After the End(28)
“We need to talk about the damage to his brain.”
“I’ve bookmarked this article.” He clicks a link and spins the screen around to show me. A teenage girl smiles lopsidedly at me. “She had the same surgery as Dylan, and it left her mute and paralysed, but she’s learning to speak again, and she’s just done a 5K sponsored walk!”
“What if that doesn’t happen, Max?”
There’s a long pause, and then he looks at me, his eyes shining but his jaw set hard. “Then we’ll have a disabled son. And we’ll be grateful every single day for him.” He reaches for my hand and squeezes it, then returns to his laptop.
Suddenly cold, I pull my feet onto the sofa beneath me, and cradle my coffee. I think about Dr. Khalili’s words, about a boy who cannot walk or talk, who cannot eat food, or use the toilet, or ask for comfort. I pick up my phone and find the Bringing Up B podcast that has kept me company on the long drives home from the hospital, and I click on “contact us.”
You don’t know me, I write, but I need your help.
ten
Max
Dylan looks at the ball, concentration etched on his face. He runs toward it and kicks with all his might, almost falling over in his effort to make the ball reach its target, all of five feet away from him. In front of the white plastic goal—so small I can place my outstretched arms around both posts—I kneel on grass still damp from the night before.
The goal was a present for Dylan’s second birthday, and every morning since, he’s dragged me out at first light to play. I’ve been in the UK office for the last two weeks, with my next trip not for another week, and I’m soaking up this time with my boy. He changes so much, even in a day, that a trip away means coming home to a completely different child.
The ball’s slowing down. The grass was only cut a few days ago, but it grows fast at this time of year, and Dylan’s blow-up ball is no match for a clump of daisies. I edge forward and lunge at it in a slow-motion dive designed to fail. As I overshoot the ball, I nudge it in the right direction, rolling on the wet grass and clutching at my head in mock dismay.
“Go!” shouts Dylan, in the abbreviated version of “goal” Pip and I love so much we’ve adopted it for our own.
“How was the match?” she’ll ask me, after the five-a-side I join when I can.
“Not bad,” I’ll say. “Nil-nil, then Johnno scored a go just before the whistle.”
Dylan jumps on me and I lie on the grass, looking up at my son, silhouetted against the morning light.
“Good go,” I tell him. “Great go!” Despite the warmth of the sun, damp is seeping through my clothes, and my neck feels stiff and uncomfortable. “Off you get, champ.” I sit up and let him slide off my chest, and he makes a crash far too loud for a boy dropping onto grass . . .
I blink hard, my body dragged reluctantly from sleep. The open laptop is on the floor by my feet. The fire is still on, but daylight streams between the drapes we didn’t bother to close last night, and the air in the room is stale and hot. Pip is curled, catlike, on the sofa beside me, both hands folded beneath her head. I touch her shoulder and she murmurs but doesn’t stir.
“Sweetie, it’s gone nine.”
She opens her eyes and pushes herself upright. “What? Oh no!” She stands, and almost falls, groggy with tiredness and stiff from sleeping on the sofa.
“It’s OK.”
“But I’m always there at seven. Always!”
“It’s OK.”
She rounds on me. “It’s not OK. Stop saying it’s OK! We have a routine. I’m at the hospital by seven. Every day. Every. Single.” She dissolves into tears before she finishes her sentence, and although I stand up and put my arms around her, she’s stiff and unyielding.
“Why don’t you go and have a shower, and I’ll call PICU and tell them—”
“I don’t want a shower, I just want to be with Dylan.” She wriggles away from my attempts to comfort her, and I wish I hadn’t tried.
I walk out of the room. “Well, I’m having one. I’ve been in these clothes for twenty-four hours and I stink.”
Fifteen minutes later I’m clean and awake. I put on a suit, but leave off the tie. Armor, Pip used to call it, when I was packing for a trip. She’d sit on the bed and I’d tell her who I was meeting, and what I’d be doing, and she’d pick out shirts and tell me it was like going into battle.
“If you were a woman you’d have makeup too,” she said once. “That’s why we call it war paint. Something to hide behind—to make us look stronger than we really are.”
Pip’s waiting in the hall for me. She’s picked up her bag, but her hair is matted on one side, and a half-moon crease runs from her left ear to her nose. The front door’s open before I’m on the bottom step, the engine running before I’m out of the house. If she notices my suit, or wonders why I’m wearing one when I’m not going into work, she doesn’t say anything.
She drives angrily, snatching the steering wheel and snapping at anyone who dares to pause at a junction, or hesitate on a roundabout. Traffic’s bad, and from the tension in Pip’s ramrod arms that’s my fault too. At the lights, she rocks on the clutch, even though she knows it bugs me, and tuts under her breath when the lights turn red again before it’s our turn.