Daniel’s unmoving form lay still under a tightly-fitted white sheet and hospital blanket. The bandages were wrapped around his head, and his eyes were closed under the fluorescent overhead lights. The room was empty and clean--he’d just been moved there after surgery, and the mountain of flowers and cards that would soon fill the room hadn’t even been delivered yet.
The sound of monitors beeping and the hushed voices of the nurses on the ICU floor outside Daniel’s room filtered into his brain. All images of Blake and the hallway and Mrs. Henderson’s English class yesterday morning had dissolved as he slept. Daniel had no memory of crouching behind tables as Blake shouted his name in the empty hall, and no memory of their confrontation after Mrs. Henderson had fallen to her knees, bleeding to death inside the classroom.
As Daniel’s eyes moved slowly beneath his eyelids, all that he was conscious of were sounds. A doctor opened the door to his room and walked in with a clipboard in hand, his face serious and concerned as he assessed the situation. He walked over to Daniel’s bed and stared at the young patient as the ventilator caused his chest to mechanically rise and fall. The steady hum and beep of the machines was the only sound in the room aside from the ballpoint pen scratching across the clipboard as the doctor took notes.
“Where is he? I want to see my son!” A woman’s voice echoed through the ICU. “Let me see him!”
The doctor set his clipboard on the foot of the bed and rushed to the door to see what the racket was about.
Lisa Girch was standing at the nurse’s station with wild hair and a raincoat that hung off her bare shoulder, revealing a tattoo of a blue bird and a heart on her pale, freckled skin. She tugged the jacket over her shoulder as the doctor approached.
“Ma’am,” he said, reaching out a hand that he never intended to touch her with. “You need to calm down.”
“Calm down, my ass!” Lisa shouted, reeling around. As she did, the contents of her cracked leather purse spilled from the counter, tubes of lipstick and bottles of pills scattering across the polished floor and rolling underneath the plastic chairs in the waiting area.
“You brought my son in yesterday with a head injury—Daniel Girch. He was shot and then he went right to surgery and I didn’t even—” Lisa was getting herself worked up to the point that hyperventilation seemed like a very real possibility.
The doctor finally made contact with her, placing one large, strong hand on her bony elbow. “This way, ma’am,” he said, nearly dragging her birdlike body along beside his. She clomped after him, her ankles wobbly on her tall wedge sandals. The shoes were a poor choice for both the weather and the situation. “You can see him now, but only briefly.”
The door to the hospital room was the only thing that stood between Lisa and her son, and although her first instinct was to shoulder the door like a football player and race through the room to see and hold her only child, at the threshold to the room she paused.
“Is he…” She faltered, nearly tugging her elbow out of the doctor’s firm grip. “I mean, will he…”
“He’s alive, Mrs. Girch.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to correct the tall, handsome, middle-aged doctor with the distinguished crow’s feet and the blue vein running across his temple. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t a “Mrs”--had never been anyone’s “Mrs”--but something in her gave way at that moment, and all she could think about was her child.
“I’m ready to see him,” Lisa whispered, putting a hand against the wooden door.
Inside, Daniel lay just as before, his bed a solitary island floating on a sea of shiny linoleum. The sound of the machines punctuated the silence.
The doctor stepped into the room behind Lisa, holding his tongue as the woman took in the heavily bandaged head of her comatose son. She’d forgotten about the purse she’d dropped—which a nurse was now dutifully collecting and refilling with its former contents—and instead of worrying about how her chipped nail polish must look to the doctor, or whether Darren, her latest boyfriend, would show up unannounced to borrow fifty dollars for his next fix, she simply stared at Daniel. Her baby boy. The only person she had left in the world who was whole and undamaged by time. Until now.
Lisa fell to her knees next to his bed, unable to hold herself up on shaking legs any longer. The doctor rushed up behind her to catch her fall, his hands grasping her narrow ribcage and getting tangled in the belt of her cheap trench coat.
“Can he hear me?” she croaked, trying to right herself on the thick heels of her sandals.
The doctor helped Lisa to her feet again, steering her into a chair next to Daniel’s bed.
“We think he can,” the doctor explained. “There’s research to support the idea that comatose patients can both hear and sometimes process the sounds and words that go on around them. We’d like Daniel to hear us speaking positively about his recovery, and—ideally—we’d keep talk of the incident to a minimum.”
The very mention of the word incident was enough to incite rage in her. “Oh, the incident? Is that what we’re calling it now when a child brings two guns to school and—”
The doctor had her by the elbow and on her feet in an instant. He dragged her across the room and through the doorway before he spoke. Lisa had to take two small steps to his every one in order to keep up with him.
“Mrs. Girch,” he said once the door was closed behind them. “Talking about what happened yesterday will not help Daniel at this point. All it will do is cause him anxiety, assuming that he can hear us. He may not know anything about what’s going on, and if we fill his head with stories of violence and death, we’re essentially pushing him deeper into the void. We don’t want that. We want to bring him back to us.”
“Oh, so me being angry about some kid shooting my son in the fucking head is going to send him towards the light?” she shouted angrily, pulling away from the doctor again. “You think he’ll hear my voice and want to die, is that what you’re saying?”
“What I’m saying,” the doctor said carefully, “is that we don’t know. We have no idea what’s going on in his head, and we want to keep sending messages of hope and love, not of terror and mayhem.”
She clenched her jaw and exhaled. The nurse from the front desk walked towards them, handing over Lisa’s purse like she was offering her a platter of roadkill. She turned away immediately, ready to avoid any confrontation with a mother who was clearly grief-stricken and filled with rage.
“Okay,” Lisa agreed. “I’ll keep it happy and light. Just let me see him.”
The doctor opened the door, following closely behind Lisa in case she fell again or needed to be pulled from the room. But this time she approached the bed tentatively, putting a hand on Daniel’s knee like she was afraid it might startle him.
“Hi, baby,” she whispered, her eyes welling up with tears. The mascara she’d put on the day before had clumped and run, and she brushed at the flakes of black that clung to the thin skin beneath her eyes. With the back of one hand, she wiped at her nose. “Mama’s here.”
The lights in the room cast a sterile glow over the scene, and the monitors continued to beep in time with Daniel’s pulse, with his oxygen intake, with his IV drip. The doctor backed up a few steps and retreated, leaving his clipboard behind on the foot of the bed.