No heartbeat.
No life.
They’ll fix you, I thought, squeezing his hand, holding on, like I hadn’t in the water. They have to.
19. NUMB
At the hospital someone gave me something to wear.
Someone else brought bandages, patched up the gashes the rocks had torn in my skin. Even though there was no need. Nothing was gushing or dripping. Nothing hurt. Nothing had penetrated the hard shell around the neural cortex and—or so it seemed from the fact that I could still walk and talk—none of the complicated wiring beneath the surface had been shaken loose. I was fine. But I let them patch the skin. I nodded when they told me I needed to get myself checked out—somewhere else, of course, where they knew what to do with things like me. I would have agreed to anything as long as they let me stay.
Auden was gone, swept away behind a set of white double doors, and I sat on a blue padded chair, staring at nothing, waiting.
This isn’t happening, I thought, then cut myself off.
No denial. No rage, no bargaining, no acceptance. I wasn’t getting sucked into any of that five-stages-of-grieving shit, because he was still alive. Ergo, no grief. No denial.
This is happening.
I had wanted to feel. Now I wanted to stop. I wanted to be all those things people were afraid of. I wanted to be cold and heartless, like a computer, like a refrigerator, like a toaster. I wanted to turn myself off.
That, at least, I could do.
I didn’t.
The white doors swung open, and a doctor pushed through. He sat down next to me.
Not good, I thought. If it was good news, he would stay on his feet, he would spit it out quickly, so we could all sigh and laugh and go home. But bad news, he’d want to deliver that face-to-face. He’d want to be close enough that he could pat me on the shoulder. Or catch me if I passed out. Even though, as a doctor, he would know that was an impossibility.
“Has someone contacted his parents?” the doctor asked.
I nodded. “There’s just his father.” It was hard to get words out. Every time I spoke—every time I sent a blast of air through my throat, past my larynx, into and then out of my mouth, I remembered doing it for him, breathing for him, and I wondered if my air had been good enough, if I had been good enough or—
No. I am a machine, I thought. I could control myself. I could control my emotions. They weren’t real anyway, right? Whatever happened, I could handle it. I would handle it.
“He’s on his way,” I said in my pathetic little voice. I didn’t know that for sure, because I’d had to leave the message for him, bad enough, since how do you leave that kind of message? Hi, your son might be dead and if he is, it’s probably my fault. Have a nice day!
The doctor sighed. He had two thin scars in front of his ears and another set framing his nose, telltale signs that he’d just finished his latest lift-tuck. It looked good. I hated myself for noticing. “I should really wait for his guardian to arrive before I go into the specifics of his situation, but—”
“You have to tell me something,” I pleaded. “Please.”
“But, as I was about to say, I don’t think it would hurt to give you a general update.” He paused, and gave me a searching look like he was trying to figure out if I was prone to noisy and embarrassing breakdowns. I wondered if there was a private little room somewhere that they used for conversations like this, a walled-in space where you could shriek and throw things without inconveniencing all those people whose lives hadn’t just fallen apart.
But the waiting room was empty. We stayed where we were.
“Your boyfriend’s heart stopped.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said automatically.
I have never hated myself more than I did in that silent moment after the words were out. There was nothing I could do to take them back.
“Okay, well…” In that pause, I could tell. The doctor hated me too. “Your friend’s heart stopped. He was technically dead for about two hours.”
Was. I held tight to the verb tense.
“But we were lucky that the body temperature was already so low….” The doctor shook his head. “I don’t know how he managed to last as long as he did in water that cold, but it’s made our job a bit easier.”
The water was too cold, I thought.
My fault, I thought.
No one forced him to jump in after me, I told myself. No one forced him to stay.
But I knew better.
“We’ll keep his temp down to slow his metabolism, and keep reperfusion as gradual as possible—resume oxygen supply too quickly and brain cells start dying, but if we do it slowly, we should be able to preserve a substantial amount of brain function.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Substantial.”
“It means we’ll know more when he wakes up.”
“But he will wake up? When?”
“That’s still to be determined,” the doctor said slowly. “But, yes, in cases like this, we’re optimistic for a cognitive recovery.”
“You mean he’ll be okay,” I said eagerly.
The doctor looked uncomfortable.
“You said recovery,” I reminded him. “You said optimistic.”
“I said cognitive recovery. We have every reason to hope that his brain might emerge from this intact. But his body… I’m told you were there, so you must know. The weight of the water crashing down on him, at the speed it was falling, and the rocks… There are impact injuries, crush injuries. He took quite a beating.” The doctor shook his head. “The extent of the damage…”
“You can fix it,” I said. “He has plenty of credit, enough for anything. You have to fix it.”
“There are a lot of things we can fix,” he agreed. “And in cases like this, there are of course”—he paused, then looked pointedly at me. No, not at me. At the body—“other options.”
“Oh.” I looked at the floor. “It’s that bad?”
“It’s bad,” he said. “But I’m afraid I can’t go into more detail until his father arrives. You’re not family, so…”
“Of course. I understand.”
I understood. I wasn’t his family. I wasn’t his girlfriend. I was nothing.
M. Heller arrived an hour or so later, sans wife number two. He blew past me, pushed aside the nurse who tried to stop him from going through the white double doors, and disappeared behind them. When he emerged, a few minutes later, he looked different. He looked old. He slumped down on the closest chair and let himself fall forward, his head toppled over his knees. He was shaking.
But when he looked up to see me standing over him, his eyes were dry.
“M. Heller, I just wanted to say, I don’t know if they told you that I was with Auden when—Well, anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry, and I hope—”
“Get out,” he said flatly.
“What?”
“I don’t want you here. Get out.”
“M. Heller, look, I’m not trying to upset you, but your son and I—”
“What?” he said fiercely, like he was daring me to keep going. “My son and you what?”
“Nothing,” I said quietly. I didn’t have any words.
“He’s my son,” M. Heller’s voice trembled on the word. “And they’re telling me he might—” His face went very still for a moment. “I can’t look at you right now. Please go.”