Blink Once (18 page)

“We’ll give him the dose right away, because it does take a while to work and we don’t want him in this much pain. It will make him a little groggy for a few hours,” she explained.

“But he can’t fall back into a coma, can he?” Mom asked.

When she said that, my eyes flew open. Had I been in a coma? How long ago was the surgery?

“No, he’s okay,” the nurse reassured her. “He’s doing absolutely great, in fact; this medication will just break the headache, nothing else. Let me go get that. You all can visit for a few minutes until Dr. Louis gets here.”

Mom pulled a chair over to the bed and Dad stood
beside her. “Can you feel your toes?” she asked, so I pulled my legs up to show her. The tube in my stomach really killed, too, so I pointed to it.

“That’s a feeding tube, to make sure you were getting enough calories,” Dad said quickly. “Did they say that would come out with the trach tomorrow?” He turned to Mom.

“Oh, I don’t remember.” Mom looked flustered. “Dr. Louis said something about being able to swallow—let’s ask him when he gets here. West, you’re so skinny already, we want to make sure you can eat before they take the tube out.” When she spoke to me, the volume went up. Why was everyone talking to me so loud?

My head hurt so bad that I felt like I could see sounds. With my eyes closed, I saw sparks when a loud cart wheeled down the hall. In a minute, the nurse was back with something in a syringe. “This should do the trick,” she said, injecting it into my IV.

Mom was talking away nervously. “You don’t know how nice it is to be able to have him tell us how he feels—I mean, it’s been three months! I’m just so happy, I can’t even tell you. When did Dr. Louis say he would be here?”

“He’s on his way; let me go see if he responded to the page we sent him,” the nurse said as she left the room.

I got the feeling she was psyched to get away from Mom, who was acting like a crazy lady. Why did Mom keep saying three months—it hadn’t been that long. Maybe
a month. Was it longer? I was confused; my brain felt scrambled.

Mom and Dad sat down while they waited, and spoke in murmurs. I could see that they were sitting next to each other, heads close together. I could catch only snippets of their conversation; I didn’t want to hear it. My head hurt too badly, and the medication wasn’t helping yet. Finally, slowly, I started to feel the band around my forehead loosen up a little bit. But I also started to feel like I was drifting off. I remembered Dr. Louis coming into the room and talking to Mom, then asking me to lift my hands, to touch my nose, but it all felt like it was happening in a dream. I did my best, and he seemed happy with that. “You just rest now, West. He needs lots of rest, then we’ll be able to gauge where we go from here.” I drifted back to sleep hearing Mom talking to him, Dad asking some questions. I felt good, warm and sleepy, and I knew that everything was going to be okay.

When I woke up, the room was darkened, and I was alone. My first thought, now that my head felt better, was of Olivia. She was going to be so happy to hear that I was doing fine, that everything had worked. I had to have Mom or Mike call her right away. I drifted back to sleep thinking of what she might say, and how soon I could see her.

The next morning, Mom was there again when I woke
up. “Hi, sweetie,” she said when I opened my eyes. “They are going to take you in for a brief surgery just to remove the trach and the feeding tube. The doctor said it’s a fifteen-minute procedure, at most, but you’re ready for it today, okay?”

I gave her a thumbs-up. Then I motioned that I wanted to write something by pretending to hold a pen and writing in the air.

“Oh, you want to write? Okay …” Mom searched her purse and found a pen, then took a card off the bedside table and held it up for me to write on the back. My hand was pretty wobbly, but not as bad as it had been before. I wrote
Olivia.

“Who’s that?”

Then I wrote,
Tell her I’m OK.

“Is this someone Mike would know? Or Allie?”

I wrote
Mike. He knows. Hospital.
I knew Mike would remember the pretty girl from the room next door.
Have Mike tell her. I’m OK.

By now I was exhausted and my giant scrawl had filled the back of the card. Mom took it and tucked it into her purse. “I’ll call him when you’re in surgery and make sure he gets the message,” she said. “How’s your head? Is it better today?”

I gave her an okay sign with my fingers just as two orderlies came into the room to wheel me into surgery. “This is
a quick one,” one of them said. “We’ll have him back in no time.” Mom grabbed my hand before they took me out.

“I’ll be right here, sweetie.” Exactly what she had said last time.

The guys wheeled me down the hall and into an operating room much like the one I was in last time, only with less people. A guy in a mask leaned over my face. “Hi, West,” he said loudly. “Today we’re going to remove your trach. It’s a fast procedure, but it can be painful, so we’re going to put you under for this. When you wake up, don’t try to talk right away. Let’s give it a day or two, okay?”

I gave him a thumbs-up to show him that I understood. He nodded to a woman who was standing by my IV stand. I didn’t even have a second to feel myself falling asleep, instead I just woke up back in my hospital room. I thought for a moment that they had forgotten to do the surgery, that something had gone wrong, because not enough time had passed. It felt like one minute. But when I reached up to my throat, the brace was gone, the tube was gone—now it was just my neck, skin, and a big bandage taped down over my lower throat. The feeding tube was also gone, a small bandage in its place.

Mom wasn’t in the room when I woke up, so I decided to try talking. “Hi,” I said to the empty room. It sounded very froggy, not like my voice at all. “Hi,” I tried again, but air came whistling out under the bandage on my throat,
making it almost impossible to say anything. Before I could try it again, Mom showed up and Dad was with her.

“That was fast, and you’re already awake.” Mom was staring at the bandage on my throat. She moved down the blanket to peek at the bandage on my stomach. “He said three stitches.” She turned to Dad. “Out next week.”

“Looking good, buddy,” Dad said, taking a seat next to me. “How do you feel?”

I raised my hand to make a sign, but then decided to give it a go, to try to talk. “Okay,” I said. My voice was low and raspy; I sounded like a creepy whispering guy from a horror movie.

Dad’s grin said it all. Mom turned away so I wouldn’t see her crying, but I knew she was crying again. “The doctor was just telling us that if you place your fingers here”—Dad took my hand and put two fingers over the bandage on my throat—“the air won’t come out quite as much and you can talk a little bit more.”

I tried it, pressing down just a little. “Hi.” Definitely better, louder.

“Like that.” Dad smiled. I knew it was hard for him to look at me, his son, covered in bandages, thin, and with long, greasy hair that stuck to my forehead. His face looked pained.

“But he also said give it a day or two to close up; they don’t put stitches there,” Mom added.

“Olivia,” I said, pressing down on the gauze again.

“Oh, yes, I had Mike tell her that you were okay,” Mom answered. “And she was very happy to hear it.” She gave me a little smile. “I’m sure he’ll tell you more when he’s here this afternoon. I think he was a little surprised to hear that you knew her at all. And you know how we all feel about Allie….”

“I should go get the doctor, right?” Dad said nervously. I could tell he did not want to get into a conversation about my girl problems right now—or ever. Mom nodded and he left the room.

After he walked out, Mom took my hand and scooted closer to me. “I’m so happy, I can’t tell you how happy I am. I wasn’t sure this was going to work, that we would get you back after all this time,” she started.

The doctor walked in with Dad behind him, a huge smile on his face. “This is exactly what I want to see, my friend,” he exclaimed as he adjusted the bed up. “You’re going to find that talking is difficult for a little bit, until this closes up.” He peeled back the bandage on my throat. “Looks wonderful. This can take a week or a little more, okay? Your vocal cords are like every other muscle in your body, and we’re going to give them all time to come back; you’ve been immobile for long enough that you’ll need physical therapy to get back on track. Do you understand?”

Without the brace and trach, I found that I could nod my head easily now.

“Wonderful. So my colleagues and your parents will talk to you more about the schedule and where you’ll be going next. We find that patients who start therapy immediately come much closer to a full recovery, and that’s what we want for you.”

I nodded again.

“Okay, so”—he turned to Mom and Dad—“we are ready to move him on Thursday. Until then, it’s rest and we’ll just monitor his progress.”

“Thank you so much, Doctor,” Mom said, grabbing his hand in both of hers and shaking it up and down. “Thank you.”

“Shall we?” He motioned to the hallway and they followed him out. I closed my eyes, but I could catch a little of what they were saying. Watching for infection, the medications I was on. Then the doctor said something about “overwhelming” me. At first I thought he was talking about doing too much physically, but it was clear from the conversation that they were talking about overwhelming me in other ways—mentally. “Unless he asks you directly … ,” I heard him say. Then something about “… will come back to him slowly, when he’s ready.” Were they talking about the accident, because I remembered that clearly, the bikes at the quarry. Mike’s face over mine, looking down at me, asking me questions. Mike’s eyes, so close up, his pupils like tiny dots in an ocean of bright green. “You’re okay,” he kept saying. “You’re going to be okay.” I fell into a
druggy-haze nap thinking about the accident. Had something else happened that I couldn’t remember? Something they were worried about? I ran over everything in my head, watching it like a movie. The way I fell. Mike. Allie crying and crying. I could see all of it clearly. But what I couldn’t remember was whatever happened next. How did I even get to the hospital? Did Mike take me in his car? Did they call an ambulance? I tried to think, but there was nothing there. Just blackness. Not even a dream memory. Until I woke up at Wilson and met Olivia. Everything that came before was lost.

Mike’s eyes, his pupils big this time, were directly over my face when I woke up. He backed away quickly when I jerked awake, like I was Frankenstein’s monster come to life.

“Holy crap, they weren’t kidding. You really aren’t a vegetable anymore. Can you talk?”

I put my fingers over the gauze. “How’s this?” I rasped.

Mike grinned. “Well, that’s sort of like talking,” he joked. “It is good to have you back!” He pulled over the chair and sat next to me. “I can’t get over it. You really are okay, right, you can move and everything?”

I lifted one leg, then the other, like a good student, then held up my middle finger. That’s what he gets for calling me a vegetable.

“Nice.” He smiled. “You seem to be back to yourself.” Mike sat and stared at me for a few moments, nodding, like he was wondering what to say. I didn’t know what to say either.

“So, I don’t know how to ask you this except to ask it: is your brain okay?” he finally said.

I gave him the finger again as an answer.

“Okay.” Mike smiled shyly. It was weird, like we were getting to know one another again. When Mike came to visit me at Wilson Center, he seemed more himself. What had changed? Why was he being so serious now?

“Here’s why I’m asking.” Mike looked down for a moment. “Because your mom told me you wanted me to tell Ollie Hudson you were okay. And so, I did it, but man, really? Since when? Forgive me, bro, but that chick is nasty. She’s got a mustache. I heard she has the herp, down there.” He pointed to his crotch.

I realized he thought I had meant Olivia from our school.

I put my fingers over the bandage. “Not her.” I shook my head and motioned to the pad and pen Mom had left beside the bed. I had been told not to talk too much, but it was pretty hard to get across what I wanted to say in just a word or two. I quickly wrote,
Olivia Kemple, from the other hospital. Long dark hair, room next door.

Mike took the pad from me and looked at it for a
second, then looked up at me. “The girl next door to you, at Wilson?”

I nodded and took the pad back to write more. I had assumed he would know I was talking about her—I don’t know why. Stupid mistake.

“So your parents told you I visited you there,” he said as I kept writing.

I put my fingers over the bandage. “I know.” I had to keep clearing my throat to talk, it wasn’t easy. I handed him back the pad, where I’d written more information about Olivia, and what I wanted him to tell her.

“West—” Mike started to say something, then looked at me. His face was superserious. “See, this is what I’m talking about. You couldn’t know this girl from that hospital. It’s impossible. You must mean somebody else.”

He handed me back the pad and gave me a sad look, like I was crazy now, or brain damaged.

I covered my throat. “Can you call her? Now?”

Mike shook his head. “Look, there’s no girl. You must have, like, I dunno, dreamed her up or something. Everyone on that floor was a vegetable, including you.”

No
, I wrote, with a ton of exclamation marks after it. I didn’t understand why he was being such a dick about this.
Olivia, next door, room 203. Call her.

Mike took the pad, read it, then closed his eyes and put his head down a second. “West, the whole place was people
connected to machines. I know, I was there. It was pretty funny, cause I would bring in some tunes for you, and one time this nurse—”

I interrupted him. “Norris.”

“Anyway, she was like, ‘Can you turn that down,’ and I was like, ‘Did someone complain’—get it? Because there was no way any of those vegetables had a problem with me playing … wait, how did you know the nurse’s name? Big lady?”