Authors: Ada Uzoije
Jean clicked her nails against each other, a nervous habit she had had all her life. The hospital lights illuminated even the smallest speck of dirt against the wall or on the floor and she looked down at her dirty shoes, torn at the toes from kneeling down after diving onto the grit of the tar of the road where her son would have fallen had she not caught him. Jean always caught her son. It was a thing between them since he was a little boy and now she sat in a hospital, hoping her child was not traumatized for life.
“Stop biting your nails! I hate when you do that,” said Norman in a most annoyed manner.
“I am very nervous, Norman. What if he dies?” a fretting Jean said, her eyes brimming with tears. Her breath was hasty and filled with panic. He passed her a bewildered glance.
“Who said anything about dying? You hear what the lady doctor said?
'There is no brain
damage; he just fell into a deep sleep.’”
Norman replied, trying not to sound too irritated.
“I have heard of people dying when doctor said they are fine,” Jean said softly and dropped her eyes.
Norman’s phone rang. He stood up and walked a few steps away to find a quieter spot to speak to his client, who had an emergency. Mr. Grant was one of Norman’s best clients and had supplied him with several contract jobs from his construction contacts before, but tonight it was his own sink that was clogged and the frantic man summoned Norman at a generous fee to come and solve his problem before his guests arrived for the cocktail party he was throwing.
“I will be there in 25 minutes,” Norman assured the man on the phone and hung up.
Jean could not believe her eyes. She rose from her seat and set her hands on her hips.
“
What! You’re going to work? Now?” Jean was furious, but Norman lowered his voice and brought his face closer to his wife’s to avoid making a scene.
“Are you going to pay the house bills, my dear?” he rasped in a serious tone.
Jean remained still and refrained from retort as he was somehow right. She caused redundancy, from leaving her last job 4 years ago, and had been unsuccessful in getting a job since. She now worked eight hours per week at an old age home as entertainment co-ordinator. The money was not great, but it gave her some kind of dignity, a purpose to society and in some degree gave her emotional satisfaction.
Norman put on his cardigan and planted his palm softly against his wife’s cheek.
“I will come pick you up as soon I finish, alright?” he said.
“I want to stay here overnight,” Jean replied quickly, but her husband pointed at a plaque on the wall.
“Hospital policy wouldn't allow that. Look!”
The sign read
'No visitors after 8:30pm
’
“I’ll be back before you know it,” he added and gave her a peck on the cheek.
Jean watched Norman as he left the room. She looked back at their son and her emotions overtook her as she leaned over Doug’s bed. His mother kissed him on the forehead.
“Don't leave me, Dougy. Please don't leave me,” she whispered as tears trickled over her face.
Jean sat down next to his bed, his hand firmly in hers. She sat in the half dark for a few minutes, trying to compose herself and eventually her mind drifted off to reminiscence. She remembered the devastation she felt when she was told she’d be unable to have a baby after trying for six years to get pregnant. She remembered how she found out she was pregnant three months later and the victory she felt in her happiness. She remembered the first time she laid eyes on her son.
Norman was different then, very caring and happy, as she recalled. He was so fond of his son and could not wait to teach him all the interesting things the world held. He couldn’t wait to watch Douglas try everything he taught him. Jean found herself smiling through her tears now. She wondered what had changed in him, what it was that made him so distant, so abrupt. It seemed as if he carried the world on his shoulders. She wanted her old Norman back, and that happy family full of awe and adventure they used to be.
The awful event resurfaced again in her mind, the reason she was sitting next to a hospital bed, worried for her son. Doug’s mother felt sick at the whole thing, not only the effect it had on the boy, but the entire bloody affair left her contemplating life and mortality and how such a thing could happen to a man who appeared to be so successful. She shrugged it off as her own plight reminded her that appearances were at best fickle and she made a conscious decision to let it go for the moment and cheer herself with reminiscence of her Doug. Granted, he was only nine years old at the time and there were no such things as ego and street cred back then to maintain. He could just be a boy – and he was—carefree.
She remembered when they vacationed in the South when Doug was eight or so. She smiled to herself remembering how they ate watermelons in midsummer after taking a dip in the pool, and how Doug would stalk her while she was sunbathing.
The stickiness of the watermelon rind smearing, his prime attack of her and his subsequent squealing stayed vivid in her memory. She would chase him right into the pool and wash off the sticky juice by tickle match. Doug’s little voice, laughing, swam in her thoughts and she did not realise that she actually uttered a giggle out loud. It jerked her back from her day dream and she shook her head sheepishly at the lady across the corridor who smiled at her involuntary joy.
Jean could only have one child and she always told her sister that this one had to make it count. At the time it was a joke, but the more he grew, the more she feared that he might succumb to his father’s hostility and become the mirror of Norman. She had to hold on to the little boy who smelled of watermelon, she had to keep him safe from the onslaught of her husband’s cold fathering and ridiculous pursuit of manliness, when he himself could not be held an example thereof. It was there in the hospital that Jean realised that for now, she hated Norman. She hated him, but she was no shield maiden who could battle dragons bound to her by marriage. Her mother made sure she knew the place of a woman – by her husband’s side and without opinion. Her father made sure her mother knew that too.
Sometimes she would wonder what Norman would do if she rebelled. He had never lifted a finger to her. But these days it felt as if he was facing some midlife crises. He was not himself; had not been for months now. He had become…meaner, she thought, but could find no exact explanation for it and when she tried to address it with him, the meanness would show. Norman had a better way of dealing with disobedient wives. The predator would hone in on the young to ensnare the mother. That was Norman’s newfound wicked way. And it worked quite well in reverse too. If young Douglas displeased his father without grounds and Norman simply felt like an asshole, he would find something to pick at with Jean, and when he had managed to belittle his wife to tears, he’d always give Doug a stern look and shift blame.
“Look what you’ve caused now, Douglas. This is your fault and you should man up and own it, but no, you hide behind your mommy. Blasted nancy.”
This infuriated her, but somehow she was so conditioned to the unspoken rules her parents dictated, those her husband seemed to unwittingly follow as well, that she never had the stomach to challenge him when he used Doug and her against one another to feed his involuntary megalomania. She hung her chin on her chest now, ashamed of the fact, her smile taken from her. Yes, she wanted her old Norman back and she thought to find out where he was hiding and retrieve her happy husband of old.
She looked up at a family of three in the waiting room. There sat a young woman in her twenties and a man of similar age next to her on the couch. In between the two of them bobbed a little boy of about three years old, unaware of the seriousness of his surroundings and the parents tried their best to accommodate him when he addressed them or asked a myriad of senseless questions. Jean was about to entertain a small measure of disdain for their happiness, their new life still unperturbed by more mature problems, but the little boy wrapped his mother’s lacy cardigan around his head like a bonnet and stared at Jean, as if posing to entertain her. He looked like a little girl with the pink crochet work fringing his face and Jean burst out laughing, giving the little actor an immeasurable thrill at her reaction. As he continued to amuse the laughing stranger, Jean’s thoughts were directed to another lovely memory of her son, evoked by the image of the boy in the bonnet.
When Doug was twelve his voice broke and it was an unending source of giggles between them, as he would deliberately say things that would provoke his voice to twist. She had to fetch her tailored garment from the boutique for her sister’s wedding and had to pick up her son from school on the way there, leaving the poor boy no choice but to be dragged through the boutique at the amusement of the older women there.
Jean collected her dress and went to fit it in the fitting room and told Douglas to wait outside her dressing cubicle, but this was Douglas – Douglas the Jester – and she knew not why she was even surprised when she emerged from her dressing room to find her son in a bridesmaid dress, giving her a proper curtsy and having the entire store in stitches. Douglas had chosen a salmon colour for his ensemble and could not zip up the garment all the way, leaving the excess material to fall awkwardly from his one shoulder and the hem tripping him every time he turned to his mother’s delight. He would invite her to high tea in a shrill voice that bent and changed pitch under puberty, leaving the entire shop holding themselves and applauding.
This was her Douglas.
It was 8pm when Doug’s ears allowed him in and he heard a hollow murmuring of orders, announcements and footsteps as he woke slowly through the portal of sleep into his alien surroundings. His eyelids weakly gave way and before him he saw nothing but white. For a moment he lay without stirring and then his eyes focused better on the white material that appeared to be hanging over him like some sort of tent. As his hearing improved he realised that he was in hospital, the calls for doctors over the intercom reverberating around him. Doug noticed that the white fabric draped down from a steel rail around his bed and was drawn to hide him entirely from the rest of the ward.
He found it impossible to recall what had happened and why he was here, but in searching his memory found some jigsaw snapshots that could not quite fit. There was a van with a screaming driver. His father was crouching next to their car and his mother pointed to a valley. It was all so obscured that he wearied from the concentration it took to recollect all the information. Then he remembered a roaring Italian sports car and a man with a suit who leaned over the side of the bridge. Doug frowned as he scanned through the images one by one, but the red car lingered longer every time he thought of it. The red car. Red. Red. Red blood! The blood! He saw blood on his shirt and blood on the screaming driver’s van, but he knew the blood was not his, so he wondered how come he was the one in hospital.
How had he come to be in hospital? He was an extremely clever and inquisitive youngster, so he tried to find out what was wrong, if he had perhaps broken something. He moved his feet and legs, then slightly elevated his arms and twitched his fingers. There was no pain or trouble moving them, so he moved his head carefully from side to side and then pushed his hips up to test his torso. Nothing seemed to be wrong at all. That was odd, as something must have put him here. He had not been in a hospital since he was born, but the eternal education offered by daytime hospital soaps on television had taught him about how things worked in such an institution. He could find out best from someone who actually knew what he was there for, so he searched for that bell button he always saw patients use and found it almost out of reach from the grasp of his hand, above his head on the pillow stack he was propped on.
He pressed the button with the figure of a lady on it to summon a nurse. A faint ringing ensued a distance away in the ward and it was then that the reality of the matter hit him. He would soon be told what had happened to him. He would soon be told that the blood was not his own, but that of his parents. If they were alive and well, then where the hell were they? The panic started growing from a tiny seed of doom lodged in his stomach, gestating into a bigger worry as the arrival of the nurse approached and Doug was reluctant now to learn the truth he so desired a few minutes before. He didn’t want to know anymore and he wished he could reverse time and just lie in the dark for a few minutes longer to compose himself.
A few moments later, a pretty young woman in a white uniform, light on her dainty feet, floated swiftly into the room. Her face lit up in surprise and she smiled as she nodded to the other patient and she drew aside the privacy curtain and said, “Oh, you’re awake, are you? We were beginning to worry. It’s been 36 hours since you came in.”
Doug knew this was to be the nurse to break the news to him and he swallowed hard, attempting to be pleasant.
“Where am I?” asked Doug.
“In Charity Central Hospital in the Intensive Care Unit,” she answered while deactivating his call button.
“Oh,” said Doug. After a pause, with the hint of a quiver in his voice he asked, “Am I sick or something? I don’t feel sick at all.” He tried to deny the other possibility, that illness was not the reason for his hospitalisation, but he dared not steer that way, for fear of what he might hear.
“Oh no, dear! Don’t worry,” said the nurse quickly in
her most cheery tone. “Nothing serious! You were just in shock,” she answered matter-of-factly and proceeded to switch on his bedside lamp and check his blood pressure.
“You were involved in an accident…sort of… and you’ve been unconscious since they brought you in here on a stretcher two days ago,” she said, her eyes fixed on her hands while fixing his drip inlet.
“At first the doctors were concerned that you might have a concussion or mild brain damage from the ordeal, but don’t fret, they couldn’t find anything wrong with you,” she smiled at him as she wiped his brow, clearly trying to sound as happy as possible.
“Not even a sign of a wound or even a bruise, I tell you. So they just decided to let you stay until you woke up,” she winked as she poured him some water.
“Dr. Lamaskaya left orders that we should call her when you did, so I’ll just go do that now, alright? And we’ll have you back on your feet in no time.”
Doug did not like her overly cheerful tone. It made him worry about the bad news side of the good news she shared. There was always a bad news side. He had learned that in his short life so far and he knew by now that the more people sugar coat a scenario, the more there would be a need for it later when the bad news came.
For once, he thought, he had to man up as his father always suggested in his most unpleasant tone of voice, and just come out and say it, just square it with her. He sat up as she turned to leave and called after her in urgency.
“Oh, wait a minute. Can’t you tell me more? I don’t remember anything. Was anybody killed in the accident? Do you know anything about my parents?”
“Listen, we’re very busy,” said the nurse as politely as she could, “and I don’t know much about it yet. I wasn’t on duty when you were brought in, see? Dr. Lamaskaya will tell you everything, I’m sure, when she comes. Don’t worry. If anything terrible had happened to your parents, it would have been on your chart, right?”
With that less than satisfactory reassurance, she turned and left as quickly as she came. That sprouting apprehension in his core sprung a few tentacles and reached for his toiled mind.
The trouble was, Doug had a much too fertile imagination for his own good. He began to fill in the spaces of his memory will all sorts of horrible things. He pictured his mother lying dead with her head severed from her body and her dead eyes staring at him. Then he imagined maybe he remembered a car on fire with his parents trapped inside screaming.
It all became too much for the boy, his heart pounding and his stomach taut with dread and uncertainty and above all, his ineptitude at remembering anything solid.
Doug began to cry.
He tried desperately to remember what had actually happened but he simply couldn’t. Then the images continued in his mind. He visualised a massive pileup with a dozen cars, all terribly damaged, bodies strewn about the area, some barely alive and some dead. One of the bodies lying on the pavement, which had somehow lost its head, had been squashed so severely that it could hardly be identified as a body. Somehow this grisly picture seemed to tease his mind more than all the other things he was imagining. He tried to tell if the body was his father’s, but he just could not form a proper recollection and with this the doubt mounted and grew. Really frightened and almost moved to hysteria, he began to work himself into a real panic, sobbing and shouting, “Please? Isn’t there somebody who can tell me what happened? Anybody!”
As he was in a double room the noise woke the old man in the other bed. He’d been brought in in an alcoholic coma and on waking nursed a terrible headache, exacerbated by the noise of the wailing teenager in his room. Every time Doug shouted it vibrated like a clash of cymbals in the old man’s ears.
“Hey, sonny, belt up, will you? Your shouting isn’t going to help either one of us, dammit! Just be quiet like a man and somebody’ll come when they’re ready. Your squealing isn’t gonna get you anything but a hearty slap, I promise you!” he threatened in a hoarse slur that conveyed his fury accurately and he sat up, fists on high as he yelled at Douglas Bates in the half-dark room.
“But I’m afraid my parents are dead,” whimpered Doug.
“Oh well, maybe they are. But you’ll live through it. Mine have been dead for 50 years and I’m still alive and kicking ... and damn well happy for it, actually.
”
At that, Doug just buried his head in his pillow and wept. The old man sounded disturbingly like his father. There was no reassurance, even forced in the name of kindness and the boy started wondering if being a man was all about behaving like a prick for the rest of your days. So he sobbed in frustration and tried to keep his crying down, because he was in no state to receive another third-degree from the grump next to him.
Luckily, it wasn’t long before Dr. Lamaskaya came in to see her young patient. Noticing the state Doug was in, she sat down beside the bed, patting his shoulder and making soothing noises until he calmed down a bit. “What’s the trouble, Doug?” she asked sympathetically.
“I can’t remember what happened,” he jerked under his sorrow. “They told me I was in an accident but they wouldn’t tell me what happened or if my parents were injured or killed or what,” he moaned, shaking his head. “I can’t remember. I can’t remember and I want to know!”
“Okay, okay” said Dr. Lamaskaya. “I can’t tell you everything but I can assure you that your parents are fine,” she said softly.
“In fact, they were with you when you came in. There was a serious accident. A man was killed, not your father, don’t worry. Your parents weren’t involved. Apparently you were standing very near to the man who was killed and the trauma of what you saw caused you to faint. You’ve been out ever since.”
“That’s awful! Where were we? Who was he?”
“I don’t know. We’ve phoned your parents and they are on their way. But don’t worry, gradually you’ll remember. Your folks will surely fill you in on the details, but to keep you from being upset when you do remember, I’m giving you some medication to calm you, okay?”
She took a container from her pocket with his name printed on it and spilled one tablet into the palm of her hand.
“Here, have one now, and one each day for the next two weeks until you feel better, alright?”
Doug nodded as he swallowed the anti-psychotic and felt her lay him back down on the bed. She gave him a calm look, smiled slightly and left into the pale, quiet corridor.
Doug was still quite upset, though very relieved that his parents were alright. After a few minutes, the pill kicked in and he looked up at the bland ceiling and its playing shadows while he waited for his parents to arrive.