Taylor had asked, “What about any brain damage?”
“He was really lucky there,” Dr. Bauer said. “Got away with a superficial wound to the temporal artery, when an inch the other way…”
He shrugged again.
Now Taylor and I go back to sitting in silence, the only real sounds in here being the slow, steady beeps of the monitor, tracking the beat of his heart. I know this soundtrack, from when I would be awake and alone in my room in Chapel Hill, the quietbeep-beep-beepof my own monitor sometimes as loud and threatening to me as if it were a bomb set to go off at any moment.
It’s one of the things that’s stayed with me, even as long as I’ve been out of the hospital. Will probably always stay with me.
How loud quiet like that can be.
The way it is now as we sit here next to Burt Webb.
“Crying doesn’t get you anywhere,” Taylor says, circling back to that. “Does that make any sense to you at all?”
She’s looking at Burt, so she doesn’t see me smile. “Just about everything I’ve ever heard you say makes sense to me,” I tell her.
There is another silence. I stare over at Burt, too, and now I’m the one willing him to wake up, just for a minute, even as peaceful as he looks, even not knowing if waking up is the best thing for him at this point.
“I’m going to sit here for as long as it takes,” she says.
“So am I.”
“You don’t have to stay with me, Silas.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
She turns her chair so it’s facing me now, the sound of the legs jarring on the linoleum floor.
“Maybe we should give this up,” she says suddenly. “The whole thing. Give it up right now.”
I know what she’s talking about, and that she’s not quite done.
“Maybe they just own us, simple as that,” Taylor says. “Theyalways have and they always will and they’re willing to do anything they have to as a way of keeping it that way.”
I’m not going to argue with her. Not here. So I still don’t say anything.
“I don’t want you to end up in a room like this,” she says in a voice not much more than a whisper. “A room like this or worse.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
Now I let her see me smile. “What I know is that the world already tried to kill me once.”
She picks up her chair now and carries it over next to Burt’s bed and takes his free hand.
“You come back to me right now, you hear me, Burt Webb?” she says in the same soft voice.
And in the next moment, I see him open his eyes.
Then he turns his head slightly and smiles up at his wife.
I feel as if I’m the one who might cry, that’s how happy I am, like I just witnessed some kind of minor miracle.
Only then, just as quickly, his eyes close, and the smile disappears and I suddenly realize that the room has gone completely silent, that there’s no slow beeping coming from the bedside monitor, no rise and fall of Burt Webb’s chest under his sheet and blanket.
Nothing except the quiet.
