Neither of us said much. Periodically, Jacqui and I, alone or together, would wander into the ward, slip between the curtains to David’s bed, hoping for some change, some development.
“They’ve got him pretty sedated,” she said at one point, staring down at him. “They’ll see what happens when he starts to come around in the morning.”
“I know.”
As I moved past her, I touched her softly in the small of the back and then walked away.
Standing outside, just around the corner from the ER entrance I lit a cigarette. I was blowing out the first lungful of smoke when the doors slid open and Jacqui stepped out.
I reflexively tucked the cigarette out of sight, though I knew she had already seen me.
“Busted,” I said sheepishly.
“Can I have one?” she asked.
I fumbled with the pack, then cupped my hands around the Zippo to light it for her. I was stunned.
She took a deep drag and held it for a moment, shuddering slightly as she restrained a cough. “Almost twelve years,” she said. “When did you start again? With more than the token one or two a day, I mean.”
I tried to think. “It’s been a pretty rough year.”
“Yeah.”
We puffed in silence for a long moment, watching the smoke curl up toward the streetlights.
“We don’t both need to be here,” she said. “Nothing’s going to change before morning.”
“Do you want to—?”
She shook her head. “I can’t.” She gestured at the ER.
“Right.” Not with her co-workers watching. Not when she felt she could, maybe, do something, anything, if she needed to. “When are you supposed to work next?”
“Monday. Afternoon.” She took a drag off her cigarette. “We’re going to need to get some sleep.”
“Yeah.”
I dropped my cigarette and crushed the butt with my heel. I didn’t want to leave. I could see what she was saying, but it wasn’t just David that I wanted to be there for.
How long had it been since we had shared a cigarette late on a Saturday night? How long had it been since we were on the same side in a fight?
“So you think I should—” I gestured toward a cab waiting a short distance away.
“Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I lied. “I understand.”
“I’ll call you if anything—”
“Yeah.” I nodded emphatically. I took a couple of steps toward the cab and then it hit me. “You’re thinking this is going to be a long-term thing.”
She hesitated, and the sudden weight of our situation crushed in on me. That look on Jacqui’s face, that pause: David wasn’t going to be better when I returned in the morning.
I let myself in through the front door. I had to see it for myself.
Everywhere I went there were signs of a tragedy: a knocked-over stack of magazines in the living room; the kitchen sink full of cold grey dishwater; a pile of Davy’s laundry that I had folded and placed on the stairs for him to take up to his room now scattered and strewn. I imagined the heavy shoes of the paramedics kicking at the clothes, a T-shirt catching in the wheels of the stretcher.
I tried to breathe evenly as I climbed the stairs. David’s bedroom was the worst of all.
His blankets had been pulled across the floor. The mattress had slid partly off the bed frame, its corner bright blue where the sheet had pulled away.
I surveyed the chaos slowly, trying to build a story around what I knew and what I was seeing. Davy in the early stages of the seizure, falling out of bed, trying to hang on but dragging the mattress with him. His flailing arms catching the bedside table, knocking it over, smashing the lamp, scattering all of his most prized possessions—baseball, glove, video game, book—onto the floor. I could see my son staggering around the bedroom, crashing into the shelf by the door, knocking books to the floor, smashing the glass of a picture of the three of us at Disneyland. Falling against his desk, spilling the glass of water, pens falling to the carpet, Nolan’s plastic cage tumbling onto its side.
I could see him in the middle of the floor, his body heaving and shuddering in the rounded, clear space amidst the chaos, his teeth uncontrollably gnawing into his tongue, his lips.
Unable to bear where my imagination was taking me, I kept noticing small details: the way the spilled water pooled around the edges of his computer keyboard. The faint, blue glow from the video game, which had fallen open. The way the baseball seemed to sit at the lip of the glove, as if about to be caught.
Standing there, surrounded by his life, by those things he loved, I wanted to take David something, something to comfort him, something to tuck into the hospital bed with him. Something familiar that would be there when he woke up.
Until he was about six, David had loved a battered brown teddy bear. He had called the bear Pik, after a Pokemon, and he carried it with him everywhere, usually by the ear. Jacqui and I had thought there would be a fight when it came time to separate the two of them, but David took care of the separation on his own. We had only noticed the absence of the bear after a few days.
I wished I knew where the bear was: it would have been perfect. Something to hold, something soft, something familiar and meaningful.
I stepped into the room and righted Nolan’s cage. The hamster was all right, cowering in the corner beside his overturned food bowl. David’s old baseball glove lay on the floor; it was dingy and battered and soft. That would have to do.
As I bent to pick it up, though, I spotted To the Four Directions beside it on the floor, partially concealed by the sheet. I had noticed it before, but it hadn’t really registered: what was the book doing in his room? Jacqui had put it on top of the fridge, homeland of exiled objects.
“That little …”
I could picture it; it was something I would have done.
No wonder he didn’t put up any resistance to going to bed.
I replaced the book on top of the fridge before going out the back door. No need for Jacqui to know.
It was only lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, that it occurred to me: the book was in his room. He wouldn’t have forgotten to replace it in the kitchen before he went to sleep, risking his mother’s wrath. And it was partially under the sheet.
David had been reading when the seizure hit.
II
On my way back to the hospital the next morning, I half expected to find David wide awake, sitting up in bed, playing that damn video game, as if my absence and a few hours in his mother’s tender care were enough to bring about a full recovery.
I found him exactly the way I had left him, broken and still.
I tucked his baseball glove into the crook of his arm, and kissed him gently on the forehead. “Good morning, Davy,” I whispered, before sitting down in the chair beside the bed.
Jacqui went home then, and I spent the morning at David’s side. I didn’t see a doctor at all until Jacqui returned several hours later: she was back less than three minutes and here he was.
He was older than the doctor we had seen the night before, balding, but with a bushy beard, almost sloppy in what looked like his street clothes. He glanced at me over the top of his glasses, but didn’t acknowledge me as he leaned against the bedrail and started flipping through the chart.
As Jacqui bent to brush David’s hair back from his forehead, she looked at the baseball glove. Biting her lower lip, she smiled at me.
“Has he ever had a seizure before?” the doctor asked.
“No—” Jacqui said, but he cut her off.
“Is there a family history of epilepsy?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
The doctor nodded, still looking at the chart. I don’t think he had glanced at David at all.
“Does”—he had to glance at the top of the sheet for his name—“David have any allergies? To food, or to any medication he might be taking?”
“Not that we’re aware of,” Jacqui said, her voi
ce growing cold, impatient. All the same questions.
The doctor nodded again, but he still wasn’t looking at David. “And has he suffered any injuries to his head recently?” he asked. “Sports, perhaps? Or a fight in the schoolyard?”
“No.”
The doctor pushed his glasses up. “Well, the tests came back negative for meningitis.” He looked at Jacqui, not at David. “I think the first thing we need to do is send your son …” He couldn’t even remember David’s name. “For some tests. I’ll order an MRI and a CAT scan.”
“Dr. McKinley put in a request for a CT last night,” Jacqui said.
“Then I’ll make sure that happens,” he said, momentarily focused. “He’ll get priority if he’s coming from Emergency. After, we’ll get him admitted and we’ll see what the tests show us.”
“Doctor,” I asked, “is it possible we’re jumping the gun a bit?” Jacqui looked at me—I couldn’t tell if she was agreeing with me or not. “Isn’t it possible that once the sedative wears off, he’ll just …”
The doctor was flipping through the file, and I had run out of words. I couldn’t shake the feeling that David was just going to wake up, that all of this would vanish behind us like a bad dream.
“According to this,” the doctor said, “your son was treated early last night with a single intravenous dose of lorazepam.” Jacqui nodded. “That should have worn off a little while ago.”
He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and looked up the bed at David. “Ah yes. It seems our patient is awake.”
My knees buckled at the words. I turned to smile at my son, my mouth tightened to say good morning.
But I stopped.
His eyes were open, but David didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at anything; his eyes were flat and dull, rolled partway back in his head, twitching from side to side.
“David?” I said quietly, trying to get his attention, to break the spell. And then more loudly, “David?”
He didn’t respond. A thin trail of saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth.
“David?”
Two and a half hours after taking David from the ER for an MRI and CT—with a promise to return him within the hour—the attendants brought him back. Jacqui and I tucked him under the covers. His body was heavy and slack and I couldn’t help but think of all the nights I had rolled and snugged him under his quilt after he had kicked it off.
His eyes were open, his pupils wide and darting from side to side. I leaned in close, trying to get his attention, hoping for a moment when his eyes would widen, when his face would set in a smile of recognition and he would say “Dad!” and throw his arms around my neck, but there was nothing: no recognition, no smile, no words.
Just an occasional blink, and that constant and oddly familiar flicker, back and forth.
“I’ll take the first shift,” Jacqui said quietly.
I glanced at her. I had been staring at David for a long time.
I didn’t want to leave, but I agreed with her, already thinking ahead to the night to come, building elements of routine out of what had been unimaginable just the day before.
I ruffled Davy’s hair.
Back at the house, I went into the kitchen to check the answering machine. I was bone-tired, but I knew there was no chance I’d fall asleep. My mind was whirling.
No messages.
I took the copy of To the Four Directions off the top of the fridge and let myself out the back door.
In my apartment, I ignored the bottle of vodka beckoning me from the freezer and ran myself a glass of tap water.
I wasn’t sure why I had brought David’s book up with me. I certainly wasn’t in the mood to read, and the book should have been a reminder of David being mad at me, his last words to me either sullen or laced with bile.
Last words—what was I thinking?
Curiously, though, all I could think about was how excited David had been to read it, the warmth I felt when I saw the light under his door when he was supposed to be asleep.
I sat in my reading chair and turned the book over in my hands, started idly flipping through the pages. The book felt loose, worn-in, the result of him—and who knows how many other kids—carrying it around, reading it, loving it.
I found the bookmark, which David likely had tucked randomly near the back of the book as he was reading.
World’s Best Dad.
Yeah, right.
Cupping the spine loosely in my hand, I let the pages fall open. It felt right to read the words that David had been reading. I had no way of knowing if this was where he had left off, but it looked like a good part. Something about Dafyd in a subterranean chamber, ghosts coming out of the walls. God, how I had eaten this stuff up.
I was shifting to cross my legs when I happened to catch sight of myself in the mirror across the room, a sudden glimpse of my face looking up from the book. A chill ran through me. I stood up, holding my place in the book with my forefinger, and walked slowly toward the mirror, never looking away from myself.
It couldn’t be …
I stopped almost against the mirror and gazed at my own eyes, watching the way they moved when I glanced to the right, then to the left.
I opened up the book and started to read a line, but I couldn’t read and look at my reflection at the same time. I shook my head—there had to be a way.
I turned the book around so the printed pages faced the mirror, and lifted it in front of my face until the top of the spine was across the bridge of my nose. In the mirror, I looked crazed, only my eyes visible above the book.
I ran my eyes along the reflected lines of text, not trying to decipher the words but trying to catch sight of myself reading, trying to see what my eyes looked like as they traversed the lines of the story.
I couldn’t do it—every time I tried to see what they looked like in the mirror, my eyes would stop and I’d be staring into my own pupils. Physicists have a term for it, the way observing something changes the thing being observed.
I pulled the book away from my face in frustration.
But it didn’t matter if I couldn’t prove it.
I considered the book in my hand with a mounting certainty: David’s eyes weren’t moving randomly. They were moving metronomically, from side to side, left to right.
He was reading.
III
WITH DAVID ADMITTED, we saw a different specialist the next morning. It was just as well—every time I thought of Dr. Whatever-the-hell-his-name-was, the way he barely looked at David, a cold fury built in me that made me want to hit something.
On the other hand, Dr. Rutherford, a stately, middle-aged man with silvering hair and a plummy South African accent, spent a long time with David. He tested reflexes and flexibility, checked his eyes and his ears, all of the usual measurements that the nurses had been tracking in his chart, and then asked us to step out of the room.
“I’m going to test his reaction to noxious stimuli,” he explained. “It’s not something that parents usually like to see.”
I was still waiting for an explanation when Jacqui took my arm and directed us into the corridor. A few seconds later David let out a sharp exclamation of pain and surprise. It was the first time I had heard my son’s voice in days, and I turned around and threw back the curtain.
The doctor was leaning over him with a needle in his hand.
“That’s the test, Chris,” Jacqui said from behind me. “It measures a patient’s level of consciousness by checking their reaction to pain.”
I let Jacqui turn me away.
We spent the next half hour with Dr. Rutherford as he pored over the MRI and CT results. Finally, he held up his hands and said, in his warmest voice, “I’m very sorry that I don’t have any more concrete information for you.”
After the doctor was gone, I cleared my throat. “Can I ask you something?”
Jacqui regarded me suspiciously.
I probably should have mentioned it to the doctor, but I knew it didn
’t make much sense. Still, the thought had been weighing on me.
“I think David might have been reading when the attack hit.”
“What makes you think that?”
I pulled the book out of the pocket of my jacket. “This was on the floor of his room, under the rest of the mess.”
It took Jacqui a moment to respond. “We put that on top of the fridge,” she said. “Did you—?”
I shook my head. “I think he snuck it off the fridge after you put him to bed.”
“It’s no wonder he didn’t put up a fight.”
I nodded. “I think he was reading—reading this—when he had the seizure.”
“But reading wouldn’t …”
“I know. I’m not saying that it caused the seizure, just that the two things happened at the same time.”
For few moments I watched the relentless movement of David’s hands, the constant flicker of his eyes.
“There’s one more thing,” I said slowly, not sure if I wanted to share this. She’d think I’d gone crazy.
“What?” she asked, looking at me.
I glanced at David’s eyes again.
“Look at this,” I said, opening up the book. “Watch my eyes.”
I started reading from the top of the page, exaggerating the reading movement somewhat, moving my eyes past both ends of each line, hoping it would be obvious to her.
When I stopped, Jacqui looked puzzled. “What?” she asked.
“Look at my eyes,” I stressed, repeating the whole pantomime.
“You’re reading,” she said. “I don’t …”
“Now look at David,” I said. “Look at his eyes.”
Jacqui looked down at David, then back at me. “His eyes are moving.”
I almost smiled. She saw what I was getting at.
“Chris, that’s called nystagmus. It’s involuntary.” Suddenly a nurse again. “It’s a symptom. We see it in patients with neurological problems, head injuries, that sort of thing.”
“I think it’s more than that,” I said. “The movement, it’s so regular, so consistent. It’s like his eyes are actually focused on something.”
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