Chapter Three

THEY brought me up to the adolescent ward called BBR2 sometime that night, when it seemed that the entire rest of the hospital was asleep. I can’t remember who wheeled my stretcher, but I know that I was more relieved than scared to be whisked, alone, out of the emergency room, into a huge, empty elevator and down a soothingly dim hallway into a dark and peaceful room. It got me away from the madness, away from my mom.

“My foot hurts really bad,” I told someone, a nurse, and she was sweet and said, “I know, it’ll get better,” but that wasn’t helpful, so I told her again and again—because the pain was searing, enough to make me sweaty and nauseous—until she went away and then returned with some pills, which I gulped down, hoping they’d not only numb the pain but make me unconscious, too.

I got the bed by the door, though the one near the window was empty, and I lay in it alone for a while, I’m not sure how long, waiting for the drug to wash over me, closing my eyes but not quite sleeping, thinking about the recital and the ice cream and the sleepover that didn’t happen—Kristin’s pillow and stuffed monkey at home in my bedroom.

“Hello, dear.”

An elderly woman, pudgy and uniformed, like a nurse, roused me, but her voice was indifferent—not sweet like the others’ had been.

“Hello.”

“How are we this evening?”

I was confused by the question. What could possibly be my answer? She didn’t wait for it.

“I just need to ask you some intake questions,” she said, plopping into a clunky bedside chair and sighing as she retrieved a pen from behind her ear. She started with my name, my address, and I answered her suspiciously, wondering why I, instead of my parents, was answering such things.

“Date of birth?” she continued.

“April twentieth, 1970.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

I searched her face for irony, ignorance—a clue, perhaps, that I did have a brother indeed—and I winced as my foot pain groaned back to life. I told her, mainly to see if it was true (because perhaps it wasn’t true after all if she could ask such a thing), “They said my brother died.”

“Oh, yes, dear,” she said, no apologies. “Besides him.” Her pen sat poised above her clipboard.

“No,” I told her, stunned. I barely heard the rest of the questions, though I must have answered, because she wrote things down and nodded her head at me and then she was off, and as she left the room I asked her to please bring me more pills, because my foot was on fire, and because I was way too awake.

Nobody came with the pills, but people came in and out of the room to examine and prod at my foot, take it on and off ice, get the swelling down so it would be ready for a cast the next morning. And then I had a visitor—my cousin Susan, who lived in South Jersey and who we usually only saw at Thanksgiving. She was my mom’s first cousin, one of three sisters in their thirties, and I adored her.

“Hi, Bethie,” she said, rushing into my room from the hallway with a nervous, bewildered energy, as if she were being chased.

I had to blink a few times before her presence registered with me. How did she get here so quickly? How did she know? It made it worse in a way, having Susan here, so out of context—a sure sign that this was all real, and that it was a very big deal.

“Susan? What are you doing here?” was all I could say. She stood over me, put her face close to mine, and I saw that the tiny freckles around her eyes were stained with running, clotted black mascara. I had never seen her cry before.

“They called me. Mom gave them my number as next of kin,” she said. “Oh, Bethie, Bethie. I’m so sorry. How does your foot feel?”

“It hurts a lot,” I told her. “Where is everyone?”

“Mommy and Daddy are together,” she said. “You’ll see them soon.”

“And Kristin?”

Her eyes watered, and she said, “With her parents.”

So that left Adam. But neither of us mentioned him.

She blew her nose and sat on the edge of my bed. It must have been three in the morning by then—a time I’d never before been awake to see—and I couldn’t help but doze off, fitfully.

When I woke up Susan was gone. In her place was Mrs. Tuchband, standing over me and putting her soft, spicily perfumed hand on my cheek. She was about my mom’s height, five feet tall, and had hair just like hers—chestnut brown and chopped into a short, feathery ’do. She was pretty, with warm eyes that crinkled in the corners when she smiled. It felt odd, having this practical stranger be there with me, taking care of me like a mom, but I was so happy to have her that I wanted to cry.

“Try to sleep, Beth,” she said, her voice thick with worry and exhaustion.

“How? My foot hurts so bad,” I told her.

I moaned out loud for the rest of the night, and she settled into another chunky wooden chair, like the one the intake nurse had sat in, this one across the room near the empty bed, under the window. I could see her only faintly in the darkness, her form like a shadow through the filtered light of the hallway and the mottled veil of pain in my head.

“Try to imagine,” Mrs. Tuchband suggested, “That the pain is really an itch. Try to concentrate really hard on that.”

I tried, though it was a struggle to focus, and though I was convinced that such a trick would never work.

“I can remember sitting in hospital rooms with my Ellen, after all of her knee surgeries,” she told me. “And it would hurt so much and I would say to her, ‘Turn that pain into an itch!’”

“Did it work?” I asked, momentarily distracted by the mention of her daughter, who was eighteen and so hip and so beautiful—a singer who would come around to all the Sunday school classrooms with her guitar, teaching “Dayanu” or “Eli Eli,” the downy curls of her strawberry-blond hair resting on her arms. Her voice was mesmerizing—husky and sweet and soft and immense all at once. I always sang my best when she was there because I wanted her to notice me.

“It would work!” Mrs. Tuchband said. “Let’s make it work for you. Did you turn the pain into an itch yet?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Good. Now concentrate really hard and move the itch to your pinkie finger, and scratch it! Scratch it hard until it goes away!”

I scratched at my left pinkie until my fingernails left red streaks, but all the while I was still moaning, too, and tears leaked out of my eyes. There was no itch, only pain, and in between the scratching and trying to imagine I kept returning to just one thought: Adam is dead. Adam is dead. Adam is dead.

How could it be true? Dead was for movies—horror movies, like Friday the 13th and The Blob and Dracula, which I’d watch with Adam on rainy Saturday afternoons, shielding my eyes from the gory parts while screaming with delight. It couldn’t be true.

I finally fell asleep, my nails still desperately digging into my pinkie.

When I opened my eyes again, Mrs. Tuchband was still there, across the room, hunched and asleep in her chair just beneath the window, where the blue glow of dawn was seeping in. I slowly pieced together where I was, remembered the sound of the roof crashing in and the sight of Adam on his stomach, motionless beneath my tutu, and then the news, delivered by the doctor whose face I could not picture.

“Do you want me to call for more pain medication?” Mrs. Tuchband was awake then, sitting up and rubbing her face and slowly standing, her hair stuck straight up like a feather on the side that had been pressed into the back of the chair. “You were moaning,” she explained, coming closer to my bed. “You were moaning about your foot.”

I had temporarily forgotten about my foot, but now that, too, came back to me. I felt the searing pain and looked down to try and see it but it was splinted and wrapped elaborately, with just my toes, purple and swollen as raw sausages, peeking through the top. “Yes. It hurts so bad,” I said groggily.

“What time is it?”

“Five thirty. You rest now, and I’ll go and find a nurse.”

It was the time of morning that I wasn’t accustomed to seeing face-to-face, but always sideways, the almost imperceptible light slipping in through the crack between my bedroom windows and their heavy shades just as my father was leaving for work. I was nudged awake by the sound of the heavy garage door going up, its squeaky metal wheels grinding in their tracks as he lifted it by hand to step out onto the driveway and then close it behind him before easing into his Pinto, turning the motor over and letting it warm for a minute or so before backing out of the driveway and heading off for the twenty-minute drive to Toms River High School North, where he wore a button-down shirt and tie every single day of his thirty-year tenure as an American history teacher there. “I can’t stand that some of these new, younger teachers don’t wear ties,” he’d say. “You’ve got. To look. Professional.”

I would picture him leaving, moving through the chilly darkness of our house all alone, eating cereal at the kitchen table, reading the paper, putting on his shoes and his coat and heading out into the day before the sun even officially broke through the sky, and I would feel a twinge of sadness about it all before falling back into my deep sleep, only to have to get up myself an hour later. For the longest time, in a tradition that would continue until high school, my mom would be my gentle alarm clock. She’d come into my room fresh out of her own bed, still warm and rumpled in her nightgown, and climb under the covers with me, whispering, “Beth. Time to get up,” and I would groan and tell her “Noooo,” and she’d lay there with me for five or ten minutes and then try again, this time with a bit more urgency in her voice. “Beth,” she’d say, “come on. You’re going to be late. What do you want for breakfast?”

“Oatmeal,” I’d tell her. Or “Rice Krispies” or “Pop-Tarts.” And she’d go and get it all ready for me, but not until I was sitting up and focused on getting to the shower, and she was pretty certain that I wouldn’t fall back asleep and make myself late.

I had hoped that some sort of normalcy would return at daybreak, but it didn’t seem likely as I lay there alone, surveying the hospital room in the morning light. Next to me, along the wall where Mrs. Tuchband had slept, the other bed was still empty. A drab gray curtain hung between it and me, blocking my view of its pillows, and also in between us was a narrow table on wheels with a yellow plastic pitcher and the small white bedpan that I had peed into the night before. A television, mounted high on the wall in front of me, was off.

“OK, sweetheart, she’s on her way.” Mrs. Tuchband had returned, pouring some water from the pitcher into a plastic cup and standing beside my bed with it in her hand. I barely knew her, and yet here she was, the only one holding vigil. She’d lost Mrs. Brandwene somewhere along the way, as well as the rabbi, who had gone to see my father in the ICU.

“Good morning!” A chirpy nurse entered the room, palming a miniature, pleated Dixie cup. “This is Tylenol with codeine. It’s not quite time for it, but since you’re really in pain I’ll give it to you early.” She smiled at me and then at Mrs. Tuchband, dropping the pills into my hand. I swallowed them with the water and then lay back into the pillows, feeling exhausted.

“Sleep, dear. I’m going to need to get home,” Mrs. Tuchband said. “But your cousin Susan is on her way up. And Mom will be in here soon. They’re letting her share a room with you. Isn’t that nice?” I nodded, and then faded away.

I slept hard, dreamed of nothing and woke up gradually sometime later, the ruckus at the next bed registering only as a distant din at first, bringing me up out of my drugged slumber in a way that felt like bursting to the surface of the pool at the beach club after attempting to swim the entire length under water. And only when my head finally popped out completely did I realize that it was Mom’s voice at the center of the commotion.

“If only we hadn’t stopped at that gas station! If only we had left the ice cream place five minutes earlier!” Her words came out like whines and groans, broken up by hoarse sobs and waves of childlike weeping. “Oh why did we have to take that route home? It’s not fair! It’s not fair! If only I hadn’t let him sit in the back hatch! If only if only if only …”

“Please take this, Mrs. Greenfield. Please, it will help you.”

“I don’t want any drugs! I want my son!”

“It’s just a little something. It will calm you. Please, Mrs. Greenfield.”

She was quiet for a moment and then began crying again. “But we were almost home,” she said pleadingly. And then she yelled it, as if saying it was what made her realize it in the first place. “We were almost home!!”

I listened with the distanced fascination of someone watching a trauma scene on Marcus Welby, M.D., but with less empathy and more shock. It unhinged me to hear my mom losing it like that; scared me like nothing else ever had before.

One of the nurses—there were about three clustered around her bed, plus a doctor and the rabbi and my cousin Susan—saw that I was awake and yanked the curtain between our beds, blocking the whole scene from my view. But my mom caught the move and shifted her frantic attention to me, so I closed my eyes and tried to pretend I was still asleep.

“Beth? Are you awake, Beth?”

“Mrs. Greenfield, please, let her …”

“Oh my Beth!” I snuck a peek and there she was, at my bedside, a wreck, the back of her hospital gown flapping around, her eyes terribly hard and glassy. “Oh Beth I’m so sorry! So sorry!” She dove at me with a desperate lunge, leaned over me and pulled me into her chest, pressing her cheek against mine and stroking the top of my head. “This isn’t fair for you. This isn’t right …” She spoke dramatically and continuously into me, and I recoiled with each word, each new squeeze, going stiff and emotionless beneath her. I couldn’t cry, couldn’t look at her, couldn’t bear to be in the room. I felt compelled to let her know that I was fine so she would leave me alone, though, and so, bereft of any other ideas of how to do so, I smiled at her. It was maniacal looking, I’m sure, the way I looked right at her and forced up the corners of my mouth—not my eyes, not my cheeks—into a big, toothy grin that was pure mechanics, total desperation. My mother paused when she saw my face, pulled her arms away and dropped them to her sides.

“Are you OK, Beth?” she asked, confused.

“I’m fine!”

“You can talk to me. You know that, don’t you? You can talk to me. You can cry, let it out.”

“I’m fine.” I was, in a way. I was completely numb. Couldn’t have cried if I tried.

She looked even sadder then—alone, as if her last shred of support had gone, abandoned her. Like she was the crazy one for grieving so hard. A tiny drop of me melted inside, regretting the way I had smiled and signaled a standoff. But just a drop. I couldn’t help it; she was on her own. And so was I.