Page 117

Finally,on a Saturday, July nineteenth, he’s breathing on his own. He doesn’t say anything to me, or anyone else. While I’m nervous, he responds to touch, pain, and gives us nods and hand squeezes, and flips his dad off when he teases him about having a hot date later for being so agitated. He passes a series of breathing tests, keeps his oxygen up and sleeps. A lot. He sleeps more than he’s awake.
“This is what they do,” Leigha assures me when he hasn’t been awake much and I worry about brain damage, or something equally as dramatic as to why he’s not responding to us. “Agitated is totally normal and he’s sleeping because he’s healing.”
Finally, twenty-three days after his surgery, he says his first words to me directly.
An “I love you” is whispered in my ear when I kiss his cheek before leaving one night.
I cry. No… I fucking sob and he struggles too. It’s an emotional moment between the two of us and if I could have bottled those first words and saved them for the days to come when he doesn’t speak and only grunts his responses to us, I would have.
For days, I sit in his room and neither of us say a word. But then there are moments when he does talk.
“You look tired,” he tells me but doesn’t make eye contact. I wonder how he knows this, because from what I’ve seen, he’s yet to actually look at me. His attention is on anything but me.
“I’m fine,” I assure him, setting my phone on the tray beside his bed.
He looks at the phone. “You got a new one?”
A hint of a smile twists my lips. He remembered that mine broke. “Yeah, my mom got one for me and brought it up.”
“Is she here?”
I nod. “She stays with me sometimes at the hotel, or Frankie does. Your mom stays sometimes too.”
He twists his head toward mine, sighing, and I can’t tell if he’s annoyed by something or just concerned but his brow furrows. Still, no eye contact. He’s looking at the phone when he asks, “You’re not there by yourself, are you?”
“No, never.”
“Why don’t you go back home?”
I don’t know why he asks that, but then again, his questions for me have been odd. He asked me yesterday how come I won’t leave his room. And that same morning, asked his mom why she kept coming back. Again, I go back to what Leigha told us. They’re not the same in the beginning.
“I’m not leaving you alone here,” I tell him. “You wouldn’t leave me in a hospital all alone, would you?”
He draws in a quick breath and rolls his eyes as though it’s a stupid question. “Never.”
“I’m not leaving you. I love you.”
I wonder if he’s going to say it back.
I’m met with my first real eye contact. He blinks slowly, his brow furrowed. “I love you,” he mumbles, his lips moving around the words carefully.
Then there’s the quietness that envelopes us at night. When the interruptions are fewer and he lets me lie with him. We waitfor the other to speak first. No words come though because what’s left to say?
So I give him time. I rest my head gently on his chest in silence, listening to his breathing because that’s all that matters, that he is, in fact, breathing on his own.
I have questions. So many of them. What now? Where does this leave us? Is there an us? When will we feel normal again? Will we ever? Or has the love we once had been forever replaced by the painful reminder that he almost died because of me? Will it ever feel normal to touch each other again? Or will we be reminded of that night he watched me get raped by another man?
I… don’t know the answers to any of that, but as I sit beside him with swollen eyes and a broken heart, I tell myself that miracles do happen. I can’t outrun this pain. I endure it. I let it take its course, work through me and understand that those who have experienced pain like this, have always loved someone. And that in itself is comfort for now.
Two weeks after he’s awake, we have our second conversation that consists of more than just please drink water and him flipping the cup at us and refusing it.
I sit beside him and hand him water. “Are you in pain?” He’s just finished with physical therapy and I expect an outburst soon. It always comes soon after he begs them to let him walk up the stairs to get out of here, and they refuse. He can barely walk, let alone go upstairs and that’s one of the requirements before he’s discharged. There’s a part I never knew that came with having a traumatic brain injury to your temple. The dizziness. The headaches. The mood changes.
“No,” he mumbles, his eyes distant and on the ceiling, refusing the water I offer him, again. At least he doesn’t hit the cup out of my hand this time.
“Grayson?”
He looks into my eyes, just me. Since he’s woken up, hehasn’t focused on anyone besides when he told me he loved me. He doesn’t seem to want to.