the operating room with Chase and the man shook his head.
“We can let you walk down the hallway as far as the OR but we can’t let you inside,” he said. “How will that be?”
“Chase,” I said, “I’ll go with you to the door, okay?”
He nodded and blinked at me, his eyes big and dark. The nurse came with the IV and Chase asked her if she had a butterfly needle and she said, “Right here.” She leaned over him and rubbed the back of his hand until a vein stood out and then slid the needle in place. He watched her and didn’t flinch.
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 24