Chapter Thirty-Six
Middle of the night phone calls were rarely a good thing. Since parting from Drew almost two months prior, he had been half-expecting a call from him or Cora. For Sam, late night calls were usually a change in work schedule, an extra shift, an early start. But not tonight.
“Dad?” he asked, glancing at his alarm clock. Two forty-three am.
“Sam.” He’d never heard his father’s voice sound quite like that. “It’s Theo. There’s been an accident.”
A wave of cold washed over him at the words and numbly he listened to what his father had to say. He was already up and pulling clothes from his dresser as the words head injury and hospital filtered through.
“Molly?” he asked.
“I’m calling her right after you,” his Dad assured him.
The next hour was a blur, getting on his bike and driving through the dark streets to the hospital.
He spent what seemed like a lifetime staring at the information board before a security guard stepped up to him.
“Sir, can I help you find somewhere?”
“I…ICU.” The three letters were hard to spit out. “My brother’s there.”
“I’ll show you the way,” the guard said and Sam followed numbly. His father was pacing the corridor outside and rushed to embrace him. “Sam.”
“How is he?”
“They haven’t told me anything. There’s a waiting room we can sit in.”
His father led him down the corridor to the empty waiting room, walls painted in cool, calm colors, chairs scattered across the floor and boxes of tissues on every table. A room to wait and grieve.
“Dad, what happened?”
“He and his friends were playing hockey last night. They stayed late. Around midnight they had finished up and were coming out. Theo had taken off his helmet. His friend hit the puck towards him. Theo went for it, on instinct I guess, slipped and hit his head.” His father pressed a hand to his forehead. “Why couldn’t he play football or basketball, like everyone else.”
Theo had always gotten a lot of stick in school for choosing hockey over the more popular sports but to him, it was no choice at all. He loved being on the ice.
They sat, watching the time tick away on a clock on the wall. The door opened and they both stood. It was Molly, eyes red, face pale. “Is there news?” she asked.
“Not yet, sweetheart,” their Dad replied. She hugged him, then Sam, and they sat again. More people came in, Theo’s friends who’d been with him when he fell, and a woman waiting for news of her critically ill husband. She sat in the corner with a friend, their tones hushed.
It was almost five am when a doctor came to see them.
“Theo’s family?” he asked, before leading them to a private room and explaining what had happened.
“The blow to his head caused a build-up of fluid and pressure in his brain. We had to drill into his skull to relieve that pressure, in a procedure called a craniotomy. Right now, Theo is in a medically induced coma and we’ll be keeping him comatose for a week to ten days.”
“What’s his prognosis?” their father asked.
“It is hard to be certain at this point. Alongside the fluid, there was a hemorrhage - a bleed - in the brain tissue near the point of impact. It is small but it’s not possible to say right now whether he’ll have complications as a result. We won’t know anything for certain until we wake him up.”
“What kind of complications?” Sam asked.
“Because of the location of the bleed, we’d be concerned about motor and speech difficulties, as well as cognitive problems. He also has a serious concussion and we can’t outrule possible memory or personality changes.”
The doctor’s list of complications just about covered every eventuality Sam could imagine.
“Will he wake up, for definite?”
The doctor paused and Sam knew the answer before he voiced it.
“We won’t know that for certain until we try. We’ll repeat the brain scans over the next few days and that will give us additional information. I should warn you, his condition could deteriorate at any time and you need to be prepared for that.”
“Can we see him?” Molly asked.
“The nurse will come and get you when it’s time.”
It was only two visitors at any one time, so Sam let Molly and his dad go first. Molly held it together until they got back to the waiting room before she dissolved into sobs. Sam slipped out, leaving his father to comfort her. He needed to be with his brother.
The nurse encouraged him into a seat next to Theo and resumed her position at the end of the bed. Sam spent a minute just taking in all the machinery surrounding them.
“Hey, Theo,” he said quietly, taking his brother’s hand in his like the nurse had said he could. “You’re really channeling the Matrix right now. I don’t know that you can hear me, maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I’m sorry it’s been so long since we talked, there’s so much I want to tell you. I met this guy and he’s really great. You’d like him.”
He trailed off, casting his mind around for something else to say. “I hear they’re keeping you under for another while, to give your brain time to heal. You gave your head such a smack, Theo.”
Tears welled in his eyes and he forced them back. “We’ll be right here with you, the whole way along. It might take some time, to get you better, to get you back to yourself, but we’ll do that, I promise.”
He gave Theo’s hand one last squeeze before getting up and leaving, nodding to the nurse as he passed. Back in the waiting room, Molly was calmer. She and his Dad sat in silence, holding hands. They were praying. Sam had never put much stock in prayer or faith, but he sat with them, held their hands, and gave himself over to the silence.
When it turned a reasonable hour, they started making phone calls. To family, to friends. Sam called Tom, who listened and said simply, “Whatever you need, we’re there.”
At eleven am, he got a call from Cora. She was brisk as always and at first, he couldn’t get a word in.
“Sam, good news. Russell took a plea deal, it’s all ironed out, and Drew will be out of witness protection this time tomorrow. You can pick him up if you like.”
His words were halting, stumbling as he explained about Theo.
“I’ll organize someone to go get him,” he promised, even while Cora was assuring him she’d handle it.
He kept his promise, calling Matt, the other answering on the first ring, already aware of the situation with Theo. He passed on Cora’s number and Matt said to leave it with him.
Sam returned to his family in the waiting room as they made a plan for the next ten days. They all wanted to take time off, but Dad, ever the voice of reason, felt they might well need that time later, when Theo was awake and in recovery. Right then, he barely knew they were there, later was when it would count.
They drew up a rota, taking into account all their work schedules, so that one of them would always be in the hospital. The staff had offered them a family room, with a bed and a sink. They’d take turns staying overnight.
“It is going to be a long and hard road, for all of us,” his Dad said. “But I’m here and I won’t check out, not like before.”
Sam wanted to believe him but he knew that when the going got tough, he’d be the one left with the responsibilities. He was okay with that. He had to be.