The coach asked if anyone from the team would volunteer to go with Kurt to the hospital.
“I’ll go,” I said, but he looked right past me like I didn’t matter.
Jason said, “Yeah, let her go. We need our team players here. We’ve got a game to play.” He was still treating this like it was nothing. And it was funny because no one on the team did volunteer. Either they had got a good look at Kurt and were too scared to go along, or they wanted to get back to their game. I don’t know which.
“I’m going,” I said, looking straight at the coach. “Get out of my way.”
The guys from the team just stood there and stared at me. Fortunately there was a woman inside the ambulance, a black woman who took control of the situation. She realized that they weren’t going to move unless I was inside. “Get in, honey,” she said. “Just sit tight and let us do our work.”
I got in. The man driving the ambulance fired up the siren, and we sped off across the soccer field and past the high school. As we went out the driveway, I looked at the brick school building through the back window, and it all looked different. I had a feeling that things would never be quite the same. Kurt was unconscious. His skin looked awful. The ambulance lady put an oxygen mask over his face. She carefully studied Kurt’s breathing. She looked up at me and tried to fake a smile. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“I’m Martha. You know this guy?”
I tried to talk but couldn’t. Nothing came out; I was that scared. Martha seemed to understand right away what Kurt meant to me.
“Hang onto that strap,” she said, pointing to a rope loop above me head. I grabbed it. Then she yelled to the driver, “I think this calls for a little more action, Vince.”
Vince hit the siren again and punched the gas pedal to the floor. We flew around a corner and I held on to the strap. Martha smiled at me again. It was a warm smile this time. “Vince likes it when he gets to drive fast,” she said, pretending that it was all a game—that Kurt wasn’t as bad off as I knew he was.
At the hospital, I was pushed out of the way by the two orderlies who helped wheel Kurt into Emergency. Kurt was still unconscious. I wanted to keep asking, What is it? What’s wrong? Will he be okay? But I had given up. Nobody was going to answer my questions because nobody knew what exactly was wrong with Kurt.
They wheeled Kurt down a long hallway, and I tried to get a good view of which room they took him into. A nurse took me by the sleeve, sat me down and started asking me questions about Kurt. “We have to call his parents,” she said. “Do you know the number?”
I gave her Kurt’s phone number, and she left to make the call.
I sat down and tried to relax but couldn’t. Martha came in and found me sitting on the edge of the chair. “I wish I could hang around and keep you company, Tina, but I’ve got another call.” She handed me some change. “Go get Coke,” she said. “Everything will be okay. Things usually aren’t as bad as they seem, believe me.” She gave my hand a squeeze and then turned to go.
I was in a funny haze, and I almost thought I was going to pass out. I took a deep breath and stumbled up the hallway to the pop machine. I popped the quarters in but stood there looking at the choices. I couldn’t think straight. I needed to see Kurt right then and make sure he was alive.
I made a fist and smacked it hard onto the side of the machine, then ran down the long hallway. An orderly grabbed me and said, “You can’t go down there,” but I pulled away and kept going until I saw a sign over a door that said EMERGENCY.
Inside I saw a little kid crying as he got stitches in his forehead. Nearby an old flabby guy with no shirt on was taking a deep breath while a doctor held a stethoscope to his chest. Then I saw Kurt, stretched out on a hospital bed. He was still unconscious. Two doctors and a nurse were bent over him. They appeared serious and desperately concerned.
The nurse inserted a tube into Kurt’s arm as I sidled up. The tube was connected to an elevated bottle of clear liquid. “Is he going to be all right?” I asked her.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” she said, sounding like a cold-hearted mother disciplining a bad child.
“Is he going to be all right?” I demanded.
The doctors were trying to ignore me. One nodded to the nurse to remove me from the room. She tried to grab onto me, but I shook her off. “I’m staying,” I said defiantly. Maybe I was wrong to be so stubborn, but I had a feeling that if I walked out of that room I might never see Kurt again.
One of the doctors, a young guy with glasses, turned to me. He acted like this was no big deal, like it happened all the time. In a cool, clinical voice, he said, “I’m Dr. Bennington. Could you describe the accident please?”
I told him what I had seen and he nodded. “Was he all right before the game?”
I remembered the way he had been looking. “No,” I said. “I think he was feeling bad. He said he was feeling a little nauseous. His mother didn’t want him to play. But he did anyway. He said it was nothing.”
“Did he say he had any pain?”
“No. But during the game he was holding his side.”
He turned to the other doctor. “Almost certainly the liver. Internal bleeding. Given his skin color, there’s a good chance there was already a problem. If his liver was already compromised, a sudden impact could have caused the liver to fail. Let’s get him stabilized and run some tests. Right away. There’s no time to fool around.”
“What’s his name?” the doctor asked me, again talking like this was all matter of fact.
“Kurt,” I said.
The doctor bent over the patient, shined a tiny light in his eyes. “Kurt, can you hear me?”
“No response,” said the other doctor. “Let’s get him upstairs.”