8. Under Pressure
UNDER PRESSURE
FOX
She has a bruise along her left jaw that is turning the color of a storm system.
I keep looking at it. I don’t know why, because there is a catalogue of worse things to look at in this room—tubes, monitors, the ventilator that is breathing for my wife because her body has been temporarily relieved of that responsibility—but the bruise is the thing I keep coming back to.
The size of it.
The wrongness of that color on her face—the one I know so well, one I’ve looked at across breakfast tables, in the dark, and in the kitchen of a diner late at night when she handed me a bowl of cassoulet that changed my life, and I apparently failed to understand the significance of that in any useful timeframe.
The bruise is the size of my hand.
I put my hand next to it, not touching, just measuring.
Mother fucker! Yeah, it’s the size of my hand.
Here is what I know, medically, about my wife’s condition, because I have asked every person in this hospital who will stand still long enough to answer me, and some who would have preferred not to.
Her brain is swelling.
It is doing this in response to the impact, which was significant—the truck was doing forty, the physics are not ambiguous, the outcome is something the ER attending described as “she’s lucky to be alive,” which I have decided is the last time anyone in this building will use that phrasing in my presence.
Lucy is not lucky.
She should not have been in that car.
She should not have been on that road.
She should not have been driving through that fucking curve on our street on her way to collect her things from a house she was leaving because I told her, with my characteristic composure, that I never loved her.
She’s here in a medically-induced coma because the swelling needs somewhere to go, and her brain needs to be still while it goes there because I fucked up.
They tell me they will bring her out of it when the pressure normalizes.
The subdural hematoma is being monitored.
Four ribs on the left side are fractured, one of which punctured her lung, which has been addressed; this is no longer the primary concern, but it is a fact I am holding in my body like a piece of shrapnel.
She has a deep laceration along her hairline that required eleven stitches.
I know this because I counted them.
The waiting room outside the ICU is the kind of terrible that hospitals specialize in—fluorescent, beige, furnished with chairs designed to prevent sleep, which is either a cruelty or a philosophy, and I cannot tell which.
I have been here for fourteen hours.
They called me when I was waiting at home for her.
I’d told her I wouldn’t be there when she came to pack her things away, but that wasn’t going to happen. I needed to see her. Make sure she was okay.
Now, I know I was there to beg her to stay.
I heard the sirens but ignored them, didn’t think much of it—until the call came, and I knew that I should’ve gone out on the street to see what happened, to learn who had an accident so I could’ve been with her…
or maybe if I hadn’t been an asshole, she wouldn’t have left and none of this would have happened.
My legs gave way when the hospital called.
I sank to the floor after they said, “Is this Archibald Bennett? We have a Lucy Bennett. There’s been an accident.”
I barked questions they answered by asking me to show up at TriStar Centennial Medical Center.
Less than fifteen minutes later, I was there, and I have not left.
I follow doctors down corridors and back. I stand in the ICU next to her bed, holding any part of her body I can reach, begging her to stay, for the intervals they allow, which are not long enough, and which I have been negotiating to extend with increasing aggression.
Percy is here.
I texted him two hours after I came.
FYI, Lucy had an accident and is fucking lucky to be alive.
He arrived within the next half hour without being asked, because Percy Hale has been showing up for me without being asked for years, and I have never been more grateful for a single quality in another person than I am for that one right now.
He brings me coffee, which I drink even though it tastes like poison.
He sits next to me in the terrible chairs.
He doesn’t say much, which is not his usual mode. Still, he seems to understand that the version of me currently sitting in this waiting room is not capable of being talked to in the normal way, that I am held together by something thin and fragile that cannot withstand much contact.
“You want to eat something?” he asks at some point—the third or fourth hour.
“I’m fine.”
He sighs elaborately. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Percy,” I say his name the way I say it when the conversation is over.
He lets it go.
He has been letting things go all night, which is a kindness I don’t deserve.
He’s right that I think it’s my fault. He’s wrong that he thinks it’s not my fault. All of this is.
At three in the morning, Dr. Reyes—the attending neurologist, who has probably delivered more terrible information more kindly than I can fathom—comes to find me with an update.
I stand up immediately, which I have been doing every time a doctor appears, rising from these chairs like a system on alert.
“The numbers are moving in the right direction,” she tells Percy and me. “Slowly. But in the right direction.”
“What does slowly mean?” I rasp.
“It means we’re cautiously optimistic, and we’re watching closely—“
I grit my teeth. “What does slowly mean in hours. In a timeline. Give me something specific.”
Dr. Reyes looks at me with the expression of a woman who has had this conversation before, one reserved for people adjacent to the injured who want to know the future. “Mr. Bennett, I understand you want—“
“She’s my wife.” It comes out with more force than I intend, with something under it that is not volume exactly but is close to it, a pressure that has been building for fourteen hours and has been finding the weakest available exit.
“She is my wife, and she is in there because of me, and I need you to give me something I can work with, because what I am currently working with is cautiously optimistic, which is a sentence that contains no information, and I’m asking you to do better than that. ”
Percy puts a hand on my arm.
I do not remove it because it’s the only reason I am not lunging at the doctor.
To her credit, Dr. Reyes does not retreat.
“If the pressure in her brain continues to decrease at the current rate, we’re looking at beginning to wean her from sedation within twenty-four hours.
That’s the most specific I can be right now, and it’s contingent on those numbers continuing to move.
I will tell you the moment anything changes. I will find you personally.”
I breathe a sigh of almost relief. “Thank you.”
She leaves, and Percy’s hand stays on my arm, guiding me back to sit in the terrible chair.
I put my head in my hands.
“Fuck!” I cry out.
The few other people waiting with us to hear what’s happening with a loved one of theirs don’t bat an eyelid. They know how I feel.
We keep vigil.
The waiting room hums with its fluorescent indifference.
Somewhere down the hall, someone is crying with the low, controlled exhaustion of a person who has been at it for a long time.
I know that sound. I know it exactly. It was the sound Lucy made the night she packed her bag, behind a door I didn’t open, while I stood downstairs and ruminated on my decision like a man who had the luxury of time.
She cried.
I did nothing.
The list of things I did not do is very long, and I am going through it, item by item, in the small hours of this waiting room, which is perhaps not a useful exercise but is the only one I have.