She felt an ice pick pierce her heart. “Yes.”
“This is Kyle Kerr. I’m the resident physician at the emergency center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Your son Zachary is here. Unfortunately, he was in a bicycle accident and is in our intensive care unit.”
“Oh God, no!”
“The good news is he’s alive and breathing. But he sustained a head injury. He’s unconscious. Is there someone there who can drive you to the hospital?”
“Is he going to be all right?”
“We don’t know at this stage. But if you can get someone to drive you in, that would be good. If not, we can have the local police come for you.”
“How bad is he?”
“He has a concussion and there’s been some subdural bleeding which we’re working on.”
“No, God. This isn’t happening.”
“I’m very sorry to call with such news. But can you get someone to drive you here?”
She tried to concentrate on the question. The only neighbor she was close to, Ginny Steves, was away for the weekend. “No.”
“Then we’ll call the Carleton police.”
She agreed and hung up. Barely able to maintain control, she called her sister, Kate, who lived south of Boston, to meet her at the hospital. She dressed, and within minutes a Carleton squad car showed up in front of the house.
Maggie had only a vague recollection of the drive—sitting in shock in the rear of the cruiser, lights flickering, no siren, no conversation with the officer behind the wheel—her mind iced with fright.
Twenty minutes later, the car pulled up to the entrance of the emergency room. The officer escorted her inside to the reception desk. In a matter of moments, the resident physician, Dr. Kerr, came out.
“How is he?” Maggie said.
“The good news is that there are no broken bones, no damage to his spine or internal bleeding,” the doctor said. “We’ve secured his airways and stabilized his blood pressure. But he experienced trauma to his parietal lobe,” and he put his hand on the left side of his crown. “The CAT scan showed intracranial bleeding, so we performed a procedure to lower the pressure.”
“A procedure?”
“We put a burr hole in his skull to relieve the subdural hematoma.” Dr. Kerr continued, but Maggie nearly passed out at the thought of their drilling a hole in her son’s skull.
“We implanted a pressure bolt to monitor the swelling. It’s normal procedure for this kind of injury. We’re also hyperventilating him to keep his blood pressure augmented.”
“Is he going to have brain damage?” She could barely articulate the words.
“At this point, it’s hard to tell. But he’s young and healthy, and that’s in his favor. But we can’t get a full assessment of brain injury until the swelling subsides. We induced a barbiturate coma to lessen the activity. And we’ll be attending him aggressively to be certain that there’s no swelling.”
While they spoke, Maggie’s sister, Kate, arrived. They hugged, and Maggie told her what the doctor had said.
“I want to see him,” Maggie said. “I want to see him.”
“Certainly.”
“How did it happen?” Kate asked as they headed down the hall.
A Boston police officer took the question. “He was bicycling home and hit a pothole at the corner of Huntington Avenue.”
“He was less than a block from home.”
The officer nodded woefully. “There wasn’t any ice or snow on the streets, but this time of year they get chewed up pretty bad.”
They brought them into the ICU and past a few beds to a cubicle. When they pulled back the curtain, Maggie nearly fainted in horror. Zack lay in a bed, his face bandaged and tubes and wires running from his wrists, neck, and skull to a cluster of beeping monitors. An IV hung above him and a catheter tube ran down his leg to the other side of the bed. His eyes were discolored and swollen closed, and he was breathing on a respirator that was hooked up to an intratracheal tube. His right arm was also bandaged from the fall. For an instant, Maggie could not process that this was her son, not some unfortunate stranger. Then she broke down.
A nurse came in and put a chair beside the bed for Maggie. When she was able to compose herself, she rested a hand on Zack’s arm. “Zack, it’s Mom. I’m right here, honey. You’re going to be all right.”
“The good news is that he’s stable now,” the nurse said, “and his vital signs are strong.”
Maggie nodded. Then she whimpered to herself, “I can’t lose him.”
“You won’t,” Kate said.
“Zack, you’ll be fine. You’re going to wake up soon.” As Maggie said that, she had a fleeting flash of her getting him up for grade school.
Please don’t let me lose him, too.
Thirteen years ago, Zack’s older brother, Jake, was left to die in a pool of his own blood, his face reduced to pulp. He had been at a Cambridge club, frequented by gays, and was set upon in a dark parking lot by two brutes named Volker and Gretch who were high on beer and pot. Apparently one of the men had shouted slurs to which Jake was heard shouting, “Go to hell, asshole!” Then they were upon him. Because the only witnesses were a female cousin of one of the killers and then friends, everybody lied, claiming that the two were elsewhere. A slick lawyer managed to dismiss DNA analyses as faulty. After the acquittal, one of the killers said justice had been served, adding that it was too bad about Jake’s death, but that may have saved some little kid from sexual molestation.
Jake’s death had all but killed Maggie’s husband, Nick, who lapsed into a profound depression. Eventually he said that he could not go on with life as it was and renounced the world, joining an order of Benedictine monks at the other end of the state. They divorced, and in so doing Nick had left a gaping hole in Zack’s young life and Maggie full of grief and contempt. Three years ago, Nick died of cardiac arrest and was cremated.
Volker and Gretch.
Even after all these years, the very syllables of the killers’ names made Maggie’s stomach leak acid.
For maybe twenty minutes, she and Kate sat by Zack’s bed without speaking. Then Maggie said, “I don’t even know him anymore. Since Nick died, he barely talks to me. He’s like a stranger, like someone else’s son.”
“He’s on his own now,” Kate said. “He’s got school, he lives in the city. Kids do that. They grow up and go off on their own. It happens to every parent.”
“Does it? Weeks after he and Amanda broke up, he finally told me. I’m like the last person to know what’s going on in his life. I sometimes feel childless.”
“What was he doing biking in the middle of the night anyway?”
“At a friend’s house playing cards.” Then she added, “He’s got a gambling problem.” The moment the words hit the air, she wished she could pull them back.
Kate glared at her in dismay. “He has?”
“He’s in debt. I don’t know how much, but he’s been trying to gamble his way out.”
“How do you know that?”
“Bills and overdraft notices used to come to the house till I spoke to him.” She shook her head. “I’m a lousy mother.”
“No, you’re not. And you’re not responsible for his financial problems.”
“I wish I believed in God so I could pray. I really do.”
At the foot of the bed, she spotted Zack’s backpack with his laptop in it. He brought it wherever he went because he was working on his master’s thesis to meet a deadline. The topic was the influence of Darwinian theory on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. As he had explained it, he was using a core argument in an early Darwin essay, that revenge is the strongest human instinct, and applying that to understanding character motivations in the novel. His main argument was that revenge drove Victor Frankenstein to create life artificially in hopes of killing death.