Read by Silas Hawkins
Bill regulated his breathing by focusing on the steady rise and fall of his son’s chest. The synchronized up-and-down, in-and-out pattern steadied him. Sean had flecks of grey at his temples, stubble on his chin, but hell, they never stopped being your kid. The steady beep from the monitor ping-pinged in the background. Bill took a pillow and plumped it between his hands. He imagined the soft foam covering Sean’s nose and mouth, pictured his legs and arms jerking as oxygen leaked out of his muscles. How much pressure did it take? When he looked at Sean’s greying hair, at the unshaven chin, he tightened his hold on the pillow. Sean’s hand rested on top of the blanket, his fingers rhythmically tapping against the coarse fibres. Bill closed his eyes.
It started ten years earlier when a sleepy late-night driver slid across the median and ploughed head on into Sean’s car. For Bill it was a morbid consolation that the person responsible for hurting Sean ended up killing himself in the process. He was on his way home from his fiancée’s house. Later, Trish told them he wanted to get home to prepare for an important business meeting. Bill obsessed over what Sean’s last thoughts were when the headlights caught him in the darkened car and his pupils constricted. Did he gasp in a breath as he swallowed the prayer, “Oh, God,” his fingers white on the steering wheel, bracing for what he could not avoid?
A few weeks before the accident Sean had said, “God, Mom and Dad, I’m so lucky. A great job and now Trish. I can’t wait to marry her.” Bill and Susan were proud of him, tall and handsome, a thick moustache, a tax lawyer earning more in his first year of work than Bill had in his last. At thirty-two, he already had it all.
Trish stayed by Sean’s bedside in a trance not unlike his. She read to him from the newspaper, held his limp hand, dozed beside him in worn blue jeans, her hair pulled into a ponytail, held his hand through the murky four weeks of his coma and the exhilaration of his beginning to wake up. She held on as the slow comprehension seeped in; Sean would never be the same.
“But he’ll get better, won’t he?” Trish asked. The question haunted Bill. Sean would get better, wouldn't he? He had to. They stood in the hall outside Sean’s room cradling Styrofoam cups of bitter coffee. Trish smiled, as if her brightness could ward off the unthinkable. “He will get better, won’t he?”
Sean looked the same but the circuitry inside his head was smashed and what remained was a grown man with a seven-year old’s innocent trust. And no memory of Trish. Nothing.
That didn’t keep her from praying for a miracle. “When you get better we’ll finish making our plans for the wedding,” she said, whispering their secret memories. Bill had to leave the room, he couldn’t watch. Her love for Sean, her fidelity to the memory of who he was and what they had been together, kept her rooted to him. But the accident took away more than Sean’s memory, it erased his ability to store new ones. He had a strange hold on distant memories, as if the injury had removed the top layers of his past and left behind odd fragments from childhood. She was supposed to be his wife, yet each day he met her as if it was the first time.
“How are you?” Trish leaned down to kiss him.
“I’m okay.” Sean blushed when he asked, “Who are you?”
Sean never saw that sadness clouded her eyes. He couldn’t comprehend the loneliness of her devotion to a life they'd planned to share. He was a tax lawyer who had trouble adding; a handsome man-boy who flirted with the pretty girl holding his hand; a love struck puppy smiling blankly at everything she said. Susan released her from the vigil, untying the knot they never had a chance to tighten.
“Honey, it’s okay to let go. Sean would have wanted you to start over.”
Trish married a few years later, sweetly inviting the three of them. A beautiful wedding invitation arrived with a handwritten note. “I would love to have you share my day. I miss Sean and will never stop loving him. I hope you understand. Love, Trish.”
They went, but without Sean. Both cried as they watched the woman who was to be the mother to their grandchildren marry someone else’s son.
The nurse had turned down the lights in Sean’s room and pulled the curtain closed.
“He’ll be awake soon. Anaesthesia can be funny stuff, it can take a while to wear off,” she said.
The green lights of the monitor glowed like light passing through water and strangely altered by it. Sean had had his first seizure three years before.
“It’s probably a residual effect of the brain injury,” Dr. Gallagher said. “Let’s run some tests to be sure.”
Bill and Susan waited in the doctor’s office. Dr. Gallagher snapped the film into the light box and the picture of Sean’s brain stared back, the large scars from his accident as familiar as the grinning toothless portrait of him in grade school. The doctor pointed to a spot on the screen.
“This is new. A meningioma, a kind of tumour.” He sat behind his desk, the fingers of his hands steepled together. “The fixed margins of the skull and the tumour push against each other and that causes the seizures.” Dr. Gallagher took off his glasses and dropped them on top of the chart. “It’s remarkable, really. Like lightning striking the same place twice.”
“What do we do now?” Bill asked.
“Surgery is our best bet.” The black hands of the wall clock ticked and jerked with each passing second.
“And if we do nothing?” Bill asked.
“That’s an option. But without surgery he’ll keep having seizures. Even though he has a significant brain injury, he is otherwise healthy. Surgery will give him a chance to stay that way.”
Susan reached for Bill’s hand, but he shook her off. “Bill?”
“Hasn’t he suffered enough?”
Bill was silent on the drive back to the hospital. When he pulled into the parking lot and stopped the engine, Susan turned to face him.
“We have to do it,” she said resting a hand on his thigh. “I can’t bear to see him go through more seizures. They scare him,” she rubbed her hand in a circle, “and they scare me.”
Bill pounded his palm against the steering wheel. “Why? Why Sean? He never did anything to deserve this.”
Susan scooted close and pulled Bill toward her. She slipped her hand around to the nape of his neck where she fingered his hair and rubbed the cord of muscles. “We can’t do nothing.”
“Sean, sweetie.” Susan sat on the edge of the bed, her fingers straightening the covers. “Dr. Gallagher says you need to have surgery.”
“Mom, I have red Jell-O!” He held up a jiggling spoonful.
One thumb circled his cheek while she cupped his chin. “Aren’t you a lucky boy?” Bill walked out of the room.
They sat in the hospital waiting room, Susan crocheting quietly while the TV blared out a game show. The endless wait and the agony of the unknown wore him down. Damn hospital, damn waiting room.
“How can you just sit there?” he said. Susan laid the yarn down and looked up. “Sean could die from this,” he shouted, “and you’re making a blanket!” His words echoed in the room. She fingered the yarn but said nothing. “Or worse,” Bill said, “he could live another forty years, and we won’t be here.”
Saying out loud what he was most afraid of silenced him. They wanted Sean to live, wasn’t that what they prayed for? Yet if he outlived them, what then? Bill sank into a chair, he cradled his head in his hands. “I hate this.”
They nursed him back to health together, then just as the hard part was over Susan had a stroke so powerful she fell to the ground in a limp bundle, her sight and hearing, her taste and smell, her being, lost instantly. Bill was grateful she didn’t linger, that she didn’t suffer. He missed her as much as he missed the Sean from before the accident. Caring for him became his job, a daily reminder of what the accident had robbed them of.
Each morning Sean asked the same question. “Where’s Mom?”
“Remember?” Bill answered. “Mom went to heaven. She’s waiting for us there.” Then the seizures started again and Sean needed more surgery.
Sean rested in bed among the lines and cables that snaked up to the monitor. The nurse had lowered the volume, yet Bill was aware of the steady clicks of Sean’s heart rate moving like a too-fast sweep hand on a watch. Which of them would go first? His own heart was weak. The prognosis for Sean wasn’t good. The words he’d shouted at Susan repeated themselves in his mind. “Sean could live and we won’t be here.” Who would care for him the way they had? Who would be there to be part of the memories that managed to survive? A get-well-card from Trish was taped to the wall. She kept track of them, sending a card at Christmas and on Sean’s birthday. The last time they saw her was at Susan’s funeral. The priest had finished his prayers and while Bill and Sean stood at the graveside people paraded by offering words of sympathy, a handshake or a polite embrace. Trish waited until no one was left. She hugged Bill, then kissed Sean on his cheek. “I’m so sorry,” she’d said. The card included a picture of her children, a boy and a girl. If it weren’t for Sean’s accident, Trish would be at the hospital, the two children would be Bill’s grandchildren.
That kind of thinking didn’t help. He had to decide what to do, to decide what he could live with. From behind the curtain, he couldn’t see the nurses' station and the nurses couldn’t see him. Who would know if he did the unthinkable? The nurse said anaesthesia could be funny stuff.
Bill leaned against the side rails, his fingers curled around the edges of the pillow. He waited for something, a catalyst, passion, grief, anger, something to propel his muscles and in so doing provide relief, maybe peace. A way to control the situation, to take charge instead of being at the mercy of a merciless fate. He squeezed his eyes shut trying to recall the anguish he’d felt when they first realized Sean was permanently damaged. But nothing came to him. There was no message from Susan. No answer to his unanswerable prayer. “Take Sean,” he’d prayed it over and over when Sean was in surgery. “Please, God, take him.” The timing would have been perfect. For once why couldn’t God get it right?
When he opened his eyes, the room was strangely quiet. The sound of the monitor and the noises of the hospital dissolved away. In their place was the morning quiet of the mountains after a snow storm. Clean, white, unblemished. Pure.
Looking down he saw Sean’s hand moving. Before he woke from the coma, before any of them knew Sean would never be the same, he had moved his right hand in a rhythmic dance. His fingers traced a path across his thumb like he was using them to count, like a musician responding to a tempo. Sean’s music was silent, his counting added up to nothing. Bill punched the pillow with his fists. Then he lifted his son’s head and placed the pillow underneath.
Sean’s eyes twitched before he opened them. “Daddy, is that you?”
Bill slid his hand into Sean’s and squeezed. “I’m here, buddy.”
--
Intensive Care by Ann Brady was read by Silas Hawkins at the Liars’ League Brains & Beauty event on Tuesday 14 September 2010 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London
An oncology nurse by day, a writer by night, Ann Brady has had several short stories published. She writes a monthly column in the magazine Oncology Nurse Advisor. An American, Ann lived in London from age 10 to age 16 and attended school in Cavendish Square.
Silas Hawkins is continuing the family voiceover tradition (he is the son of Larry the Lamb and Earnest the Policeman). Recent credits include the narration of a 4-part documentary on Latin music for the BBC and the voicing of a singing pink alien frog thingy for animated children's series Wonderpets. Voice Agent: [email protected] Acting Agent: [email protected]
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