Seventy-One
BURT WEBB HAS made it through surgery, and through the night. But barely.
I’d followed most of what his surgeon explained this morning to Taylor and me.
The first bullet had deflected off his sternum and pierced a lung lobe, but somehow missed all of his major blood vessels, by the grace of God.
The bullet, which the surgeon had removed from the chest cavity, had miraculously missed damaging his heart, in the end only partially collapsing his right lung.
The bullet to the side of his head, as close as it had come to the brain, had passed through him.
By late morning, Burt has already been moved into a private room, just down the hall from the ICU. The governor is the one who made that happen after Helene Mayes had called him. She’s gone back to Cross Rivers by now.
I had sat with Taylor through the night in the visiting lounge near intensive care.
An hour ago, they had allowed us into his room.
I could tell it was sooner than any of the doctors and nurses on Burt’s floor would have preferred, but I assumed the permission might have been some sort of executive order from the governor, too.
There is an IV in Burt’s arm and a heart monitor next to his bed. All of it, the tubes and monitor and even the antiseptic smell of the room and the nurse checking in every few minutes, has taken me right back to Chapel Hill after my accident.
Like it’s me in that bed.
But now it’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had. He’s the one fighting for his life.
Even not being much of one for prayer, I’ve spent a lot of the night praying that he wins this particular fight the way my friend Gideon Garland had not, after he never even made it as far as a room like this.
None of this do I mention to Taylor.
“I’m not going to cry,” Taylor says suddenly. “I don’t even want him to hear me crying.”
I’m not surprised by that in the slightest. Somehow, even now, there is this calm about her as she keeps her eyes and her intense focus on her husband, as if willing him to open his eyes.
“I nearly lost you, Silas, but I didn’t,” she says. “And I’m not going to lose him.”
“You’re not going to,” I say.
She turns to face me briefly, before she turns back to Burt. A bandage covers his face from the side of his left eye to his ear.
“When you walked away before, the doctor told me the loss of blood injured his brain as much as the second bullet did,” she says.
“Almost like he took two shots to the head instead of just the one. But you heard what he said about the coma they induced to help him rest.” She swallows hard. “Rest and start healing up.”
I’d asked Dr. Bauer, that was his name, how long the coma might last.
“A few more hours,” he’d said. “A few days.” He shrugged. “Maybe longer. At this point, that’s about as definitive as I can be.”
Taylor had asked, “What about any brain damage?”
“He was really lucky there,” Dr. Bauer said. “Got away with a superficial wound to the temporal artery, when an inch the other way…”
He shrugged again.
Now Taylor and I go back to sitting in silence, the only real sounds in here being the slow, steady beeps of the monitor, tracking the beat of his heart.
I know this soundtrack, from when I would be awake and alone in my room in Chapel Hill, the quiet beep-beep-beep of my own monitor sometimes as loud and threatening to me as if it were a bomb set to go off at any moment.
It’s one of the things that’s stayed with me, even as long as I’ve been out of the hospital. Will probably always stay with me.
How loud quiet like that can be.
The way it is now as we sit here next to Burt Webb.
“Crying doesn’t get you anywhere,” Taylor says, circling back to that. “Does that make any sense to you at all?”
She’s looking at Burt, so she doesn’t see me smile. “Just about everything I’ve ever heard you say makes sense to me,” I tell her.
There is another silence. I stare over at Burt, too, and now I’m the one willing him to wake up, just for a minute, even as peaceful as he looks, even not knowing if waking up is the best thing for him at this point.
“I’m going to sit here for as long as it takes,” she says.
“So am I.”
“You don’t have to stay with me, Silas.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
She turns her chair so it’s facing me now, the sound of the legs jarring on the linoleum floor.
“Maybe we should give this up,” she says suddenly. “The whole thing. Give it up right now.”
I know what she’s talking about, and that she’s not quite done.
“Maybe they just own us, simple as that,” Taylor says. “They always have and they always will and they’re willing to do anything they have to as a way of keeping it that way.”
I’m not going to argue with her. Not here. So I still don’t say anything.
“I don’t want you to end up in a room like this,” she says in a voice not much more than a whisper. “A room like this or worse.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
Now I let her see me smile. “What I know is that the world already tried to kill me once.”
She picks up her chair now and carries it over next to Burt’s bed and takes his free hand.
“You come back to me right now, you hear me, Burt Webb?” she says in the same soft voice.
And in the next moment, I see him open his eyes.
Then he turns his head slightly and smiles up at his wife.
I feel as if I’m the one who might cry, that’s how happy I am, like I just witnessed some kind of minor miracle.
Only then, just as quickly, his eyes close, and the smile disappears and I suddenly realize that the room has gone completely silent, that there’s no slow beeping coming from the bedside monitor, no rise and fall of Burt Webb’s chest under his sheet and blanket.
Nothing except the quiet.