I sense Mom gathering herself up to do the right thing. She offers her hand to Kim. “I’m glad to meet you,” she says, “though I’m awfully sorry it has to be this way. I guess Jackson and I are still in shock, but we’re both so grateful that you and Tom have been here … ”
“I—” Kim begins, but shakes her head. She can’t go on. “I’ve just been so scared,” she says, when she regains her composure. “Last night, waiting while Oz was in surgery, I was so scared. No one knew—I was so scared it would go badly and Jackson wouldn’t get here in time.”
She turns to me. “Oz loves you so much,” she says, starting to cry, and then I’m the one doing the comforting. I hold her until she calms down, until she takes a deep, shuddering breath and pulls away from me to look at Dad. She leans over, takes his hand, and rubs her thumb along his thumb. She whispers his name, but he doesn’t hear her, either. Or if he does, we don’t know it.
“Kim, you’ve got to get something to eat, get some rest,” Tom says. “You’re a wreck. Now that Jackson’s here, why don’t you go home for a little while? I’ve got to go home myself, check in with Mary Beth and the kids. I’ll drive you.”
“No,” she says. “I’m not leaving.”
“You’ll make yourself sick.”
Kim shakes her head wearily. “I just can’t leave, okay? I can sleep in the waiting room again. Tonight I’ll be able to sleep there.”
She looks as if she could nod off right where she stands. Her eyes are puffy, her clothes rumpled, her hair’s a mess. Her tiny hands with their long, shell-pink fingernails look like they belong to another person, someone young and ditzy like she used to be before she moved in with Dad. “I just need to be here with Oz,” she says, and sinks into the chair beside his bed.
“Well then … ” Mom says. For just a second I see something in her eyes that says she feels Kim’s overdoing it.
Kim doesn’t seem to notice, though. She stays there, holding Dad’s hand, whispering his name until the nurse bustles in and reminds us that visiting’s allowed only fifteen minutes every hour and only two people at a time.
Back in the waiting room, Grandma and Amy are huddled together. Kristin is reading her book. Ted is pacing. His face lights up the way it always does when he sees Mom, and he folds her into his arms. They just stand there together a long time. Grandma pats the seat beside her for me to come there. She puts her hand over mine and squeezes it hard. For once, she doesn’t say anything. Amy says, “I’m sorry your dad got hurt, Jackson. I hope he gets better. I can draw him a picture, okay?”
“He’d like that,” I say.
She actually gives me a hug and kiss when it’s time for Ted to take them to Grandma’s house. Kristin heads for the elevator without having said a word, then stops and rushes back to give me a brief fierce hug that nearly knocks me over. Mom smiles at me when they’ve gone. “See? I told you.” She puts her arm around my shoulder, briefly touching my face with her own.
But I don’t want to talk about Kristin tonight. I don’t want to talk at all. I indulge myself cataloging all the crap I’ve had to deal with in the last few months since Brady ran away. Then get this stupid idea that what’s happened is his fault—that somehow his leaving triggered the chain of events that led to my ending up here in this hospital waiting room not knowing whether my dad will live or die. If he hadn’t left—what? I close my eyes; they ache from crying. I lean back and rest my head on the plastic sofa. Mom smooths my hair back from my forehead like she used to do when I was little.
I think, oh, if I could just go to sleep. But I can’t. Last night, maybe the very moment Dad was falling, I was climbing the ladder to my loft in the condominium. There, I was as sleepless as I am now. But I never thought of him. I never once thought he could be hurt, he could be dying. I thought only of Amanda: her face in the moonlight, her long beautiful hair. Now it seems selfish to have been so absorbed—as if I’d missed some shifting of the universe, as if my paying attention could have stopped the fall. I’m fully aware that blaming myself for what happened is even more stupid than blaming Brady. Blaming anyone. I mean, things happen. But telling myself that, even believing that it’s true doesn’t stop the image of Dad falling from jolting me like an electric shock every time I drift off to sleep.
twenty–five
Once Ted has a talk with Kristin and Amy, they settle in at Grandma’s just fine. They were upset and frightened, he tells Mom. “They cried,” he says. “Kristin said, ‘Is Jackson’s dad going to die?’
“I told her, absolutely not! Ellen, I didn’t mention it before, but while you and Jackson were in the room with Oz, I talked to one of the nurses. She was very reassuring. Not that it will be easy the next few days, or that something couldn’t go wrong. But there’s no reason why it should.”
Mom doesn’t say anything for a long time. I’m stretched out on one of the long couches, pretending to be asleep, and I don’t dare open my eyes to look at her. When she does speak I can tell she’s been crying.
“Oh, God,” she says, “why am I angry?”
I should sit up right now or at the very least do something to make them realize I’m not asleep. But I don’t. I just let her go on.
“I feel like such a terrible person, sitting here thinking ‘wouldn’t you just know Oz would go and do something to ruin my life again!’ God, as if he’d planned it.”
“Ellen,” Ted says. “Sweetheart, it’s been such a shock. You don’t know how you feel at this point.”
“Oh, yes I do,” Mom says. “I’m pissed out of my mind. I want to go home to our new house. Our life. All the way back on the plane I kept thinking about it. How everything was waiting—”
“It’s still waiting,” Ted says. “It’s all there.”
I hate the way I feel listening to the two of them. Bitter. I think, if Mom hadn’t married Ted, she’d only want to be with me right now. She wouldn’t be thinking of anything but me and what I need. And she wouldn’t be angry at Dad, either. Okay, here’s how out of it I really am: I think this accident might have brought them back together again. I actually let myself imagine how it would be: Dad waking to realize that Mom has been at his bedside since the moment she heard that he was hurt, that it’s her voice that brought him back—
“I know, I know,” Mom says to Ted. “I’m being completely ridiculous. I shouldn’t even talk about this. I know I’m not really mad at Oz; how could I be mad at him? It’s just so—awful, so absurd. The truth is, right now, mad is the only safe thing to be. If I weren’t mad, I’d be useless. I wouldn’t be able to stop crying. Ted, my heart just breaks when I think about Jackson. If Oz dies—”
“He’s not going to die,” Ted says. “By God, he can’t die. Not after I promised Kristin he wouldn’t.”
Mom laughs a little, which is what I know he meant her to do, and I think, it used to be my job to make her laugh. But although Mom’s probably right, mad is safe, I can’t really work up any anger toward Ted. He’s so wonderful to Mom; he so obviously adores her. Listening to them just makes me feel left out and sad. It’s my own fault, I know, for eavesdropping.
“Are you still planning to take Kristin and Amy back to St. Louis tomorrow?” Mom asks.
Ted says, “Yes, unless you need me here.”
“No,” she says. “I can handle it. But I want you to get some rest before you go. I don’t want you on the road exhausted. Oh, Ted, if anything happened to you—”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he says.
“You’re always so sure about everything,” Mom says. “Sometimes that drives me crazy.”
Ted sort of laughs. “I’ll never be sure about you, Ellen. I don’t think I’ll ever quite believe you actually married me.”
“God, isn’t it perfect?” Mom says. “Because, just for the record, you’re the one thing I feel absolutely sure about.”
I direct my thoughts to Kim, who’s stretched out on the couch across from me. Is she eavesdropping, too? I don’t think so. She’s breathing so evenly. One hand hangs limp over the edge of the couch. She makes odd, squeaky sounds from time to time. I think she’s actually asleep, that she’s been asleep for a while.
When she came back from making her phone calls, she looked better. She’d combed her hair, put on some makeup. She sat down with Mom and me and told us about last night. She wasn’t there when it happened, which she says she feels terrible about. Tom called from the hospital to tell her. But by the time she got there, Dad was already in surgery and there was no one around to give them even a clue about what his chances were.
“Bad,” was all Tom knew. That was what the ambulance guys had kept repeating when they got to the scene. It was morning, about six thirty, when the doctor finally appeared and they found out that Dad had pulled through, that he would probably survive.
I think Mom liked Kim better after we talked, especially when Kim said, “Maybe you’ll want to go alone this time, Jackson. If you go in and sit there with him a while, you’ll get used to the way he looks a little. You’ll see; at least now he’s not in any pain.”
I did go by myself, but Kim was wrong about it making me feel better. I felt lousy. I couldn’t stand to look at him. But it was even worse if I closed my eyes because what I saw then was Dad the way he’s supposed to be: moving, always moving. And I could hear him laughing. I didn’t stay. I went down a flight of stairs just outside the intensive care unit and walked through a maze of corridors, careful not to glance into the lighted rooms along the way. When it seemed like a suitable amount of time had passed, I went back to the waiting room.
“Yeah, I feel better,” I lied. “I think I’ll try to rest.”
Mom and Ted fall silent. Through slitted eyes, I see that Mom’s fallen asleep, her head on Ted’s lap. He’s sleeping sitting up, his head on the pillow he’s propped behind him against the wall. I open my eyes all the way. Soundlessly, in slow motion, I sit up. It’s dark in the waiting room, except for the open doorway on the far end of it, a bright rectangle of light. I don’t know; maybe I’ve slept a while. I sure don’t remember anyone turning off the lamps on the low tables or setting my backpack there within reach. My Walkman’s in it, and tapes. Books and magazines. All the things I took with me on the trip.
I think of Amanda again: what she said to me last night, how it was to be with her, and I feel the way I’ve always felt when I come to the end of a really good story and remember it was a story. I wasn’t in it, after all. It wasn’t real.
This line of thinking makes me feel agitated, as if I’m not my real self, as if this waiting room is no more real than the beach I walked last night with Amanda. As if nothing is real. The accident can’t really have happened; it can’t be my dad in that room so out of it that he didn’t even know I was with him. He can’t die. There can’t be a world that doesn’t have him in it.
When I was little, at the strangest times, I used to think of people dying—Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, even myself sometimes—I’d think of all of us not being, and a darkness would build up inside me. I was mostly a quiet, well-behaved child, but when that feeling came upon me, I would do something wild. I’d burst out singing, or jump up and run outside, run myself silly to explode it.
“Jackson Watt, good grief, what’s gotten into you?” Mom would say. But I never told her.
I don’t want to tell her how I feel now. But I know if I don’t get up, get out of this room, the darkness will make me do something crazy and she’ll know something’s terribly wrong, so I tiptoe out into the corridor.
The bright light hurts my eyes. The floors, the walls, the ceilings are dazzlingly white. The double doors at the end of the corridor are white, too. And closed, which I guess means you’re not supposed to go in.
I can see my watch now, in the light. Three in the morning. I can’t go see Dad. I can’t go back into the waiting room. I pace up and down the corridor. I walk slowly, pausing each time at the doors to intensive care. The windows reveal nothing but another hall and the doorway to a supply room or closet. Now and then, I see a nurse pass by rolling some kind of equipment or carrying a tray of medicine, and I shrink back, so she won’t see me.
I don’t care how bad he looks, I need to see him. I think if I don’t see him right this second, I’m going to die. I stand there, my hand on the metal door handle, my heart beating so hard, so loud it scares me. I nearly fall down when the door opens from the other side. It’s Dad’s nurse. She says, “Honey, if you want to see your dad, come on in. It’s all right. Don’t stand out there worrying.”
I’m so grateful, I can’t even speak. I follow her, and I’m scared witless again when we reach his room just as the ventilator alarm goes off. It sounds like a siren, like those awful Nazi sirens you hear in World War II movies. The nurse adjusts it, and it stops. He’s alive.
“I’ll just check these few things, give him his medication,” she says, scribbling on a chart. “Then you can sit here with him a while.”
As soon as she’s gone, I pull the chair as close to the bed as I can get it. I prop an extra pillow between the back of the chair and the iron bed rail so I can rest my head. If I sit just right, I can see Dad’s profile, and I can keep my hand over his on the edge of the bed. I doze nearly an hour that way and what wakes me is an odd sound, almost a moan. Then I feel Dad’s fingers moving.
I sit straight up, so I can look full into his face. He moans again, his eyelids flutter open, and he sees me. He can’t talk because the ventilator tube is crammed down his throat, but he moans again, and in the shape of the moan I recognize my name. His chest heaves, and the alarm goes off again. Dad gives me a scared look; his fingers tighten.
“It’s okay,” I say, praying the nurse will come, and she does.
“Don’t be frightened, Mr. Watt,” she says, as she works around him. “You’ve had an accident, but you’re fine. Everything’s fine. Your son’s here with you.”
Dad closes his eyes again; his fingers relax.
The nurse beams at me. “The minute I saw you, I had a hunch you’d be the one to bring him back,” she says. “That you were just the thing he needed.”
twenty–six
Good news,” the doctor says when he makes his rounds in the morning. “Mr. Watt is conscious, though it’s unlikely he’ll remember anything that happens in the next few days—he’s so heavily sedated. But he’s as alert as I’d expect him to be under the circumstances; his vitals look good. With luck, we’ll be able to begin to wean him from the ventilator within the next twenty-four hours—probably take it out about this time tomorrow. Of course, we’ll keep him here in intensive care another day or so. Then another four to six weeks in a regular room, I’d say. As long as he’s in traction. When we remove the pins, put casts on his legs—that’s when he can go home. He’ll be able to get around on crutches. But the important thing now is that he keep calm, that we watch him closely. And that you folks take care of yourselves, too.” He peers at us almost sternly over his half-glasses. “It’s going to be a long haul. It’s going to be difficult for everyone. So try not to place unreasonable demands on yourselves these first few days.”
“He’s right,” Ted says when the doctor’s excused himself and hurried off to his next patient.
“But he’s not us,” I say. “Not me, anyway.” I’m surprised to sound so belligerent—I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to hurt Ted’s feelings, either, but I can see on his face that I have. And Mom, too. But nobody’s getting me out of here, no way.
They don’t argue with me. We go eat a quick breakfast in the cafeteria, then I go back to Dad’
s room, where the new nurse says I can stay as long as he remains stable and as long as I don’t get in anybody’s way.
He sleeps mostly, but I like being there when he wakes. Now and then, he gets restless, pulls at the arm restraints, and I talk to him, calm him. The alarm on the ventilator goes off more often now. It’s because he’s hyperventilating, the nurse explains. Now that he’s more aware, he’s probably in some pain—plus, he has moments of anxiety and confusion. The machine has to adjust to the changes in his system that all those feelings cause.
By afternoon, it’s happening more. I lean as close as I can get to Dad’s face on the pillow so he can hear me over the noise, and I talk to him. It gets so that I can make the alarm stop by talking in a certain way.
I think of the right-brain exercise we did in Mrs. Blue’s English class last year: she turned out the lights, made us put our heads down on our desks, close our eyes, relax—and with her voice alone she took us on an imaginary journey up a mountain path. I remember how I actually felt the night breeze against my skin so keenly that I shivered. I felt the steep rocky path beneath my feet, heard the branches of ancient trees shifting and creaking above me. As I neared the top, I saw the dancing flames of a campfire. An old man sat in front of it. He was small and wizened, dressed in a black wizard’s cape that was trimmed with slices of moon. He handed me a notebook like Brady’s divorce notebook, but the pages in it were blank and shining.
When it was over and we came back to the harsh light of the classroom, we were all amazed. Each of us had taken our own journey, found our own unique path, our own wise man, received his gift. We were like grade-school kids, waving our hands, dying to tell our stories.
“Now you know what happens when a writer writes a story,” Mrs. Blue told us. “He actually goes to that place, experiences it as something absolutely real. On another plane.”
I want to take Dad on a journey now, someplace far away from this hospital, far away from pain and fear and confusion. I start with one of our weird vacations. “We’re in the old Jeep,” I say, “the first one you got, after the divorce. We’re on a country road, looking for the Daisy BB Gun Plant and Air Gun Museum.”
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