C.J. Carmichael - Small-Town Girl

The neurologist had been wrong. Ben didn’t look as though he was sleeping. At home Ben slept with his arms flung out and his covers tangled, hair curled engagingly over his forehead.

Here he was arranged neatly, with his arms at his side, his legs straight and together. His beautiful russet curls had been partially shaved.

Julie couldn’t move. She’d been clinging to an irrational hope that Ben would open his eyes when he heard her voice, when he felt her hand touch his. Now she knew, without even trying, that he wouldn’t.

“Oh, Ben.” Russell hurried to their son. He gathered one of the small, limp hands and pressed his cheek to it. Julie saw Russell’s tears escaping from behind his closed eyes.

Several tentative steps brought Julie to her husband’s side. She laid the back of her fingers against Ben’s cheek. His pale skin felt warm. Illogically, the numerous electrodes attached to his scalp made her think of the shock treatments notoriously used for mental illnesses.

Dr. Assad had assured them the EEG was painless. It was merely a tool for measuring brain-wave activity. Besides, Ben was beyond pain at the moment. Ben was beyond anything, judging from his face, which was blank, utterly devoid of his unique personality.

Where had he gone? If he wasn’t in this body anymore, where was he? Did he know they were here? Did he know she loved him, that she’d give anything…

“Ben.” She bent low to whisper his name inches from his ear. His perfect, beautiful ear. “Ben, it’s Mommy. You’re going to be all right, baby. I promise you’re going to be all right.”

She ran a finger down the side of his face, feeling the sharp edge of bone beneath soft boy skin. When he was an infant, sleeping in her arms, she’d often touched him this way. She’d dreamed about his future, imagining jars of insects, crayon-scrawled pictures, scraped knees and brave smiles. She’d pictured him sailing through high school, going to college, finding a girl….

Never this.

“I love you, Ben.”

She felt a cool hand on her arm and gazed up blankly.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Matthew. We’ll be moving Ben to ICU soon. You and your husband are welcome to stay while we make the preparations.” The nurse guided Julie toward a chair. Russell took her other hand.

Julie swayed as her field of vision narrowed. She blinked, putting a hand to her forehead.

“Julie?” Alarm coated Russell’s voice. “Are you all right?”

“Washroom—” She almost choked on the word as the nausea hit, upturning her stomach, bringing bile to her throat.

“This way.” The sympathetic nurse opened the exit and pointed her down the corridor.

“Let me come,” Russell said.

She shook her head at him, then rushed off. In the washroom she headed for the first available cubicle, then almost blacked out as she knelt on the floor. Facing the toilet, she retched, then flushed, then retched again. The former contents of her stomach swirled with the in-rushing water, before disappearing down the pipes.

Now she noticed a pale-yellow stain on the white toilet seat. A couple of black hairs stood out against the plain tile floor. She retched once more, wiped her mouth with a wad of toilet paper, then flushed the toilet again.

Oh, God, she was weak. Pathetic and useless. She leaned her head against the metal wall and closed her eyes. Something burned behind her lids. Tears? But she couldn’t cry; she wouldn’t.

Ben. She had to help Ben. She’d promised. She was his mother, for God’s sake.

Facts. She needed facts. Sitting on the cold floor, her head against the cubicle wall, Julie dug her cell phone out of her purse.

AT JULIE’S REQUEST, Gina found several books at the public library and rushed them to the hospital. She gave Julie a sympathetic hug, but later Julie couldn’t remember anything the younger woman had said. She took the books to the waiting room by the ICU, where Ben had just been transferred, and started to read.

What she learned wasn’t reassuring. Statistically, patients with severe head trauma, in very deep comas, had a fifty-percent survival rate. A third of those patients who recovered from significant brain injury developed emotional or behavioral problems as a result.

Julie confronted those difficult facts and read grimly on. She learned the difference between brain death and coma. In brain death the actual neuron cells were destroyed, offering no hope of recovery. But in Ben’s case, those cells were intact. Just not functioning normally.

Hope. She needed hope. And here was something else she could cling to. There were cases in which brain injury patients originally considered hopeless recovered fully.

Just as Ben was going to do. He had to. Julie shut the book firmly, knowing she could face Ben now that she knew he had a real chance. Her boy would survive.

THE POLICE RAN THROUGH the particulars of the accident with Julie and Russell. A drunk driver had rear-ended the van Ben had been traveling in. It still wasn’t clear whether Ben hadn’t been wearing his seat belt or had fastened it incorrectly. At any rate, when the Caravan tumbled off the road, Ben crashed through a side window, to land on a grassy boulevard several yards away. Ben’s best friend’s mother, who’d been driving the van, had walked from the accident. As had her son, Jeff, and the drunk driver, though not in a very straight line.

Only Ben had been hurt.

As she stood sentry at her son’s bedside Julie made herself visualize the accident, imagining she’d been there and what she might have seen. She did this to herself over and over, the way she probed a canker sore, or tore at a hangnail.

In her mind she saw the van fly off the road and flip over. Her son catapulted from the driver-side passenger window, then hitting the boulevard next to a video store. A size-three Converse running shoe, tan brown with dirt-gray laces, kept flying in the air. The untied laces—Ben would never heed her admonishments to do them up—streamed through the air like ribbons.

In these constant mental replays, the shoe never landed. Not the way Ben had, in a still heap of mangled boy against lush green grass. No, the manufactured combination of rubber, canvas and cotton kept soaring, like a kite, or one of the seagulls patrolling Vancouver’s inner harbor. A boy’s sneaker. Size three. Laces untied.

Hospital staff had included the shoe in the bag of Ben’s belongings she was given to take home from the hospital. Good as new, almost.

The one that had stayed on Ben’s foot had been ruined.

BY THE END OF THE FIRST DAY, Ben’s vital signs were stabilized, but his condition remained listed as critical. The second day he began breathing on his own and the ventilator was disconnected. Poised for their son’s return to consciousness, Julie and Russell hovered over Ben for the rest of that day and the next. Yet nothing happened.

“What does this mean?” Julie pleaded with the doctor for an explanation. But he had no answers to give.

Julie learned how the mind became numbed by despair. She and Russell began to take turns at Ben’s bedside, unable to talk any more of their fears or hopes. Each hour that ticked by became another mark against them.

“Hey, Ben, want to listen to some music?” On the morning of the fourth day Russell brought a tape machine from home, along with some Disney tapes. Soon a cheerful melody from The Lion King bounced life into the small private room.

The doctors said hearing was often the first sense to return. Julie leaned over her son, searching his face for the tiniest reaction to the familiar tune. A smile, a twitch, a blink of his eye.

Nothing.

“Oh, Ben.” She set the Harry Potter book she’d been reading aloud onto her lap. “Do you remember how much you enjoyed The Lion King the first time you saw it?” She’d bought him the video for Christmas when he was six. He must have watched it once a day for the next two weeks. Soon he’d had all the lyrics to every song memorized.