The Off Season (15 page)

We landed, and waiting outside security was a guy who was clearly a football coach, and it wasn't just the Washington jacket—it was the way he stood and everything. He came right up to me and shook my hand, said his name was Charlie Wright and that he recognized me right away, which I guess was one good thing about
People.
He didn't say too much as we walked through the airport, just that it didn't look like Win needed surgery, and how glad he was that I could come out on such short notice and how he understood about Dad. Which I guess he'd learned while I was on the plane.

We drove right to the hospital, which was even bigger and shinier and scary-looking than I had imagined, and I was awfully glad Charlie Wright was with me. He walked in kind of holding my arm, which I really appreciated, and took me up to a floor with nurses everywhere and blinking lights, worried folks standing in little groups outside each patient's room. There was one room so full of people and machinery I could barely see the bed, and Charlie stopped one of the nurses, and she looked at me and said I could go in.

"Complete idiot." That's a pretty graphic description. "Total moron" is another one. There are some curse words too, for a person who is absolutely stupid and worthless. But I can't think of anything strong enough to explain how I felt at that moment, how completely disgusted I was with myself for thinking that maybe Win would be wearing a whiplash collar and chatting it up, or that it was pretty cool for a sixteen-year-old girl to fly here all alone and get away from all those jawing people in Red Bend, or that maybe because of Win's injury I'd be able to hang out with Bill, and maybe even reconnect with Brian.

Because, I now knew, all that thinking was dead wrong. Because now I could see a person lying in the bed with tubes coming out of his mouth and nose and arms, wires hooked up everywhere and a big plastic collar strapped hard around his neck, his closed eyes like bruises, and his skin looking almost green in that hospital light. That was my brother.

W
IN'S HANDS WERE DIRTY
. Isn't that weird? His fingers still had grass stains on them, and bits of dirt under his nails the way you get when you play football. When
he'd
played football.

I reached out without even really thinking. His fingers were warm even though Win didn't look alive at all. If they'd been stone cold, I wouldn't have been a bit surprised.

"You can touch him," a nurse said, though I already was. I'd forgotten other people were in the room, I was so busy thinking that it wasn't Win in the hospital bed all surrounded by tubes and wires and blinking lights. It was someone else. Not that they'd switched bodies or anything, though I'd have believed that in a heartbeat if there was a chance in heck it were true. But that it was someone else altogether.

"It's not as bad as it looks," the nurse continued, although I sure didn't see how that could be the case. She pointed to that hard plastic cuff around his neck, so tight his chin looked jammed in. "That's called a cervical collar—"

"To keep his neck from moving. Until the bones can knit," I said.

You know how when you touch something hot, your hand jerks back right away? That's because it's a reflex. Because if your brain had to take the time to process it, you might end up pretty burned.

That same thing was happening right now. My reflexes were taking over, if you want to think of it that way, and shutting down all those emotion parts of my brain so I could survive. Not that I wanted this to happen. I wanted to burst into tears and demand they fix Win right away and make him back the way he was. But I couldn't. Until Bill arrived, I was the Responsible One.

Even so, when Charlie Wright put his arm around my shoulders, it was all I could do not to lose it. We stood there for a while, him respecting my silence in a way I really appreciated, and then a nurse said that Win's doctor was available if I wanted to talk.

"Sure," I said reflexively, my brain barely even registering.

Dr. Rosenberger was very tall and thin, with gray hair like doctors always have. He brought me into a little private room made for talks like this, and brought Charlie too, when I said it was okay, and said how difficult this must be and he'd explain as best he could.

"Did you give him the steroids yet?" I asked.

"Steroids!" asked Charlie Wright. "What are you talking about? The NCAA would never allow—"

Dr. Rosenberger blinked, and examined me. "Have you been online?"

"No, I ... we were just studying this. In school."

The doctor turned to Charlie Wright. "Not 'steroids.' A cortisone drug that reduces swelling in the spinal cord." He faced me again. "We administered it twenty-three minutes after the incident. That's as good as it could possibly be. Do you know what C6 means? C5?"

I nodded. "Cervical vertebrae. Does this mean he can still move his shoulders?"

The doctor frowned a bit. "That's a very good question. We won't know his exact situation until the swelling goes down. But his shoulders, definitely. The rest ... His spinal cord wasn't severed, only bruised. A C5 or C6 is a world of difference from C2. Your brother's very fortunate."

"If he was fortunate, he wouldn't be here," I said. I guess when the emotion part of my brain turned off, the tact went too.

If Dr. Rosenberger was offended, though, he didn't bat an eye. Instead he went on to tell us a whole bunch more medical stuff, how Win's injury was incomplete because the spinal cord itself wasn't broken, just the bones, and that it was stable because the ligaments weren't damaged. And even though he kept telling me not to get too optimistic, not yet, I couldn't help but notice that
incomplete
and
stable
sounded better than
completely unstable.
Then he explained how the Philadelphia collar—that's the official name for that cervical collar Win had on—would keep his neck from moving until the broken vertebrae reknitted, and for some reason all I could think about was Philadelphia cream cheese and how cream cheese wouldn't keep Win's neck stable at all.

Just then the phone rang. Dr. Rosenberger answered, and looked at me. "It's your parents."

How's that for stupid? I'd turned off my cell phone on the plane when the lady asked me to and I hadn't even thought to turn it back on again.

He handed me the phone. "Tomorrow we'll have a conference call with your folks. Right now work on getting some sleep." He smiled at me. "That was a good article. I really enjoyed it."

He and Charlie left. I sat there blinking, figuring out finally that he was talking about
People.

"So ... how's he look?" Mom asked, her voice quavering.

"He—he's okay," I said. What was I supposed to say? That her son looked like a piece of roadkill? That he had more tubes in him than a basement?

"What'd he have to say?"

"He's sleeping, so he didn't talk too much. You know how important sleeping is."

"You better warn him, sport," said Dad. "Those hospital painkillers will bind you up. You gotta be careful."

"Okay." There again, what was I supposed to say—that constipation probably wasn't the biggest issue in Win's life right now? Sure.

"Oh, George!" Mom said. "Listen, when should we come out? What'd the doctors say?"

"Um ... let's wait for Bill to get here first." Which led to a long discussion about Bill and his travel plans, which they knew all about because they'd talked to him a bunch already. I kept dodging their Win questions by repeating what Dr. Rosenberger had said, that we wouldn't know anything for a couple days, and filling them in about complete and stable and Philadelphia collars, only without using the words "cream cheese," and trying to sound as with it as I could, which was hard.

I got off the phone at last, totally exhausted, and got hit right away with another problem: where was I going to sleep? I hadn't even thought about it, though I did still have my little duffel with my toothbrush and everything. Maybe I could crash on one of those waiting room couches.

When I wandered out into the hall, though, Charlie Wright was standing there. "Why don't you come home to our place?"

I looked toward Win's room, the nurses working away.

"They'll take care of him tonight," Charlie said. "You need to rest."

So I followed him back outside. Charlie mentioned how impressive I'd sounded, how mature, even though I didn't feel either one of those things, not a speck. All I felt was beat. I'd changed my mind: I should not be here. This was Mom's job, this is what moms do, it comes automatically with having babies. They learn it in the hospital giving birth, probably. Or Bill, or Mr. Larson even, because he knows all about spines. Whoever should be here, it wasn't me.

We didn't say much in the car. Charlie pulled into a nice house on a street of same-looking houses—probably a dairy farm once. We walked in and Marla, his wife, gave me a big hug, and she wouldn't let go, she kept hugging and hugging until I felt this little pop inside me, and all that exhaustion and resentment and maturity collapsed like a dam breaking, and I sobbed onto her shoulder like my organs, not just my heart but my liver and kidneys too, all those organs we haven't covered yet in A&P, were being ripped right out of my body.

Guess how well I slept. Even though Marla has a very nice guest room and promised to keep the kids quiet. But I was awake at five anyway, because of the time change and just because. Charlie drove me back to the hospital. I told him he didn't need to do all this but he said that after four years he considered Win a son and wouldn't be anywhere else in the world.

I went into Win's room. He was awake, it looked like, staring at the ceiling.

"Hey, Win," I said. The nurse nudged me until I was standing almost right over him, which felt weird but it was the only way he could see me with his neck so locked up.

"Hey," he whispered. The tube was out of his mouth at least. That was nice, knowing he really could breathe on his own.

"You look good." That was the best I could come up with—isn't that pathetic?

"No, I don't." He wasn't joking, either.

"Yeah, well ... this is something, all right. Mom wanted to come so much, but her back—" I felt like such an idiot. Like, oh your neck is broken and everything but Mom is
really
hurt. Plus I couldn't even figure out what to say about Dad.

"Could you do me a favor, D.J.?" Win whispered.

"Sure. Anything."

"Get out of this room and don't come back. And keep everyone out. Including Charlie."

"Oh," I said. I mean, what do you say to that? What can you possibly say? "Um, okay." And I stumbled backwards, feeling my way out of the room because my eyes barely worked. That's how much his words hurt me. Like I'd been punched in the stomach.

Out in the hall, Charlie asked how he was.

"He, well, he doesn't want to see anyone right now."

"Makes sense," Charlie said. He didn't seem fazed at all.

So we settled in a waiting room. Charlie kept telling me stories about Win. How he had both playbooks memorized on the first day of practice, offense and defense, so he'd know everything that was going on. How he took the underclassmen under his wing and got on their butts and had special morning workouts for them, just like he used to in high school. How he went to Marla Wright's exercise classes because she said this thing called Pilates helps your core strength and even though he was the only guy in the room, and about four times bigger and twenty years younger than all her Pilates ladies, he didn't blink an eye. How he was the first one to practice every day and the last one to leave. All this stuff that didn't surprise me one tiny bit, although listening kind of killed me because for a second I'd forget Win was lying in a bed a couple doors down, and then when I did, I'd hurt twice as much.

Charlie patted my leg. "Don't worry. It's going to take time, from what I've heard, for Win to get used to all this. He'll come around."

I didn't say anything but I thought to myself, Do you even know my brother? Do you know him at all? Because the way Win was talking in there, it didn't sound like he was going to "come around" anytime soon. When Win was a kid, he had this huge baseball card collection. He still does, in these binders he hasn't looked at in years. But he looked at them a lot when he was a kid, worked on them all the time, and then one day Bill took them down without asking and showed them to a friend, then left them spread out all over the bed, where Win found them. They weren't damaged or anything, although some of the cards were out of their holders, but Win just freaked. He didn't beat Bill up, nothing like that, he just stopped talking to him. And I mean
stopped.
For a whole month. He wouldn't even look at him. If Bill had something Win needed, Win would ask Mom or Dad, or me, even though I was only about six years old and totally blown away by this whole thing. He'd say, "D.J., could you please hand me the glue?" if that happened to be in Bill's hand. Finally he stopped, but for that month, boy, I wasn't the only blown-away one. Bill cried almost every day, and Mom cried too, but Win wouldn't budge. And then of course he didn't call home or talk to us for almost nine months last year...

That's the thing. If Win decides not to talk, he can do it pretty much forever. So what if right now he was full of painkillers and in shock and all that. This was still
Win.

Finally Charlie had to go pick up Bill. I sat by Win's door, wondering if I should tell him that Bill was on his way. It might perk him up. On the other hand, huge flower arrangements kept arriving for him that the nurses just kept at their station because Win had been pretty explicit to them too, about how he felt, and the way he told them off left me not too interested in talking to him, wimp that I am. Instead I just tried to keep people from bothering him like he'd asked me. Which wasn't too hard because this floor was Family Only, so no one came by.

No guests, that is, but all sorts of medical people kept moving in and out, and then Dr. Rosenberger showed up with a couple young doctors trailing behind him. I was relieved Win didn't yell at
him
at least. He explained he was going to do some tests to see how much Win could feel. Win didn't say okay, but he didn't say no either, so Dr. Rosenberger started poking Win in the leg with this little tool. A pinprick test, he called it. "Just speak up when you feel something."