Page 25 of Fox
I put my hand next to it, not touching, just measuring.
Mother fucker!Yeah, it’s the size of my hand.
Here is what I know, medically, about my wife’s condition, because I have asked every person in this hospital who willstand still long enough to answer me, and some who would have preferred not to.
Her brain is swelling.
It is doing this in response to the impact, which was significant—the truck was doing forty, the physics are not ambiguous, the outcome is something the ER attending described as “she’s lucky to be alive,” which I have decided is the last time anyone in this building will use that phrasing in my presence.
Lucy isnotlucky.
She should not have been in that car.
She should not have been on that road.
She should not have been driving through that fucking curve on our street on her way to collect her things from a house she was leaving because I told her, with my characteristic composure, that I never loved her.
She’s here in a medically-induced coma because the swelling needs somewhere to go, and her brain needs to be still while it goes there because I fucked up.
They tell me they will bring her out of it when the pressure normalizes.
The subdural hematoma is being monitored.
Four ribs on the left side are fractured, one of which punctured her lung, which has been addressed; this is no longer the primary concern, but it is a fact I am holding in my body like a piece of shrapnel.
She has a deep laceration along her hairline that required eleven stitches.
I know this because I counted them.
The waiting room outside the ICU is the kind of terrible that hospitals specialize in—fluorescent, beige, furnished with chairs designed to prevent sleep, which is either a cruelty or a philosophy, and I cannot tell which.
I have been here for fourteen hours.
They called me when I was waiting at home for her.
I’d told her I wouldn’t be there when she came to pack her things away, but that wasn’t going to happen. I needed to see her. Make sure she was okay.
Now, I know I was there to beg her to stay.
I heard the sirens but ignored them, didn’t think much of it—until the call came, and I knew that I should’ve gone out on the street to see what happened, to learn who had an accident so I could’ve been with her…or maybe if I hadn’t been an asshole, she wouldn’t have left and none of this would have happened.
My legs gave way when the hospital called.
I sank to the floor after they said, “Is this Archibald Bennett? We have a Lucy Bennett. There’s been an accident.”
I barked questions they answered by asking me to show up at TriStar Centennial Medical Center.
Less than fifteen minutes later, I was there, and I have not left.
I follow doctors down corridors and back. I stand in the ICU next to her bed, holding any part of her body I can reach, begging her to stay, for the intervals they allow, which are not long enough, and which I have been negotiating to extend with increasing aggression.
Percy is here.
I texted him two hours after I came.
FYI, Lucy had an accident and is fucking lucky to be alive.
He arrived within the next half hour without being asked, because Percy Hale has been showing up for me without being asked for years, and I have never been more grateful for a single quality in another person than I am for that one right now.
