Page 26 of Fox
He brings me coffee, which I drink even though it tastes like poison.
He sits next to me in the terrible chairs.
He doesn’t say much, which is not his usual mode. Still, he seems to understand that the version of me currently sitting in this waiting room is not capable of being talked to in the normal way, that I am held together by something thin and fragile that cannot withstand much contact.
“You want to eat something?” he asks at some point—the third or fourth hour.
“I’m fine.”
He sighs elaborately. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Percy,” I say his name the way I say it when the conversation is over.
He lets it go.
He has been letting things go all night, which is a kindness I don’t deserve.
He’s right that I think it’s my fault. He’s wrong that he thinks it’s not my fault. All of this is.
At three in the morning, Dr. Reyes—the attending neurologist, who has probably delivered more terrible information more kindly than I can fathom—comes to find me with an update.
I stand up immediately, which I have been doing every time a doctor appears, rising from these chairs like a system on alert.
“The numbers are moving in the right direction,” she tells Percy and me. “Slowly. But in the right direction.”
“What does slowly mean?” I rasp.
“It means we’re cautiously optimistic, and we’re watching closely?—“
I grit my teeth. “What doesslowlymean in hours. In a timeline. Give me something specific.”
Dr. Reyes looks at me with the expression of a woman who has had this conversation before, one reserved for people adjacent to the injured who want to know the future. “Mr. Bennett, I understand you want?—“
“She’s my wife.” It comes out with more force than I intend, with something under it that is not volume exactly but is close to it, a pressure that has been building for fourteen hours and has been finding the weakest available exit. “She is my wife, and she is in there because of me, and I need you to give me something I can work with, because what I am currently working with iscautiously optimistic, which is a sentence that contains no information, and I’m asking you to do better than that.”
Percy puts a hand on my arm.
I do not remove it because it’s the only reason I am not lunging at the doctor.
To her credit, Dr. Reyes does not retreat. “If the pressure in her brain continues to decrease at the current rate, we’re looking at beginning to wean her from sedation within twenty-four hours. That’s the most specific I can be right now, and it’s contingent on those numbers continuing to move. I will tell you the moment anything changes. I will find you personally.”
I breathe a sigh of almost relief. “Thank you.”
She leaves, and Percy’s hand stays on my arm, guiding me back to sit in the terrible chair.
I put my head in my hands.
“Fuck!” I cry out.
The few other people waiting with us to hear what’s happening with a loved one of theirs don’t bat an eyelid. They know how I feel.
We keep vigil.
The waiting room hums with its fluorescent indifference.
Somewhere down the hall, someone is crying with the low, controlled exhaustion of a person who has been at it for a long time. I know that sound. I know it exactly. It was the sound Lucy made the night she packed her bag, behind a door I didn’t open, while I stood downstairs and ruminated on my decision like a man who had the luxury of time.
She cried.
