When He Fell (2 page)

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 and bruises and tubes. Surely he cannot be as damaged as all that. Only this morning he was bouncing around, kicking his soccer ball, scuffing the walls. Only this morning I snapped at him as I wrote out a check for the month’s afterschool club and tension knotted the muscles of my neck, throbbed in my temples. All because of a lousy check, a stupid soccer ball.

Tears crowd my eyes, gather in my throat, and I swallow hard.

“When do you think he’ll come out of the coma?” I ask, and my voice quavers.

“When his condition is more stable, we will attempt to bring him out of the coma,” Dr. Stein tells me. “But first the ICP needs to reduce.”

“The ICP?”

“Intracranial pressure.”

“When will that be?” I’m hoping he will answer in hours, but his hesitation tells me otherwise.

“Perhaps in a few days,” he says, and I can tell he is temporizing. “As I said before, the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are critical.”

I nod, and reach out to stroke Ben’s uninjured hand. His skin is still soft, like a baby’s, but I’ve noticed lately he is starting that headlong tumble into pre-adolescence; he has become obsessive about me not seeing him getting undressed, and he needs to shower more than he used to. The hair on his legs and arms has become darker, coarser, not the white-blond, baby-fine hair of his toddlerhood. He’ll be ten in March.

“Ms. Reese?” I can’t tell if the doctor sounds impatient or sympathetic. Probably both. “You should wait outside.”

I turn to look at him. “I can’t be with him?”

“It’s better now if you leave us room to monitor his condition. Just in case.”

Just in case of what?
I am not brave enough to ask the question. I nod and with one last look for Ben, I leave the room. Dr. Stein directs me back to the private waiting room where people hear bad news. I don’t want to go there, but I can’t face the huge ER waiting room either.

I sink into a chair, my mind still spinning, straining in denial. I can’t believe this is happening, that this is happening to Ben, to me, and yet another part of me is not surprised at all. Another part of me, a secret, ashamed part, has been waiting for something like this all along, has known I would never get it right, that I could never manage to bring up a child right, or even at all.

An animal sound of pain escapes me, and I reach for my phone. I punch in Lewis’s number recklessly; I don’t care about the consequences. I need someone now and it’s just a call. I’m not hurting anyone.

But I falter when his phone switches over to voicemail, and in the end I only manage one broken word.

“
Lewis
,” I whisper, and then I disconnect the call and press the phone to my forehead, squeezing my eyes shut tight as I do my best to block out the world.

2
JOANNA

The day it happens is like any other. No one talks to me when I pick Josh up at school, although no one really ever talks to me. I’ve never been too friendly with the other mothers at Burgdorf, besides a few tight-lipped smiles when I manage to attend an event. Usually Lewis does the drop off and pick up; I work from eight until six or seven most days. But today I pick Josh up myself, because I’ve had a cancellation. And no one says anything.

“Hey there,” I say to Josh as he comes out of Burgdorf’s bright blue doors. A few other mothers and nannies are gathered on the sidewalk in tight little knots; the mid-October wind is chilly, funneling down Fifty-Fourth Street and they hunch their shoulders against it. Burgdorf rents an office building in midtown; only twenty years old, the school doesn’t have the kind of money that most Manhattan private schools have, with their Brownstones and big endowments.

Josh comes to stand before me, unspeaking, but this isn’t surprising. Josh has always been on the quiet side.

I’ve battled against Josh’s silence since he said his first word at the age of two and a half.
No
. Spoken very softly when I put peas on his plate, and Lewis and I rejoiced as if he’d just given a speech about world peace.

He said a few more words over the next few months, and then we sent him to preschool and he didn’t say anything for a year.

The director at the preschool advised testing, and so I took him to various doctors, all of whom flirted with different diagnoses. They ruled out autism or anything ‘on the spectrum’, as has become the parlance. I was relieved as well as a tiny bit disappointed. At that point I craved a diagnosis, an answer. I wanted this to be a problem I could fix, or at least treat.

They moved on to other conditions: social anxiety disorder. Social phobia. Depressive disorder. Nothing was definitive. No one offered us anything besides more therapy, possible pills. None of it really worked.

Lewis was, although he tried to hide it, exasperated with me. “He’s just a quiet kid, Jo,” he said more than once. “Let him be. He’ll come out of it when he’s ready.”

But Josh wasn’t just a quiet kid. He wasn’t just shy; he was, as one doctor had said, selectively mute. He didn’t speak for the entire first year in preschool; not one word to anyone, not even to us at home. Kids tried with him at first, offering a toy, touching his shoulder in a game of tag. He never responded, except to shy away or duck his head. Eventually the other kids saw he was different and they stayed away. Their mothers didn’t invite him to their children’s birthday parties, even when there were whole-class invitations. Kids thought he was weird, and he
was
weird.

But we’ve progressed a long way from those dark days, since he’s been at Burgdorf. I’d picked the school particularly, because it catered to ‘the whole child’ and was, on the brochure, ‘a place for positivity’. Lewis rolls his eyes at that kind of language and I suppose I do too, a little, but I still feel it’s what Josh needs. Kids at Burgdorf have a lot more freedom to express themselves—or not, as Josh’s case may be. They don’t have to conform to a standard, and since Josh can’t and won’t, it’s the perfect—or at least the best—place for him. In kindergarten he started speaking again; in first grade he even made a friend. Ben Reese. The two have been best friends for nearly three years. Josh’s first and only friend, and I am as proud as if I managed the whole thing myself.

In reality I’ve only met Ben’s mother Maddie a couple of times; I’ve only seen Ben a little more than that. When they have play dates—an expression I loathe and yet accept—Lewis usually takes them out while I am at work.

Now Josh and I ride home on the subway, all the way from midtown to Ninety-Sixth Street, and he doesn’t speak the whole way. I am not bothered; in fact I am scrolling through some emails on my phone. When we pull out of the Eighty-Sixth Street station Josh rests his head briefly against my arm.

I touch his hair lightly; his eyes are closed. “Are you tired, Josh?” I ask as I delete an email from my phone. He doesn’t answer, and I decide he is.

We arrive home fifteen minutes later and Josh disappears into his room, as he often does, usually to read one of his Lego or nonfiction fact books. He’s insatiable when it comes to trivia; most of our conversations involve Josh reciting all he knows about some specialized subject.
Did you know earthworms can live for up to eight years? But they die if their skin is dry. They have nine hearts.

I cannot retain the trivia, although I do try to listen to Josh and absorb it. I enjoy the evidence of his passion, even if it is simply for a collection of forgotten facts.

His other passion is Lego, although he’s never actually built anything with the blocks. He just likes studying the designs in the Lego books we’ve bought him.

While he’s in his room I make him a snack of dried fruit and nuts and pour a glass of water, the healthy alternative to cookies and milk. Lewis rolls his eyes at my insistence on things like limited screen time and no sugar or additives; he grew up on Twinkies and endless TV. But this is the plight of the modern mother; if I didn’t do these things I would be judged. Condemned. Add the fact that I am a dentist and a mother in Manhattan, and it all becomes exponentially more intense.

Lewis comes home as I am making dinner, a healthy meal of brown rice and low-fat chicken strips seasoned with paprika. I’m not very good at cooking, not like Lewis, who can throw together a bunch of ingredients with careless ease and emerge with something that tastes delicious. I follow recipes to the millimeter; it’s how I’ve always lived my life. Lewis will laugh as I level off a teaspoon, eyeing its flat surface like a nuclear physicist measuring plutonium. He never measures anything, and somehow it all works out for him.

“How was work?” he asks as he comes in the door. He shrugs off his scuffed leather jacket and rummages in the fridge for a beer. As usual when I see him I feel my insides lurch with that intense mix of love and trepidation that I’ve felt since the moment Lewis laid eyes on me at a party when I was a grad student and he worked as a maintenance man for an apartment building in Queens.