A Story of Now

Her lungs are suddenly capable of only the shallowest of breaths. And if her mother’s hand wasn’t pressed lightly to the small of her back, Claire’s not sure she’d be able to remember exactly how standing works.

“They said it’s not as bad as it looks, sweetheart.” Her mother’s voice is quieter than usual. Less shrill.

Claire takes in the sight of her brother. He currently looks more machine than man. From where she stands, she can see how at least three different tubes exit his body, departing from places that previously worked just fine without them. One pushes oxygen in and out of his lungs with terrifyingly robotic regularity.

She thrusts her hands into her pockets and tries to focus on the tasks at hand—standing and breathing. “It looks pretty fucking bad to me.”

“Claire,” her father says quietly, a warning.

“What?” she snaps.

He doesn’t respond.

The woman in a white coat standing over her brother doesn’t even react to her language. She’s probably used to it. She gives them a small, sympathetic smile as she passes.

At the prompting of her mother’s hand, Claire takes another step.

“I’ll be right back, honey. I’m going to talk with the nurses.”

The hand on Claire’s back is suddenly absent. Abandoned by its psychological role in keeping her upright, she fights the urge to fall backward.

So now she’s adrift in the middle of the room, a metre or so from her brother, trapped in this panicked, head-spinning, little vortex where everything that was this morning, when she had bacon and eggs with him in a shitty café before his shift, no longer is.

How does that happen?

His chin is pushed upward, and his arm is stretched out at an odd angle from his body. It looks as if he’s been flung against the bed and left there. There’s a bandage covering most of his left shoulder, and she can see a deep graze near the line of his jaw. She wonders how much more damage there is that she cannot see.

A light cotton sheet conceals his body as if whatever is underneath can only bear the lightest of touches upon it. The ventilator that breathes for him looks as if it’s pinning him down, an aggressively benevolent form of life sustenance.

Claire fixes her gaze on the calming familiarity of Cam’s light-brown hair, the one part of him untouched by injury, machine, or bedding. She focuses on her mother’s words. It’s not as bad as it looks, she reminds herself.

“He’s in an induced coma,” her father tells her quietly as his hand replaces her mother’s. “That’s why he’s on the machine. It looks worse than it is.”

Claire nods. It has to look worse than it is.

A nurse strides in, does something to the drip attached to Cam’s arm and leaves again. Claire follows her as her mother re-appears.

She needs a minute if she’s going to have any chance of taking this in. She needs some air, and she needs silence. Unsure of where she’s going, she follows the swift steps of the nurse who just left Cam’s room. She follows her back to the nurses’ station, situated near a small waiting area.

“How’s eleven?” the woman at the counter asks the nurse.

“He’ll live.” She picks up a can of energy drink and slugs it down. “If all of his major organs hold up.”

Claire stops in her tracks. Eleven. Who’s in eleven? Is it Cam?

She swallows hard again and heads automatically for a vending machine in the corner. She buys a bottle of water, takes it back to Cam’s room, and glances around for a number she doesn’t want to find.

* * *

Her parents go home in the early hours of the morning. Claire spends the night in his room. She sits there and listens to the steady sounds of beeps and whirs that fill the ICU and to the hushed hurry of the night shift at work. In these few hours alone, she learns every inch of this room, every shade of colour, and every nuance of its clinical, disinfected odour.

She watches as medical staff march in and out and tend to him in all kinds of ways.

He even has his own nurse, an efficient middle-aged man with more bald patch than hair. He performs an astonishing amount of tasks throughout the night, despite his slow, steady movements. While he’s not exactly friendly, he takes a minute to explain to Claire everything he does in concise, one-line briefings.

“Just to stave off any infections,” he explains as he sticks a needle into the flesh of Cam’s stomach.

“Just checking the wound drain. Large puncture in his leg,” he mutters later as he lifts the narrow pipe with one finger and makes a note on the chart. The drain contains fluids in colours Claire didn’t know could inhabit a human body.

“We’re just taking him for another scan,” he announces in the early hours of the morning as staff members wheel Cam’s bed from the room.

And then Claire is left in a small, empty square of space alone. The room, divested of its reason for being here, suddenly makes no sense.

* * *

Sometime in that in-between time of night and morning, when the grey predawn makes its appearance through the windows, her parents return.

They wait in the hallway while the doctors are with her brother. Her father pretends to read the paper, and her mother stands at the nurses’ station and asks them every single question she can think to ask about Cam’s night, questions she’s already asked Claire twice over.

Claire picks at the plastic lid of her coffee cup and wishes she could scream at her mother to shut the hell up. She wants to tell her that nothing she says or does will make these people any better at making Cam better. But she doesn’t. She just shuts her eyes and stays as still as she possibly can.

Finally, they are introduced to a doctor. Small, fast-talking, and with a lovely singsong accent, he stands there and quickly recites the litany of injuries that earned Cam a trip to the ICU. Claire catches phrases—the lung collapse, a small crack in a vertebra, mild trauma to the liver and a kidney, broken elbow, severe puncture wound in thigh, minor brain bleed. For some reason, she hangs on to the qualifiers, to the smalls, the minors, and the severes. She wonders about their measure, about the difference they make.

“Now we have seen clear scans,” he tells them. “We know none of these injuries in of themselves are life threatening, but the combination of traumas, the question mark over the damage to his organs…” He takes a breath and taps a pen on his chart. “Well, now it’s a matter of waiting, letting his body do whatever healing it can before we decide if surgery is necessary. The most pressing thing right now is that kidney. The trauma has prohibited some function, and we need to see if this corrects itself. We want him to hang on to it if he can, but it’s too soon to tell.”

Claire thinks about the nurse and his comment about organs holding up. “Is he going to die?” she asks before she can stop herself.

“Claire.” That hand makes its presence known on her back again as her mother tries to play puppet master.

Claire bites her lip and steps away from the hand. She does not care if it’s rude to interrupt. She needs to know this now.

The doctor turns to her and smiles. “In my profession, we have learned never to say anything with utmost certainty until we are of the utmost certainty. I can tell you this, I feel very, very confident, complications notwithstanding, that your…brother, is it?”

Claire nods.

“That your brother should recover. Everything from now on is about how well and how quickly we can help him get over this.”

Claire nods and lets out a breath. The ice in her stomach slowly start to melt. That’s all she needs to hear. Everything else can wait. She walks back to his room.

* * *

The house already looks as if it’s been abandoned even though her parents were here just last night. It always has a slightly neglected air anyway, clean and spotless and untouched. Right now, though, it’s downright forlorn.

She ignores its neediness and heads straight for the undemanding surroundings of her bedroom. It’s still a mess from her rush to get ready for work last night. Twelve hours ago, she flung these clothes onto the bed, accidentally knocked the books off her desk, and squirted that final spray of perfume that lingers faintly in the air. It looks as if the scene of something that happened a month ago, already relegated to a shady, half-conjured memory.

She stares blankly at the wall until she finally recalls herself to her task—sleep. She takes her phone from her pocket and throws her jacket across the chair. As she’s about to set her alarm, the phone rings. It’s Nina. Claire stares at the name flashing on the screen but doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have the energy to speak.

She sits paralysed on the edge of the bed and contemplates undressing. She decides not to. It feels too permanent, as if she’ll sleep and wake to a fresh new day. But that’s not true. She needs to retain the feeling of this all being temporary if she’s going to return to the hospital and walk back inside the nightmare that awaits. Then maybe that will feel temporary too.

So she crawls into bed fully dressed and squeezes her eyes shut. Her phone begins to ring again. It’s Mia this time. Claire blinks heavily and stares at the name on the screen. She wants to answer it. She really does. If there’s anyone she would want to speak to, it’s Mia. She wants—needs, even—Mia’s calm warmth. But she also knows if she’s going to make it through this, she can’t afford that kind of comfort right now.

Besides, she’ll probably just cry the moment she hears the slightest hint of sympathy. And she doesn’t want to cry. She slips her phone under her pillow and shuts her eyes. She begs sleep to emerge from behind the wall of caffeine she’s built over the last few hours. It’s slow to arrive.

They called her at work. That’s how she knew something was really wrong.

One minute she was knee-deep in customers and listening to one of Nina’s hilarious stories, a fractured narrative continued each time they had a moment between orders. The next Andrew was handing her the phone, a look of fatherly concern on his face. Andrew doesn’t do fatherly concern.

That’s when the feeling started, the cold dread that crawled into her stomach and stayed there. It staked its claim before she even found out who was at the other end of the phone. And then, only minutes later, she was in Vito’s service car on her way to the hospital, the dread freezing solid in her gut.