When He Fell

We’ve worked so hard for this, the three of us. We’ve put the difficult times behind us, the tragedy and fear and the dreaded silence. Even though life sometimes feels like walking on a tightrope, everything teetering, I choose to believe we’re steady now. We’re solid.

Lewis cleans up the kitchen while I do paperwork, and Josh stays in his room until bedtime. At eight-thirty I knock on his door and push it open, my heart lurching a little when I see him lying curled up on his bed, his knees tucked up to his chest.

“Josh?” I move closer, and then perch on the edge of his bed. “Josh. Honey. Is everything okay?” I should know better than to ask my son such an open-ended question. Josh deals in facts. The only way to get information from him is to ask factual yes-no questions. “Did something happen today to make you sad?” I try. “Did Mrs. Rollins yell at you?”

“No.” His voice is barely audible.

“Did you get in a fight with someone?” I think about Ben, but Josh never fights with Ben, as far as I know. They are utterly unlike each other; Ben is loud and rambunctious and hyper. I’ve wondered, on the few occasions that I’ve met him, if he has ADHD. Josh is none of those things, but somehow the friendship works. Opposites attract, I guess. Look at me and Lewis.

“No,” Josh says again, so softly. He squeezes his eyes shut and my heart flips over in fear. I can’t shake the feeling that something is really wrong, and I need to know what it is.

“Tell me,” I say quietly. “Tell me what’s wrong, Josh, and I’ll fix it for you. I promise.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know they’re not quite right, that they’re a promise I can’t necessarily keep, and yet I mean them. I mean them so much.

But Josh just hugs his knees more tightly to his chest and keeps his eyes closed. He doesn’t say anything, which is not a surprise and yet still a worry. After a moment I rise from the bed and fetch his pajamas. He takes them obediently, and I rest a hand on his shoulder for a moment before I leave the room for him to change.

In the living room Lewis is sitting at the desk by the window, going over some invoices. His phone beeps with an incoming voicemail and he glances at it, frowning, before tossing it aside.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

“Yeah, just a work thing.” He gives me a quick, distracted smile.

“I’m worried about Josh.”

Lewis sighs. “I know you are, sweetheart.”

I stand behind him, resting my hands on his shoulders. “He really doesn’t seem himself, Lewis.”

“We all have bad days.” Lewis glances up at me, patting my hand before turning back to his paperwork. “He’ll be fine.”

I remain there a moment, taking comfort from Lewis’s warmth, his steadiness, his certainty that life will fall into a usual, peaceful pattern. I’m amazed at Lewis’s faith sometimes; his own childhood was tempestuous, with his mother dragging him across the country after a bitter divorce and then basically ignoring him for the next ten years while she went through several deadbeat boyfriends. Yet despite all that Lewis still possesses a seemingly unshakable faith that things will work out for us, for Josh, even when they haven’t in the past. But I don’t think about that.

I finish tidying up the kitchen and then I go back into the bedroom to say goodnight to Josh. He is already huddled under the covers, his eyes closed, his breathing even. I wonder if he is asleep—maybe he really is just tired—but then I notice how tense his shoulders are, scrunched up by his ears.

“Josh,” I say softly, and he doesn’t reply. He doesn’t even open his eyes. I decide to play along that he is asleep, just for tonight, because maybe all he needs is a little space, a little time. Maybe he did just have a bad day as Lewis said.

Gently I pull the duvet up over his shoulders and brush a kiss on his forehead, my lips barely touching his skin. I breathe in his little boy scent of soap and sweat and sunshine, my eyes closed. Then I tiptoe from the room and close the door softly, and hope that just as Lewis always believes, everything will look better in the morning.

3 MADDIE (#ulink_2c2fb197-4930-5818-a4b0-0f095a8d2266)

That night in the ER Ben experiences storming, which is a term I’d never heard before, but which Dr. Stein explains to me. Storming is, in layman’s terms, when a person’s vital signs go haywire; Ben’s temperature rises and then drops, his body seizes, his heart rate is all over the place. Dr. Stein tells me this happens in ‘roughly fifteen to thirty-three percent of all TBI cases’—TBI being traumatic brain injury. I am starting to know the acronyms, and I hate them all.

When I ask Dr. Stein why this happens, he launches into a lengthy soliloquy on possible causes of storming. Maybe it’s ‘sympathetic’, and is part of the recovery process. Maybe it’s a reaction to the drugs he is receiving, or a change in dosage. Maybe it’s a neurological response to the initial trauma. Blah blah blah. I am desperate to understand, and yet this is a language I don’t speak. I want bottom lines and doctors don’t give those. They don’t deal in promises.

I stand at the door and peer at Ben through the window; the sight of his body flailing in the bed, the machines beeping faster and louder, is beyond terrifying to me, but I am coping better now, or perhaps I am simply numb. Numb and utterly exhausted, living in this terrible stasis, and I have no idea what happens next.

Lewis hasn’t called me back. I didn’t expect him to, but I am still disappointed.

At ten o’clock that night I break down and call Juliet. I need to talk to someone.

“Oh, Maddie,” she exclaims as soon as she answers the phone. “Is Ben going to be okay?”

Shock slaps me in the face. She knows. Juliet knows about Ben. How? Why? And why didn’t she call? I swallow down my own question to answer hers.

“I don’t know, Juliet. He’s in a medically-induced coma.”

“Oh, no.” She let out a muffled sob and I feel an unreasonable dart of anger, because I haven’t permitted myself to shed any tears, but she can? She has that presumption?

“How…how did you know?” I ask. And then I realize how little I know; I don’t even know how or where he fell. I’ve been too busy coping with the result to wonder about how it happened, or where, or why. And suddenly I feel like I need to know these things, that they might be important.

“I…” Juliet hesitates. “I was on playground duty.”

Burgdorf parents are required to volunteer for the school three hours a week; I usually end up stuffing envelopes or doing data entry after work, while Ben is in afterschool club. Juliet does the ‘fun’ things, the field trips and playground duty. She was there when Ben fell. Which means she knew about this for hours and hours, and yet she never even called me.

“It happened on the playground?” I finally ask, and my voice sounds scratchy, hoarse. “Did you see him? How did he fall?” I blurt the questions, needing facts.

“I didn’t see,” Juliet says quickly. “The kids were running all around, you know how it is. It all happened so fast…” She trails off, helplessly, and I close my eyes. Does it really matter if he fell off the slide or the swing? Or maybe it was the huge concrete climbing structure in Heckscher Playground in Central Park, where the kids often go for recess. Ben’s twisted his ankle or banged his knee on that thing more than once. Wherever he fell, it landed him here, fighting for his life.

“I’m so, so sorry,” Juliet says. “They rushed him to the hospital. The paramedics were so good…”

I can feel the sting of tears in my eyes, and I can’t believe that after everything that has happened, I am going to cry now. “You didn’t even call me,” I choke, and I am ashamed at how needy I sound. I’ve learned not to be needy, not to depend on anyone. A lifetime in foster care makes you an expert in self-sufficiency.

“Oh Maddie, honey, of course I wanted to,” Juliet says, her voice breaking. “But I knew Mrs. James would contact you first and I didn’t want to barge in before she could tell you the details…”

But she wasn’t there. You were. And you’re my friend. The protests lodge in my throat like stones.

“…And then with the kids… Emma had ballet exams today…” She trails off, and I know she realizes her excuses are cringingly, shamefully lame. And I don’t understand why Juliet is failing me like this, because I’ve always considered her a good friend.

I don’t have a lot of experience with friends of any kind, but I’ve known Juliet for ten years, since Ben and Emma were babies. For the last three years she has treated me to a ticket to the school’s annual charity gala, and made sure I sit at her table. She’s given me her castoff clothes even though they’re not my style at all. They’re still good quality. She’s had me over for Thanksgiving when they’re in the city and she knows I have nowhere to go. Why didn’t she call me when she knew my son was in the ER, in a coma?

“He’s going to be okay, though,” she says, and her tone is deliberately upbeat. Maybe she’s trying to mimic Burgdorf’s environment of positivity, but I feel none of it now.

“I have no idea,” I tell her flatly. “The doctor told me the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are critical.” I pause. “As to whether he lives or dies.”

“Oh, Maddie…” Juliet’s voice is like the cry of a small animal, as if I’ve hurt her with this information, and suddenly I can’t take any more.

“I have to go,” I say abruptly, and I hang up. I walk back from the little waiting room to the doors of Ben’s room—a journey I already feel I’ve made a thousand times—and peer in the window. Ben is still restless and agitated, his body jerking spasmodically as the doctors and nurses attempt to subdue him. I can’t bear to see him like this, and yet I can’t look away either. All I can do is wait.

Wait and wonder, because as I replay the conversation with Juliet something doesn’t feel right. Juliet would call me. She’s the type of person who calls, who cares.

Why didn’t she see how Ben fell? Why didn’t she give me any details at all?

I can’t help Ben now, and so I focus on what happened. On finding out what happened. I call Juliet again. She answers after the fourth ring, her voice a little wary.

“Maddie?”

“I just want some details,” I burst out. “About how it happened. Was it on Heckscher Playground?”

“Yes…you know that’s where they go for recess when it’s nice out.”