Crash (6 page)

13

Dan

Dan’s plane from Mexico landed in Boston at 11:15 the night of Neil’s first surgery. Saul picked him up at Logan Airport and brought him right to Neil’s hospital room. He laid his small duffel bag of clothes next to the bed. He would later use it as a pillow, sleeping next to his brother on the floor of the ICU. I hugged Dan tight. It was so good to see him, to feel him. He seemed so grown up. College was agreeing with him.

I gently jostled Neil’s shoulder.

“Neil, wake up.”

He slowly opened his eyes, saw Dan, and closed them again.

“Neil, do you know who this is?”

“Dan,” he said without opening his eyes.

“And who’s Dan?”

“Brother,” he said and went back to sleep.

Dan smiled and gave us a thumb’s-up sign, already seeming to grasp the significance of that recognition.

Saul and I quickly brought Dan up to speed on Neil’s injuries. Then, with Neil sleeping peacefully, Dan pulled up a chair and quietly started telling us about his trip to Mexico. He flipped through the pictures on his digital camera, narrating the show. He seemed so worldly. He was a traveler. He had been somewhere his parents had not and had stories to share.

After the travelogue, Dan told me to close my eyes and hold out my hand. Instead of placing the surprise in my palm as I expected, he clasped something around my wrist. I opened my eyes. There was a silver bracelet with a pressed flower encased in an acrylic oval. I collect pressed flowers, so the gift was perfect. He dug around in his duffel bag some more and pulled out an onyx chess set for Saul and a beaded belt for Neil.

“It reminded me of his hacky sack,” Dan said.

I felt a stab of fear, wondering if Neil would be able to return to the foot bag game he was so good at.

“He’ll love it,” I promised.

All the while, Neil slept. Then, out of the blue, he called, “Dan, cut it out.” We all laughed because of course Dan hadn’t done anything at all.

“You’re not in the country five minutes and already you’re being blamed for stuff,” Saul observed. We all laughed. It was the first time we had laughed since learning of the crash more than twenty-four hours ago, and it felt good.

When the kids were little, Dan was always getting into trouble for beating up on Neil. Often he deserved it, starting fights and picking on his little brother. (Dan even managed to take some measure of credit for his brother’s survival, telling him days after the crash, “I made your ass durable.”) But years later, Neil would admit that sometimes they would be sitting together on the couch watching TV and out of the blue Neil would yell, “Ow!” knowing I would come in and punish Dan, who all the while protested his innocence.

But while it may have been okay for Dan to beat up on his kid brother, it was not okay for anyone else to mess with him. One day after school, a group of kids started harassing Neil. The boys must have been in the second and third grade at this time. Dan came up behind his brother and quietly told him to drop his backpack and run home as fast as he could. Neil took off. Dan scooped up the pack, distracted the head bully with a kick to the shins to give Neil a head start, and then took off after him. The two arrived at home breathless but unharmed. We had a little talk about bullies and fighting, but I was secretly proud of Dan for sticking up for Neil.

Dan was a tremendous help to us those first days in the hospital. He carried Neil to the bathroom and helped him in the shower. He brought him smoothies from the cafeteria and fed him with a straw.

At one point Neil’s nurse Sean wanted to get him out of bed. He told us he was going to go get another nurse to help with the transfer from bed to chair.

“I’ll help you,” Dan offered.

Sean looked wary.

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “He worked at a camp for disabled youth. He knows how to transfer patients.”

Sean brightened. Now each young man draped one of Neil’s arms across his shoulders. Sean counted to three and they lifted Neil to his feet. Neil teetered weakly but regained his balance with their support. As they were getting ready to pivot him over to the chair, an older nurse passing by the room came running in, waving her arms.

“Family can’t lift patients,” she warned.

At that point, Neil released Sean, wrapped both of his arms around his brother’s neck and said, “But I trust him.”

He then laid his head on Dan’s shoulder and added, “He lifts weights.”

The boys were always close, but the accident served to bond the brothers in a way no other experience could. After Neil left the hospital and friends would gather around his makeshift bed, a pullout couch in the living room, I’d often overhear him telling them, “My brother came all the way from Mexico to be with me.” And Dan’s love and affection for Neil has deepened in a new and lasting way, precious now for almost having lost him.

14

Trista

They met at school, on the set of the comedy
On the Razzle.
Neil played the constable; Trista played one of the townspeople and sang in the chorus. It was her first foray into the performing arts, and, though her role was small, she lit up the stage with her endearing smile. You hear that said a lot about people who have passed away. “She was always smiling” sounds like such a cliché, but with Trista it was true.

Her mother, Mary, gives Neil most of the credit for that smile. Neil was her daughter’s first boyfriend, and Mary has often told me that Trista believed he was “the one.” She is grateful to Neil for bringing Trista out of her shell, giving her confidence and poise. Apparently prior to Neil, her daughter was self-conscious and shy. But having a boyfriend made her glow.

They had a lot in common. They were both very smart and liked school. Trista was on the honor roll. Neil got a perfect eight hundred on his math SATs. They both planned to be teachers—Trista in history, Neil in mathematics. They had engaging senses of humor and enjoyed teasing each other. For such a young couple, they had a lot of chemistry.

They had only been dating for seven or eight months when she died. They were starting to talk seriously about the future. Neil would be heading off to college that fall and was in the throes of the application process at the time of the crash. But they had come to the decision that they would continue their relationship after he left.

Neil doesn’t remember much from the night of the accident, but he told me once, months later, about the last conversation he had with Trista as he walked her home that evening. He asked her if she had noticed that now, when they talked about their future, they had stopped saying “if”’ and started saying “when.”

“Should I be afraid?” she had asked him.

“No,” he told her.

That was the last thing he remembers.

I dreamed about Trista a few nights after she died. I was seeing patients at my clinic, and when I opened the door to an exam room, there she was, sitting on the exam table, smiling at me sweetly. Her wavy brown hair tumbled around her freckled face. She was dressed in her typical funky fashion: layered red skirt, chunky boots, woolen tights. The beaded red bracelet I had given her for Christmas jangled softly around her wrist. She waved to me without speaking. It was as if she was telling me it was okay. She looked happy and at home.

15

POV

Neil had been in the hospital for four days, and he still did not know what happened to him. He never asked. He knew he had a broken leg, but he never asked how he got it. He also never asked about Trista. But we knew it was just a matter of time. So we made a plan as a family as to how we would tell him. We met with the hospital social worker. She agreed to help us break the news to him when the time came. We made up rules. We would only give him information as he asked for it. We would wait until he was ready to hear it.

We also never left him alone. The accident was all over the Boston news, and we did not want him finding out haphazardly, from the janitor, say.

“Hey, man. Sorry about your girlfriend.”

We made sure the doctors and nurses all knew that he wasn’t aware of Trista’s death so that they wouldn’t accidentally let something slip. We wanted it to come from us. We had the social worker’s phone number in case we needed her.

On the fourth day in the ICU, Neil uttered his first spontaneous words. He asked for a book.

“Mom, they say I’m going to be here for two weeks. Can you bring me my books?”

It was astonishing. His request reflected thought. Someone had given him information. He was going to be here two weeks. He had processed that information.
What am I going to do for two weeks?
He had come up with a solution.
I’ll read.
And he had formulated a request to bring about that solution. “Mom, can you bring me my books?” It was amazing.

But as overjoyed as I was to hear this true conversation, my heart also grew cold with the realization that, number one, I didn’t think there was any way he could actually read a book and, number two, if he could ask for books, it was just a matter of time before he asked for Trista.

Sure enough, that night, just before seven, just as he was drifting off to sleep, he asked, “Mom, can you bring Trista to visit me tomorrow?” Saul had just left for the hotel room. It was just Dan and I. I stared at Dan, panic-stricken. He motioned for me to go ahead. Tell him. We pulled our chairs up close to Neil, one on either side of him. Neil kept his eyes closed.

“Neil, I have to tell you about Trista.”

“Okay.”

“You two were both in a car accident.”

“We were?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And her injuries were more serious than yours.”

No response. Eyes closed.

“They took her to a different hospital.”

I used past tense. I didn’t lie. But I didn’t push either. I really didn’t want to feed him this information at night as he was drifting off to sleep. This awful news that could only invade his slumber and give him nightmares.

“In that case, Mom, can you keep me updated?”

That was the other part of our family strategy for telling Neil. Only give him what he asked for. A bit at a time. Only what he could handle.

“Sure Neil. Just ask.” Dan nodded at me like I’d done a good job. Like that was enough. We sat there in the darkened room for a while, listening to Neil breathe, waiting for him to wake up and ask more questions. But he seemed to be out for the night.

I stepped outside Neil’s room and called the social worker. I just wanted to update her, see if there was anything else she recommended.

“I’m here but I’m not here,” she told me, explaining that her shift ended at seven. It was 7:05. She gave me the name of her evening counterpart, but I didn’t want to start all over with someone new. I felt abandoned. Let down. How many times had I stayed beyond my shift to see a family through a crisis?

Dan and I kept our vigil at Neil’s bedside. We were both so tired. Neither one of us wanted to leave Neil, but there was another bed at the hotel room, and we had one more key. We argued briefly over who would stay with Neil, but there was really no contest.

“I’ll call you if he wakes up,” Dan told me with a wink, then rolled his sleeping bag out on the floor.

I crossed the frigid wind tunnel between the hospital and the hotel, my collar pulled up around my ears. I used the toothpaste and toothbrush the hotel provided and washed my face at the sink. I looked down at Saul, sleeping on top of the bedspread, fully clothed except for his shoes. Crow’s feet and worry lines had cropped up overnight. Our carefree existence before the accident—professional careers growing, one son in college, another close behind—seemed a million miles away.

I kissed Saul’s cheek and lay down next to him. It seemed like I had just shut my eyes when my cell phone rang. Saul and I both were fully upright before the first ring ended.

“Hello?”

“He’s asking again.”

Saul and I crossed the frigid street, the two buildings forming a wind tunnel to be forged each time.

In the hospital room Neil lay still, Dan at his side. I pulled up a chair next to Neil’s right side. Dan was holding his hand on his left. Saul sat gingerly on the edge of the bed.

“So, Mom. Tell me about Trista,” Neil said without opening his eyes, just sensing I was there. Something about the way he said it told me he already knew. He didn’t ask how she was doing. He didn’t ask for an update. Just “tell me about Trista.” Like he knew there was a story there. Something he had to hear. The story I needed to finish. Dan held his hand. I put the side rail down and moved in close. I started with a recap.

“Do you remember me telling you that Trista was in the accident with you?” He nodded.

“And that she was taken to a different hospital in Boston?” Another nod.

“And that her injuries were more serious than yours?” A silent yes. He still had his eyes closed, so I wasn’t sure if he had fallen back to sleep. I waited. He didn’t say anything or even open his eyes, but he moved his hand in a circle, motioning for me to go on. I was crying now. I put my hand on his shoulder and spoke quietly.

“Trista tried very hard to stay alive, Neil. And the doctors and nurses did everything they could. But in the end, she didn’t make it.” My voice broke.

“I’m so sorry.” Dan kept rubbing Neil’s other shoulder. Neil didn’t yell or scream or deny the reality. He didn’t even open his eyes. He just turned over and said, “Then I don’t want to get up any more.” Checked out. Done. It would be how Neil would deal with many things in the coming days and weeks. My heart broke for him.

I watched him for a long time. I wondered how he could possibly process that information. How completely unreal the whole thing must seem in his brain-injured, time-warped, drugged-out state. One minute you’re walking down the street holding hands with your girlfriend. The next you’re being told that while you were asleep, she passed away.

Despite our diligent preparation and all our “family rules” about how and when and where to tell Neil about Trista, Neil remembers the scene very differently—like those movies where the same story is told differently from each character’s point of view. In his world, the information came quickly and cleanly. Like a guillotine.

“She died.”

In mine there was forethought, a plan. A strategy worked out carefully over days, in consultation with others. Words well chosen and delivered in the warm embrace of family. I used to argue with Neil about it, tell him that’s not how it was. I wouldn’t have dropped those words like a hatchet on a chopping block. “She died.” For him to remember it that way made me feel callous and cruel.

I once lamented to Neil that if only I hadn’t said to him that night “Why don’t you walk Trista home?” that maybe they would both be alive now. But he told me that if he hadn’t walked her home, she would still be dead, and he would feel unbearably guilty for not being there. Maybe that helps him bear his wounds sometimes. By seeing them as penance. As proof that he was there. As the least he could do to protect her.

So maybe remembering my words the way he does is part of his healing. Maybe he has to remember them that way. Maybe he needs to feel the cruelty of the situation full on, not softened by a mother’s touch. Maybe he has to feel it like a cutter has to feel a knife against her skin. Because pain makes things real. Whatever the reason, his memory is what it is. I have finally come to realize that it has nothing to do with me. It is his reality and part of his healing and his journey back. And I have to honor it.