Page 64 of All I Have Left

EVIE

E ight days after his second surgery, we’re offered another miracle. Grayson’s pressure in his head has come down and they’re able to ease off his sedation.

We have another moment, though brief, where he wakes up and holds my hand.

He’s frustrated and angry that he can’t get up, and more so with the breathing tube.

I talk to him and when I’m in the room, Leigha tells me he’s at least calmer, though I’m surprised by this because I’ve never seen him so agitated before.

“Is this normal?” I ask Leigha when he manages to kick a tray near the foot of the bed and send it crashing to the ground.

“Yes, very much so,” she tells me, watching him sleep now.

“Not only are they trying to make sense of their surroundings but the tube is not comfortable at all. He wants to talk and he can’t.

He wants out of the bed, but we can’t do that until he starts physical therapy and he can’t start therapy until the tube is out. ”

“And he can’t get it out until he passes the breathing tests,” I deduce, feeling defeated for him. I watch the monitors and then his face. The bruising is fading, the deep black has turned purple and shades of yellow and green on the outer edges .

“His lung is what we’re worried about. It just needs a few more days.”

“Are all the patients like this after brain surgery?” I ask, and then regret it.

Two days ago they had a patient die. He was sixteen and had been in a car accident.

He made it through surgery but died three days later when his brain herniated onto his brain stem.

The agonizing cries from his parents had me appreciating every single milestone we had with Grayson.

Even if it meant him kicking over trays and refusing to partake in neuro exams.

“The younger men are the ones that always give us a run for our money,” Leigha notes, smiling at Grayson. “Hang in there, honey. This determined side is what’s going to make the difference in his recovery.”

I want to believe her. And I do, because if there’s anyone who can push through this kind of injury, it’s Grayson.

It’s three more days, three failed breathing tests, and an incredible amount of frustration from Grayson, before they extubated him.

He’s incredibly irritable, flips the doctor off when they refuse to take it out and writes a note that says, “Fuck off,” to a nurse who tells him they’ll try again tomorrow.

That’s when I know he’s going to make it. I smile and I don’t think he appreciates my smile since he doesn’t get his breathing tube out, but his stubbornness is what’s getting him better. He’s a fighter, like they said.

He gets his tube out on Thursday the following week when they’re sure his lung has healed.

Watching him get extubated is awful. It looks painful when they suction his lungs.

He fights through it, his body restrained to keep from ripping it out himself.

And I think in those moments, that might be what bothers him the most. Being constrained to the bed.

Wyatt’s words come back to me and what he braved in Iraq.

I have images of what I think happened, ideas of what prisoners of war endure.

It’s probably nowhere close to the actual evil he was subjected to.

That same night, he has to be intubated again because his throat swells. They try having him inhale epinephrine and steroids, but it doesn’t work and the tube goes back in, much to his discontent. They end up having to sedate him just to do it.

Three more days of failed breathing tests and his inability to breathe on his own, he’s not happy. With anyone.

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 wait for 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, he hasn’t focused on anyone besides when he told me he loved me. He doesn’t seem to want to.

My breath catches at the golden brown looking back at me, looking for answers. I can’t help as the tears once again fall from my eyes.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” I gently rub his hand. Part of me doesn’t want to ask, but then again, I do. I want to see what he remembers of the night.

I watch his chest, the rise and fall, the warmth of his hand. It all reminds me of that day in his truck.

He clears his throat, shifting in the bed in obvious pain. “Being at the lake.”

“That’s your last memory?” My bottom lip trembles in anticipation as to what might follow. “You don’t remember anything after leaving the lake?”

He nods, swallowing hard, the blood in his left eye so evident now.

I watch his face. The muscles in his jaw pulse and the cords in his neck strain as he works his throat.

He’s been struggling to swallow lately, the swelling in his throat from the intubation tube causing irritation.

But it’s more than that. He shows the first real emotion I’ve seen yet. Tears.

My heart flips as the glazed-over bloodshot eyes stare back at me, so lost, so confused as to what happens now. That’s when I know he told me a lie.

And I let him.