Chapter 8 New York, New York
New York, New York
The SNL writers were pitching Daniel Radcliffe when AJ’s phone rang, then rang, then rang.
“It’s Pat,” said Libby, in a voice so dull it chilled AJ’s blood.
He’d been driving his three-year-old son, Charlie, on the Mass Pike, when a rockslide sent a truck bed of utility poles barreling toward their Subaru. Patrick made the split-second decision to turn the wheel so the loose telephone poles would hit his side of the car instead of Charlie’s.
The Subaru and Patrick had both done their jobs. When the EMTs arrived, they found Charlie in a nest of broken glass, otherwise unharmed.
But the car was ruined. And so was Patrick, whose entire upper body had been crushed by a pole that had rebounded through the windshield. According to one EMT, his head had ricocheted between his seat and the window and the incoming log, “like a pinball in a pop bumper.”
Apparently, Charlie didn’t cry when they loaded him into the helicopter. Apparently, he’d always wanted to ride in one.
When AJ arrived at Simmons, it was nearly eight p.m., and Patrick had already been in surgery for several hours. Libby was the first to greet her.
“The whole left side of his body was pulverized.” As she spoke, she continued to furiously text her husband, Lucas, who was the general counsel at another hospital. “The real issue is his brain.”
A craniectomy involved removing a piece of the skull to relieve brain swelling, which was currently the biggest threat to Patrick’s life.
For some reason, AJ became instantly fixated on whether or not they were going to reattach the missing piece of skull and what the time frame was for that—something to do with the phrase “couldn’t put Humpty together again. ”
“They will in a few days,” said Libby. “Assuming all goes well.”
Assuming Pat lived.
Libby showed AJ to a waiting area blatantly intended for several families that the Graveses had claimed for themselves like a pride of lions. The trash was piled high with pizza boxes and soda cans. AJ’s family even knew how to turn waiting into a tailgate.
AJ’s mother silently hugged her as she entered the room. Then her father slowly rose from his chair. AJ’s heart sank as she smelled the beer on his breath; sure enough, he squeezed her shoulder, then walked toward the exit, probably to down another. AJ had half a mind to follow.
Mike, seated in the corner with his head against the wall, glanced up from his phone with a tremulous nod.
Then, three-year-old Charlie ran over to give AJ a hug. He didn’t seem to understand why his aunts and uncles kept appearing, but he wasn’t fighting it.
AJ squeezed her nephew and let him lead her to Emily, noting the single SpongeBob Band-Aid on his right hand. AJ pretzeled herself onto the floor where they were playing, letting herself be enfolded in her twin’s familiar smell, in the unassailable rightness of her embrace.
Beneath the clock, Patrick’s petite blond wife, Elle, vacantly cradled AJ’s six-month-old niece, Claire. As the hours bled together, her hand stroked the child’s head in one continuous motion.
If Patrick was a normal born of normals, then Elle was a normal born of weirds. Raised by an astrologer-medium mother and a medieval-weapon-forging father, Esmerelda Nimue Mabon-Fay had grown up dreaming of the minivans and mom haircuts she saw on Saved by the Bell.
At eighteen, she shed several name syllables and fourteen inches of hair to reinvent herself as hyper-normal Elle Fay of UMass Amherst; she and Pat had fallen in love across a maroon-emblazoned quad.
They’d married quickly, bought a split-level in Gladstone, and Elle had received the mom haircut and minivan of her dreams. She never mentioned her mystical upbringing, except to laugh at it.
But tonight, the clocks had forsaken them.
The thin tick of the second hand would stop for nothing, not even Patrick’s life.
More than once, AJ caught Elle looking out the window at the blackened sky, beseeching the planets and the forces that moved them.
AJ wasn’t one for prayer, she recalled as she silently chanted Help us, help them, help him in an unbroken mantra.
When the surgeon emerged at 4:28 a.m. to tell them the procedure had concluded, and that the swelling in Patrick’s brain was starting to stabilize, the Graveses huddled, as was their custom. And amid their hugs and high fives, AJ saw Elle genuflect her tear-lined face and thank the Goddess.
When Pat awoke after his first round of corrective surgeries, the doctors found his limbs unresponsive.
The Graveses were on edge as they waited for further developments, but none more than Libby. Almost losing Patrick had tripled her need to lash out, and in Pat’s absence, AJ saw it as her duty to run interference, to placate their dad, to zamboni the damage.
The days crawled by, leaving AJ exhausted to the point of jet lag. On the bright side, the doctors now felt confident enough to reattach the missing piece of Patrick’s skull.
His rehabilitation would be a multiphase disaster recovery program.
The power lines from Pat’s brain to his limbs were still down, and his skeleton had lost its structure.
The left side of his head had been marred, his ear macerated, his neck badly scarred.
But by the end of the second week, some of the swelling had gone down and he was starting to look more like himself.
And he was increasingly awake. The first time AJ walked in to find him propped up, gazing at her, she almost choked on her own tears.
“I’m not that ugly,” said Patrick, his voice still hoarse from being intubated.
One of the best aspects of Brian McKenzie growing up between two sisters was that he had been raised to lend a hand, and over that first month, he made himself damn useful.
He had always been treated as a guest on previous visits to AJ’s family, but no one had the bandwidth for that now.
In response, Brian stepped up, seamlessly pitching in wherever he could.
When he saw that AJ needed a break, he gently suggested they head back to the house. There, AJ got in the shower for the first time in days. She emerged to find that Brian had stripped all the beds and begun washing the sheets in her mother’s newly renovated laundry room.
Together, they cleaned the fridge and took the trash out to the garage, where AJ discovered six open cases of Bud, their contents drained and neatly replaced. AJ emptied each box into the recycling until it was so full, Brian had to use one of the flattened cartons to compress the cans.
“He missed one,” said Brian cheerfully, holding up a lone undrunk beer.
AJ frowned. “Aren’t we cutting back?”
She had really frightened herself after the SNL holiday party.
She couldn’t remember going home that night, or fucking Brian, or throwing up in her bed, all of which she’d apparently done.
She’d awoken the next day in her bathtub, upper body clothed, lower body ass naked, pieces of her fight with Noah lodged in her mind like shrapnel.
When Brian had found her he’d thought it was hilarious, but he’d readily agreed to Dry January once he realized how upset she’d been.
Now, he shrugged. “It’s just Bud.” He popped the lid, downed half, and offered it to AJ, who threw back the rest mostly to drown out her own revulsion.
Then they headed over to Patrick and Elle’s split-level and stripped their beds, emptied their trash. When AJ wept over Pat’s inanimate running shoes, Brian held her.
Brian was easy in the waiting room. He sat equidistant from Mike and AJ’s dad and watched the silent television with an unobtrusive expression on his face.
If anyone spoke to him, he responded kindly, then went right back to occupying himself.
AJ, who felt like she had enough to juggle with her family, appreciated that Brian did not make himself one more person to appease.
Libby, of course, felt like AJ had brought Brian to show her up. The main downside of being fully supported by Lucas was that he worked long hours, so while Libby could (and did!) frequently mention that he was “upholding the Constitution,” she was also mostly alone.
Whatever dissatisfaction Libby felt on this score was now being redirected at AJ and Brian through a number of choice comments about how AJ should lock him down—presumably as a reminder that she, Libby, had successfully done so.
“Such a help,” said Libby after Brian had brought their mother a cup of water. “Age, you should really lock him down.”
AJ found these remarks extremely irritating, but Brian wasn’t fazed. He would turn to Libby and ask her about her own life with such earnest ESPN-journalist interest, he could mollify her for up to an hour at a time.
“You really should lock him down,” whispered Mike after one such intervention.
“Because he has a way with huge egos?” said AJ.
Mike shook his head, getting shy. “Because he’s a good guy.”
The only person who didn’t seem particularly keen on Brian was Emily.
At first, AJ assumed she was preoccupied with Patrick.
Of all of them, Emily was spending the most time in his room, wordlessly communing with him while he slept.
But one Sunday night, Brian brought dinner to the hospital, and AJ got to observe them together.
It wasn’t that Emily disliked Brian so much as she didn’t really take to him. She was friendly enough, and AJ doubted whether Brian knew the difference, but when Emily loved you, like really loved you, it beamed out of her. With Brian, Emily’s smile was this side of dim.
“Don’t you like him?” AJ asked later as the two of them said goodbye outside Patrick’s room. She hated to go, but she had to be back in the city for work the next day.
“Yes, I like him,” said Emily. “I like him just as much as you like him.”
AJ laughed to hide her dismay.