Page 5 of Thicker Than Water
Chapter TwoSIENNA
I don’t recognize my brother.
His face is bruised to deep indigo around his nose and eyes. There’s an IV taped into place on his hand, which is specked with blood the nurses missed. A bandage circles his head, the gauze stretched tight, and his body is hooked to so many wires he looks like a fuse box. Strangest of all is his mouth, stuck open with the plastic tube snaked into his trachea.
Julia and I stare at him, holding hands so tightly we feel each other’s pulses. Julia’s hammers; mine whips. The air in the ICU is colder than it should be, especially for April, and when I shiver beneath an air vent, Julia shivers too, as if the movement coursed from my body into hers.
The last time we were in a hospital like this was eight years ago, when Julia’s mother was dying. My role was easy then: support Jules, advocate on her behalf to nurses and doctors, demand information when they were stingy with it. I hunted down tissue boxes. I crushedup potato chips to sprinkle onto cake from the cafeteria—a makeshift snack, sweet and savory, that made her smile. And in every other moment, I stood beside her, anchoring her between Jason and me.
Now, though, Julia and I need each other equally. Her hand in mine is the only thing holding me together as Dr. Brighton, a woman we’ve waited hours to see, explains the mechanics of Jason’s crash. How he drove off the road and slammed into a tree. How his head snapped forward as his airbags deployed, breaking his nose and the bones around his eyes. How the paramedics intubated him at the scene.
“Was there another car involved?” The question squeezes my throat, identical to the one I asked seventeen years ago, the night Jason called me at college to tell me our parents had been killed in a crash. It’s a reflex, how quickly I picture Clive Clayton, his suit and smooth hair at the sentencing. My entire body clenches, waiting for the doctor to answer, same as it clenched in the courtroom waiting for the judge to speak.
“They said there were no signs of another vehicle,” Dr. Brighton says, and I loosen, just a little. “It’s possible he was driving distracted, though. On his phone, maybe?”
“No,” I say, resolute. Jason doesn’t text or call while driving. Jason hardly texts or calls at all. He treats his phone like it’s the same one our parents bought him when he first got his license—an early, clunky model that was only for emergencies.
Dr. Brighton continues, this time with technical stuff, and here is where her words dissolve for me, where each syllable is only a sound floating from her mouth, reaching me slowly, liquidly, as if I’m listening from underwater.
Bilateral, subdural, hematoma—these are words from another language.
When she sayssubarachnoid, I picture spiders. Then blood. Thenblood spidering through my brother’s brain. Because that’s what Dr. Brighton is talking about. Brain bleeds. Brain injuries. They have him in a medically induced coma now—the doctor emphasizesmedically induced, as if to soften the blow ofcoma. She tells us what drugs he’s on, but the names mean nothing to me.
“Every morning, we’ll turn down the anesthetic to reassess his neurological function,” Dr. Brighton says, “and at that time, we’ll recalculate his GCS score.”
“GCS?” I’m not even sure which of us asks it—me or Julia.
Dr. Brighton smiles politely. I see it in her face: she’s explained this already.
“Glasgow Coma Scale. It’s how we measure the level of consciousness in a patient after a traumatic brain injury.”
We nod. “Right,” one of us says.
“We’ll repeat this process,” Dr. Brighton adds, “until he’s responsive enough and breathing well enough on his own for us to take the tube out.”
“And when will that be?” I look at my brother, the blue mosaic of his face. Can he hear us talking? If I bent toward his ear, said,Hey, punk, I’m gonna freeze your bra if you don’t wake up soon, would he want to roll his eyes, tell me that surely, in a hospital of all places, I can lay off him for a while?
“We can’t say for sure,” Dr. Brighton answers. “And I can’t promise anything. But we’re hopeful we’ll see improvement over the next few days.”
She leaves us then, no closure to the conversation. I crane my neck, watching through the doorway as she leans across the counter of the nurses’ station, reaches for a cup that one of them holds out to her. When I hear laughter—from Dr. Brighton or a nurse or some inconsiderate visitor—I grip Julia’s hand like a stress ball.
“I can’t believe this,” Julia murmurs. She’s staring at Jason, who’sstill unfamiliar, still bandaged and tubed like a goddamn extra onGrey’s Anatomy. “And what if she’s wrong? What if hedoesn’timprove?”
“Hey. We can’t think like that.” But the same questions pound through my head.
“I know, but—he looks so bad. So wrong. Almost like a stranger.”
“He’s not, though,” I say. “He’s still Jason. Just the Hospital Chic version. New wardrobe. New color palette. New”—my gaze lingers on the gauze around his head—“accessories.”
The joke, painfully inappropriate, doesn’t land. Julia’s face remains tight with anxiety.
“It’s just,” she says, “what if that’s it? What if he never wakes up and everything between us is still—”
She stops herself, and like always, I can practically see the words she’s forcing back. I don’t know what they are or why she won’t say them. I only know they’re stuck inside her throat.
“Everything between you is still what?” I prompt, picking up the scraps of her sentence.
She shakes her head, already downplaying whatever it is. “Jason and I have just had trouble connecting lately. He’s been so busy with that promotion he wants, and you and I have been slammed with work, and we just—we haven’t spent much time together.”
