It’s been closer to three days—Pearl was wrong when she said two. Fifty-six hours, thirty-one minutes, and a handful of seconds since I chased his stretcher through the doors of UCSF Medical Center and raised holy hell when someone tried to keep me from his side.
It didn’t matter, as it happened. Unlike me, when I arrived aching with sepsis, Vance had no clue what went on around him. No one could stay with him as they wheeled him into surgery to put pins in his mangled arm and stitch his busted head and punch a tube into his chest to drain the blood that was filling his chest.
When the car plowed over him, it was going thirty miles an hour, and the impact damaged his lungs, crushed his arm, snapped two of his ribs. When he hit the pavement, the impact cracked his skull.
Just a hairline fracture. I’ve heard that a thousand times. No brain damage—but because of how his lungs were messed up by the impact, he’s been put into a coma-like state, hooked up to a ventilator since we got here. “Letting him just settle down,” as one of the nurses repeats eighty-seven times a day.
I look at his IV bags. I know what every one of them holds. What his dose is. Why, and how long they think he’ll be getting it. I know it’s helping him get better, but I hate it anyway.
I hate how he’s got black eyes, and how someone had to stitch his cheek—because somehow, as he flew through the air, one of the bushes from the church lawn scratched so deep, it scraped his cheekbone.
I hate the thick tube punched into his chest under his left arm, draining fluid from his hurt chest. I hate the way the nurses keep on putting chapstick on his lips, like he is theirs to touch. More than anything else, maybe, I hate that they cut his hair. Every time I think about his long, soft hair, my eyes ache and my throat feels too tight.
When my eyes slip shut—which isn’t often—I have nightmares about what his head looks like beneath the bandages. About the fractured skull. Even though it’s just a minor hairline fracture, and his brain is okay, his head was spit open. So there’s stitches there. Forty-eight of them.
My bad dreams of bleeding-head Vance aren’t much worse than being awake. His gray-ringed eyes don’t ever open. The rotating staff of nurses puts eye gel in them and sometimes tapes them shut, like something from a horror movie. If he ever seems alive—twitches or moves at all—they push more drugs into his IVs so he’s more sedated…therefore even further from me.
I pray all the time, but I don’t know what to say. Mostly I say please. The old cliché is right. “Please” can be the best prayer. In my case, at times it feels false. Give him back to me. Right now. There is no please. I hate God in those moments.
“He’s going to be okay. You know that, right, Luke? Nothing that is wrong with him is threatening his life.”
I turn around so fast, Pearl’s eyes widen.
“Everything that’s wrong with him could kill him. If you don’t see how, you haven’t bothered to think hard about it. Just look at the chest tube.” My voice is a hiss. We’re not supposed to say upsetting things in earshot of Vance, and it’s not as if I’m leaving him.
“It could get infected if one of these…nurses—” I would call them “children,” but right now, the two are over in the corner looking at computer screen, and I think they can hear me. “If someone gets one germ on it, he’s got a chest infection. Then he has another fever.” When he has a fever, they put cool cloths on him, even though we all know when you have a fever, you want to be warm.
My eyes make their trek over his body, cataloguing all the scrapes and bruises, the bandages and wires and stickers. They catch on his casted arm, propped up on pillows.
“Don’t forget his arm and his new metal pins. That’s no big deal, right? Not like he’s a career artist.”
“Luke, I’m telling you. His Wiki bio says he’s ambidextrous.”
“He needs both hands for sculpting.” My voice cracks. I drag air in through my nose.
“You should take the Xanax, PL. You remember? Dr. Todd prescribed it. Like for real. It would help.”
“Xanax makes me foggy.”
“And you’re needed here.” She nods in the direction of the children. “Clearly, you are their leader.”
“I am needed here. Without me watching, no one takes care of the small things.”
“What are those, Dr. McDowell?”
“Shut up, Pearl.”
She shriek-laughs so loudly, it peels over the ICU noises. She laughs so loud and long she snorts, and I stand up because I’m angry, and you can’t be truly angry sitting down.