Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,75
report as he jogs. Webster hops out and runs to catch up. He won’t have a problem with the ER personnel. Any parent would be allowed access to his child.
The ER doctor assesses Rowan. He orders blood tests, an X-ray on the shoulder, a CAT scan of the brain. If that doesn’t show what he wants, he’ll order up an MRI. Webster hopes that Rowan will wake up on her own before the MRI.
“You the dad?” the ER doctor asks.
“Yes. How is she?”
“Right now, critical. I’ve ordered tests, but we don’t know what we’ll find. As you know, prognosis is guarded with head injuries. We need to know how much swelling of the brain there’s been. You ought to get yourself a cup of coffee and some food. After the tests, they’ll wheel her up to the ICU, and you can be with her then.” The doctor wraps a solid hand around Webster’s upper arm, and the gesture frightens him. Does the doctor know more than he’s telling?
Webster finds his way to the cafeteria and stands in line. All hospital food is the same: fattening and unhealthful. He wonders how much he actually weighs. He might not get back on the scale until he’s been running for a couple of weeks. He passes through the entire line and finds nothing he can stomach except a tangerine and the cup of coffee. He searches for an empty table. He doesn’t want to talk, and the uniform might elicit talk.
He wonders what happened to Rowan’s dress. Where Tommy is and how he’s doing. Maybe later, he’ll call the kid and report and ask him to drive the cruiser up to Burlington. No, Tommy can’t do that; Webster has the keys in his pocket. It doesn’t matter. None of it is important.
The only relevant fact is the nature of the swelling inside his daughter’s head.
Webster holds Rowan’s hand. The low beeps from the IV, the steady signal from the monitor, and the crackling from the blood pressure cuff—all of it make a symphony both horrific and comforting. Proof that she’s still alive, waiting, as he is, for a moment of recognition. He pictures the long fall in the night, the unseen rock protruding, the black water. A boy, standing in his underwear, calling out and begging. Amid the low laughter, the thunk, the odd trajectory, the shallow splash of feet, the audible warning to hurry… hurry…
He imagines the glow of the firelight, the dumbstruck faces, some alert at once while others gape. The boy diving into the inky quarry, calling out again and crying. The resistance as the boy drags the girl to the edge, the weight like heavy cloth moving through the water.
In the ICU, the lights are harsh and unforgiving. Already the purple-blue below her eyes, the gauze wrapped around her head. Webster prays as he hasn’t in years. “Please,” he says aloud.
He brings Rowan’s slender hand to his forehead and whispers.
After a while, he stands up and goes outside into a corridor, where he is allowed to make a call. He rummages in his wallet for a piece of paper Sheila gave him as she left his house. He waits through the rings and is relieved when the phone is answered.
“You’d better come,” he says.
The longer the patient is in a coma, the less likely that patient is to recover. This is a fact Webster knows, and he wonders, as he sits in a chair beside the bed, what kind of healing is happening inside her skull, and why it’s taking so long.
When Sheila comes, she has on a pair of black cotton pants and a white dress shirt and looks as helpless as he feels. She carries a small duffel.
“They said the next forty-eight hours will tell,” Webster reports as they stand in the hallway.
Will tell what? Webster wants to know. He didn’t ask, afraid of the answer. “They said an MRI might be necessary.”
Sheila leans against a wall.
“Today they’re going to attempt surgery on her shoulder. I asked the neurosurgeon whether or not they’d have to drill into Rowan’s head to relieve the pressure, and he said they didn’t expect to have to do that just yet.”
“Yet.”
“Yet.”
“You look utterly exhausted,” Sheila says.
“I am, but I don’t dare leave her.”
When he sits with his daughter, he talks to her, no longer believing that she can hear him. He does it the way an agnostic might say a prayer, hedging his bets. He has told her everything he can remember