CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Alex
Now
Joshua and I had one child. Arthur. I had kept him from the hospital on purpose. A room with tubes and a machine doing the breathing was not the first version of his father I wanted him to have. Martina brought him at nine.
I met them in the lobby. I wanted to prepare him.
I understood, standing there watching them come through the sliding doors, that I did not actually know how to do that.
There is no version of the sentence your father was in an accident that arrives gently, no matter how many times you rearrange the words on the drive over.
Arthur was in the clothes he’d slept in. Martina hadn’t made him change, which told me she’d made the right call about a great many things that morning.
He looked at me. He didn’t run. He walked, the way he did most things, at his own considered pace, like running toward bad news wouldn’t make it arrive any less true.
“Is he dead?” Arthur asked.
“No,” I said. “He’s alive. He’s very hurt, Arthur. I need you to understand that before we go up there.”
He nodded. Not like a child, like a man twenty years older. He was absorbing the information and filing it before he let himself have a feeling about it.
“How hurt?” he asked.
I crouched down so we were level, which I hadn’t done with him in over a year because he’d started objecting to it, and he let me do it now.
“He was in a car accident,” I said. “He has a lot of broken bones. He hit his head very hard, and the doctors are worried about that part more than the other parts.” I made myself keep looking at him.
“He might not wake up all the way for a while. When he does, he might not be exactly like he was before. I don’t know that yet. Nobody does.”
Arthur was quiet. He looked past me, toward the elevators, toward wherever his father was.
“Can I see him?” he asked.
“If you want to. You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I need to tell you what it looks like first, so it isn’t a surprise. There’s a tube in his throat helping him breathe. There are wires. His face is bruised and there’s bandages on part of it. It’s going to look scary. It’s okay if it’s scary.”
He considered this with the same seriousness he considered everything, weighing it, deciding what to do with it before he let it show on his face.
“Is it my fault?” he asked.
The question landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there.
“No,” I said, immediately, more firmly than I’d said anything all morning. “Arthur. Look at me. This is not your fault. Not even a little.”
“We argued Thursday,” he said. “About the science fair thing. He said I embarrassed him at the school thing and I said some stuff back.”
“That has nothing to do with this,” I said. “He and I argued Friday night too. About something that had nothing to do with either one of us being careless with a car. People argue with people they love. That’s not what happened here.”
He didn’t look fully convinced. I understood that no one sentence from me was going to undo whatever arithmetic a child does in the dark when a parent ends up in a hospital.
So I didn’t try to finish the job right there in a lobby that smelled like corn chips and hand sanitizer.
I just held his hand and let him take his own time getting there.
Martina stood a few feet off, not intruding, her purse held against her stomach with both arms the way she held it when she needed something to do with her hands.
“Ready?” I asked him.
“Ready,” Arthur said, and it wasn’t entirely true, and it was true enough.
He was very still in the doorway of the room.
He didn’t cry, which surprised me and then didn’t, because Arthur rarely cried where anyone could watch him do it.
He stood there and looked at his father for a long moment, cataloguing all of it the way he catalogued everything.
Then he walked to the side of the bed opposite the machines and stood there with his hands at his sides.
“Hey, Dad,” he said quietly.
The monitors kept their rhythm. Nothing in the room answered him.
“The doctors are going to fix you,” Arthur said. He said it like a fact he’d decided to make true through sheer will, which was his way of managing things too large to feel all at once. “You just have to do the part where you wake up.”
I stood in the doorway with my hand over my mouth.
He reached out, carefully, and touched two fingers to the back of Joshua’s hand, avoiding the IV line. It was the instinctive care of a child who had clearly been paying closer attention to the adult world than any of us gave him credit for.
Then he stepped back and looked at me.
“Okay,” he said. “I saw him. Can we go now?”
“Yes,” I said.
He didn’t look back at the bed on his way out.
I understood, watching him go, that he had done exactly what he came to do.
He was not going to spend one unnecessary second longer in that room than the visit required.
This particular economy of grief, taking only what was needed and leaving the rest for later, was a thing I recognized.
I did it too, and had been doing it, apparently, since long before I ever noticed it in myself.
Martina took him down to the cafeteria for pancakes, because pancakes were what Martina believed in for occasions too large for words. I went back to the waiting room to sit with whatever came next.