Despite giving them fake reasons, Mom says Doctors Morrow and Schwartz won’t do another CT scan until, or unless, we have something called “just cause,” which is a fancy way of saying they want more proof than her word. They’re short with us, fed up. We’re wasting their time. Benny’s wasting a perfectly good room that could be used for another. Dad’s tried to reason with them, too. But time is not our side. Time is our enemy, waging a war we can’t win.
The hospital and doctors were patient in the beginning when they appeared to understand, to care, about our circumstances. But now, with insurance pounding on their backs and news crews and random people in and out of Benny’s (now infamous) room, they want us out. We’re “a distraction to all other patients on this floor.”
They repeat the same things. “Does he have a history of head injuries or not? We want to help Benedict the best we can, but we can’t do that if you’re not telling us the whole story.”
Mom starts to sob as the lie unravels. “I just want you to fix him. You can’t take him off the ventilator yet. Give him more time to show you he’ll wake up. He WILL wake up.”
“Believe me, Mrs. Paxton,” Dr. Morrow says, “I hear you. I’ve got kids of my own, and if I were in your shoes, I’d be making the same plea. But we have to diagnose and treat based on facts. Your son is in a persistent vegetative state. He is not aware of his surroundings. He is legally brain-dead.”
“NO! He squeezed my hand!” I pipe up angrily. “I felt it!”
Dr. Morrow looks to Dr. Schwartz with a sigh of aggravation as he wipes the deepening creases in his forehead. “We’ve said it before. He’s incapable of voluntary movement. On the off chance he progresses to wakefulness, it is our opinion, and the opinion of the doctors who have examined him here, he will never have a higher brain function—IF he wakes at all. There was too much damage and swelling, even with the steroids and drainage. It’s irreversible. Based on what we’ve seen, we don’t think he will be able to wake up or even breathe on his own if he did. It’s in his, and your, best interest, to start thinking about organ donation and funeral arrangements.” He folds the chart beneath his arm. “I’m sorry. Really, I am.”
Mom cups her hand over her mouth to stop the cries that fight through. She’s shaking her head, flinging the tears from her lashes while Dad rubs his hand on her shoulder, and we all sit in this room where the walls smother us until we threaten to stop breathing altogether. I dig through the files in my brain for something factual, something we can hold on to, shove in their condescending faces. But I’m empty—they’re all … empty.
“Go ahead and take him out of the coma,” a rasped voice says from the doorway. A short, thin man with smooth dark skin, and a thick, graying beard pokes his head inside. He’s dressed in a navy suit donned with a silken reindeer tie. “See if he survives. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Excuse me?” Dr. Morrow says. “Who are you?”
The man saunters up to Benny’s bed and pulls a stick-shaped light from his top pocket. “Dr. Frederick Stein, director of the Pituitary Tumor and Neuroendocrine Program at the University of Illinois and chief neurosurgeon at the University of Chicago Medical Center.” He emphasizes his titles in a way that says, Shut up and listen.
Doctors Morrow and Schwartz trade glances, then to Dr. Stein. “Okay. What are you doing here?”
He turns to us, ignoring the two doctors, and holds his hand out toward Dad. “You must be Mr. Paxton.” Mom sobs louder into her hand.
“I can’t believe it. You’re here. You’re really here,” Dad says, tears in his eyes.
My eyes meet Brynn’s. Our expressions mirror images of hope and wonderment and all the things this very room has lacked for days. I wish Sarge were here, instead of at a doctor’s appointment of his own, so his face could do the same.
Dr. Morrow reaches for a shake, but Dr. Stein turns away again. He shines the stick light into Benny’s eyes and quickly pulls back with a confident kind of smirk. “Ah-ha! A flicker!”
“Excuse me?” Dr. Schwartz says. He fidgets, holding Benny’s file close to his body as if the walls are suffocating him now.
Dr. Stein continues checking Benny’s vitals while the two doctors move in closer to watch his unorthodox approach—lifting Benny’s arm and letting it fall, tapping the skin on his forehead, and tugging on his ears.
“You can’t see it unless you’re trained to,” Dr. Stein says, softly, “but there’s a flicker of light in the very back of his cornea. He’s not gone, he’s right here, aren’t you, Benedict?” He tucks the sheets into Benny’s sides and reaches for the chart that’s now buried under Dr. Morrow’s arm. “May I?” He doesn’t wait for an answer before sorting through the chart’s notables.
Dr. Morrow is silent for the first time since we’ve been here. Dr. Stein flips page after page as if he’s looking for something specific. A diagnosis or verbiage, maybe. We aren’t really sure what to make of him, or anything else that’s happening, so we just hold our collective breaths and watch. His finger traces the paragraphs with urgency, and he stops suddenly. “There’s your proof. Schedule another CT scan and a full blood workup. NOW.”
The two doctors appear confused as they move in to see what Dr. Stein sees inside the file, but he quickly flips it shut.
“We’ve already done the testing,” Dr. Schwartz argues. “There’s been no change, and in our opinion, no reason to continue.”
Dr. Stein looks at us again, satisfaction drenching his face. “In 1998, a boy, similar in size, weight, and age, was struck by a pickup that was driving eighty miles per hour on a county road. Doctors pronounced him brain-dead and called for euthanasia, but instead of giving up, the parents called me. The boy is top of his class now.”
Dr. Schwartz chimes in, his bushy mustache clinging to his lips. “With all due respect, that’s a unique incident. Not likely to happen again.”
“In 2007,” Dr. Stein continues, “a three-year-old girl’s skull was nearly crushed by a piece of farm machinery. Doctors gave up on her. I didn’t. She asked Santa for a skateboard this year.”
Mom looks to Dad, and I can feel the room swelling with a kind of hope we hadn’t felt before. The cracks of my heart pulse, try to knit themselves back together.
“I’m not saying miracles don’t happen,” Dr. Schwartz says, “I just mean—”
“In 1948,” Dr. Stein says, his voice more serious as he grabs ahold of Benny’s hand, “a two-year-old boy stood behind his father’s car and, without the driver’s knowledge, was run over, nearly flattened, and just like Benny, it was said he would never open his eyes again. We didn’t have specialists as we do today. My baby brother didn’t make it because they gave up on him. That’s when I decided to devote my life to saving as many people as you’re willing to throw away.”
The room falls silent. Dr. Morrow clears his throat awkwardly. “Uh, I’ll order the scan and, uh, blood work. One more try couldn’t hurt, I suppose. But insurance won’t—”
“Don’t you worry about that part,” Dr. Stein interrupts. “It will be taken care of.”
Dr. Morrow nods, bows his head as he and a speechless Dr. Schwartz leave. They avoid eye contact with any of us, because they know—they have to know—they haven’t done everything they could or we wouldn’t be hearing this conversation about a “flicker.”
Dr. Stein pats Benny’s hand once more, then trails toward the doorway.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Mom says, wiping her nose with a crumbled up tissue. “This is everything to us.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he says. “I don’t make promises, but I do make sure no metaphorical stone is left unturned, by the grace of my brother, may he rest in peace. Take comfort in that. I’ll get back to you in a bit.”
Dad wraps his arm around Mom and lets her cry into him as Dr. Stein’s shadow fades around the corner. “There’s still hope, Bess,” Dad says into her ear. “There’s still hope.” I hang back in the chair against the wall and watch their two hea
rts collide. Mom isn’t fighting it for once. She’s letting it happen—the way it should be. By the way Mom and Dad never seemed to fall into each other in this particular way before, I always thought love was square. Perpendicular angles meeting at just the right points, so no matter which way you turn the shape, it’s the exact same. They’ve been stuck inside these angles for as long as I can remember. Not in motion, more like running in place. But what I’m learning is, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe love—their love—isn’t a perfectly angled mass, and maybe love isn’t meant to be. Maybe it’s flexible, wavering with ebbs and flows, more like a circle or oval or even a heart, and they’ve got to find a way to navigate through it without losing sight of the beginning point or the end. Watching them, my mind drifts to Bash.
I haven’t heard from him in days.
“Where’d that come from?” I ask, noticing an envelope with a bear drawn on the front. It’s nestled in between a plush teddy bear and a fruit basket on Benny’s bedside table.
Mom sniffles. “I found it clutched in Benny’s hand when we got back from the cafeteria. The nurse said a young boy left it, but he ran out when she asked who he was. Weird, right?”
I reach for the envelope, trace the drawing with my fingertip. “What … was in it?”
“Twenty dollars,” she says. “Donations are trickling in, but every little bit counts. I wish I knew who left it so I can thank him.”
I shouldn’t be smiling, blushing so many shades of crimson. Heat prickles my cheeks. I hold the envelope tight, close to my heart. So he does like me, I think. Maybe my heart isn’t so square after all.
A while later, Dr. Stein enters the room slowly, with a heavy, almost weighted frown on his face. His head drags. After a long, breathy sigh, he folds the chart down to his waist. We hang on to the air as if it were a dangling cord that could float us to safety. Five seconds pass. Ten. Nearly fifteen before he looks up with a stifled smile.
“So?” Mom says, standing from her chair. Dad stands, too. And for the hell of it, I stand with them.
He tells us about all the fluid that’s gone down, the blood pressure that’s in a normal range, but most of all, more important than anything else I hear, that brain activity has been detected, “however vague.”
“Benny is a near perfect candidate for me,” he adds.
“So what’s the next course of action?” Dad asks, gripping Mom’s hand and puffing out his chest. In this light, he looks kind of like a superhero, and the way he’s remained strong and steadfast even when we’ve all crumbled around him, I suppose he is.
Mom stops crying long enough to look up from the floor tiles. It’s obvious she had been awaiting more bad news, because it’s all we’ve heard for weeks now. That thing, hope, is hard to keep when everyone says our situation is hopeless. My heart clangs loud in the quiet room, competing with the noisy beeps that pour from Benny’s machine entourage.
“The next part isn’t going to be easy. We have to bring him out of the coma to see if he can survive without the machines,” he says.
The words kind of fade in and out as I think back to the moment everything changed. My hands still remember the movements of unhinging the stroller. I watch through a fuzzy cloud of semifocused lenses while Dr. Stein explains lowering the pain medicines’ dosage little by little, until he either wakes or he doesn’t.
When all is said and done, Dr. Stein pauses in the doorway, beside me. I can smell his cologne wafting under the vents. It’s sweet like coconuts and reminds me of the vacation we took to Florida many years ago.
“If you’re religious at all, pray,” he says. “If you’re not, drink. Hard liquor is best.”
* * *
Thanksgiving, a holiday usually spent stuffing our faces with all of Nan’s butter-laden recipes, is spent at Benny’s bedside this year. No fine china passed down from Nan’s Gran Gran. Instead, we eat off foam trays that section our preportioned hospital turkey and gravy, which tastes more like rubber and literal nothingness than, say, food. It comes with a side of starchy mashed potatoes with liquids not fully incorporated into the flakes, and the crème de la crème—cranberries floating in some sort of strawberry Jell-O. Less than a stellar way to give thanks, but as Dad puts it, “We give thanks for every day of Benny’s life. And especially the lives of everyone involved in the making of this chocolate pecan pie I bought from the bakery.”
A few days later, after the “feast” has settled, I tiptoe into the rink, crouching low under the front window, like a stealth animal on the hunt, and sneak up behind Bash. Deeply invested in a textbook, he doesn’t flinch.
“Even when you’re trying to be quiet, you’re loud as shit,” he says. “Plus, I have eyes. I saw the door open.”
I say nothing and push the textbook away to make room for the yellow cupcake I place in front of him. It’s covered in pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles—things I know will bug him. A single candle stands tall in the middle, unlit.
“What’s this?” he drops his pencil.
“Happy birthday!”
He pushes the cupcake away without so much as a “you remembered!” or “that was SO nice of you!” and draws his textbook near. “What’s so happy about it?”
I scrape a dollop of frosting from the icing’s peak with my finger and smear it on the tip of his nose.
He slowly cranes his neck up to meet my eyes. I smile a big, cheesy smile. He wants to look glum, upset I thought of him, but after a few seconds, he smiles back.
“Light it,” I tell him, pointing to the candle.
“Nah, I’m good.”
I swipe another lump of frosting and paint it in one flat line across his forehead. “LIGHT IT!”
With an aggravated sigh, he digs deep into his pocket, revealing a blue Bic lighter in one palm. He lights the candle then wipes the frosting from his face with one finger. “You’re really not very nice, you know.”
“Thanks! No one ever says that about me!” I hold my grin while the flame dances between us, flickering shadows across his face.
He devours the sight of the burning stick, seemingly indifferent. “Please don’t sing.”
“Fine. Make a wish.”
He closes his eyes, his long, dark lashes at rest, and blows the flame until it disappears into the air. I feel his breath, warm, across my face.
“I won’t ask what you wished for, but I had my friend Violet look up your horoscope, and she says today is a good day for surprises so—SURPRISE! See? Horoscopes are real if you read them first, then make them happen.”
He chuckles, turns back to his work. “I’d rather forget I’m legal now, though.”
With frosting still on my fingertips, I fall into the chair next to him and lick them clean. “Why? You get to vote and serve our country and get into R-rated movies without a guardian and … that’s it. I’m out of good news.”
Silent, he moves his swivel chair close to me, pats my leg the way Sarge might—pat pat pat—except Sarge doesn’t send shockwaves through my spine the way Bash does. He’s reluctant to touch me, though. His nails barely scrape the top of my jeans, which only makes me want him to press a little harder. He’s delicate about it. I bury my hands in my lap, anticipating. Our eyes meet again. His hand rests there now, unmoving. But now that the flame is gone, I see the pain swimming around in his stare. I know what he wished for, for his mom to get better. I wished for it, for him, too.
Christmas lights have been strung around the small room. The ones still working beam an angelic glow across the front desk. Garlands and candy canes line the room, and somehow, a scent of pine permeates through the candle’s burnt wick.
I sigh. “You know … I thought when my nan died, Christmas couldn’t get any worse,” I break the silence. “She was the glue that held us all together. Held me together. We sort of broke apart when she died last year. We hadn’t even put ourselves back together yet … Then this thing happened—this monumental thing.”
“You mean the accident?”
“I m
ean you.” I smile. That butterfly feeling flutters around in my stomach, and I wonder if he feels it, too. I don’t know what makes me say it. Maybe I just want something real, something I can understand.
He clears his throat, removing his hand. “You think I’m some monumental thing in your life?”
“More like … a nice distraction.”
He clears his throat. “You and your nan must’ve been close.”
“We were.” I smile sadly. “I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately because of—well, because. She tried to teach me how to use my heart more and my brain less, but I always fought her on it. I hope I haven’t let her down too much…” My words fade and I blot a stray tear, smearing the mascara smudge across my fingers. Bash chews on his lip, biting the skin; his face is sullen and flat, but I feel him look at me, then away again, that same old game we continue to play with one another without skipping a beat. I sink into the chair and melt into the smoky fabric just as he jumps from his. He tugs on my wrist and pulls me up, too.
“Come with me,” he says. And I do.
He leads me around the vacant rink that echoes our every movement. With no one here, it feels like an abandoned playground we have all to ourselves, which is both exhilarating and totally creepy at the same time. Around the corner, he ducks into the room where all the skates are lined in rows along slats bolted to the wall. We weave through them, this maze of wheels and wonder, to the very back door I’ve never opened before. He swings it open and urges me to go down a set of steep stairs to a nearly black basement.
“No way. I’m the brains, man,” I smile. “The pretty one always dies first.” I lower my voice to a whisper and dig my fingers into his jacket. “I mean you; you go.”
“Yeah, I get it.” He jogs down the stairwell that feels never ending into what feels like a pit of darkness. I slowly follow, gripping the railing as if my life depends on it (maybe it does). When he flicks the light, it’s a dim, yellow shade, calming like a nightlight. I can see where I’m going now and move fast behind him. We walk through stacks of broken-down cardboard boxes, old skates—some with wheels, some without—and various other (what I would call) trash, to a metal exit door he props open with a large, gray stone pulled from just outside.
The Inevitable Collision of Birdie & Bash Page 18