The people at the triage desk in the ER seem just as relentlessly indifferent. “Benjamin Reese?” They scan computer screens, taking forever, before glancing back up at me with blank stares. Perhaps I should find comfort in their lack of concern; surely it can’t be serious if they don’t know? If they don’t care?
“Please take a seat, Miss…?”
“Ms. Reese. I’m his mother.” My voice rings out, cracking on the last word, and still no sympathy. They must see scenes like this a hundred, a thousand times over; they are immune, inoculated against grief by the sheer number of times they witness it.
“Please take a seat,” the woman repeats in a monotone, and without any other options, I do as I am told.
Five minutes later a nurse comes through the double doors of the ER ward and calls my name. I rise from my seat like a puppet being yanked on a string and walk towards her on stiff, marionette’s legs.
“Ms. Reese?”
“Yes—”
“You are Benjamin Reese’s mother?”
“Yes—”
“Please come this way.” I follow her through the double doors; they swing heavily behind me, making me feel as if I’d been entombed in the ER. She leads me to a small waiting room with green vinyl seats and a fake potted plant on a little fake wood table and I stop on the threshold, not wanting to go in. Not a little room, the little room where in the sappy movies the camera pans back from behind the glass, and you watch the doctor give the parents the terrible news, see them silently break down. Not that room.
“If you’d like to wait here, the doctor will be in to see you shortly.”
It is that room. And I am in it.
I pace the room; it is tiny, and it only takes three steps to cross it. I press my hand flat against the wall and then push off, as if I am swimming. I feel as if I am swimming, or wading through thick, cloying mud; it’s becoming hard to breathe. My mind skitters towards possibilities and then darts away again, fast. I can’t bear to think about any of them even for a second. I wish I could call someone, but there is no one. My life isn’t like that. It never has been.
I could call Juliet, maybe; she is my closest friend, perhaps my only friend. I know she would come if I ask her, and yet I resist making that call. I don’t want to make this real.
Then I think of Lewis, and my heart lurches with both despair and need. Lewis would know what to do in this situation. Lewis always knows what to do; he’s the most comfortingly capable person I’ve ever known. But I can’t call Lewis; I haven’t spoken to him in two weeks. And he’s not mine to call.
“Ms. Reese?”
I spin around to face a doctor in a white lab coat. He has thinning hair and glasses and he carries a clipboard; his face has that neutral look that doctors do so well.
“Where is Ben?” My voice comes out in a crack of accusation.
“I’m Dr. Stein,” the man answers, the faintest of rebukes in his voice for my having skipped such pleasantries. “And Ben is in a room across the hall. He’s had a fall and hit his head, as I believe you are aware. We’ve currently put him in a medically-induced coma, for his own protection and safety.”
I stare at him. “A what?”
“When Ben fell he experienced some trauma to his brain. There has been some swelling, some shearing…”
Shearing? I think of sheep. “I don’t know what that means.”
“When a person receives a traumatic injury to the brain,” Dr. Stein explains, his too-patient voice grating on my already raw emotions, “the axons in the nerves can be damaged or even torn. That’s what we call shearing. The injury to his brain also caused swelling, which increases the intracranial pressure. If that continues, we can relieve it by drilling a hole in his skull.”
Quite suddenly I feel as if I could be sick. Dr. Stein must see that in my face because he says with some alarm, “Ms. Reese?”
I swallow bile; my tongue feels thick in my mouth. I sit down hard on the vinyl sofa and rest my head on my knees. A few deep even breaths and I manage to speak. “Is he going to be all right?” I want the bottom line. Clearly I can’t handle the details.
“I can’t answer that question definitively,” Dr. Stein answers.
“Can you tell me anything?” I ask, my face still pressed to my knees. The room is fading in and out and I am having trouble breathing. My skin feels cold and clammy, my hands and feet tingling with pins and needles. I know I need to start coping, because Ben doesn’t have anyone else, although not for lack of trying on his part. For the last six months or so he’s been asking for a dad. Asking about his dad, and I don’t have any answers. Not ones I’m prepared to give.
“We will keep him in the coma in order for his brain to heal,” Dr. Stein explains. “The next twenty-four to forty-eight hours will be critical.”
I raise my head; the room swims before me. “Critical?” I repeat. “In what way?”
“For his survival, Ms. Reese,” he says and I reel back as if I’ve been struck. “Is there someone you can call?” Dr. Stein asks, because clearly he can see that I’m not coping well. “Someone who can be with you?”
I think again of Juliet; she’ll be with her three girls now, getting them from school, running them to various activities around the city. Ballet for Emma. Tae kwon do for Hannah. Archery for Lily. Juliet has a full-time aide—her word—to help her with the business of managing her three children’s privileged lives. But even with her aide, I know she’ll be busy; she might have even switched her phone off.
And then I think of Lewis. “Maybe,” I say, and I reach into my pocket to curl my hand around my phone. The thought of talking to Lewis, of hearing his steady voice, comforts me. “But first I want to see Ben.”
Dr. Stein nods. “When he is a little more stable, we’ll transfer him to the neurology department. But for now…” He opens the door, gesturing for me to go first even though I don’t know where I’m going. I step out of the room; I’m in that post-adrenalin rush, jelly-limbed and icy with cooled sweat. Distantly I hear the sound of a busy ER: beeps and sirens and someone crying. Another person groans.
“Right this way,” Dr. Stein murmurs and I follow him to a room with heavy, swinging doors. a room that has bright lights and too many machines, all surrounding a boy in a bed who is utterly still and silent. My son.
I walk slowly towards him, barely trusting my legs to keep me upright. The machines beep and whirr and sound very loud in the room; a nurse stands by his head, checking something. I have no idea what. I have no idea about any of this.
I take a step closer to Ben. Remarkably he doesn’t look that injured. There is a bandage on his wrist, and Dr. Stein murmurs that it might be broken, but they can’t take an x-ray until his condition is more stable. There are no internal injuries as far as they know; the damage is merely to his brain. His brain.
There is a little dried blood on his cheek, and his left eye is swollen shut. He is breathing through a ventilator and other tubes trail away from him like snakes.
His head is wrapped in white bandages; it reminds me of when he used two rolls of toilet paper last Halloween to dress up as a mummy. Lewis and I took the boys trick or treating, and we shared a bag of candy corn, both admitting to a secret weakness for those nauseatingly sweet triangles of sugar. It seemed like a lifetime ago; only a year, but a different reality. This is what is real now and yet I can’t take it in; everything in me resists.
I sink into a chair by his bed and reach out to touch Ben, but my hand falls short. I am afraid to touch him, to hurt my son. His golden-brown lashes fan his cheeks, and he almost looks peaceful, despite the bandages