Cross Roads (3 page)

“Mom, are you okay? What’s wrong?” he had asked, getting up from his books.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, wiping her face with the backs of her closed hands, “nothing at all. You know me, I sometimes start thinking about things, things that I am so grateful for, like you and your brother, and I just get all emotional.” She paused. “I don’t know why, my dearest, but I was thinking about how big you’re getting, a teenager in a couple years; then you will be driving and off to college and then you’ll get married, and as I thought about all this, do you know what I felt?” She paused. “I felt joy. I felt like my heart was about to burst out of my chest. Tony, I am so thankful to God for you. So I decided to make you your favorite dessert, Marion-berry Cobbler, and some caramel rolls. But as I was standing there, looking out the window at everything we have been given, all the gifts, and especially about you and Jake, I suddenly wanted to give you something, something that’s especially precious to me.”

It was then that Tony noticed her clenched fist; she was holding something. Whatever it was fit in the small grasp of this woman already shorter than he. She held out her hand and slowly opened it. Curled up on her palm was a flour-anointed necklace with a gold cross at the end, fragile and feminine.

“Here.” She held it out. “I want you to have this. Your grandmother gave it to me, and her mother to her. I thought I would one day give it to a daughter, but I don’t think that’s going to happen and I don’t know why, but as I was thinking and praying for you, today seemed to be the right day to give it to you.”

Tony had not known what else to do so he opened his hand, allowing his mother to drop the finely woven thread onto his palm, adorned with the small delicate gold cross.

“Someday, I want you to give this to the woman you
love, and I want you to tell her where it came from.” The tears were now rolling down her face.

“But Mom, you can give it to her.”

“No, Anthony, I feel this strongly. I don’t exactly understand why, but it is for you to give, not me. Now don’t get me wrong, I plan to be there, but just like my mother gave it to me to give, I now give it to you, for you to give.”

“But how will I know—”

“You will,” she interrupted. “Trust me, you will!” She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him long, unconcerned for the flour that might be transferred. He had not cared either. None of it had made any sense to him, but he knew it was important.

“Hold on to Jesus, Anthony. You can never go wrong by holding on to Jesus. And know this,” she said as she pulled back and looked up into his eyes. “He will never stop holding on to you.”

Two days later she was gone, swallowed up in the selfish choice of another barely older than he. The necklace still lay in his safe. He had never given it away. Had she known? He had often wondered if this had been a premonition, some warning or gesture by God to give him a remembrance. Her loss had destroyed his life, sending it careering down a path that had made him who he was, strong, tough, and able to withstand things that others struggled with. But there were moments, fleeting and intangible, when the tender longing would slip in between the rocks of his presentation and sing to him, or begin to sing as he would quickly shut such music away.

Was Jesus still holding him? Tony didn’t know, but probably not. He wasn’t much like his mother anymore, but because of her, he had read the Bible along with some
of her favorite books, trying to find in the pages of Lewis, MacDonald, Williams, and Tolkien a hint of her presence. He even joined, for a short time, the Young Life group in his high school where he tried to learn more about Jesus, but the foster system in which he and his brother landed shuttled them from home to home and school to school, and when every hello is just a good-bye waiting to happen, social clubs and affiliations become painful. He felt that Jesus had said good-bye like everyone else.

So the fact that he had kept Jesus on the list was a bit of a surprise. He hadn’t given him much thought in years. In college he had briefly renewed the quest, but after a season of conversation and study had quickly relegated Jesus to the list of great dead teachers.

Even so, he could understand why his mother had been so enamored. What wasn’t there to like about him? A man’s man, yet good with children, kind to those unacceptable to religion and culture, a person full of infectious compassion, someone who challenged the status quo and yet loved those he challenged. He was everything that Tony sometimes wished he was, but knew he wasn’t. Perhaps Jesus was an example of that bigger-than-yourself life, but it was too late to change. The older he got, the thought of transformation seemed increasingly remote.

And it was the God-thing that he couldn’t understand, especially as it related to Jesus. Tony had long decided that if there was a God, he or she or it was something or someone terrible and malevolent, capricious and untrustworthy, at best some form of cold dark matter, impersonal and uncaring, and at worst a monster taking pleasure in devastating the hearts of children.

“It’s all wishful thinking,” he mumbled as he crumpled up the paper and indignantly tossed it at the garbage can
across the room. Living people couldn’t be trusted. Reaching for a fresh bottle of Balvenie Portwood, he poured himself a triple and turned back toward his computer, switching it back on.

He brought up his official Last Will and Testament and spent the next hour expressing his suspicion and antipathy by making major revisions and printing off a new copy, which he signed, dated, and tossed with the old back onto a pile of others already in the safe, locking and resetting the alarms and turning off his desk lights. As he sat in the darkness thinking about his existence and who might be pursuing him, little did he know he was drinking his last Scotch.

M
orning burst through his uncovered window with a vengeance. Bright sunlight mixed with remnants of Scotch sent his head into spasms, a morning migraine to murder the day. But this was different. Tony not only couldn’t remember how he had gotten back to his condo, but he was in the grip of pain unlike any he had ever known. Sprawled and passed out on his couch in an awkward position might account for the stiffness in his neck and shoulders, but nothing in his memory compared with this piercing pounding, as if someone had unleashed an unstoppable series of thunderclaps inside his head. Something was extremely wrong!

Sudden nausea propelled him toward the toilet, but he didn’t make it before forcefully ejecting everything that remained in his stomach from the night before. The
exertion only accentuated the excruciating pain. Tony felt raw fear, long imprisoned by sheer willful determination, now bursting its bonds like a beast, feeding off expanding uncertainty. Fighting the debilitating terror, he staggered out the door of his condo, pressing both hands hard over his ears as if it would keep his head from exploding. He leaned into the hallway wall, frantically searching for his ever-present smart phone. A frenzy of pocket rifling produced nothing but a set of keys, and he was suddenly hopelessly awash in a terrible vacancy, an absence of connectedness. His would-be savior, the electronic purveyor of all things immediate but temporary, was missing.

The thought occurred to him that his cell phone might be in his coat, which he usually hung on the back of the kitchen chair, but the condo door had automatically locked when he exited. One eye wasn’t functioning properly, so he squinted with the other at a blurry keypad, trying to remember the code that would allow him back inside, but the numbers spilled over one another and none of them made any sense. Closing his eyes he tried to concentrate, his heart pounding, his head on fire while growing desperation continued to build inside. Tony began weeping uncontrollably, which infuriated him, and in a flurry of profanity-empowered panic he began punching numbers randomly, frantic for a miracle. A wave of blackness dropped him to his knees and he slammed his head against the door. It only exacerbated the pain. Blood now streamed down his face from a gash where he had engaged the edge of the doorjamb.

Tony’s confusion and agony increased until he was entirely disoriented, staring at an unfamiliar electronic keypad and in one hand holding a set of unfamiliar keys. Maybe he had a car nearby? Reeling along a short hall, he tripped down a flight of carpeted stairs and out into a parking
garage. Now what? Pushing all the buttons on the key fobs, he was rewarded by the flashing lights of a gray sedan not thirty feet away. Another upwelling of darkness yanked him off his feet and down he went a second time. On his hands and knees, he crawled frantically toward the car as if life depended on it. Finally he made it as far as the trunk, hoisted himself to a stand, steadied for a moment while the world spun, and once again dropped, this time swallowed into a comforting nothingness. Everything that hurt and tugged so desperately for his attention stopped.

If anyone had witnessed him fall, which no one had, they might have described a sack of potatoes tossed from the back of a moving truck, collapsing in a heap as though no bones inhabited his body, dead weight pulled down by gravity. The back of his head struck the top of the trunk hard; his momentum spun him toward the concrete floor where his head bounced a second time with a sickening thud. Blood now oozed from his left ear and pooled from the gashes in his forehead and face. For almost ten minutes he lay in the dimly lit underground garage before a passerby busy looking for car keys in her purse stumbled over his leg. Her shriek echoed off the concrete. No one heard. Visibly shaking, she dialed 911.

The dispatcher, sitting in front of an array of screens, took the call at 8:41 a.m. “Nine-one-one. What is the location of the emergency?”

“Oh my God! He’s bleeding everywhere! I think he’s dead…” The woman was hysterical and on the verge of shock.

Trained for this, the dispatcher slowed the cadence of her voice. “Ma’am, I need you to calm down. I need you to tell me where you are, so I can send help.” While listening she muted the call and on a separate line prenotified Portland
Fire of the potential medical emergency. She quickly typed information and codes into the call log, maintaining communication to an expanding set of first responders. “Ma’am, can you tell me what you see?” She muted and switched, quickly stating, “Engine 10. M333 respond Code 3 on a UN3 at 5040 SW Macadam Avenue, cross street is Richardson Court, just north of the US Bank and beneath Weston Manor, in the first level of an underground parking garage on the river side.”

“Medic 333 copy, switching to ops 1,” came the response through her headphones.

“All right, ma’am, slow down and take a deep breath. You found a man who appears unconscious and there is blood… Okay, help is on the way and should be there in a couple minutes. I want you to stand to the side and wait for them to arrive… Uh-huh, that’s right… I will stay on the line with you until help gets there. You did great! They are on their way and almost there.”

Portland Fire arrived on-scene first and, locating Tony, did a quick initial assessment before beginning medical procedures to stabilize him while one of their crew calmed and interviewed the distraught witness. The ambulance operated by American Medical Response (AMR) was there only minutes later.

“Hey, guys, what do you have? What can I do to help?” asked the AMR paramedic.

“We have a fortyish male who the lady over there found laying on the ground next to his car. He’s vomited and reeks of alcohol. He’s got a large gash to his head and facial cuts and has been unresponsive. We did a manual c-spine, and he’s on a non-rebreather.”

“Did you get vitals yet?”

“Blood pressure is 260 over 140. Heart rate, 56.
Respiration’s 12 but irregular. Right pupil is blown and he’s bleeding from the right ear.”

“Looks like a pretty significant head injury?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”

“Okay, then, let’s get him on the board.”

They carefully logrolled Tony and placed him on a full backboard. The fire crew securely strapped him down while the AMR paramedic started an IV.

“He’s still pretty unresponsive and his breathing is erratic,” offered the fire EMT. “What do you think about tubing him?”

“Good idea, but let’s do it in the back of the ambulance.”

“University COREL status is green,” called out the driver.

They put Tony on a gurney and quickly loaded him into the ambulance while the driver called in.

Tony’s vitals plummeted and he went into asystole, a type of cardiac arrest. A flurry of activity, including an injection of epinephrine, got his heart restarted.

“University, Medic 333. We are coming to your facility Code 3 with a fortyish-year-old male found down in a parking garage. The patient has an obvious head injury and was unresponsive upon arrival. Patient is 5 on the Glasgow Scale and is in full spinal precautions. He had a brief period of asystole, but return of pulse after 1 milligram epi. Last BP was 80/60. HR 72, and we are currently bagging him at a rate of 12 breaths per minute and preparing to intubate. We have an ETA to your facility of about five minutes, do you have any questions?”

“No questions. Administer 500 cc’s of mannitol.”

“Copy.”

“Dispatch, Medic 333 is transporting with two firefighters aboard.”

Siren howling, they exited the garage. It took less than five minutes to climb the winding hill to Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), the hospital sitting like a gargoyle above the city. Wheeling Tony into the resuscitation rooms where incoming trauma patients are triaged, a crowd of doctors, nurses, techs, and residents converged and what ensued was orderly chaos, an intricate dance where each knew their role and expected participation. Rapid-fire questions punctuated the conversation with the first responders until the doctor in charge was satisfied, and the crew released to ease down from the adrenaline charge that usually accompanied such a call.