Warhead

by Jeff Henigson

  My parents sat down.

  “It may take a bit,” Mom said. “We’re waiting on a wristband and a room assignment, and—”

  I cut Mom off. “No worries,” I said. The girl was looking straight at us. I didn’t want Mom to reveal me as the patient. I could see she was about to say something more, so I jumped in again. “You just let them take their sweet, pleasant time,” I said, winking. Mom smiled a little awkwardly.

  I started praying that the girl’s dad would get called before me. That way I could make a clean exit. But it seemed uncertain—we’d registered first. A better bet would be for me to head off to the bathroom for a while, like Mom had.

  I was just about to do exactly that when a nurse who’d briefly spoken with the lady who registered me started walking in our direction.

  “Heningson?” she said, mispronouncing our name like everyone always did.

  “Henigson,” Dad said. My back stiffened. I took a glimpse in the girl’s direction. She was looking right at me.

  The nurse, holding a clipboard in one hand and a wristband in the other, smiled at Dad. “May I have an arm, Jeff?” she said to him.

  Dad sighed. “I certainly wish I were the one undergoing all of this.” He motioned toward me. “This is my son,” he said. “That’s Jeff.”

  I could feel my face go bright red. I was sure the girl was looking at me, but I didn’t look back.

  * * *

  •

  Around three in the afternoon of my second day in the hospital, while I was playing cards with Ted and trying to ignore how neurotic Mom and Dad seemed as they paced around in the background, Dr. Egan and her team showed up at my room. We’d seen her that morning, when she’d explained the day’s procedure: a cerebral angiogram. Totally calmly, she’d explained how a plastic catheter was going to be inserted into a large artery in my leg and threaded up that blood vessel all the way to the carotid artery in my neck. Dye would be injected into my brain that would reveal in an X-ray any blood flow to the tumor. Mom had winced throughout Dr. Egan’s description. Dad clenched his jaw. I told them both to take a chill pill. The thing to worry about wasn’t the procedure itself—which ended up going just fine—it was what the procedure might reveal.

  The Dr. Egan in front of us with the results that afternoon was completely different from the one we’d seen that morning. Her posture was stiff. Her smile had left. The expression on her face was hard to read, but it reminded me of Dr. Gourevik.

  Ted folded his cards and hopped off the bed. Mom and Dad nodded hello to Dr. Egan and huddled close. I tried to straighten up, but that made pain shoot through my bandaged right leg. I grimaced.

  “The angiogram has revealed a number of blood vessels going into the tumor,” Dr. Egan said. “Frankly, it was something I was hoping not to see.”

  “Why were you hoping not to see lots of blood vessels?” I asked.

  “Because they are a potential indicator of cancer and could also make tomorrow’s surgery more complicated.”

  I frowned. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I know you like to be fully informed, Jeff.”

  I crossed my arms and stared at her. Even though she was a foot away and talking to me, it took a while for her to actually look back. “Wait a second, are you asking me if I want to go ahead with the surgery?”

  She nodded. “I was about to.”

  “I didn’t think I had an option. Dr. Gourevik said the tumor had to come out. You agreed with him. Are you saying there’s an option?”

  “I’m saying that the surgery may be more dangerous than I thought.”

  “So what you’re actually saying is I need the surgery, but it might kill me. Is that it?”

  Dr. Egan slowly nodded. “It’s unlikely, but it’s a possibility. I just can’t give you any guarantees.”

  Mom moaned. Dad drew in a breath and exhaled slowly. Ted stared at his cards.

  A chill went down my spine. I looked at my hands.

  Dr. Egan had been standing at the foot of the bed, but now she came around to the side. “May I sit?” she asked. I didn’t look at her. I just motioned that she could.

  “There is something I can promise you, Jeff. I will do everything that is humanly possible. I will not quit. I’ll give you everything I have.”

  Her words rang in my ears. It felt as if her confidence was back. She was ready.

  I decided I was, too. I looked up at her and nodded.

  * * *

  •

  Until that afternoon visit from Dr. Egan, I had never once thought of my own death. Sure, I had plenty of nightmares about dying, thanks to Grandma’s bedtime Holocaust stories, but I didn’t walk around thinking something might actually kill me. Now that death seemed possible, I found myself wanting something I’d been after my whole life: for my dad to tell me he loved me.

  I got a nasty blood infection when I was twelve. It gave me an off-the-charts fever and made my liver bulge out above my stomach. I was hoping I’d hear those words then, but Dad just patted my shoulder and told me to hang in there. At the time, it really bummed me out. But I got around to reasoning that my actual life wasn’t on the line—that if it had been, he would have said the words I was after.

  The evening before surgery, with worry about my own death gnawing at me all afternoon since Dr. Egan’s bone-chilling visit, Dad and I were alone in the hospital room. Ted had just high-fived me and wished me luck and headed home, and Mom had stepped out to have a quick chat with him in the hallway. Dad had been sitting in the recliner, going over papers from work, but he got up and came over to the side of my bed.

  I was hoping he’d look at me, but his eyes were tracing the IV lines going in and out of me, and then the pole that held the heart rate monitor.

  I was struggling to sum up the courage to ask Dad if he loved me. I could come out of tomorrow’s surgery unable to speak or to understand anything he said to me. Worse, I could end up dead. I felt a pit deep in my gut. This could be our last conversation.

  He drew in a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “You’ve got a big day ahead of you,” he said, his eyes now on my hand, where a thick tube entered through a vein.

  “Dad,” I blurted out. He looked into my eyes, but all of a sudden I wasn’t sure what to say.

  He waited. I stayed silent. “What is it, Jeff?”

  I swallowed. “Do you, like, have anything you want to tell me?” My right hand started shaking, but I grabbed it with my left.

  Dad’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. He abruptly swallowed, the way I did when I got called on to speak in class but had nothing to say.

  “I…I want to tell you to fight the good fight tomorrow.”

  “Well, okay, but what if things go wrong? What if there are gazillions of blood vessels and Dr. Egan can’t get things under control and I end up dying? If that was the situation, is there anything you’d want to tell me now?”

  He tightened his grip on the metal crossbar of my bed. His eyes nervously traversed the space between us, never fixing on anything, never looking directly into mine. I could hear his breathing, light and fast, as if he’d just gotten back from one of his morning runs. His right hand was shaking, too.

  My father, someone a fellow World War II vet had once called “a vessel of confidence,” was filled with anxiety.

  After his silence, I felt that way, too.

  * * *

  •

  The next day, after surgery, in the early afternoon, I woke up to my mom’s touch. At first, I didn’t know where I was. Sounds seemed like they were coming through a muffled speaker. But I could feel a hand resting on top of mine, and I knew it was my mom’s. Her thumb was stroking my wrist. Her fingers were wrapped around my palm. I could feel her squeezes, like she was speaking to me in her own Morse code, pulsing out “I’m here” and “I love you.”
>
  That’s the first thing I clearly heard before finally getting around to opening my eyes. In a crackly voice, I said the same thing back to her.

  It took a while to fully register where I was. There was something sticking out of the side of my head that made it uncomfortable to turn. I reached for it, but Mom stopped me. “What is it?” I said.

  “It’s a drain tube.”

  “What’s it draining?”

  “Fluid from your brain.”

  That’s when I realized what I was waking up from.

  My eyes were so dry it hurt to move them. I asked Mom to get in front of me so I could see her. Her eyes were full of tears, but she was smiling. I didn’t want her to leave, not even for a second.

  She stayed for a long time. Her smile was soothing. It looked genuine, too, like she was celebrating. I asked her a few days later what she had been thinking in that moment. “That my son was alive,” she told me. “That he could speak. That everything was going to be okay.”

  From time to time, she glanced to her side and gestured with her head. I realized what she was doing—trying to get Dad to come over. She kept at it, but I could tell from her jaw clenching that she was getting frustrated. “Bob, come here,” she finally said, ordering him into position. Even then, it felt like a lot of time passed before he appeared.

  He looked like fish do after you catch them and pull them out of the water. Mom had him in position, but it was like he didn’t belong there. The muscles around his neck were flexing like gills in need of air. His eyes were blinking rapidly.

  He touched my hand after Mom pushed his elbow. He didn’t speak until she prodded him again.

  He finally managed to say, “Hi, Jeff.”

  He cleared his throat then. It seemed like he was going to say something, like ask me how I was doing, or congratulate me for making it through surgery. When I saw how much he was struggling, I hoped he might be trying to say something much bigger. Seeing him struggle so much made me nervous, too. I clamped down on his hand and waited.

  “Jeff,” he said. “When you’re discharged from the hospital, and feeling up to it, you may have a party.”

  I immediately let go of his hand. Weeks before, I’d asked him if I could have a party at our house, just for fun, like my friends did every once in a while. He told me I’d have to earn it, and pulled a list of tasks straight out of the air. “Wash your mom’s car. Mow the lawn. Pull the weeds in the garden. Water the trees. Clean the pool. See if it needs chlorine.” The list went on. I knew it would keep growing until I gave up, so I did.

  He thought a party was going to brighten up my life now, in a hospital ICU, after my skull had been sawed open and a tumor had been carved out of my brain.

  I pressed my lips tightly together. I was filled with anger, so much of it I couldn’t feel the pain in my body or my head.

  I glared at my father. “I don’t want a party,” I said. “I just want you to leave.”

  When I first woke up in the ICU, I didn’t want Mom to leave my side. But by the end of my second day there, with her asking me every two seconds if I needed anything, I practically wanted to boot her out. Dad had pissed me off with that crap about how I could have a party, but at least he wasn’t stressing me out just by being around.

  That evening, I was in the middle of a nap when I was startled awake by a nurse’s voice blaring through the speaker above my bed. “Can I help you?” the voice said. My eyes popped open to see Mom, inches away from me, with her finger next to the intercom button.

  “Everything all right?” Dad said from the recliner. Mom ignored him.

  “One of my son’s IV bags is almost empty,” Mom said. “No one has been by in the last forty-seven minutes.” She sounded irked.

  There was a pause. Mom tapped away on the metal frame of my bed. “I’ll have someone stop by,” the nurse finally got around to saying. Mom shook her head and exhaled sharply.

  A minute passed, and in that time Mom asked me twice how I was doing. I assured her I felt fine. When the nurse showed up a moment later, smiling at us with a fresh bag in her hand, Mom just pointed at the empty one.

  With the new bag in place and Mom still right next to me, the nurse maneuvered to adjust something on the wall directly behind my bed. In the process, she accidentally whacked my drain tube, the one coming out of the side of my head. I felt a surge of pain and grimaced, and Mom screeched. Dad jumped to his feet and rushed over to my bed. “What happened?” he said. He’d glanced at me, but his focus was on Mom.

  “She slammed Jeff’s head, that’s what happened!” Mom said, shaking her hands. She turned to me, distraught, but with concern on her face. “Are you okay, Jeff?” The nurse was frozen in place, her lips trembling. She looked pretty freaked out.

  Dad was standing just behind Mom. His eyes were drilling into mine, demanding my attention. He motioned toward Mom as she shook and tutted over me, then flicked his head toward me. I got his message.

  I labored to make the pain in my head disappear from my face. “I’m totally fine, Mom,” I said. She wasn’t convinced. Dad nodded, like I was moving in the right direction.

  I wrenched myself up in bed. My leg throbbed suddenly, in the area where they’d inserted the catheter for the cerebral angiogram, but I kept the pain buried. Mom turned back toward the nurse, who winced like she was expecting to be slapped, and that’s when I extended an arm, perforated with half a dozen IV tubes, and grasped my mom’s shoulder. She whirled back.

  “Mom,” I said, making my voice sound as deep and calm as I could. Her brow was furrowed, her lips slightly separated, as if she was afraid of what I was going to tell her.

  I’d already removed my hand from her shoulder. Now I flipped it over, palm up. I motioned toward it with my nose. Mom looked down and clasped it.

  Dad stood there, observing. I felt the pain in my head, but I had to ignore it. I placed my other hand on top of Mom’s. “Everything’s good, you hear me?” I forced a smile.

  She let a long breath out and nodded. Dad, almost imperceptibly, nodded his approval.

  A minute later, with everything much more relaxed, the nurse left the room. Mom followed her out, I’m sure to deliver a major lecture. That’s when Dad turned to me. “You’re taking it like a soldier,” he said. I was blown away by the comparison, considering he’d actually fought in World War II and he’d never said anything like that before.

  He wasn’t finished. “It’s really helping your mother.”

  I stuck my hands in my armpits, my thumbs pointing up. I exhaled deeply. I got what he was telling me. It was like right there, in the hospital room, I had an actual job to do. Not only that, but Dad was telling me I was doing it well.

  I looked into my father’s eyes and grinned. Like a soldier, I said, “Yes, sir!”

  * * *

  •

  In the days after that moment in the ICU when I managed to chill Mom out, I found myself getting more stressed. Mom had nothing to do with it—if anything, her newfound calm helped me relax. The problem was Dr. Egan weaning me off the pain pills. They’d kept my mind suspended in a relatively warm daze. Now I was being dropped into a cold reality. I became conscious of everything around me.

  The lights in the ICU, which I’d hardly noticed before, were on around the clock. The heart monitor was constantly beeping. The only real distinction between day and night was who was around, and the hushed conversations going on between staff on the slower night shifts—about a new movie, who was sleeping with whom, and so on—were loud enough to keep me awake. Other times, an alarm would fire off, and I’d hear nurses and residents rush to a room down the hall. The more aware I became, the more anxious I felt.

  On the morning of my fourth day in the ICU, which was starting to feel like detention, Mom walked in wearing a confident smile. She had a grocery bag in one hand. “I’ve got something fo
r you, sweetie,” she said. My mind was on the code-blue alarm that had gone off fifteen minutes earlier, which meant that someone on my floor had gone into cardiac arrest. But I didn’t mention that to Mom.

  I reached into the bag she handed over and instantly recognized the contours of my Walkman. I probably smiled genuinely then, because Mom’s eyes lit up. “How’d you manage to get this in here?” I asked. The day we checked into the hospital, the lady out front had told me they weren’t allowed.

  “I said to Dr. Egan that separating a teenager from his music would be an emergency, and she gave it the okay.”

  I thanked Mom, grabbing her hand and kissing it, then went back to the bag. It had headphones and the Walkman with fresh batteries in it, but nothing else. “How about the tapes?” I asked.

  Mom gasped, then touched her lips. “Did I actually forget them?” she said.

  I nodded and laughed.

  It turned out one was in there, a mixtape my buddy Paul had made for me earlier that summer. When I finally got Mom to stop apologizing, I put on the headphones and pressed play.

  The song that came on had an eerie beginning, a deep, dark hum with a clock countdown steadily ticking away and snippets of what sounded to me like radio transmissions between American and Soviet military personnel. It was Sting’s “Russians,” about the insanity of nuclear war. The moment it stopped, I rewound the tape and listened to it again.

  It didn’t matter to me that Mom had brought only the one tape. Even that afternoon, after she came by with more, I was still listening to it, and mostly to that one song. When Mom told me Dad would be by shortly, I looked forward to playing it for him, considering how concerned the two of us were about nukes, and I wondered what he’d say.