Things Fall Apart: Chapter 25: Hospital Humor

Frey

When we were little kids, Asteria always loved to go too fast in the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe car we shared. You know, the yellow and red plastic “car,” you had to push along with your feet? As we got older, Asteria and I would take turns seeing who could last the longest riding on top of that thing down a big hill. Every time, I fell off after a few seconds, but Asteria would fly down the street, looking downright graceful, always jumping off lightly before the car ran into a bush.

She never crashed.

Waiting in the hospital to see whether that little girl is dead or not can’t be described in regular words. Juno is pretty proficient in French, and if she wasn’t so catatonic that she can’t speak, she’d say, “There’s no word for this in either of the languages I know.”

So we wait without words to help us cope. The air smells like rubbing alcohol, and I wonder if Asteria is alive enough beyond those walls to tell the difference between the kind of alcohol used to heal and the kind used to kill. Mom has her head plastered to Dad’s shoulder by tears. Juno does her best to calm Arinna down, Arinna whose screaming sobs have been going on now for about ten or fifteen minutes. Some guy in a brown stained shirt tells us to shut her up but we all just stare at him until he’s too uncomfortable to stay. Arinna, who probably loves Asteria more than Mom and Dad. Arinna, who asked me to teach her how to make coffee so she could make it for Asteria in the early hours of the morning before she came staggering home from one party or another. Arinna, who can never remember Juno’s blindness because she knows Juno is more than her disability. Arinna, who, at nine years old, has to wait to see if her sister is dead. Mom has told us a hundred and twenty times that the police said the driver was fine, but “fine,” is a relative term, so we wait in suspense anyway.

A white coat comes through the door. A doctor. We stand.

“Asteria was driving drunk,” says the woman. Dr. Longstead, from her name-tag. “She’s lucky to be alive. She has a concussion, and she will for about a month. She’s suffered some bruising of the collar bone, a few broken ribs and one broken finger. Other than that, she’s still kicking.” The doctor finally smiles. “Your daughter is fine,” she concludes, mostly for my mom and dad. Juno still isn’t satisfied.

“And the passenger?” she asks. Her hands clutch Arinna’s in a death grip the likes of which have never been seen from Juno.

“Ben?” the doctor frowns. “I’m so sorry. Are you immediate family?”

“Yes,” I say before Juno can be her honest self. Dr. Longstead seems surprised but says nothing. “He’s our cousin,” I add.

“Well, I’m sorry, but your cousin has just come from surgery,” Dr. Longstead says. “He broke his back in the accident...” Dr. Longstead takes a pause as if we have time for that. “And his brain function has been compromised.”

“What does that mean?” Juno’s voice grips the air. The doctor sighs.

“It means he will be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life,” the doctor says all in one breath, “and he’s suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. He will have cognitive and communication problems for a very long time. But we do offer speech therapy and we have a certified speech-language pathologist on staff here at the hospital.” Nobody hears the last bit.

Juno sits down.

The captain of the football team, paralyzed.

Juno’s only real crush, unable to remember who she is.

The tall, blonde, flirtatious class president, now unrecognizable.

“Can we see him?” I ask, knowing Juno can’t, but asking anyway.

“Of course.” I take Juno by the hand and nod to Dad, who nods back. We follow Dr. Longstead through a maze of white hallways.

“He’s right in there,” Dr. Longstead says, gesturing. “He is under heavy medication and will not wake up to see you, but you can at least sit with him for a little while.”

Juno opens the door without a word. I thank the nice doctor, knowing what she’s letting us do probably isn’t allowed for someone who just came out of a life-changing surgery.

Ben– or what is now considered Ben, I guess– lies peacefully on the hospital bed, as if he doesn’t know yet that his face is completely ruined.

The right half of his face is grey and looks almost as if it’s about to slop right off his skull. One closed eye bulges farther out than the other closed eye. His lips are stitched up on one side, in a ghoulish half-smile, a shadow of his old smile. A big set of stitches dominates the swollen mess of the left half of his face, stretching from his hairline to his jawline, over the smaller eye and down his cheek. His nose is obviously broken, purple and grotesque, with a little nose-piece set to help it heal.

He looks like Two-Face from that Batman movie. 

But I leave that out when I describe his face to Juno.

Juno doesn’t cry when I finish. In fact, she smiles.

“It’s not like it matters to me, right?” she whispers. She feels her way to Ben’s body and dances her hands over the ruins of his face. “The deformed boy and the blind girl,” she laughs softly. She kisses the big set of stitches on Ben’s cheek lightly and holds out her hand to me.

“I’m ready to go.”