I went over to a coffee machine in the corner and stared at it. I suppose I went over to it because I’d seen people do that, in TV and films, but I didn’t want coffee or anything else. I went back to Jake and we took up the vigil together, staring at those blinds. Everything that happened to Sandy happened out of sight and out of our realm of knowledge and understanding. I didn’t know what the regulations were at the time about relatives being in the emergency room, but in retrospect I wish we’d forced our way in there to at least be by her side. As it stood we were excluded, relegated to the role of bystanders during those final and definitive moments.
People passed us and at some point a nurse asked us if there was anybody else we should contact and we both looked at her, dazed. I had to think of the question again, going over the words in my head, before I mentioned our mother and that she ought to be called but that one of us could do it. The woman moved away and Jake said he’d already tried Ma. I was fiddling with my phone, thinking I ought to try again, when the door to the operating theatre opened and a doctor came out. He had taken off his gloves and cap and mask but still had his scrubs on and the front was spattered with blood. I knew that it was Sandy’s blood and knew, too, by his expression that she was dead even before he came over and opened his mouth and said words to that effect. For a few minutes I shut down and was vaguely aware of Jake talking to the doctor in intense, terse tones, and when I tuned back in Jake was asking if we could go in and see her. The doctor said it would be okay but asked us to wait while they cleaned up the operating room. He stepped away from us gently, cautiously, moving backwards and keeping his eyes on us, as if he had a feeling that in our grief we posed a potential problem.
The door shut for a few minutes and opened again and the doctor came back out, and the rest of the trauma team came with him this time. They looked at us with sympathy and timidity and the doctor said we could now go in to see our sister if we wanted. He also said something about needing us to come talk to him afterwards but I don’t think we ever did.
The room was smaller than it had looked from the outside and darker than I expected. They had left the overheads off and turned out the surgical lights and the only illumination now came from a bedside lamp that cast a grim yellow glow. Jake closed the door behind us, shutting out the noise of the ward. Any surgical tools and instruments had been removed, and the machinery all around her that had presumably been working to keep her alive, or monitor her life, was still and quiet. The dim silence had a dense and murky underwater quality to it, as if we had locked ourselves in a submersible and were slowly floating down, away from the world of light and warmth that we had always known, towards some place else.
Sandy lay on the operating table in the middle of the room. Her lower half had been covered by a sheet. The sides of the sheet were bloodied. We went to stand on either side of her and we each took one of her hands and the one I held felt as warm as my own, as warm as it always had. Her face was bruised and one cheek swollen into a grotesque bulge but she was still recognizable as her, or what had once been her. Jake reached down for the sheet. When I saw that he was going to raise it I looked up and away, at him, so I never saw what happened to her legs. But I sometimes think that seeing the reaction on his face was worse, in a way.
After that I did something odd. I walked over to the corner of the room and sat down and sort of curled up, like a child or a wounded dog. Jake, he stayed beside her. I could hear him talking to her in low and tender tones and even though I couldn’t make out the words I knew what he was saying and just wished she could have heard it. Through all of this I’ve never been tempted by any notion of comfort in another life and have no doubts that what was lying on the table was no longer our sister, and in that state had meaning only to us.
The door opened. I thought it would be the doctor coming back, but when I rolled over I saw it was somebody else – a younger woman about our age. She wasn’t in the OR scrubs and instead wore some kind of blue uniform. She stopped and made a startled sound and put her hand to her mouth. I couldn’t stand but managed to sit up, facing towards her.
She said she hadn’t known anybody was in there and I explained that we were family, that we were her brothers. Then she started talking, a bit too fast, and it took me a moment to work out that she was saying she had been part of the paramedic team that arrived at the crash site. She said she’d wanted to see Sandy, to check up on her. She said she probably wasn’t supposed to and apologized and then she said she’d never seen anything like that and she put her hand to her mouth again and started to cry. Seeing those tears made me wonder why neither of us was crying and I remember being hazily aware that I was probably still in shock. Jake stood looking curiously at the girl and then went to shut the door behind her and said he wanted to ask her about something. She wiped at her eyes and said that would be okay. First he got her to describe the crash site: what it had looked like when she arrived. She told us about the demolished vehicle and how her supervisor had known right away that they needed the fire department and the jaws of life to cut out the driver. Sandy was unconscious at that time and the girl had stayed next to her, just talking to her gently through the broken window, in the ten minutes it took the crew to arrive. I did not think to thank her for that at the time, but I have thanked her often since, in looking back on it, offering up my silent gratitude like a futile and hollow prayer.
The girl – who was staring at the floor, remembering – said that Sandy had come around when they cut her out of the car. Jake asked her if Sandy had been lucid at that time, which confused the girl and she said something about them giving Sandy morphine for the pain, but that wasn’t what Jake was getting at. He put his hands on the girl’s shoulders, not roughly, but as if he needed to make sure she understood what he was asking. He asked if Sandy had been aware and understood what had happened to her legs. The girl had to think. Possibly she was thinking about lying to us. But eventually she admitted that Sandy had been crying out about her legs as they loaded her into the ambulance and after that the girl didn’t know any more.
When Jake heard that he sat on the edge of Sandy’s bed and put his hands to his face, as you might if you were splashing yourself with water, only in this case he held them there for a long time. The girl said she was sorry again and I expected her to leave, but she didn’t. Her presence didn’t seem out of place in any way, though, and she stayed with us until Jake stood up and headed for the door and shoved it open and left. I went after him. I came out of that dim murk into the blazing lights of the ward and the noise and the people. I spotted Jake down one of the hallways, moving away from me, hunched forward and cradling his guts as if he were physically hurt or wounded. I called out his name and started to hurry. He reached the end of the hall where there was a big plate-glass window overlooking Oak Street. In front of the window was a gurney, an empty gurney, and Jake picked that up and hurled it at the window. Only the window didn’t break. They must have safety glass in those places, in case of all the things that might happen, things like that. The window didn’t break but the gurney did. It bounced off and landed in a tangled mess, upside down, like a dead mantis.
I reached Jake at the same time as two orderlies. They held him – gently – by both arms, but he didn’t struggle or react to them in any way. It was as if they weren’t even there. He looked at me and his face was teary and boyish-looking and filled with a terrible hatred. Keep me away from that guy, he said, or I’m going to kill him. It sounded like a vow. At that time we didn’t even know the name of the driver, but I told Jake I would and that was just one of the many ways in which I failed him, one of the many ways in which I’m just as responsible as him for all the no-good things that he’s done.
On