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Stable.
He’s stable.
Oh, God, thank you.
Mum is beside me with her hand on my shoulder. My back muscles won’t stop jerking. Tears hurt as they build over raw, rough eyes, the salty water burning. A reminder of the many I have shed over the past two hours.
“And he’s trying to wake up, so we have sedated him.”
I drop my hands, surprised by this. He can’t be. I saw him… I saw it. He’s not all right. Dread finds a place in my stomach. “We need to operate as soon as Dr Matthews arrives. The theatre is being prepped right now. He has swelling on his brain…” His words trail to a muted drone.
One more knock to the head…
One more; he could lose his memory.
Brain damage. Or—
I blink. The conversation moves forward, as I fade into the background. I grip my mum’s hand to ground myself, the sensation of being out of my body hard to calm.
Words keep pouring from the doctor, but the drone of my heart, the dread roaring through my abdomen, drowns most of them out. The others are listening, but I’m not sure what the doctor is saying. I try to understand.
He says, ‘subdural haemorrhage.’
Then,‘intracranial pressure.’
Fuck.I wish I hadn’t got highlights before anatomy class.God, I wish I hadn’t spent the entire class staring at the new caramel strands.
But I didn’t know you needed me to understand these things, Xander. Or I would have studied.
My mum squeezes my hand; I drop to the present through a hit of words and sounds. The conversation is clear again through the rousing sensation of my mum’s fingers.
“The best course of action is that we operate with him under a sedative. So, he can still respond to us, and we can map his brain… Every brain is different, and his is fragile. He is not in the clear yet. His injuries are severe.”
“I want you to be prepared for the possibility he won’t be himself after this. He may be different. We will have the theatre ready soon, so we are going to take him down now.”
“But he’ll live?” My voice places me in the conversation, the eyes landing on me cementing my presence. I am present. I can do this. “He’ll live.”
“Unless we have complications.”
“God,” I breathe.
“Call Bronson. I don’t care what he’s struggling with. We don’t have enough time for his demons today,” Clay orders Max who is thumbing his phone with the kind of aggression I imagine will soon be growled down the phone.
My feet work on their own, moving me towards the room where I feel a magnetic pull. Needing to see with my own eyes that the image brutally cleaved into my memory of my Xander Butcher bleeding from his skull is not the end of him or us. My stomach doesn’t believe it, not when the feel of his lifeless head still sits like a phantom weight in my hands.
This feels like torture.
A long goodbye.
It’s not a contronym.
Goodbye.
Pushing the door open, my gaze is arrested by the sight of him on his back with his eyes gently closed—relaxed, even. He’s asleep. Not dead.
Not dead, Kaya.
My throat clogs up for a moment of pause as my eyes roam my broken world: his newly shaven scalp, the bandages over his ear where the rivers of blood came from when I cradled him on the street, the hospital gown, the long tubes like plastic snakes rushing down his forearm.
