The Off Season

by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

  The doctor frowned a bit. "That's a very good question. We won't know his exact situation until the swelling goes down. But his shoulders, definitely. The rest ... His spinal cord wasn't severed, only bruised. A C5 or C6 is a world of difference from C2. Your brother's very fortunate."

  "If he was fortunate, he wouldn't be here," I said. I guess when the emotion part of my brain turned off, the tact went too.

  If Dr. Rosenberger was offended, though, he didn't bat an eye. Instead he went on to tell us a whole bunch more medical stuff, how Win's injury was incomplete because the spinal cord itself wasn't broken, just the bones, and that it was stable because the ligaments weren't damaged. And even though he kept telling me not to get too optimistic, not yet, I couldn't help but notice that incomplete and stable sounded better than completely unstable. Then he explained how the Philadelphia collar—that's the official name for that cervical collar Win had on—would keep his neck from moving until the broken vertebrae reknitted, and for some reason all I could think about was Philadelphia cream cheese and how cream cheese wouldn't keep Win's neck stable at all.

  Just then the phone rang. Dr. Rosenberger answered, and looked at me. "It's your parents."

  How's that for stupid? I'd turned off my cell phone on the plane when the lady asked me to and I hadn't even thought to turn it back on again.

  He handed me the phone. "Tomorrow we'll have a conference call with your folks. Right now work on getting some sleep." He smiled at me. "That was a good article. I really enjoyed it."

  He and Charlie left. I sat there blinking, figuring out finally that he was talking about People.

  "So ... how's he look?" Mom asked, her voice quavering.

  "He—he's okay," I said. What was I supposed to say? That her son looked like a piece of roadkill? That he had more tubes in him than a basement?

  "What'd he have to say?"

  "He's sleeping, so he didn't talk too much. You know how important sleeping is."

  "You better warn him, sport," said Dad. "Those hospital painkillers will bind you up. You gotta be careful."

  "Okay." There again, what was I supposed to say—that constipation probably wasn't the biggest issue in Win's life right now? Sure.

  "Oh, George!" Mom said. "Listen, when should we come out? What'd the doctors say?"

  "Um ... let's wait for Bill to get here first." Which led to a long discussion about Bill and his travel plans, which they knew all about because they'd talked to him a bunch already. I kept dodging their Win questions by repeating what Dr. Rosenberger had said, that we wouldn't know anything for a couple days, and filling them in about complete and stable and Philadelphia collars, only without using the words "cream cheese," and trying to sound as with it as I could, which was hard.

  I got off the phone at last, totally exhausted, and got hit right away with another problem: where was I going to sleep? I hadn't even thought about it, though I did still have my little duffel with my toothbrush and everything. Maybe I could crash on one of those waiting room couches.

  When I wandered out into the hall, though, Charlie Wright was standing there. "Why don't you come home to our place?"

  I looked toward Win's room, the nurses working away.

  "They'll take care of him tonight," Charlie said. "You need to rest."

  So I followed him back outside. Charlie mentioned how impressive I'd sounded, how mature, even though I didn't feel either one of those things, not a speck. All I felt was beat. I'd changed my mind: I should not be here. This was Mom's job, this is what moms do, it comes automatically with having babies. They learn it in the hospital giving birth, probably. Or Bill, or Mr. Larson even, because he knows all about spines. Whoever should be here, it wasn't me.

  We didn't say much in the car. Charlie pulled into a nice house on a street of same-looking houses—probably a dairy farm once. We walked in and Marla, his wife, gave me a big hug, and she wouldn't let go, she kept hugging and hugging until I felt this little pop inside me, and all that exhaustion and resentment and maturity collapsed like a dam breaking, and I sobbed onto her shoulder like my organs, not just my heart but my liver and kidneys too, all those organs we haven't covered yet in A&P, were being ripped right out of my body.

  Guess how well I slept. Even though Marla has a very nice guest room and promised to keep the kids quiet. But I was awake at five anyway, because of the time change and just because. Charlie drove me back to the hospital. I told him he didn't need to do all this but he said that after four years he considered Win a son and wouldn't be anywhere else in the world.

  I went into Win's room. He was awake, it looked like, staring at the ceiling.

  "Hey, Win," I said. The nurse nudged me until I was standing almost right over him, which felt weird but it was the only way he could see me with his neck so locked up.

  "Hey," he whispered. The tube was out of his mouth at least. That was nice, knowing he really could breathe on his own.

  "You look good." That was the best I could come up with—isn't that pathetic?

  "No, I don't." He wasn't joking, either.

  "Yeah, well ... this is something, all right. Mom wanted to come so much, but her back—" I felt like such an idiot. Like, oh your neck is broken and everything but Mom is really hurt. Plus I couldn't even figure out what to say about Dad.

  "Could you do me a favor, D.J.?" Win whispered.

  "Sure. Anything."

  "Get out of this room and don't come back. And keep everyone out. Including Charlie."

  "Oh," I said. I mean, what do you say to that? What can you possibly say? "Um, okay." And I stumbled backwards, feeling my way out of the room because my eyes barely worked. That's how much his words hurt me. Like I'd been punched in the stomach.

  Out in the hall, Charlie asked how he was.

  "He, well, he doesn't want to see anyone right now."

  "Makes sense," Charlie said. He didn't seem fazed at all.

  So we settled in a waiting room. Charlie kept telling me stories about Win. How he had both playbooks memorized on the first day of practice, offense and defense, so he'd know everything that was going on. How he took the underclassmen under his wing and got on their butts and had special morning workouts for them, just like he used to in high school. How he went to Marla Wright's exercise classes because she said this thing called Pilates helps your core strength and even though he was the only guy in the room, and about four times bigger and twenty years younger than all her Pilates ladies, he didn't blink an eye. How he was the first one to practice every day and the last one to leave. All this stuff that didn't surprise me one tiny bit, although listening kind of killed me because for a second I'd forget Win was lying in a bed a couple doors down, and then when I did, I'd hurt twice as much.

  Charlie patted my leg. "Don't worry. It's going to take time, from what I've heard, for Win to get used to all this. He'll come around."

  I didn't say anything but I thought to myself, Do you even know my brother? Do you know him at all? Because the way Win was talking in there, it didn't sound like he was going to "come around" anytime soon. When Win was a kid, he had this huge baseball card collection. He still does, in these binders he hasn't looked at in years. But he looked at them a lot when he was a kid, worked on them all the time, and then one day Bill took them down without asking and showed them to a friend, then left them spread out all over the bed, where Win found them. They weren't damaged or anything, although some of the cards were out of their holders, but Win just freaked. He didn't beat Bill up, nothing like that, he just stopped talking to him. And I mean stopped. For a whole month. He wouldn't even look at him. If Bill had something Win needed, Win would ask Mom or Dad, or me, even though I was only about six years old and totally blown away by this whole thing. He'd say, "D.J., could you please hand me the glue?" if that happened to be in Bill's hand. Finally he stopped, but for that month, boy, I wasn't the only blown-away one. Bill cried almost every day, and Mom cried too, but Win wouldn't budge. And then of course he didn't ca
ll home or talk to us for almost nine months last year...

  That's the thing. If Win decides not to talk, he can do it pretty much forever. So what if right now he was full of painkillers and in shock and all that. This was still Win.

  Finally Charlie had to go pick up Bill. I sat by Win's door, wondering if I should tell him that Bill was on his way. It might perk him up. On the other hand, huge flower arrangements kept arriving for him that the nurses just kept at their station because Win had been pretty explicit to them too, about how he felt, and the way he told them off left me not too interested in talking to him, wimp that I am. Instead I just tried to keep people from bothering him like he'd asked me. Which wasn't too hard because this floor was Family Only, so no one came by.

  No guests, that is, but all sorts of medical people kept moving in and out, and then Dr. Rosenberger showed up with a couple young doctors trailing behind him. I was relieved Win didn't yell at him at least. He explained he was going to do some tests to see how much Win could feel. Win didn't say okay, but he didn't say no either, so Dr. Rosenberger started poking Win in the leg with this little tool. A pinprick test, he called it. "Just speak up when you feel something."

  Win lay there looking at the wall, where the nurses had just rolled him, like he was memorizing the wallpaper.

  "How about this?" Dr. Rosenberger asked after a minute, poking him all the time—not hard, but enough that someone would feel it if they had working nerves.

  Win still didn't answer, and I started to get a really bad feeling. "Win?" I said. "Please talk to him."

  Dr. Rosenberger shot me a look, catching on right away. He leaned right over Win's face. "Listen, Warren"—which no one ever calls Win, ever—"I know this is awful. You have every right to be furious. But we cannot help you—we cannot make you better—without your help. Please, if you feel anything at all, tell me. It is critical that I know."

  Win didn't move, didn't even make eye contact. It was like he was in the room alone.

  "Win," I pleaded. "Please. For Mom."

  Dr. Rosenberger tried a couple more times, but he would have had more luck talking to a rock. Maybe that pinprick was poking Win like a hot needle and it was all he could do not to yell, but I'll never know because he sure wasn't showing anything.

  Finally we all left. I must have looked pretty bummed, because out in the hall Dr. Rosenberger took the time to explain to me about the stages of grief, and that it was completely normal for Win to be in denial like this. I nodded, but inside I couldn't help thinking that Win wasn't denying his injury. He was making it his whole entire world, if that makes any sense, and just getting drowned in it without trying to deal with it one tiny bit.

  17. Bill

  DR. ROSENBERGER ALSO TOLD ME that he'd like to have a family conference call in forty minutes. So I had to give Mom and Dad a heads-up, which meant finding a special cell phone room because heaven forbid you use your phone in the regular hospital rooms, and then oh so luckily right as Mom was asking about Win, I got a second call from BRIAN and so I said Win was doing just what he should be doing—because isn't that what the doctor said, that it was normal not to talk?—and that they'd tell us a whole bunch in the conference, and as fast as I could switched to him.

  "Hey."

  "Hey. How are you doing out there?" He asked, sounding so concerned.

  "Oh, you know..." Later I realized I should have apologized right away for my whole People mistake. But I didn't, and then by the time I did realize, it didn't matter one way or the other, it was such ancient history, and so irrelevant to what our lives were now.

  "No, really. How are you? How's Win? Is there anything I can do to help?"

  Oh, it was good to hear his voice. It was like the way ice feels on a really bad injury, only warm instead of shivering cold. "You can talk to me," I whispered—whispered because it took so much effort not to bawl. So I probably sounded like I had a bad cold.

  "Of course. Whenever you want."

  "Okay. How—how was your game on Friday?" Which sounds stupid, but at that moment I really needed to talk about something that wasn't hospitals and spinal cords and all this pain.

  Brian laughed like he understood. And he said Hawley lost to Cougar Lake, and then he went into a long description of how on the way home the bus got stopped by a buffalo, because there are a couple buffalo meat farms out that way, and apparently one of the buffalo had got out somehow and was standing in the middle of the road absolutely not interested in letting the bus go by. Jimmy Ott wouldn't let anyone off the bus because he'd been to Yellowstone and seen this video of tourists getting gored by buffalo, stupid tourists videotaping each other getting too close—I remembered that story from Jimmy, and how mad us kids had been that he didn't bring a copy of that video home for us—but eventually this buffalo, the Cougar Lake one, decided he was ready to amble along, like the bus and the honking bus horn and all these football players shouting out the windows had nothing at all to do with his decision.

  It was completely hilarious, the way Brian told it, and I laughed so hard my cheeks hurt. And then, just as I was cracking up the most, Charlie walked by the door with Bill, and they both saw me laughing on my cell phone like a heartless moron. So I quick told Brian we'd talk more later and rushed out to hug Bill.

  You'd think that, being his sister and all, I'd remember how big Bill is, but each time I see him lately I'm just amazed. Maybe I don't see him that often, or maybe he just keeps bulking up. But it felt so good to put my arms around him and feel all those huge muscles. It made me feel safe. "Charlie here's been filling me in on how smart you are," he said.

  "He's lying." I grinned. God, it felt good to have Bill there. Although you could see he was faking that good mood because he had big circles under his eyes like he'd been crying.

  We walked down the hall, Charlie staying a bit behind us so that we'd have some privacy. I could see the nurses up and down the hall checking Bill out, and the families too, the moms and sisters. I hoped it would bring Win extra-special care, all those females grooving on Bill like that. Plus Bill was carrying this big pizza box with a big hot-pizza smell.

  "How is he? Really?" Bill asked, and all the pain he'd been hiding came out in his voice.

  "He's right here," I said, motioning to Win's door.

  Bill squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. "Hey there, bro! I brought your favorite."

  "You have to lean over him so he can see you," I whispered, kind of angling Bill that way.

  He grinned down at Win. "Hey, man. We're going to get you out of here."

  Win's eyes flicked over Bill's face for a second. He didn't even look at the pizza box, though the smell was pretty powerful in that little hospital room.

  "Hey, Win, you're going to beat this. I just know it."

  There was a long silence. Finally Win spoke. "D.J.? Don't you remember my instructions?"

  Again, that kicked-in-the-stomach feeling. I tried my best not to gasp, the pain was so strong. As gently as I could, I led Bill back into the hall. He didn't deserve to stay in there and get abused like that.

  "He, um ... Don't take it personally—it's just the stages of grief," I explained. What else could I say? I hoped Bill wouldn't ask me to explain the stages, but he looked too upset, too in shock, to ask anything at all.

  There were a couple other doctors and folks at the phone conference besides Dr. Rosenberger, and Charlie of course, and we all sat around this table with a fancy phone thing in the middle. Dr. Rosenberger explained to Mom and Dad the same things he'd said to me, how we really wouldn't know anything for at least another day and maybe several, although the break in the vertebrae looked very clean, which was a good sign, and his spinal cord bruising wasn't that extensive, and how these injuries heal in very different ways and sometimes it takes months for things to happen.

  I noticed he didn't mention Win not talking.

  "Is he—is he going to walk?" Dad asked, his voice cracking.

  "We do not know," Dr. Rosenber
ger answered in a really no-nonsense way that was actually very reassuring. "We don't know what he's going to be able to do. I can't make any predictions."

  Then he said we had other stuff to talk about like rehab, and that there was a great rehab place near Minneapolis we should look into.

  Mom asked in a scared voice how much it cost.

  Charlie Wright leaned into the table. "That's not something you need to worry about, Linda." Which led to a long discussion about insurance and other financial stuff I wasn't too interested in once I heard we wouldn't be going bankrupt.

  Then Dr. Rosenberger said what a great job I was doing, how much it meant to Win.

  "I wish I could be there," Mom said, starting to choke up.

  "Don't worry, Mom," I said. If Dr. Rosenberger could lie, then so could I. "Win's doing great. You just work on getting yourself better so when you see him, you can give him a big hug." Which was pretty thick, but it seemed to cheer her up. Dr. Rosenberger nodded at me like I'd said the right thing.

  Finally the conference call ended, after the doctors recommended a bunch of Web sites so my folks could do that at least. Then everyone cleared out with their piles of papers, and Charlie left too, and it was just me and Bill.

  Bill sat there staring at the table. He hadn't said one word, I realized all of a sudden. He hadn't even moved. He looked like a statue. A really sad statue. With big muscles.

  "You okay?" I asked.

  "It should have been me," he whispered.

  I sat on the table next to him. "What are you talking about?"

  "It should be me in there, it shouldn't be Win. He doesn't deserve this."

  "And you do? Come on, Bill—"

  He started to cry. "I could handle it better. I don't need football. But it's all he's got."

  Bill was right, but I couldn't say that. Also, the very last thing I'd want is Bill hurt. Not that I wanted Win hurt either, but wishing the injury could switch to Bill—not only was it impossible, it was wrong. "He's got us," I said.