Cammers With Benefits

When I walk into Brice’s hospital room, I think he’s asleep again. That his brief visit to the conscious world has fluttered away like a leaf on the wind. Underneath the gauze and casts and blankets, it’s not easy to see movement, let alone the flicker of his eyelashes. I fall into the seat beside the bed with a little too much angst and far too loud a sigh.

“Rough day?” comes a raspy voice beside me.

I’m back up on my feet in an instant, grabbing at Brice’s one good hand. His fingers squeeze back. “You’re awake,” I say, the emotions I thought I had conquered back now with a vengeance. I’m wiping my sleeve at my cheeks, biting my lips as I hold back sobs. “They told me you’d woken up, but when I came in the room, I thought you were sleeping again. I’m so sorry, Brice. I’m so sorry.”

His face is half covered in bandages, but I see the sliver of an eyebrow rise up towards his hairline. “What do you have to be sorry for?”

“It was my idea to go to the barbecue restaurant. If we’d eaten anywhere else, you wouldn’t be like this.” And now the sobs. There’s no holding back now. No hiding the fact that I’m not strong enough to do this.

Brice pulls my head down to his chest. I cuddle up to him gingerly, ever cautious of hurting him more. “That’s no way to live.”

“What?”

“Always thinking ‘What if?’ You can’t do that to yourself. I mean, what if I hadn’t walked into your room that night and seen your computer screen. I never would have known about your secret life on the Internet. We never would have slept together or met Greg. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be here now, but I wouldn’t take back that first night for the world.”

I don’t know what to say to this. It’s true, but I never traced the steps back that far.

“Even if I knew

it was going to end here. It was worth it,” Brice says and leans forward to place a kiss on my forehead, in the process straining something that makes him groan. He’s grimacing when I look up at him, but he tries to smile. “I wouldn’t trade any of it. Because you’re here now too. And that’s what really matters.”

I wish I could say the same, because right now, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give to make Brice whole again. Although he’s the one in the hospital bed, I feel like I’m the one who was split open that day. Half of me wants to believe that everything will be fine. Like he said, we have each other, so we can get through this. But the rest of me is crunching numbers, working out how long it’s going to be before I can take Brice home.

I’m swollen up inside, ready burst and release all of my anxiety on Brice, but I stop myself. This isn't the time. The only thing he should be thinking of is resting. I’ll have to carry the burden of this stress by myself.

I’m not with Brice two minutes before his mother bursts in the door. At the sight of her one and only son finally awake amidst a congregation of machines beeping all around him, Maggie breaks down. She throws herself across Brice, who yelps and rubs at his side. After a few minutes, I’m able to pull the weepy woman away, but it means pulling myself away too. Before heading out into the hall, I mouth at Brice, ‘I’ll be back soon’.

Guiding Maggie by the elbow, I get us to the same benches where Dr. Heyman gave me the truth about Brice. So it’s fitting that the moment we sit down, Dr. Heyman walks by.

“Just the people I wanted to see. I was just on my way up to see your son,” he says, kneeling down in from of Maggie.

Maggie’s crying again. She never really stopped. So it’s down to me to do the talking. “So you’re optimistic about his outlook?”

“I won’t know anything until I run a few tests. Now that he’s awake, we can finally get down to business.”

Something is niggling at me. A thought that I wish I could banish, at least for the time being. But being practical, I can’t help but throw it out. I’m won’t be able to stop worrying over it otherwise.

“There’s a slight problem,” I say as Dr. Heyman is standing back up.

“What’s that?”

I hesitate, but I have to get this out. “Brice doesn’t have insurance, so I’m not sure how feasible physical therapy is going to—”

Dr. Heyman claps his hands together and smiles up at the sky before looking back down to me. “Our patient might not have insurance, but the driver of the car did. And since he was 100% at fault, it’s all going to be coming from his policy. So you can at least take that worry off your plate.” He looks to his watch. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see about getting started with that gamut of tests I was talking about.”

He pats Maggie’s shoulder and walks off, leaving me to clean up her weepy mess.

I can’t get a word from her. She simply cries, face covered, not responding to my hand running up and down her back. These aren’t happy tears either, not that I can blame her. No matter the height of Dr. Heyman’s optimism for Brice’s outlook, the fact remains that at the moment, he can’t even get out of his hospital bed without assistance. That is a hard reality to face for anyone, especially a mother.

Her soft sobs eventually calm enough to ask for a tissue to wipe her eyes and nose. Then, as if the past ten minutes hadn’t happened, she stands and excuses herself.

“I’m going to be late for my shift if I don’t scurry off now,” she says, still sniffling, but refusing to acknowledge her weakness. “Be a dear and watch over Brice until I get back. Before that, though, could you head over to the welcome desk and see about getting me a parking voucher?”

I assure her that I will while she claims that she needs time to clean up in the bathroom. While I’m walking across the lobby, my brain is buzzing about in the background, trying to wrap around something that’s bothering me about Maggie. She’s never been the super emotional sort. I always saw her as a bit stoic, especially in regards to her son. It seems like Brice was always an afterthought in her life, something to be managed more hands-off than with motherly caresses. Now she’s acting as though her whole world is falling apart.

There’s a missing piece I’m not seeing, but I can’t be sure what it is.

The guy at the front desk stamps a little card and hands it over without a word. His eyes are locked on his phone, hidden just out of sight under lip of the desk. When I return back to the bench beside the vending machines, Maggie is nowhere to be seen. A peek inside the bathroom reveals that she’s not there either. Then the realization hits me: Maggie didn’t drive here today. She took a cab because her car is in the shop. She mentioned it in passing earlier, so why am I holding a free parking voucher?